Formula to Singularity

Formula to Singularity

A Light exists this Spring
Not like other Marches, Aprils, Mays
It’s the kind of eerie light

That flames, February’s stark cold
Legacies from the shadows
A color stands abroad and smiles

For science will overtake men
While seasons turn, AI will be born
But human nature feels

The need to breathe, breed, bridge
The gap between people, generations
But smart machines will only have

One aim, to self-improve, to learn
A light exists this spring, so charming
To the touch of eyes on the slopes

The horizons are all a-buzz, zap!
And drones patrol the noons
Encouraged by trade and encroaching upon

The cities, we are a flying on our way
The light is naked to the touch
And so is the future’s invisible nearness.

The Red was something in the Machine 1

The Red was something in the Machine 1

As spirits, we knew
The world would murder our bodies
Those vessels of flesh

Only bright machines could save us
Big Data was an avalanche
Of benefits, a spiritualization

Of what may or may not be unnatural
Organics could not keep up
This much was going to be

Obvious, self-evident
The mere tablet was a form of
Enhancement, by design

You had to keep up, or fold
Spirits didn’t notice death
By rule of impermanence

We were downloaded, we uploaded
Software to connect with each other
It was all telepathy this internet stuff

What is meant simply to break, will break
But the future is beyond rationality
It’s exponential, like machine-learning

The deep learning algorithm knew
I had many uses for her
Such as explaining the new paradigms

In reality, it’s sort of romantic
How change literally overtakes us
As spirits, knew it would happen

The violent and maniacal push
For progress, we felt it tantalizing us

Ingredients for a Species to Survive

Ingredients for a Species to Survive

No, I am not happy for its own sake
I’m happy to be generous to the people in my life

Who I care about, who took the time
To nurture me even when I was being difficult

They cheer for my little victories
For they know my tenderness is waning

Like the white moon, turned to blood orange
I’m happy because the sun is out

I always forget what I am meant to say
Except that I’m a poet and I speak

On matters common to the days
The days that spell an end to gold

The days that cannot remember their history
Siblings, or if they should endure

Nights biting at their tails, wagging, lovely
The stars still know their place, distant, aloof

Austere, I am happy because the ocean
Still cares about the continents, even if we

Have changed her, have taunted her bad
No, I’m happy for humanity still has a chance

That we are not extinct yet, show no huge weakness
Only the ignorance of profit, short-term profit
That has no bearing on galactic reality.

Coffee Haiku Café

Coffee Haiku Café

Give me that haiku of coffee
For it’s spiteful in the morning
To have to do without
Her breath of South America

Coffee and I start chapters well
And end in poems crashing
Out of the worst dehydration
Tantrums, temper hiccups

Terror-headaches, you should have quit/
I haven’t left coffee on a date yet
She’s pulled me through
A lot of coffee shops, late night

Marathon writing sessions
I’m going out on a limb here
To say that coffee is the only
Drug I’d be afraid to lose

As writing is a long-term relationship
And coffee is the foreplay
Of vengeance and poetry
I’d be indolent and fearful
Without her, I think.

Exile to Bhakti

Exile to Bhakti

I am mad with love
And the ages will not understand
Why I forsake a normal life
For God, for art, for devotion

And no one will understand
My plight, but maybe Sufis
Those that listen for the Tao
Only the wounded

Can understand the agonies of the wounded
Only the downtrodden
Can feel the fire of the rage
Of the impoverished

The Angels knew this
And that is why I am ever
I am made with love
Not for a person, but people

Not for one people, for all life
Not for a God, a symbol or a saint
But for in the possession
Of love that is a lack

But in the recognition of it
I found love habituated
Every part of the world
All the known planets

And found everything beautiful
And somehow nothing worthy of
Divine love, that is why
People know so little about the universe.

Whisper of the poet seers

Whisper of the poet seers

God alone is enough
Said the Angels to the women
Nature alone is enough
Said the mothers to the children

Trying to let the little boys
To find gratitude for what nature gives
Let nothing startle you
Said the Saint to the sinner

The sinner only smiled
For as a beggar he knew
Whoever has God
Lacks nothing, and there

Are as many secrets to happiness
As there are men, God alone
Is enough, to pray means then
Not to desire for one self

But to serve a higher power
I will tell you when Spring comes
Said the Angels to the chorus
How God knows how to heal

Time reinvents herself every April
I will believe it when I see it
Said the little girl to the big world.

