Thirty years from Tiananmen

Ti-Anna, Tiananmen Square
Fatherless, freedom-less
Our lives are not massacres
They are privileges

For whatever language we speak
We know the pain of loss and
The burden of duty, calling us, in a thousand ways
I, don’t have the heart to understand

Some things, about this divided world
That rules in treachery, in forfeit, in slavery
We are the children of a mile end of destiny
It reaches out to us, like the warm mist

Of Taiwan, or the valleys of farmlands of China
But we are not those places anymore
We have defined geography and hope
In new ways, with humility and the burden

We are not fanatics, who can be
Absent from our own families
We still must live, we still must love
Not only an ideal or a place or a privilege
But ourselves, the way that makes us most human.

 

http://www.cbc.ca/firsthand/episodes/inside-these-walls

 

Ti-Anna Wang

There is a daughter who speaks about her father
As democracy once spoke for the people

Who are not deficient
They are not absent from their freedom

We live for purposes
And dreams like Chinese democracy

We were not born this way
We were moved by the world

To speak about injustice, human rights violations
We witnessed sacrifices for unspeakable courage

We are not martyrs, we are still fathers
Though imprisoned we dwindle in time

That spirit lives on like 1989
Whispers that China will shed One-State party rule

Warnings that the U.S. will reinvent tyranny
We are from both worlds, hospitable and ruthless

Male and female, politics is in everything
There’s no escaping corruption, revolution

Law, and the will for freedom is a will to power
And freedom is never free from inequality

There is no promised land of perfection
Only rudimentary ideas of what should be

There is a daughter who speaks of justice
And I cry for all the ways which we are
Enslaved, imprisoned, not free.

Ti-Anna, you are not a dissident
You are the heir to the new world
And it speaks Mandarin, and it’s free
Free in a patriotism of being global citizens

Free in the hope that our lineage leads
To a place where there are no dissidents
There is no abandonment, only people
Living and loving the only way they know how.

Chenyu

I never met a Princeton girl with such a big right brain
Big like the ocean of China’s youth burning for authenticity
I never met an Uber woman who made me smile so candidly
A key opinion leader from Woohoo, Miss Apple with message from Tree-houses

I over-do it, in my weakness for your humanity
Your portrait and words make me believe in China
But you are not a Chinese person, global citizen
Global citizen who loves yoga and being free

Author at the intersection of Entrepreneurship
You are an idiom of the deeper meaning of life
In a world where our values have become so superficial
You are the symbol of a mafia of a new kind of purity

I never met street food from the spirit before
As much as I cry, or howl or tease
It’s this soul-searching that changes the world
It’s these vowels of experimentation from Shanghai to L.A.

Instil the positive values of what makes you whole
The passage from China to expiring visas isn’t easy
And even Wall-street or the Uber Mafia may not understand you
But the world will, we’ll take you into our arms, homes, stories

Because we see a bit of ourselves in you
The wanderer, the creator, the bravery
We would have hoped for our own children
And I cannot fit you into a poem, because you are too wonderful

Chenyu, be hospitable, be confident to your true look
Dive deeper in the artists in you and marry it with the people
You are an ambassador for the people to remember
What is truly important, the human connection that transcends

The journey that ennobles, the warmth that creates
Understanding of how to not use, but experience
Write a book to save your life, paint to barter
Blessed is the way of artists and philanthropists

Nomads that have no fear, fluent in the content their thirst
If only you knew your power to inspire
All deadlines would be achieved
In the manifestation of our innate creativity.

The white globe glows on

We will all tremor in the future
And there will be no mistaken escape
No sense of time after apocalypse
What a strange and magnificent invention
Is the prophecy of our own death
* * *
We exploit so much of what is given
Only to be erased by time’s earthy hands
Forever and for good, cheers to our stay
We who were braver for the failures of our fears
* * *
There’s no comfort in tomorrow, if you know
What is to come, there’s no dawn to sooth the ache
Only the exquisite dream of utopia
Whispers from the Upanishades, of all things
* * *
We will love the future, even if it won’t be ours
It’s better by far than loving the past
The past has its own authority over us
Which we cannot yet control
* * *
We live in sketches that wish to be real
In simulations of quantum entanglement so elegant
The white globe glows on, humanity is a wounded woman
Obliged to accept her role in our decay.

