I choose purple.

I choose to sleep early and get up early, and I choose early out and early home. 
 I choose to eat cold porridge, write with broken inkwell, and look outside the clear window.

I choose to be busy with what other people don’t do, but I don’t do what other people busy doing. 

Anything, no matter how tiny it is, I choose to do it all by myself when it is possible.

I choose to get things done after I practice ten times while other people only need one time, or I do a hundred times while other people only do ten times.  

I choose water as my teacher; it always holds at the same level at a specific altitude. 

I choose to respect the grass as life; it never dies in its heart even it is uprooted and becomes curly. 

I choose a high pillow, and joyfully move whenever the pillow is moved by its surroundings. 

I choose a peaceful sky, where macaques know how to enjoy their fruits and worship the trees. 

I choose the poems without knowing who are the authors. 

I choose the books with beautiful writings without perfect lines. 

I choose wind that feels like water, and uninvited guests bring me surprise.

I choose the axis, not yet despise the rotation. 

I choose the riverside on a warm spring day, and peach blossoms outside the bamboo.

I choose to drift away, and gradually the sunset and all the surrounding mountains merge together, but I feel no move from my own foot. 

I choose the phone booth; the stories full of complaints and resentment, right or wrong, enter only into the phone booth’s ears but never into its heart. 

I choose the chicken does not birth eggs, or the eggs born chickens; the first original WeiYin King, Rulai, never left a print when he came down to visit us.  

I choose rivers desire to be turbulent, streams to be transparent, and roads to be straight and people to pursue their virtue as they long for sex. 

I choose to die if I have nothing to care about, but devote my heart with anything I do care.  

I choose things with high speed happen, just like thunder happens before no one can cover his ears.  

I choose I will finally become the person I want to be.

 

 

我选择

  诗/周梦蝶

 

  我选择紫色。 

  我选择早睡早起早出早归。 

  我选择冷粥，破砚，晴窗；忙人之所闲而闲人之所忙。 

  我选择非必不得已，一切事，无分巨细，总自己动手。 

  我选择人一能之己十之，人十能之己百之。 

  我选择以水为师——高处高平，低处低平。 

  我选择以草为性命，如卷施，根拔而心不死。 

  我选择高枕；地牛动时，亦欣然与之俱动。 

  我选择岁月静好，猕猴亦知吃果子拜树头。 

  我选择读其书诵其诗，而不必识其 人。 

  我选择不妨有佳篇而无佳句。 

  我选择好风如水，有不速之客一人来。 

  我选择轴心，而不漠视旋转。 

  我选择春江水暖，竹外桃花三两枝。 

  我选择渐行渐远，渐与夕阳山外山外山为一，而曾未偏离足下一毫末。 

  我选择电话亭：多少是非恩怨，虽经于耳，不入于心。 

我选择鸡未生蛋，蛋未生鸡，第一最初威音王如来未降迹。 

我选择江欲其怒，涧欲其清，路欲其直，人欲其好德如好色。 

  我选择无事一念不生，有事一心不乱。 

  我选择迅雷不及掩耳。 

  我选择最后一人成究竟觉。

My childhood castle

Got in my bedroom

Felt the white walls

Swallow me in

To the year 2010

 

I was hopeful to discover

Past memories uncovered

I had given this place my love

And it seemed to hold onto me

 

 

When I went back to my old house

felt the raindrops splashing through the windows

got this delightful look on my face

feeling like this world was okay

living this daydream

living this feeling

taking my teenage years in

and those silly days

and my crazy ways

 

I wouldn’t trade it for anything else

 

Whenever I head to Richmond

this historic city within me

I find those small hidden places

Where I held my secrets

 

 

Will I ever be brave?

To reveal them?

Give them another person to acquaint?

I know not today

 

Today

 

When I went back to my old house

My childhood castle 

Got in my bedroom

Felt the white walls

Swallow me in

To the year 2010 

Always a time of transition

I was in the last year

Of my second decade

 

I said goodbye 

To young adult fiction

Read some classic thrillers

And plays to readjust 

My ripening brain

 

Met someone I’d probably 

Never see again

Didn’t get his last name

Only a distant memory

 

I was surprised when someone 

In Las Vegas

Had never been to New York

 

 

And how I wanted to go

To Paris

Like the scale of excitability

Was a sliding one

 

Thank you for giving me time

To ready myself

Before heading abroad

You always look out for me

Maybe since the promising age

Of six, a child of no stories

Then, started turning pages 

Of brilliant bounded books

Felt compelled to invent 

Fiction that felt real inside

Even though I hadn’t meant

To open up my world so wide

Letting other travelers pass by

And told them mostly truth

But also planted careful lies

That grew into mutated flowers

Soon becoming leaning towers

And then translated into the third quadrant

All negative coordinates 

On my three vertices

想一想Bill Gates

You can’t even compare to him

There will be so many people that are better than you

But, there will also be people worse than you

We are at medium

And that’s not bad either

It just means we don’t fit into those larger

Or smaller sizes of life

It doesn’t really mean that we don’t have a life worth living

那不是说我们的生命不值得

We’re all taking our first turns at being humans

我们都是第一次当人

On my mom’s fifty-one’s birthday

On a sunny January day

And I thought about

How much I anticipated

My first time 

Tasting animal fries

And a double double burger

With the taste of the west in my mouth

And it wasn’t good or bad

But different in an unable-to-get-from-Virginia kind of way

Even through my taste buds 

I’m still an East coast girl

Wuhan

I come from Wuhan

No, Richmond

I spent most of my life in Richmond

Where’s that?

Oh, it’s in Virginia

South of D.C.

No, I didn’t fly from there

I moved to Las Vegas last February

Yeah, and I don’t like it more than Richmond

What do I think of Wuhan?

Uhhh

I haven’t stayed there long enough to tell you

Now? 从哪儿来？

Shanghai

Parts of my lifespan scattered

In different places

All colorful 

Eclectic 

Steps forward

Steps toward

Today

I needed somewhere to begin

Not from a new page

But from a prequel

Both our advanced reading copies

Worn from our slow hands

Folding dog-eared corners

We signed each other’s copies

Those signatures more permanent

Than flesh barings from birch trees

I couldn’t place those artificial words in my mouth

And the taste of emptiness 

Wasn’t bitter

Or sweet

But felt cleaner than toothpaste

With each time

Considering those words

I halted myself from saying

I closed my mouth

And swallowed air

Not love

Not substance

I couldn’t do it

I haven’t loved you

Some girls have

They fille it in their bones

I feel stiffness in my bones

As I’m sitting here in the cold

Gazing back at my laptop screen

Typing my decree that

No, I have never thought about being a model

 

It’s fine if you have

Maybe your younger self

Thought that being a model 

Once you were older 

Meant a great deal

Because it was a reachable goal

And you were quite pretty

 

Even as a child

I didn’t think about myself

Being a strictly pretty person

My career goals then

Ranged around singer-songwriter

Fashion designer

Math teacher

Author

I knew I had more to give the world

Than my looks

I’d want people to value my opinion

My knowledge, my expertise

Not that modeling isn’t expertise

But, in the end, I’m not one of those people