'The Ornamented Zither

The ornamented zither, for no reason, has fifty strings.
Each string, each bridge, recalls a youthful year.
Master Chuang was confused by his morning dream of the butterfly;
Emperor Wang's amorous heart in spring is entrusted to the cuckoo.
In the vast sea, under a bright moon, pearls have tears;
On Indigo Mountain, in the warm sun, jade engenders smoke.
This feeling might have become a thing to be remembered,
Only, at the time you were already bewildered and lost.'

--James J. Y. Liu, The Poetry of Li Shang-yin (1969)

'...I believe that poetry (especially lyric poetry) should not flow like water over a waterfall and be a poet's daily occupation.' --Akhmatova

"And bough-crossed skies of flame, like that which quivers
Wistfully just before a winter's night." --H.P. Lovecraft, Fungi from Yuggoth, xxiii

"A very good corrective to the Aeneid is, I think, the Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln." --Frank O. Copley

"The common [cockroach] species Periplaneta americana becomes active soon after dark each day and scavenges continually for five or six hours, but if one has its head cut off, it no longer shows this circadian rhythm of activity. Not surprising, perhaps; but in fact if the head is removed surgically and precautions are taken to keep the insect from bleeding to death, it survives for several weeks. A headless cockroach eventually starves to death, but while it lives, it continues to move in a random and desultory fashion. Janet Harker found that she could give a cockroach back its sense of direction by a process of transfusion. All insects have very rudimentary circulatory systems, in which blood just washes around in the body cavity bathing the internal organs. One individual can be made to share its blood with another by simply cutting a hole in the body wall of each and connecting them together with a short glass tube. Harker solved the problem of differences of opinion by an ingenious if somewhat gruesome compromise. She strapped the blood donor upside down on the back of the headless cockroach and cut off the upper one's legs to prevent it kicking and upsetting the weird combination. Paired like this in parabiosis (which means living side by side) the double-bodied cockroach with one head and one set of legs functioned almost normally." --Lyall Watson, Supernature (1973)