These are the letters of my life

These are the letters of my life
Wretched and nude, wandering and alone
Nobody will open their seal of discoveries
Only I know the contents of my cells
That begged for purity in such a polluted corrupt world
* * *
Hardly even I could find a speck of kindness
In the abyss that separated us here
Only for instance, the smiles of others to each other
Were the letters ever answered?
I don’t remember, I am no longer me, no longer the writer
* * *
I only hope for little things now
For nourishment, and survival and sanctuary
But even these things, I don’t find so easily
Not friends, lovers or helpfulness along the way
I’m vilified by the same people I seek to help
* * *
Ready to feel the doom from my own hands, like is my custom
The unanswered letters gather up in me
Like memories of reaching out for nobody
The universe didn’t hear my call, my acts were too small
* * *
One day I shall reply to myself, glad and grateful
Though I once thought that day was near, now I am unsure
The world collapses upon me like speckled seasons
I am an endangered species to myself
* * *
I long for things I have never found
I have no proof they exist, in me or in others
There is no glimmer of honesty honest enough for me
No spiritual fire that washes me clean once again
* * *
Only the regret of living, only the guilt of wanting
Only the desires that lead yet to more desires
There are no great cities left for me
But the landscapes seem heavy with time
* * *
I am joyous for simple things, because
There’s nothing left of the illusions we used to hold
Those treasures like the burning sun on youthful skin
It’s gone now, as I rediscover myself alone.

This Possession of a Life

I am waiting for a feast that never came
It never arrived and I’m sick of waiting
I’ve been so patient my entire life
Loving a thing that was never meant to come
* * *
It kept me hoping that things might get better
A house of windows, a reply to a heart-felt letter
Never read, a vision never truly disappearing
Of what we thought was the meaning of our lives
* * *
The feast that I am waiting for is impossible
Our masks postpone it indefinitely
Empathy is imperfect and desire leads us astray
And I never was very good at finding common ground
* * *
It’s below zero and the chalk of my poems has run dry
For a good few more than months or years
All the celebration in me has died like an old flower
Into stains of history and a corrupted Earth
* * *
We burn ourselves up in our brief conquest of life
Like a lover, we squeeze every ecstasy from their
Shuddering bodies, every last drop of intensity
We beg for something so totally fulfilling
* * *
But the feast was always a product of our minds
The prize was only a figment of our imagination
The union and sex and spiritual rapture only petty symbols
Of all a human being can do or feel or have.

The Endurance Within Us

We are as names swallowed by the cold
Haunted with the vowels of our experience
We linger in the darkness only to
Decline in the human years of our fragility

* * *

The skies of the wintry sun don’t etch our figures
We are spiritual and temporary as bodies
Star-stuff in our molecules of enchanted matter
Our thoughts bleed universal truths repeating

* * *

Our genius and trials completely unrecognised
Invisible below our surface of privacy and guilt
The years do not succumb to heart-beats
They only accumulate like forgotten madness

* * *

We’ve become as samurai for private causes
Pet crusades, the things we cherish, the few people
The tribe which we associate our blood and water
The vulnerability of our highest aspirations

* * *
We profit from the belonging we create
That which we tell ourselves is significant or important
What we find beautiful is not uniqueness
But something far more superficial and primal

* * *
We are like dusk blowing in the light
Haunted by the framework of what we believed was real
We thirst for light along the paths
Feeble and shuttering, we long for something more.

The After Memory Feeling

For once, I will be left with the shock
Of having lived, and loved in vain
In a series of lives that I was cruelly spoken to
Where even my beloveds, would push me away

* * *

I will not settle after death, you know
I will move from star to star, crystal in hand
Shade of all the eyes I have loved
And it will be perfect then, to die

* * *

And I will not regret suicide, not regret suffering or any meeker joys
The rose spells do not forgive, we only forget
Our hearts will, I Swear it, resemble the torn pages
Of memories, drifting apart barely

* * *
Remembering the taste of our sorrows and failures
That will be it then, a sudden departure
The lift of the blue flame that bid us farewell
From deep inside our dream, I will not have won today
But it will be the end, and all ends taste the same.

