I. 

A night unspent in Beijing. The trees bite my silhouette upon the whitewash, and the street stumbles through the thin ice of time. 

My eyes, welled with moonlight, my warmth, curled up in mouth, and my endless, endless aching years, swallowed by your name, burn to breathe, crackle to escape, and shatter to be buried under a scaffold laden with bleeding shells. The blood trickles down to touch the bones of many lost fortresses, many blind barricades, to reveal the nostalgic growth of becoming dim and cold. Silent like always, dead as mice.

I pick one of these shells as it shrivels into emptiness, muffled in pain. Its missing spot upon the scaffold marks a starless void, a breathless echo into the night when you departed this earth. 

Many sinking souls of wandering eyes. Bottomless love of the night. 

II. 

I think of you a lot lately. I think of the times we read Wallace Stevens in snow. “The Celestial Possible,” “The Indigo Glass in Grass,” your eyes would glitter like tears on lotus leaves. I used to take pictures when you looked away. Your lips were always purple, and eyes were always grey even under the lights.

It rained so much. It rained until the whole city turned into a temple drenched in spring. I drank it from the night, and you let me trace the water running down your cheek. We never spoke of love until I ran away. The way you mentioned it was like chewing up my fingertip while both looking up the sky. There was just blankness, all cloudless. You were this circle I wanted to pick up to taste the trail. Yet it became empty, so empty it became a void upon my fingertip. 

Days and nights, I fed it with my hair, roots of foxgloves, and it turned into a bruising teardrop. It trembled during the rainy days, and it bit onto my ear lobes when it wept. It wasn't love, I said to myself. It wasn't love. 

Some nights, I would feel your breathing like the stroking of eyelashes from a burning eye. I attempted to trace your countenance upon my mind in the bleak darkness. 

"My northern star," murmuring in your sleep, you called her. 

"My northern star," I repeated.

III. 

Awakened, but not much sober as in sleep. Time has passed, dreams wasted. 

To walk through the ravine of oblivion, one need to dust off the frame of past. Tormented as always, she grabbed the torch of life in agony. Tripped by the birth of daybreak, she spent the night in Beijing. Drunk on the blood in the shell, she empties the cup of a treacherous night.

Spent and unspent, perpetually out of time.