With Thy Light & Thunder

Every moment with you
Is the greatest indulgence
A moment of afterwards held on

With inches of magic in the works
Thy face fills me with richest keeping
That I would murmur ‘keeping’

To the ends of the world
Now it is time to sit quiet talking
Finishing your sentences, though
*
We do not speak the same language
How can this be? I overflow with leisure
And hope to be near you again, soon

In desperate hope I go to where
I know you will be, in the corner of your room
I shall find your golden canopy

Of thoughts that whisper into midnight evenings
I shall lift your eager eyes that I may
Kiss you into a deepest fullness

And dip my empty life into your allness-universe
These times are of the shower of mercy
These times are the face of a lost life burst into song.

Photography Credits: Calvin Wu, illustrator: https://www.facebook.com/CalvinWu.Illustration

A Challenge of Dreaming

I take long walks at night
Talking with you until 4 A.M
That’s what’s good for our souls
Peeking through the window
Into the legend of us
I don’t need any usual escapes
When I have you, it’s love
And the Moon and the Stars and the World
I take long walks flying
Into your embrace, kissing you
Finding as if the last solace in you
Shot like a flower in the dance
Of the Beloved womb of creation
Inside the dream of the best reality
And when I wake up the next day
I rest to be able to do it all over again.

Photography Credits: Calvin Wu, illustrator: https://www.facebook.com/CalvinWu.Illustration

Alone with Everybody

I’ve been Alone with Everybody
For so long, I can hardly remember
What anything else felt like –
Sometimes a soul feels like its life

Is only but the shadow
Of a vase against a wall
There where flesh covers the bone
I meet a woman whose heart had been broken
She is not the first, our hearts

Are all trapped by a singular fate
Like the cruelty of the species
Or the fact that separation is the default
I’ve been alone with everybody

Better than you, with hardly anyone
To tell me that I was but
Trapped in my own reality
But now I know, it’s not true
That nobody finds ‘the one’

I’ve been United with the One
For only a few days now, and it’s like
That’s all I can remember anymore.

Photography Credits: Calvin Wu, illustrator: https://www.facebook.com/CalvinWu.Illustration

Running Songs of Memory

Gather quickly
Memories from your life
Pluck them from a season
Before they fade like running mice

Gather without suspicion
Out of darkness
All the light songs you know
Throw them into the fields
Before they melt like buds

From summer’s bouquet of dreams
Gather quickly kissing from the rain
Those silver liquid drops
May never come again
Kiss your love like a lullaby

April’s Rain song seems like
A lifetime ago in hot June & July
These are the memories
Of the roof of night
Little pools on the sidewalk
Of your hushed heart

Gather quickly
Kisses and the rain
Before they pool and gather
Transforming into something else.

Photography Credits: Calvin Wu, illustrator: https://www.facebook.com/CalvinWu.Illustration

Pathos of the Street Walker

Another year is gone
As a frog takes a plunge
The octopus’ fleeting dream
Wakes in the trap
Of the summer moon
I still wear poverty on my heart
Like a beggar for divine mysticism

Along this road of withered fields
My dreams wander sick of journey
I long for Taiwan, under the willow
Enhanced by the cicadas simmering song
The pervasive silence weighs on me
Another year is going smoothly
My choices have sowed a whole field

A lifetime of paddy-field where
The girls planted me until I did leave them
Dividing the clam shells between
Summer & Autumn, I stretch across
The Milky Way in Rice-planting song
Beneath trees that remind me I am homeless
My teary cry lost in the supreme trance

My deep autumn neighbor, how does he live?
When bamboo children must suffice
And starry alphabets hidden between the nets
A cypress hat my shrine of morning dew
Where my silver coins, are vision of the moon
Dancing on the sea, cliffs of pines that remind me
I am only chasing a light-hearted precipice?

Creating a charcoal festival of frost and lunar prayers
Another year is gone and I hunger
For the small thing of peace and the light of snowfalls.