The 10th Day of Trials

After a black day, there is no forgiveness

Only the solitary confinement of our mind

And prayer, I feel the little warmth of my hands

Not that I have skin, only a kind of soul –

 

•                             *                         *

 

It’s not what I would have expected, blank

There are no keys left, no passengers, no partners

Only the brevity of this, the journey that felt like nothing

That sounds that led to the sound of falling rain

 

•                                 *                               *

The way I fell asleep to not hear or hold my own tears

There are no pockets of music, of pillows of love

Only maybe, the sound of myself breathing, the beat of seconds

I lasted as long as I could, given to foolish courage

My calm was a kind of white shade, the devotion for other things

 

•                                       *                                     *

 

That I myself possessed, it wasn’t that I felt no hungers

For the wider world of experiences, but I couldn’t afford them

I had my obsessions and inner dictates to attend to, and they were rather considerable

The movements and acts of love, they were silently expressed in me

But so passionate, so invisible, so faithful to their course

That I could feel them embrace me like their own curse.

The Betrayal of August

 

Fire-flower, there is a sweetness in your cruelty
The abused becomes the dispossessed
The martyr becomes a sadist, I saw it though the colours
Of your ember bows, the way you’d turn, night into day

There, we are all rogues, swash-buckling heroes
Where even the victim in me can repose at the feet
Of another abused child of the world
We are not equals in the games of power

I am not a man, you are not a woman
We are only mythologies, projections, illusions
Fire-flower, I taste raspberry hiccups
When I think of you, the fruitful vulnerability

Of your moods, where like a jungle of helplessness
Is born the more severe and thwarted beauty
An artist needs to suffer to possess their genius
Like a naked child wanting to become somebody

Fire-flower, there is no pain in your adornment of betrayal
When you expect the dog to bite, the wound is cute
The nature of narcissism is entirely predictable
In the traits that define our social norms

Even the women are not truly rebels
They already fight too many battles to disobey
Their sense of pride and back-water morality
Art is not like that, it’s wild and ferocious

I am not a lesson, and you are not my teacher
You are a stranger that I know so entirely
It would shock you if you knew, my deep understanding
Of your own pain, mirrored back silently at you.

Masks of Liquid Fire

Lost Inès, fire-bells, storm pixie
How quickly the lightning succumbs to the flesh
And hope is squeezed so silently in our chest
That light, doesn’t flood our vision, but warps us
With a kind of fear and anxiety

Won Inès, there’s no winning in the tragedies
There’s only ambiguity and doubt and fear
The kind of thunder that makes you climb under the bed
Or paint in the closet, or immerse yourself in the unreal

Creator Inès, there’s no season when beauty dies
Because it dies each day and in every person
As we decide to label them something, to limit their light
We kill our dreams to manufacture new ones

Cowardly Inès, there no one left to run home to
Not the night of courage, or the love of art
Not even they can save us, we are just that
Solitary bandits, cats and ambitiously warped

Memory Inès, there aren’t rooms I can go to
Only drawings, a canvas of your success
Where I’m reminded of the days of summer
Where the Eclipse held the potential of everything.

Solar Storm

 

Solar Eclipse, how everything changes when you come
I can feel in my bones the disintegration of the past
I, who love too much and too easily the rebels
The arts; the ruins of my creative drives

Abandoned I lurk in a passage to the future
I have no deep friends, no truth in my own eyes
Only the battle of the brain, this misguided heart
That seeks and wishes for stories I never find

Solar Eclipse, how you burn me to the core
I, who have only been a humble servant of the sun
How many lives mush I endure the madness?
How many misunderstandings in my soul?

Brittle light, do you not know how poor I am?
That I die of loneliness each and every day
Like a poet lost in the light, trapped on Earth
If suicide calls me, then will I be home?

