My Dear Friends:
NeverEnding Story reached a new milestone early this morning: 3.75 M pageveiws (FYI: yesterday's pageviews: 20, 710; last month's pageviews: 173,514; and on May 24, 2026, it reached 3.5 M pageviews)
I’m grateful to everyone who has shared this poetry journey. NeverEnding Story now seeks haiku and tanka with teeth—poems that bite hard.
No More Fairy Tales, LIV
sky tinged gray
a heron high-stepping
through plastic
It seems to me that one should only read [poems] that bite and sting you. If the [poems] we read don't wake us up with a fist to the skull, what’s the point of reading them?
-- paraphrasing Franz Kafka
And
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
-- Emily Dickinson
The accepted haiku and tanka will be translated into Chinese and posted on NeverEnding Story and X. And you are welcome to follow me on X at @ericcoliu (5 following, 5,211 followers).
on the windowsill
two canaries singing
to each other
I tweet and retweet
NeverEnding Story 😋
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
-- Thomas Mann
all-night wrestle
with this blinking cursor curse —
alone
at morning’s lightfall
I glimpse a swift's skywriting
A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t QUIT. 😎
-- Richard Bach
Finally, the muse knocks me out 😂
Politics of Distraction, XVII
In the land of the free, dreaming ...
To American midterm-election voters
The poor and middle class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the super-rich pay lawyers, and the ultra-rich pay politicians.
smell of muggy noon —
the Reflecting Pool's blue sky
turns algae green
Trump news on mute ...
in the soup kitchen mirror
a twentysomething's stare
FYI: CBS News, June 22: Company owned by Trump donor won $1.7 million no-bid Reflecting Pool cleaning contract
Politics of Distraction, XVIII
American “Carnage”
A 15-million-dollar resurfacing—pool reborn in flag-blue paint. It peels at once, thin skins of coating unthreading into the water.
No Trespassing
in the lingering smell
of muggy noon
a chain-link fence around
the Reflecting Pool’s green sky
Microbes revise the budget in silence. A 1.7-million-dollar, no-bid cleanup contract follows, awarded to a company owned by a Trump donor.
A super El Niño presses toward Independence Day.
FYI: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed El Niño conditions in mid-June, with a “super” event expected to develop over the summer and peak in the fall.
And The Atlantic, June 26 2026: Trump’s Peeling Green Gift to America
The Reflecting Pool fiasco says everything about how the Trump administration operates.
Donald Trump, trying to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool for America’s 250th birthday and, instead, scoring a tax-payer-funded, $14 million-over-[close to $15 million-dollar] budget own goal in the form of a cracked and peeling, green-algae-riddled, potentially duck-killing militarized zone in the nation’s capital. One of the firms hired for the renovation is named Greenwater Services.
Look forward to reading your poetry.
Happy Writing
Chen-ou
Added: reading between the lives and writing between the lines, XCIII
summer sunlight
pours through atrium walkways ...
flicker and flicker
on tired faces of back-alley youth
at the photo exhibit
FYI: This is a sequel to the following:
reading between the lives and writing between the lines, XCII
in held silence
the newbie bares, I used to
love getting high...
until a certain point
a roomful of heads bowed low
Added: Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCXCVIII: "Eid al-Adha"
billows of smoke
against olive-grove sunset
settler's silhouette
FYI: "Israel's oldest daily, Haaretz," which was was sanctioned by the Israeli government on Nov. 24, 2024
June 23, 2026: Undoing History
A revolution is taking place in the northern West Bank. A decades-long settler project is becoming a reality – fast. Settler representatives in the Israeli government are reaping political gains, while the IDF enables and supports the effort on the ground.
Investigation, June 23: The Israeli Far-right's West Bank Land Grab and Why It's a Ticking Time Bomb
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