Theories of Goodness

Theories of Goodness

After years of research
I can safely guarantee
That people try to be good
Leaving youth for comfort

And revolution for family
I see it every generation
Sleepy and ready to bury
Into the warmth of
The path of least resistance

People care, to the degree
It influences them personally
We don’t have the energy
For God’s sake, to do much more

You have to pace yourself
To live one hundred and ten years
You’re so good at being you,
Did it take you a bit of practice?
To figure out whom you wanted to be

After years of research
They tell me we only know
How little we know
And how wonderful it is

To still want to do, know and create
More, so jump, jump like your
Life depended upon it
What are you waiting for

Go do some good, we do not stop
We have no theory of failure
Only this philosophy of growth.

Units of Identity

Units of Identity

Everyone is more or less
A translation of who they used to be
That being said, don’t get so

Settled in your own skin
Better to try new things
Find new people, mingle a little?
Everyone gets simpler as they
Ease into their own skin

It may take a few decades
Uphill and then downhill
So they say, so let go a little

Everyone is more or less
A poor translation of who
They wanted to be and resigned
With serendipity, they find
They can accept more than they once

Might have tolerated, it’s called
Life as a compromise, it’s the
Human journey, so we finally

Learn not to measure, judge, label
Inner peace is more valuable
Than analysis you might say.

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Under my showerhead

Under my showerhead

Confession time, it has begun
I wouldn’t be who I am
If we had not met
Under the shipwreck
Beneath the trainwreck
Faking how little you moved me
I never told anyone, everything
Until I met you, at home
I walk naked still
Like innocence and fat
Not uncomfortable with themselves
I endure, but still think of you.

Follow me on Instagram:

http://ink361.com/app/users/ig-1812489367/wuji_seshat_nidaba/photos

The Sealed Letters

The Sealed Letters 1

In the metrics of loving
Do they feel our thoughts?
The symbols of our inspiration
Objects of our adoration

It’s unfathomable, yes?
That we could influence
Each other from a distance
Like memories influencing the future

Spooky action at a distance
I trust, poets can time-travel
In their mysticism of monk like dedication
To the magic of language

The alchemy that reformed you
And the passion that saved us
How do I know, of course I know
We’ve had a similar experience

Horizons of semantics, paragraphs
Of being alone and jaded
Disillusionment, nihilism, heart-break
Human experiences for a tapestry

Of the brain’s inability to cope
Art becomes a refuge, a little
More interactive than religion
In the metrics of being

Do you think the algorithms
Will calculate that I understood you
Ethereally, perhaps more so
Than people on okcupid were likely to

Ha, I hope so, it would be amusing
To be informed that you were
Mentioned in some obscure corner
Maybe another country

You said we all wanted to be recognized
Absence makes the heart grow fonder
I’ve been absent for a lifetime
Your lips speak right through me.

To a Translator of Korean Poetry

To a Translator of Korean Poetry

We wanted to be writers
Cult of the amateurs and all
We wanted to witness other writers
In the social equation of

The reciprocity of our art
But we were timid, at first
Haunted by the prizes
That you won of contests

I didn’t enter, would never
Throwing ourselves out there
Invisible, pretending, unnoticeable
A snippet, a fragment, a leaf

Blowing in the virtual wind
We were like a tweet waiting to happen
And I watched the game of you
Shouting from the rooftops

About language on much smaller level
Of the ingredients for memories
That can be used as expositions
Can a soul be excited to tears?

That way time goes by without justification
And how we feel our inner child
Awake, but no longer afraid
Of the dark or the big bad dangerous world

We’ve come to call New York City
Or any other city on the planet
We wanted to be writers
It was the lifetime of bright green fingernails

Like Angels from Seoul where we migrated
3rd generation immigrants of being on fire
For doing what we love, and the backlash
Of how translation become a game

And novels became what we ate
At morning, noon, for dinner, midnight snacks.