Storm-flowers of the sun, give your dagger looks
I, who have suffered already more than you can imagine
Displaced, weak, vulnerable, cowardly
For a few days of magic I sacrificed already so much

August 21st, I can feel your approach
Like a zombie apocalypse on my Venus degrees
There’s heartache in your absence, but only I would know
I who look up at the sun for her designs

I who felt her swimming in my brain like a leopard
I worshipped at the temple of her Art, like no other
Lost in the bewildered shadows of her aches
I know my time was illegitimate, hours and minutes

Like the spiritual thirst for another season
Another era of the heart, that does not exist in this reality
Troubled soul, why do you run and push and wine
When the truth of our being sets us free

In the cold climax of extreme heat, that only a few
Will ever dare to touch that side of us.

 

 

Inès – Daughter of Art

Inès, the wild rush of phantoms of the artists

The lion’s strength that seizes singular moments

The breath of time on the lids of all beauty

O’ how the entire world’s cities spin with thee!

 

Inès, the emperor must know the eclipse is coming

I can feel your fire next to me, like a candle’s heat to the palm

Blessed time, quickening with a strange delight

Of electricity’s rampant swirling sunshine

 

Inès, daughter of the muse, my treasure in the dust

Where radiant suns throw away their comforts and books

There’s no clearer confusion then your passionate moods

That lift me up from my own sombre routine

 

Inès, trumpet of mythology, designer of the dawns

Look up to the sky, this is all that you could become

Breathless expanse, turning on a fragile opportunity

Where the entire world remembers its thirsty beauty

 

Inès, tightly cling to me, make lucid the light that

Can penetrate all the moods of lesser men

The world is enchanted by you, and you do not realize it –

Leave the mourning choir for the future’s puissance.

 

 

 

For Cheeks of Taipei

In the whirlwind of chance there’s a play

The chemical bath that is my holy reset

A midnight’s prayer of my yellow parade

Inès in the dark, magnet of the Lion’s claw

 

The trance that is our solar eclipse

Waiting for Uber until there’s no recourse

But to burn the bridges we ourselves had made

The Shaman sport of festive waiting

 

Along the margins of rebellion and sensuality

Where art is a life well spent, risks taken

Through rivers of blood, thirst and bruises

We remain true to our heart’s thwarted instincts

 

That dive into dopamine’s fiery embrace

Where time is obliterated in a seizure

Of all the passion we had saved

Where we wash ourselves with our own invisibility

 

To awake with skin as thirsty for summer

As the light of our planet’s parent sun

Who must feast on the idea of hunger

Waiting for the eclipse that ends all suffering.

The Creative Script

We are not our thoughts, our own mind
Or the life we made; the intersection of time
We are not the lottery of birth
The ranks among men; the torture of the towns

No; we are something else…
Further from the cities of holograms and projections
Where a drop of sacredness changes everything
Like a dissolution of all the cravings

Where we turn invisible to the old way of things
We are not the actors and the roles
Not the sacrifices we thought we had to make
We are not the life scripts and labor and duty

We are the heart broken and made whole again
We are the cosmic patterns that sowed in us
Miracles and wonders that had little to do with us

Those things that put you beyond beliefs
Those events that change all further moments
Where the self is no longer just a self
And our work is no longer just a selfish thing

There we find remnants of who were before the fall
Before a sort of dumb materialism and capitalism
Those idols that destroyed us on the inside
Worry is itself the idleness of loving not enough

We mustn’t complain for the secret choice we made
But find fruit in the ordinary and nectar
Also in the suffering; that is our way of life
Our habit of doing and repeating
What we ourselves expect us to do; the designs
We follow irrespective of the outcomes
We are all brief experiments in a violent seeing
Where there is not time to be; but rush like an art in pain.

Spring’s Anthem of Thirst

In losing myself and letting go of my historical pride
I am realizing a new frame of reference
One that does not require trust or hope
A new leaf on an old loving flute
Where the instrument does not disrupt the melody

Time is a dream of flexibility
We must bend and embrace the footsteps
That leads us on like the burning
Thirst for a deeper connection

I do not require a life-work to be great
Nor do I require love for validation
Friendship is my own definition
Of how I relate to a generous universe

Where we re-write what was once written
In our minds as the true language
But language is only an expression
Of how one object relates to another

Morality and history are put figments
Lovers and family are but temporary actors
Who we thought we were is not maybe so accurate

