Don’t say good night,
for you will not see it,
you’d better not say it
it’s better that way
so your spirit won’t
leave for a night’s work
across the starry skies
riding on the moonlit
waves of silence
to the ghosts, it knows
from your pasts
you know not
to inform them
of your secrets
deepest, darkest.
So, you see it
better that way
that you say not
good night
at least for a while
and let not your spirit
tell it all to the ghosts
haunting you even if
you do not want.
What makes you nervous?
I get nervous with people. Many people, a few people, or just one person of no or little acquaintance. Not because I am misanthrope but because I don’t want to make a fool of myself by opening up a conversation that no one may be interested in.
I also become nervous when alone in crowds, making me feel like a visible target for being a loner that no one takes an interest in talking to. It’s not because of low self-esteem that is automatically associated with such a tendency. Instead, it’s a survival instinct not to be seen as vulnerable in public.
Given the above, I am a paradox, half moon, half sun, north-west, south-east, making me neither wholly human nor entirely ethereal. Or I may be a changeling, a human-born, a fairy-bred, which makes me less nervous about who I am or may be.
Have you ever unintentionally broken the law?
Breaking the law springs up a grim faced judge with a wig with a gavel prone to sentence: “Death by hanging.” But no one is immaculately clean, and to err is a human. I broke the following laws, but I am not a hypocrite, as supported by Robert Frost: “Far more violence has been done in obeying the law than in breaking the law.”
1. Diatary Law – I enacted this law on the first day of 2024 to return to the disciplined dieting I used to keep five years ago. I broke the sections of eating after 6:00 pm, indulging in carb-enriched food articles at home, and consuming a load of junk food. Now that my doctor has ordered me to lose weight until a follow-up visit in three months, I shall abide by the law in full force and effect.
2. Law of Affirmation – I have violated all of the sections of the law: Imagination, Visualization, and Manifestation, all of which unintentionally – and intentionally. It is unintentional because when things do not go well as I expect them to or life seems unkind to me, my eyes become blind, my ears mute, and my head blank. I become comatose, thus violating the law. Intentional in the sense that when I am lost of all, including the will to live, the law seems needless, just as I am not here.
The consequences of the violation come not in they do a single spy but in a battalion. Health risks, such as high cholesterol and diabetes, may be foreseeable. Mental health will be put in critical care if they do not adhere to the above laws. Give me a month as a corrective period, and I will reinvent myself.
If there was a biography about you, what would the title be?
Wandering Ghost without face
A ghost wandering with the streams of sorrow’s salt fire billowed on her glass heart, shattered, changed forever, has no face because she knows not what face she has. She sees it beautiful, yet severe, bright but dark. No one wants to see her, and everyone decides to ignore her. She has become invisible, and by and by, she loses her face and thus becomes invisible as people want her to be. Just like her star losing the brightness of the fire, her spirit loses the luster of light. Alas, never to acquaint joy, footless to wander evermore.
He came down from the throne of the crescent moon
with the key to the paradise his ancestors gardened
for eight hundred years of harmony in Saracen haven
to the hands of the pious proud king and queen posing
to accept it as the Christian champions emboldened
by the surrender of the ruler of the Iberian paradise;
Yesterdays, yesteryears, and to the last of the time
crept upon the waters of the palatial fountains thence
and began to fill the heart of the sultan of the palace
whose eyes billowed streams of nostalgia’s longings
on his hallow cheeks and to the back of his horse
together, leaving the fortress of a thousand memories;
And Fate, whose wings did he fly? Now, all’s bygone-
Those melodies of sweet sojourns beneath visting suns
in the neverending abundance of warmth and mirth-
when every regret, every sorrow turned back his looks,
Every look shed tears in the shadow of the evening sun,
lingering in the recollection of the Alhambra Palace.
There are stairs called “Nancy’s Steps”
at the London Bridge on the Thames
where Nancy used to walk up and down
from her den to the world, back to the den
to live a life God cared less with neglect
with nothing more than her untainted heart
flowing milk of kindness and compassion
into the neverending faith of humanity alone
Even if it betrayed her and bullied her in tatters;
She pitied an orphaned boy named Oliver
And protected himself from the world under
Until the blindfolded Goddess Fortuna span
The Wheel of Fortune to the fateful turn
To which all her wishes were forefeited
As her already wretched body was battered
With the compass of the wheel bludgeoned
Her life with the heart cherished with love;
With the blows upon her still young head
all her hopes for the beauty of life shattered
and her tears rolling down her cold cheeks
turned into liquid drops of pearls and crystals,
and then, with a cry of the heart, she departed.
or thought she, for she knew not what happened
from dusk till dawn, wandering and waiting
on the fateful steps, asking if you’d seen the boy.
Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh 
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