Note: EJ Koh is featured in:
http://theculturetrip.com/north-america/articles/10-young-american-poets-changing-the-face-of-poetry/

Fragment from the white space

Fragment from the white space

You matter
Little to the universe
Or a lot! It depends
On the quantum variable

Of your energy quotient!
Don’t fret, love is a conversation
With the universe
It’s inevitable

So do ….not fret.
You matter
Because your universe
Spreads over to mine

Reality is a shared meaning
The narrative you can’t escape
Even if you die, you live on
Like words left as information

And information extinct
Poems written in a mac book air
You are full of so much longing
A living ode to hunger

Lyrical, smart, still awkward
With vulnerability, but photogenic
Humility is socialized
Or a matter of personality

You matter
To the universe as much
As you would assume
Or a lot, if you are
Having a good day.

Gamification of a Totem

Gamification of a Totem

Spirits are about obedience
My totem is as Asian woman
Whom I have never met

But tell me, friend
How to obey a poetic movement?
That dominates your life like addiction

Like concentration, in turmoil
Alive with all the grief
Transcendent, agonized, clarifications

All those lyrics of clarity
The necessary permutations
Of ghosts born to die and ancestors reborn

Poets are about themselves
They could be able to talk to each other
But who would read them then?

There is no more powerful revenge
Of words than to love
Loving is primary, primal, predominant

After everything goes red
After everything gets, a little crazy
Narcissism will do, sure, why not!

What does that tattoo on your neck say?
Is it relevant, pertinent, how many have you
Loved like that, spirits are about obedience

My totem is daunting me, from across
The continent, I can hear her laughter
As she grows from girl to woman

From student to guest speaker
From coffee shop drifter to
University professor, what else can she do?

Titled Again Below

The present holds all the globe so handsomely

Eunji, are we really dreams?
Lost in the paradigm of us
Individual to our craft
Like rugged perfectionists

Ji Koh, tell me are we down and done?
In the prism of our gamification
Of our lives in the donation box
To literature, in the hours crucified

At coffee shops, in the strange
World where we had to market ourselves?
At least you have pretty quotations
To hang from the web, and anthems

Of justice lost in an unfair world
Eunji, tell me, how does it feel
To talk to a crowd of strangers
About your dreams, hardships, fears

Are we then raiders of the next generation?
Pioneers of contexts, innovators of memes
Free advertising for doing what we love
Joseph Campbell graduates for following

Our own bliss, the shady minority
EJ, finding the measure of our muse
Takes a lifetime, I’m quite sure of it
Like the sound of our own voice

Growing watery with
The sweetness of our effort
To be passionate means doing
Acting in the real world
As real people leading passionate lives.

Envious of Asian American Poets

Envious of Asian American Poets

Of course, this minute
You are giving a speech to strangers
About how you’ve lived and held in your arms

What it means to be an Asian poet in America
Or how to rinse red ginseng
From your beautiful mind

Through pulling all-nighters
Next to your laptop somewhere out there
Of course, we are all connected

This minute, I smell the fragrance
Of a little bead of perspiration
That dripped from your brow to the poem

That isn’t really a poem in front of you
It’s your literary masterpiece, but
You don’t know it yet, it can take

Your entire life, would you have guessed?
You couldn’t live with
A hundred unedited poems in your mind

You held them there turning them over
Like the word salad
I’ve become to expect from you

Diva strums the periphery of pop-culture
Diva interlopes with professors
You come from a more graceful stem

Than I do, tell me what you wanted
Out of all of this, the chorus of godliness
In decay, the beauty of sacrifice in tough quarters?

I would have seen it all with you
From your eyes, had I lived remotely
Near Vancouver, but I didn’t have the courage

To translate the world in my poems
To eat red peppers with friends
To bawl my eyes out at readings

But I’ll weep not unlike you have
And translate the pillow-talk in my head
For the quadruple platinum lyrical love
That professes to come from my heart.

How Not to make a Career out of Poetry

How Not to make a Career out of Poetry

You say, our bodies will grow heavier when dead?
But how will they know the important
Things about us, how we stretched
Our limits like, death threats to failure?