The human genuine is not our defining moment
Spring is a transpersonal sign of a further reach
For a horizon inside perception that turns inside-out
For giving and receiving are not the answers

I am not there, I do not sleep
I only pray for something like new beginnings
That energizes me before I go
To repeat the cycles that were pre-ordained

To hear the morning’s hush and the starlight breath
Of galaxies aching just like ours
Our bodies aging in the caress of skin
Drinking water to be whole again

Bathing in purity to be nothing again
A light transparency of spirit echoing in mind
Refining organs from within with
The hidden intelligence that unifies by design

I do not know how the diamonds glint in snow
But it has all melted and we must live who we are fully.

Those Secrets

I often asked myself why I did not love the Earth

Who had made me so tender and imperfect

The secret to living a life well lived?

Happiness was not the goal; it is not a thing

 

But a process, an awakening to loving everything

And you can work a lifetime at the heart

And dream an eternity with the soul

Until your history is swallowed up in compassion

 

And your drama disappears into a

Moist blanket of empathy where you transcend

The ignorance of your own missed opportunities

A savage garden of needs that would convince you

 

In the solitude of an unmarked place

That you are a stark nomad so unlike the unsettled world

Yet in the light of the sun, your body still aches

To be swallowed up into a bigger purpose

 

Your cells still crave the call of other stars

There’s no armor of God or golden goodness

We are the same, mistrustful and at times miserable

By-passers of creation, haunted and hunting for

 

Always something more, further than what we were

All experience is for the drinking of inspiration

A fountain of faces and seconds, of floods and races

And we’re already there; we’ve already arrived

 

We are just always catching up with our own divinity

The world is filled with too much to say

Yet in the end it matters now what we’ve told ourselves

It only matters what we do in our chosen projects of love.

The Last Comfort

I want to hear the child within speak again

The long lost language of flowers and stars

The future that is the ancient past

The whisper that is the tranquil now

 

I do not seek material things, but lift

Lift the veil of the whisper of the wind

Beneath the silence that all things return

Time is a silver slice of breeze in Spring

 

The world doesn’t require us to be anything

But how the cosmos moves us from within

I want to know the verses of tomorrow

Whose pale light will linger like a muted trombone

 

Into the night’s treachery of existence

Where the choices are made that guide our ever-afters

There are no subtle songs of the forest life

Only the make-believe of men and his bots

 

There are no solutions left to the problems we’ll create

Because we are the great trouble-makers in the galaxy

I want to hear the soul’s trembling voice who rarely speaks

That glimmer of the unknown blessedness kept deep within

 

That does not flight or suffer from these mortal wounds

Or have a need for answers in history’s definate touch

That was not so all-defining after all, just another story

Lost to the light of a billion suns.

Sunlight lifted with Her golden fingers

Hae.mi, as the golden sun interlopes
With the falling snowflakes, I see the destiny
Of how to trust the universe
It’s a woman who teaches, it’s a man who obeys

Like a lullaby of sweetly flowing years
“Trust the universe”
“You will be happy”
The nations can rage on, I do not care

Friends and lovers are free
To call my bluff, I enjoy the calm
Of solitude, the way the harmless hours
Merge into the sea of experience

Hae.mi, we do not need much love to survive
Only one drop of truth in our hearts
To believe that anything is possible
When the sun is low, and I am a colored singer

Who can hear the charm of the soul
It does not matter if I am simple, poor, barren
The world is wide, it extends to all people
I am a servant of the universe

With or without my consent, I pray at the chapple
Of her designs, and my tears are pure gratitude
There’s nothing left when memories burn away
Only beauty, only the inquiring mind

Of one for the many, of light for its unity
Of darkness, for the bird islands of life
You are as much alive as you dance in my cells
There’s no need to possess, when bliss is a substitute

In the meditation of our lives, art reassures us
That our suffering has spiritual meaning
The same mist hangs, as in ancient times
Your human eyes, pieces all that I am
To see divinity in a human form, is its own reward.

No Word About Love

The clock is chiming in our wombs
Ready for a new world to be born
Time never outlasts our heroism
If only we realized the end could be near

It’s austere to love this world and her music
Too much, I think sometimes I do
Farewell to another lonely year
How had you loved? Who cares what you did!