Photography Credits: Calvin Wu, illustrator: https://www.facebook.com/CalvinWu.Illustration

Tracing the Ocean

The moon and sun are fellow
Travelers through eternity, they collide
In eclipses as beautiful as your face

The summer grass is tall
As the lost dreams of soldiers
The images of youth burning

Through the quiet fields of discovery
The wonderment climbs in me
As I wander upon the harvest moons

Until the night is gone, until
I wake the butterfly glow in you
Ocean, the sound of the water jar

Cracking from the ice of our footsteps
After winter, we have melted
Like the moon’s encircling thinned to a thread

As the sun’s insect singing of years
Happiest as when new lovers unite
A ballet in the air of bare branches

And the crowning summers of our love
The moon and sun are fellow travelers
Starving for fat stars or myriad clouds

Or backyard love, seeking what
The ancient masters sought
There is nothing in summer that

Does not resemble a flower
No feeling that doesn’t resemble the moon
The moon is brighter since we left home

The sun’s light is wider and whiter
Since you came drunken-into my life.

Photography Credits: Calvin Wu, illustrator: https://www.facebook.com/CalvinWu.Illustration

Between Basho and Buddha

I am one, who eats his breakfast
Gazing at morning’s glory
Ripe with the naked faith
Who hates to be conquered by grief
My eternal law is the secret
Of expecting positive embraces

I conquer by love like a messenger
I am owned by the sound of the wind
My voice speaks of one world of color
Where the journey itself is the home
To live poetry is better than to write it
For imitation is not the real experience

I am one, who eats his miles together
I prefer to stand united at this juncture
Sharing one cherry blossom, between
Our two lives, how long have I waited
To see among the dawn flowers
The face of God in nature, the nature
Of the face of God, she is revealed.

Photography Credits: Calvin Wu, illustrator: https://www.facebook.com/CalvinWu.Illustration

A Guest Arrives

A guest arrives, bringing spring water
Honey dew and a flock of gulls
Jasmine wreaths and maple tea
The floral path of being swept by a cloudy wine
Is this the face to bring me to Heaven?

Is this the taste of the deepest market?
A guest arrives, with music of Mandarin
So should I go to heaven above
With her in this human world, how many times
In a lifetime can I find such as this?

A guest arrives, with spring bright and clean
One clump of peach blossoms open-mouthed
Is dark or light red more to be loved?
Her pink touch is glowing in my chest
Unrestrained as the stars moving in the ocean

A reflection of the flowers of the sun
Mirrored in my soul so constantly
A guest arrives, and my house is small and thatched
But she does not notice my poverty
She makes an alchemy of gold from my fire-stones.

My Soul is Flooded in Moonlit Night

At the end of the sky I am not alone
What thoughts occupy the highest mind
What time will the wild goose revelation come
Nearer and nearer to the final bliss

The rivers and lakes are full with Autumn’s currents
Literature and worldly success are opposed
The Tao does not listen to the lies of men
Women seek more children, while demons

Exult in human failure, minor poets trip
Throwing their best poems into the river
At the end of the sky I am not alone
The sunsets do not swallow me so easily

An army of drums meets me at the last
Stop of human travels, I have felt the white dew of love
Trap me in its sweet embrace, like a homeland
The letters I will send will go astray
Who will read the magic moon of my tongue?

Dragonfly Debts

After the battle, of many lonely years
The solitary times no longer worry,
It’s only grief and a slow dying
Facing snow, I know the color is white

A dirty walking road of dusk and clouds
There is too little light this far north
But I am old, I am finally old –
Too many places, communications are broken
*
Family is scattered, but I cannot read
My books of grief, there are too many poems
That sound the same, too many days
Each piece of spring it will return

I cannot grieve forever, my moving eyes
Return to important things, the beauty
Lost in my studies of the world, one must
Still seek joy, the greater good, across
*
The passing honors, I will reveal flying blossoms
Pollen in the wind, lost faith returns
I am drunk in the debts I have made
Nature’s drops of water, dragonflies

So little time to know each other
We should not part, happiness and I
Bliss with unusual you, I watch butterflies
Go deeper and deeper into a field of flowers.

Photography Credit: http://browse.deviantart.com/art/Dragonfly-187356316