Speculation in Gangnam （江南投機）

I sit quietly, unobtrusively, and damaged on Gangnam-daero thinking about some things, all things, and nothing in particular.  I am motionless as a city of ten million people flows desperately around me and the horizon vanishes into the contemptuous smog.

The world is torn and it was torn long before I arrived.  I swallow hard in an effort to hold back my tears.  I never found the thread and needle to fix it all.  If only I could change this ridiculous fabric. 

What if there was an alternate universe where we lived only as carefree bubbles floating on waves made of music?  What if we could use giant glowing jellyfish as intergalactic space ships?

What if rainbows were dragons we could ride while flying over rolling oceans of liquid silver?  What if those sparkling oceans were simply the tangled vibrations of future events?

What if gravity wasn’t a force but a tiny particle?  And what if we could stretch it out into an eight-pointed star as big as a planet with gravity acting equally along the entire length of each axis?

What if every person we met was just a reincarnation of our self from somewhere else in time? What if Death was really just another chance to say and do all the right things? 

What if Forever was a wine we cultivated from fermented stars and sipped under a bright moon shaped like Love?  What if the cup we used to drink it was made from Hope and Amnesia?

What if I had never existed?  What if I had never looked into her eyes?  What if sadness is just a cocoon and the butterfly inside an unborn happiness?

What if Peace was a flower we could grow in our backyard and pollinate with the joyful wagging of a dog’s tail?  What will the wind think when it’s finally time to say, “Goodbye”?

- Just a peasant

Photo of Seoul.  The idea of wagging dog-tail pollination was creatively suggested by another biologist - Michael at Broken Radius.