Time is running with new longings
I feel them in you, in kind
Distance from afar, spooky action noted
Love’s feature-bliss has no casual witnesses

It’s something white hot inside of us
It’s the need to create more than
Software, more than poems
More than playing in the dark

The clock is running out of hands
And my intent is running out of eyes
I don’t have the eyes in this world
To see all the beauty, and participate

Sometimes in a revolution, when the
Activists have all died, what shall we do?
When there’s nobody to read the books we write
No word about love, in such a brutal world

No men to embrace, no women to educate us!
And this moonlight looks for the end of all adoring
But I cannot help myself, I’m foolish in all things
The clock keeps me grounded in absurdity

Never a nihilist, I laugh shyly into the wild
I’m always the honored guest at the feasts
Of the imagination, where I roam freely
But, the partners are sourly missing

I’m holding my own hand in this anonymous playground
Committing blunders for my scanty hope
So long I’d live and work alone
That I might forget all heart and mercy
Or suffer time’s designs with stronger plans.

If Loving is Destiny

These poems mine, created early
Are nothing but the soft sense of gratitude
To life, what offered us so much!
If we took her for granted

Let it be known, that I’m drenched in dream
That I hadn’t known of your art yet, Hae.mi
I hadn’t felt your little joys
As a kind of graceful thunder

In my world of watching the eyes
Of human beings doing what they do
These poems mine, are reflections of nature
That drop from fountains like

Our toes wet in the dew, this living
Is so beautiful, even without possession
The feelings melt into a cohesive whole
Integrity with identity, wishing with hope

Touching briefly as light upon branches
Making love with a spiritual connection
The poems, on youth and ruin, are fading now…
I am nothing but a spy upon your divinity

Set in your beauty, hungry for your soul
Ready to deeply bury myself in your goodness
With the water and bread, with you as the last drop of honey
These poems mine, they just whisper

And there’s no grave to them, only endings
I’m talented in endings, as I am a decoration
For the muses, to life and all that we can never touch.

 

Photo Courtesy.

Motherhood is the only Truth of Life

Hae.mi, every verse is a child of love
As I watch you with your child
I think upon the qualities of your womanhood
Your ancestry and your design upon time

The heart as a gulf, and a bridge and a blessing
I who have experienced so little true joy
Can admire the cherishing of a maternal love
That exceeds in brightness and in sport

The spring’s treasured moments of a young mother
I watch you with your child, as I would the stars
Or holding the Earth in my mind as I would
Imagine life caring for all the galaxies

Hae.mi, so when you think of me, remember
I die at dawn and daybreak, every day
To witness your majesty as a woman and a mother
With no decisions and no receiving, I’ll carry on

So as to die with the morning and the evening
We might support the future in a familiar face
Like your son or the billions of lights
That swim in the hawk-like night

And the swan-like soul of all living things
Those eyes, a little bit like our own,
Those hearts, that feel and hope and love
Like we do, Hae.mi, that is your gift

That I can love you like a father who watches his daughter
Taking care of the world while she travels it
In the years and greetings and journeys
Given to her, and what will live on in her sons

In his daughter, who will one day become a mother…

 

Photo Courtesy.

In Winter, Merits have a Woman in Mind

Listen, Hae.mi, there are no paths closed
Between you and I, where optimism points her passion
Where the door is to the universe
This is not the time for prayers

But the time to act, my lovely field
Where I play in all that is Heaven
O’, I’ve known thee in thy dress of whiteness
And in the tempest of thy insomnia

The league of ours is beautiful
Based on the soulful arts, and
I feel as though I’ve not seen the last
Of your smile, in my poet’s arms

The sacred sacrifice of the bard
Is not nearly over, the muse bends
In a festival of tempting destiny
Such being the idol of my consumption

To the beauty I know I rest in thee
To the wonder and harmony of all that’s good
Hae.mi, the secret entrance to your life’s totality
There are no citizens or policies there

Only the abode of ritual and sweet shyness
The last warm flesh of hope and gladness
And all those things not native to me
That you possess like jewels, fruit, perspective

An abundance of so much radiance I keep
Following your spark for a hint of the luminous
And at the court of your entrepreneurship
I’m firm like the dawn of the world

For your sunsets and miracles of action
Your nurturing of the beauty in all of us.

