The desire to drink something, eat something, check your mobile phone, or merely stare at someplace. It’s only when you sit down with your laptop propped up in front of you that you realize how interesting the world can be. You may find a hundred ways to sit uncomfortably in your chair – the feeling of ants crawling on your body; or at the same time, you keep changing your sitting position, busy as a monkey in a zoo. Suddenly recall the taste of lunch, and want to try some of the leftovers in the fridge? Start to pay attention to the melting snow and how water is dripping off the edge of ice? Water gradually accumulates at the edge, forming a hemisphere, and then… Oops! It drops! This is how the poem allows you to observe, but if you don’t want to miss the deadline, please stay seated in front of your computer.

The fear of a blank page. Every time you open a new document, it’s just a blank page with nothing but only a flickering “I”, urging you to type something in. Even if you look at your computer screen with a magnifying glass (just like how my grandma does), you still can’t find any hint anywhere about what you should write about, Chinese New Year or your recent insomnia? When staring at such blankness, you may feel all your thoughts have been drained away from your brain, and gradually your mind goes equally blank (We call it the transmissibility of blankness), then you get the urge to drink, eat, check your mobile phone, etc. Please revisit 1 if such a situation occurs. 

The urge to destroy your poem. When you are halfway through your poem, you stop, take a sip of black tea, and decide to reread what you have written down. Then you’re surprised by the quality of your words. Your language is too plain or too pretentious, your line breaks are too random or too uniform, and your poem is going nowhere but towards mess. You feel there’s much to say, emotions and ideas roaring through your mind, impatient to speak, but what you have on the page are some dull, lifeless, and fragmented expressions, like the grass wilting in the hot summer sun. Then you feel an urge, an urge to take your eyes off the screen or to delete it once and for all. Please remind yourself of 2, the fear of a blank page, which is what you will face if you do destroy your poem.

To myself: Please don’t destroy this piece of poem/ manual/ cliché/ last struggle before the deadline! If the urge exists, please check 3.