Video Poem about my Proxima Centauri-b Project


I posted a video poem about my Proxima Centauri-b project on Twitter. This is a fifty second video, so please visit my account whenever you have time.

Proxima Centauri-b is an exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of its red dwarf star, and it fascinates me, along with ants and their behavior. These themes have been my obsession.

Last year, after participating in several poetry events in Los Angeles, I packed a table cloth from our RHINO Poetry booth without knowing it contained a queen ant and was soon to be infested.

After I came back home, I started seeing ants on my walls, kitchen floor, and dining table…small, black insects chillingly crawled all over. At first, I did not kill them in light of my calm Buddhist spirit. I thought that they were passing through between the seasons and eventually they would go outside and dig deep in the garden.

However, they were comfortable between the folds of the RHINO table cloth, eating its paints (some yellow-brown holes shown like meteorite burns) on the stair handrail next to unopened mail and magazines. They dexterously laid eggs in the notch.

I was frozen (I hate swarming little things). It took me a while to use the vacuum cleaner, but the ants survived the turbo sucking mode, so I grabbed the table cloth and tossed it into the super high heat tumbler dryer.

Amazingly, they walked with unsteady steps like a toddler. I shut the door and turned it on for fifty minutes more.

And they still survived.

It took me several weeks to contain the situation. Through the battle with them, I learned a lot about the insect, and also learned that red dwarf stars are unpredictable and would randomly wipe out surrounding potential life with giant flares. As I learned more about these obsessions, I felt depressed thinking of human frailty and the rampant growth of other organisms, like ants.

So, I thought that it may be fun to add animation and music to the poems for my own cheering. I used a public domain movie, "Dancing On The Moon, A Max Fleischer Color Classic", and added a simple music track inspired by Mozart.

Indeed, summer is the perfect time to play the piano, and I am thankful to my parents for supporting me with numerous years of lessons. Although I could not become a professional, this is my life-long hobby. I will post more video poems on my Twitter, so stay tuned.