Photo Courtesy.

Her Gratitude Tasted

In palaces of fire and water,
Hae.mi, how does the heart not lose herself?
When from rim to rim she squanders her beauty
In the pangs of gorgeous motherhood!

And it arouses me, because we stayed at home
Where roses meet their blowing end
And fragrance falls on thirsty lips
By gates of Eden, erect and wet

Our first elation met vaguely understood
Beneath the mirrors and hunger of our youth
Not all in world I have despised
I, who could not have who I desired most

Beneath friendly fire and blossoms of the misunderstood
In winged freedom’s last designs
Where I touched beneath your skin
The kisses have no names that you can utter

The pleasures have no shame when
Each to each are wed in friendship,
And obscene gratitude, and a lifetime’s ache.

Photo Courtesy.

Songs of Ren & Chou

The dawn disrupts me with your fierce qualities
I am so vulnerable, watching thee
Fight for causes I wish I could own with thee
And belong to a voice that has that melody

My words rain over your tweets like New York lights
I delight in your footsteps in the snow
In the dark hazel and rustic baskets
Of your laughter, I follow where you go

I delight ever in your small triumphs
And grow a Titan’s fever for your trials
Small place and random wonder for the
Valley below, my dears, it’s anonymous

Like how spring will come to you in cherry trees
And the worlds you will see, that I will not
But I can share the foam of your dreams from afar
Like raspberry whispers in the after-thoughts

Of my heart that is bigger than it should be
And my soul that hangs lost in a quote
My love is an open-secret for your sport
Humanity disrupts the things we used to know

Don’t go too far off, let me ride the companionless dark
I want to know what aches at the empty stations
And how your movements chime in the smiling years
The lady soldiers of technology, freedom and the new world

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where
The idealism of the young is never squandered
It relapses in waves across the cosmos
And burns in the memories of we are meant to become.

Odes to Ren & Chou

In the implacable sweetness at the edge of time
I was there, somehow with you
Lost in forever, with the thrill of the universe

In our brief work on this particular planet
Earth, climbing for the flowers of the future
There was no us and them, only a weird inclusion

Of all we had become, the thirst of history
The salt-rose and topaz tears of the dilemmas
Like the philosophy of equality and feminism

That burned with the ashes of a billion lives
In secret, we triumphed over fate, by our failures
We who were trampled by white men and government policies

My love, it feeds on your love for a united future
Where colors do not separate us, and birth-status does
Not enslave us, where leaders can be women

I love you as the downtrodden looks for opportunity
As in my own life’s chastity in years of poverty
At the furnace of the barren wombs of youth

I think of your lineage and how you came to stand in this spot
I trace your ideas like the blue birds of revolution
Tomorrow, we will give them a leaf from the tree of our love

Silent and starving, we will prowl the webnet for signs
Of our victory, decades from now
When machines rule the corridors of great decisions

The liquid measures of your steps will lead back here
An open-AI of how we fought for something bigger than ourselves
And gave our best years to a journey we could not name.

Soni’s Hour to Rejoice

“I must admit, I sometimes find it useful in my practice to delineate the various typologies of personality as cats and hens and ducks and swans and so forth.” – Women Who Run with the Wolves

Family, love, adventure
My skin breathes sunlight
Like women, who run with the wolves!
My heart beats stardust

Turned inside out with love
For creation, and our journeys
We who spell sacred syllables
With our blazing thrilled minds

And identity cascades in gratitude
With optimism, shining as the sun
A golden halo of all we have become
Family, love, adventure

More than thanks giving
My heart bleeds promise
With a hunger I cannot contain
For bliss, rapture, synthesis

Where we are the Earth
Where we came from, the lineage
Of so much destiny compacted
Each week is an ancestor’s mood

Each whim, a thread of Gaia’s moon
My soul contains all cosmic ingredients
Laughter, seduction, poetry
We’re like lost gifts completing each other

Where it’s not about being whole or strong
Or simply the attainment of goals
Security is following our intended course
And who’s to say what failures

Can teach us the most about ourselves
Family, love and adventure
I bounce like a nomad through the years
A boundless unfurling of miracles

A scriptive love of my own fate
The lyrics I was born to sing
If only at the center of my loving
My ability to create hope in life
And my duty to serve a higher truth.

