Tử Đan

February 2

Sometimes while half-sleeping

I could sense something creeping

From underneath the skin

From within the dark

Dear self-dialogue with shadows

Of my own hollow shapes

Suffocating my breath

Squeezing my head down

Into the ground six feet below

Sometimes while two-thirds-dreaming

I could hear the butterfly flutter its wing

Asking which one is hallucinating

And which one is living

I told her the only way to know

Is to kill one’s own soul

To see if it has truly been sown

Into this mortal planet of immortal sorrows

If I am nothing but another’s illusion

Could they exist as a fictive person

In my heart?

If they are no more than my delusion

Could I too be a piece of imagination

In their mind?

Space and time

Lock up memories in prisons

Fiery waves of emotions

Are complicit in a crime

That deserves such punishment

Worlds of reverie

Diffuse like liquid fantasies

Into flickering anomalies

The ones we desperately bleed

Until we can no longer distinguish

What’s truth and what’s reality.

February 13

Strands of hair

Soft

Like shards of glass

Slashing hearts

Just to play catch

Pale puffs of scent

Fast beating

Crawling on lips

Burning breaths of liquid

Intertwining

Deep stargazing

Into the terrifying territory

Of imagined intimacy

I smear crimson where you smell of loss

You shove gasps into our thirsty skin

Where tangent fears are scared to cross paths

This perpetual habit

Of living pain

And loving blackness

I drink toxins

And call it divinity

As my existence slowly rottens

I call it being alive

When black holes collide

They explode

Into a thousand fireflies

In desperate search of each other

Just to wither

The moment they converge

And mine submerges

Into a pool of scarlet salt

Crystallized fossils of floral eyes

Drowned dry in a puddle of night dew

The palpitating sounds in your throat

Throw stones into my pulsing pond

Dragging it down below

As it flows unto an ocean of blood-red tides

Where flutter a thousand butterflies

That already died

Sparkles of darkness

Tremble in emptiness

As I watch with eyes wide

For the thousandth time

The replay of a comedic tragedy

That I’m not the flower in your hand

And never will be

So my petals shed

Shiver

Scatter

Into corpses of clouds in the sky.

December 2

Mấy ngày đông

nhẹ

bỗng

lòng rơi vào khoảng thinh

không

còn giọt tình

nào

rung rinh ướt mọng

dành cho nhau

.

Dòng mình trôi

như những ngày đầu

thu

chưa kịp héo

nắng

đã rơi

.

Cho dù xuân có tới

Ta đã vĩnh viễn chôn mất rồi

Trong heo hắt khuya một cuối đông

Một mùa thu không bao giờ sống

lại.

Tử Đan thực hành thơ và văn đa ngôn ngữ như một dạng nhật ký trị liệu để ghi chép và đối thoại với các giác quan cảm xúc cá nhân. Bên ngoài thơ văn, Tử Đan hiện là một nhà nghiên cứu xã hội và là chủ nhân của một chốn chung sống của các loài người và không-người nương bên tán xanh Vườn Bách Thảo Hà Nội.

Sometimes while half-sleeping

H n S

vũ trụ có tồn tại không?