A Pale Fired Dream is a Haibun in a Renga, by ​Iain Lim Jun Rui

A Pale Fired Dream is a Haibun in a Renga
                               after A Ghost Story, and Kobayashi Issa

And yet, only an
aquatic metaphor, where
ars moriendi

becomes James Blake’s James Blake and
Gertrude Stein awaits bookcased,

no, not to the glass
of muddled mint and shandy--
a measured quatrain,

the kuhi cloistered, un-carved;
verses sealed, and sequestered;

now the viewfinder only tapered. Sandwiched between the edges of the anti-oedipal and New Brutalism (no tall white fountain played), where will the eidolon go in this city of tears? In an artifice, the town crier picks up a drop of the same channel up to his jawline, his handbell unintentionally ringing in the same gait.

There is no one pond.
There is no one pond dithered.
One thing-in-itself.

Cyclorama to the end.
Dithered. More than no one pond.

Prosopopoeia
is when a dew drop mattered,
a poem-in-itself.

A posthumous fragment, the
senryu nowhere to be found--

“The world of dew
is the world of dew.
And yet, and yet—“

​Iain Lim Jun Rui

The haiku that helped inspire and ends this poem is "The World Of Dew" by Kobayashi Issa (Japan, 1763-1828).
 
​Iain Lim Jun Rui is a Singaporean poet and filmmaker currently reading Philosophy at KU Leuven. Also a member of Singapore-based literary collective /S@BER, he is a two-time winner of the Love Poetry Competition and a finalist in the National Poetry Competition 2017. His poetry has been commissioned by the Singapore Arts Museum and National Gallery Singapore and is published in Rambutan Literary, ASINGBOL, Twin Cities and Voice & Verse Magazine among others. While having produced and directed several short films, his first documentary short is a finalist at Singapore Heritage Short Film Competition 2017.