Blooming into Native Serendipity

(Lost in Gaia)

I love you for not knowing me
But echoing me, like some stranger’s lost invincibility
I love you for your kindness
In the same sorrows we have all fled

Like youth’s retreating eyebrows
Like songs we used to sing
I love you for your no tomorrows
For your doomsday moods and emotive vitality

For your hairy shadows, and Costa Rican reunions
I followed how the healers move the mystics
Just today, as if it was a story I was familiar with
I love you for being in love and falling

In love with something bigger than yourself
I love you for your storytelling and your
Witnessing, the quiet birth of the apocalypse
Of every blue moment entombed in rapture and in awe

I was captivated by your Venusian fertility of art
And poetry and the musing of eternal questions
I love you for loving deeper in sweeter tones
Than I found use in doing, after doppelganger loneliness

And Aspergian humility, I played in shadows
I love you for not being there, when the divine stood on
Inside of me like a flame always glowing
I love you for your absence, for being

Especially preoccupied with your own drama
For your personal story of mirroring and copying
The feelings we all had all long, they still seemed
More blessed in your company

Somehow more vivid on your face
In your essays up the Western coast
Entwined and enshrined, I love you for the book of poems
You told the ocean you’d share with the world
I’m still waiting for my copy, by the way.

What BAE really Stands For

(before anyone else) = BAE

Mni Wiconi

Your art is my art
On a sea of dreams
On the petal of a flower
Seen before through many times

History repeats all mystics
Forests rejoice in their coming
Your art is not about how many people
Enjoy your work, it’s about

Your heart on the display of discovery
At the beck and call of
Some secret of your spirit
At the mercy of some

Deeper feeling than you cannot contain
That buds from the silence
And gives in to the melody
Behind the vibration of everything

There’s no trading honesty in this world
Our anxiety and vulnerability show enough
On our skin, we cannot hide it
That’s why, your art is my art

There’s no homepage for holistic healing
It’s born from our journey and communion
With each other, all seekers
I can’t seem to master the art of timing

To be able to find you at the right moment
The years and decades will go by
And I’ll still remember you at twenty-four
The way your hair flew to sunsets

And the moist neediness in your speech
It was in late Autumn when you went west
Where I dug up a piece of your wildlife heart
But you had already flown
Like a swan into the night

And not even my eyes that had bathed in your sunshine
For a spiritual moment could find you
Through that rush of ginger and turmeric after-taste
Like incense, you had escaped all definition
Though the impression struck me as something subtle

The leftover from a life left behind
Of meditation or even caring about chakras
Through still I can say, “your art is my art”

Water of life, tears of loving
To wash the dust of daily living
From our souls, where we were adopted
And where we departed our most beloved ones.

If vision was the art of seeing
The goodness in others that was invisible to others
I imagined you could see right into me
And it didn’t matter you were miles away

Love of beauty was a taste
And the creation of art was a kind
And our art sometimes protected
Sometimes procrastinated with our mistakes
Those were the feelings we treasured the most, in fact
You always had him, before anyone else.

The End of Desire 2.

It’s clever not to desire, isn’t it my friend?
Our worldly duties no longer
Feel weighted like fate, like we once felt
Tied to roles and roses and houses

Let’s not follow authority or impulse
But find the listening actions
The lifestyle that doesn’t inhibit

The world-soul to act through us
We were never going to be anything
But the destiny we had consented to live
The smiles and misfortunes

They were all intended
And in our grace and simplicity
We found a kind of poise to

Succumb to who we were, like sheaths and bodies
That we knew we would outgrow
To be attracted to this or that seems
Only to obey some instinct of nature

That is not false, only artificial
Desire wasn’t the bar, but it was superficial
It wasn’t the kind of skill that led us

To revelation, only repetition
Revelation wasn’t only to repeat
But to learn to be a new person.