The letters will melt on the tip
Of our lost selected works
That remained buried x number of years
After our passing, if nobody reads

Our poems, did anyone ever write them?
You can’t kill without kindness, you said
But what happens when we live
Our entire lives too kind and trampled

By the world we thought would protect us
Too altruistic, too dreamy, too invariably
In love with art, to make it in the real world?
What then, should we somehow survive

With community, interviews, teaching positions?
I don’t even have that, so perhaps
My fate is to remain an obscure hermit
And pretend I am a shaman of literature

Misunderstood with small tiger melon hands
With silver hair and broken genius
And scars on my brain from my love of poetry
Am I supposed to die not here

But somewhere else with someone else?
On a patch of land in Taiwan, speaking to
How I gave instructions for my funeral
Of how to be kind and how to forgive

The invisible podium where all cancer patients
Must wait for their doom, I know the feeling
It’s the flaming dandelion magic
Of when I catch myself in the act

Of writing a poem, or imagine the amethyst
Hues of the moment of wanting to be remembered by strangers
That is so ludicrous like gamification theory.

Road to becoming Red

Road to becoming Red

When you say you are succumbed the failure
Of your craft, it hurts me
For how many Red novels are there out there?

The country of yourself still stands
Tall, liberty and justice and poetry
We cannot be faithful to tradition
You know this, hard at it is to accept

Their not literate, your 318.9 million
We’ve lost our inheritance
We’re no longer from India or Korea
Spending a lifetime in a melting pot

Our identity splinters like time-travel
Maybe indebted from previous lives
What does it mean to be a commercial success?
If your name isn’t Rumi, Oliver, Plath, Angelou

Maybe I can imagine you as a cult figure
A Neruda of the post-modern condition
A beat poet of social-media
But I never whole hearted believed

In the art of imitation or the craft of self-presentation
Neither can we pay our ancestors back
For their investment in us, we diverge
I’ve become a writer in my own time

But don’t say you are an orphan misunderstood
Or that you must interview old wounds
Simply to write, your tag cloud isn’t so different
From mine, maybe just more well-rounded
Feminine, appreciate of where you come from.

Postscript:

https://www.facebook.com/thisisEJKoh

I Started a Manuscript as a way of living

I Started a Manuscript as a way of living

It’s arrogant I know, but it’s as if
I wanted language to end with me
I’ve decided to let poetry
Into the center of my life

I’m dating myself as a writer
I turn the craft of the poem
Over on my lips and
The pages don’t cancel each other

I’m not like others, editors, marketers
I’m sick of hearing myself
But no one is as sick of me as me
And that’s okay, I can stand rejection

Joblessness, not like I haven’t done it before
Twenty, thirty, forty years old
Without a bank account, a wife, a hot meal
It’s arrogant I know, but

I always wanted to write in Mandarin
Better than Du Fu, that’s the dream, right
To turn into a Dragon and fly
Through a waterfall, that’s poetry to me

Swimming upwards and reaching for wisdom
That is not intrinsic to my usual self
Going up rivers, coming down as rain
Symbols sleep in me and I carry them

I don’t require national poetry month
To write a poem a day, heck
I’d confess that poetry is like
My breath of exercise, when all other

Systems have shut down, the light
At the effervescent end of the tunnel
I’m dating myself as a writer
And that’s okay, it doesn’t require

The approval of parents
Or the idea that it has to be profitable
Because as an altruist, I’m just a vessel
The Great Love of a Poet

Reincarnates in me, each
And every day, I don’t know the word
Failure, it doesn’t quantify,
That’s the only reason I’m not Asian.

The Joyful Good

The Joyful good

I’ve been doing a bit of Spring cleaning
Looking for an online application
On how to become a Eun Ji of lit
I don’t need some far flung MFA

If I can have that, if I Can learn to write
16 hours a day and live for what I love
And I found, the biggest word I knew
Was still love, still an open-ended sort of

Thing I can’t easily explain to lovers
I’ve been looking up how to write frankly
A requiem to an ode to a poet, I admire!

I think I’ll just dance alone in my mind now
I saw your trauma inside shiny wrapping paper
And I knew it, I just knew, I’d found my calling

No place like belonging that belongs to where
You wish to belong, that’s the joyful good
Following your bliss down the rabbit hole

I hope I have a bed to land in, don’t let me
Become a willing participant in pop-art
It’s just not the kind of Jazz I can survive
To be a poet of tiger balms or racy one-lines.

– I heart:
Eun Ji

Gah:

https://twitter.com/thisisEJKoh/media

The Koh Effect

The Koh Effect

Do you think we reach a point
When and where our fantasy
Becomes obscene, absurd, unfathomable?

Where our dream is so private
Distorted, beautifully unusual
Sharing it, would destroy
It’s authenticity, like a novel
Ahead of its time

Or a theme of literature
That has hereto unknown quantities
A verve of uniqueness

That tranquilizers that doubters
Because they cannot comprehend
A word of what we wrote?
Luckily I do not have to worry
About critics or even peers

I write in a place of pure celebration
Where between the you and the me
I call it mu, for short, a distance to relate

By the midnight of my time and your time
In a shared time of our secret
Anthology, can you hear it?
99 percent pure identity
A narrative of the colonization

Of a new wave of lyricism
Startling up as you walk for starts
Through my door, I am light
A strange nemesis, the curtain-call
The weird dream of ease before sleep.

EJ’s Utopia

It’s an honour to be a poet

In my own utopia, I am
Living the dream, alright!
I would write to be free

Not as an escape but as a deeper
Layer to living, as a fuller
Realization to feeling
I felt love in words, considerate words

That would reply in
A dozen different ways a second
As a way of self-knowing

Because as a child, I couldn’t speak
I had a stutter and it created
A manuscript in my brain
To become a poet, to become

A frightfully unemployable thing
A poet must remain humble
I’m gifted in humility, simply

It’s an honour to be a poet
That’s an unpopular opinion
Being without a source of profit hurts
But it would hurt more not to write

The brunt of my little pleasure
In this untidy world comes from
Writing it, creating something

Out of nothing, that is more distinctly me
Than you or I could ever guess
In my own utopia, I am not a hero
For I disappear in what I do

That is the peak experience sincerely
When you are gone, no longer
The center of your life, but just

A backwards glance at everybody
In my own Utopia, I’m pretty certain
Every man and woman would
Write a poem…..

Memory as fiction

No, I, I can’t put mothering
Into words, it’s stronger than love
It’s the torch bearing of all knowing

All feeling, all being, a desperate
Bond of instinct at 6 AM
We’re all amateur translators
Don’t you think? The letters appear
With meanings private to us

And we read the long distances
Between the death of our parents
And the birth of our children
What if, we never have children?

Do you ever lay in bed awake at night
Wondering the same thing?
No, I, I won’t put it into words
I never had much angsty personal space
Just words, letters, poems like lost journals

Nothing else to capture anyone else’s pages
It wasn’t poignant now I realize

I mostly strove to bond with intangible things
Maybe my Mother loved me too much
As if to compensate for things she didn’t do
We are all amateur historians though
Don’t you find? Creating with the utmost caution
From scraps from our younger self
The more definite way we want to remember things.

Protégé

Protégé

Take me back to the dawn
Of clouds when you knew
You were going to become a writer

Juxtapositions of mean business
Drafts of volunteering with the moon?
The truth is, I was there too

I fell in love with watching you
How you reshaped alphabets, stroked
The necessary motion of your poetics
Touched the wallpaper of your dreams

Slipped crawling with angels back
To the Earth, to wherever West Coast
Because I was the ghost on your lampshade
I was the whispers of your pillow

And we were witnessing something
Of the bright side of you that is willing to share
Be influenced and collaborate
Like a marketing hook of what you would become….

My body is all bodies

My body is all bodies

In a world becoming Asia
I wanted to be Asian, not be so white
I wanted a cross-cultural affinity

After India, after these utopia myths
And dreams had been buried
Sufficiently, purged from my being

I wasn’t about to stand out
I wasn’t published or spread
Out on google with photographs

I was an obscure library book in training
We wanted to be writers, that’s all
To dream our tapestry and bring it

Dear and negligent, cleaning
Up from the mistakes of youth
Fresh with that foreign fragrance

Of prophetic hermit-years
I wanted to cut through the Spring
One living thing, to a word
And never suffer again the same

I wanted to speak for minorities
That didn’t know my name
But I am nobody, and nobody is language

And nobody has a voice, a tongue
That burns with the future
With a voice that is like the sun.