More About the Meaning of Life

At First, I raged for Freedom

Let us go then, you and I,
Into the evening spread across skies
Multitudes of simultaneous cries

Consciousness reborn
How many billion souls?
Does it take to make up a galaxy?
Like a work of art

We’ll never know
Well come and go, live and die
Into the room where women give birth

Where lovers visit, to serve evolution
The questions never answered
Of a million indecisive moments…

In a lifetime, that passes
As quickly as the predictable
Trail of thoughts, analytics of choice

Let us go then, you and I,
To be the only person
We could have been

The toast and the tea
The smiles and the tears
Do I dare, to dare, to be?

Into the thongs, singular yet identical
Unique and totally related
Human and trapped
In probability, function, duty, environment
Conditioned to be a certain way.

Pictured, https://www.facebook.com/ChloeBennet, Chloe Bennet (“Skye”).

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloe_Bennet)

When My Name Was

Changing Destiny

In the epilogue of final exists
At the wild invention of stories
In the emergency of all narrative
Who will you decide to be?

In the immediacy of dreaming
Where only a few years count
How will you stalk destiny?
Dripping with the temporary

Appetites of mortality
What will you give your soul to?
The journey that is
Beneath velvet stars, points

ii

As tiny as infinity
Blindly feeling even thoughts
Your body pulling you
In mundane directions

The moon never did any good
Breeding, profit, mating, belonging
But is that all you were created for?
In half-lit houses we ache

iii

But do not know why
A quicksilver fluidity of the future
And the grave realities that contains
All of us in holographic form

Forever retrievable, forever
Exportable to baby-earths
An algorithm of small theatres
Beautiful framed by the prospect of free-will.

What Would The Ancients Say

Of Gods and Strangers

I dreamt of lost vocabularies
Lines of poet-monks
Dialects of the Tao
Encoded in obscure Buddhist texts
Mantras of the Rishis
Wisdom of the ancients

Sanskrit whispers of sages
I have heard them all in my imagination
Or, the forgotten dialect of heart
In modern man, whose hunger
For profit is a world-destroying greed
A few generations, so much lost!

I dreamt of slow locomotives of
Quantum physics, artificial-intelligence
A million times more intelligent
Than the collective intelligence of all humans
And all this comes to pass
Progress, industry, prosperity, technology

I saw them all, existing in a relative permanence
That was as fragile as an empire
In ancient times, each one thinking itself immortal
I dreamt of the prophecies of Mayan priests
On the scorched Earth where our descendants
Mourned, for their inheritance

Our legacy and our people, were yours
I dreamt the past and the future as one moment.

The Silent Revolution is Inevitable

– Pictured, Tina Chang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tina_Chang)

Ascent of Asia

I am haunted by how little our children
Know, what we have done
To each other, to those we deemed
Beneath us, to the Earth…..

How a republic falls and how
Democracy can lie, how News can be distorted
How money hides its debt
By printing more, by pretending we are alright

Or worse, an old idea of Nationalism
Idols of a world out dated, euro-centric
I’m haunted by how little
Millennials realize Asia is the new Queen

Why do they not learn Mandarin, Korean?
We forever think we are the center
Of the globe, but I’m not a daughter
Or a son of East or West

I am haunted by how little writers
Write about revolution, about change
We cannot always repeat what others have said
We cannot always unravel in our

Personal voice, there’s a secret stairway
To broader concerns, more existential themes
There, the ultimate fiction is reality
There is a new world ready to be born
Will you join?

The Last Nature poem….

And indeed there will be time

Drink deep of quietness
Solitude is the calmer mist
This drunken slumber of nature
Always adapting, always seeking compromise

Delicate eco-systems of the valley
Glimmers of the noises of the night
Margins of the Sea, millions of years
Of history, feverish only for thousands

Of species recently gone extinct
The great human extinction of biodiversity
That’s the real news of this world
Earth, whose primal glory was the mother

Who provided when we were mere nomads
Before cities, before billions, before money
Drink deep of quietness
If the future will be a return to the past

We do not know, or shall it
Be a return to the stars, we cannot say
There are galaxies where we are known
Or, more properly, where our

Descedents are known, they are patient
Not like us, who seek profit only
In the short-term, mere years of instinct
However, there exist also dimensions
Where we have already destroyed ourselves.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Bonjour-Mona-Lisa-525400244

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Remnants of a Thousand Springs

Remnants of a Thousand Springs

The things that one grows tired of
The longing and the loving
And how the face gets older each season
I used to hardly perceive the difference

The wonder and joy are calmer now
My senses no longer follow
I am gracious with just a few
Wheeling stars, a recurrence of spring

A belt of purity across the simplicity
A sacred look a day from a stranger
I imagine to be a good omen
I’m aware of the fuel to inner burning gold

That lets memories fly away like birds
Ascending to a winter heaven
I’m less fortunate than before, I’m lucky
Only as a nomad of the inner worlds

Learning to live without preference
My attachments burned away
Until I found a solid grasp on happiness
That didn’t require significant objects
The props of living, remnants of desire.

Like words on the tip of the tongue of Silence

Going Blank Again

i

Is there an expiration date
On silence, the silence that begs us to write
In bloom we are silent
In dialogue with the universe
Then to remember the moment
We write about it for the

Rest of our lives, that is how
Mystic writers are born
Prophets who go by the name
“Anonymous” nice to read you
You will notice many of them
Shuffling down the centuries

II

With a surreal smile on their lips
In the arms of Spring
You will see them
Somewhere on the street
On the first murmur of the wind
Across the ember of the months

Through the river of language
Untying what you were taught
With hurried words that doesn’t
Need many breaths, they can say it all
Ageless, with buried open eyes
Unhearable, with the quality of silence

III

Beneath their stainless anthems
Nameless speeches to humanity
Is there an expiration date on silence?
I think not, only the extinction
Of an audience, only the missing
Information in the cloud

In the space between planets
In the time between civilizations
That’s the eternity were beautiful words go.

Free association in Red-ness

From the sneak peak to the Novel, Red, by EJ Koh.

 

Koh-Catharsis Diaries 1

A brief study in the

Implications of literary angels:

Pause and follow the direction

Of the innocence and passion

Of the birth of language

Of the pangs of poetics

It’s our sanctuary of hope

It may be disobedient to become a writer

But if it’s our calling, is it not

Our moral obligation to oblige

The inner universe in us bursting forth?

It’s where the hero’s journey

Became the writer’s journey

Alchemy of lonely years

Lonely years that were not truly lonely

Like an orphan from another country

We left behind traditions to pursue

With pause, deliberation, a lifetime of editing

Translating, giving speeches, marketing

With only the barest silver light

Of recognition from the sun outside

Like the attempt to piece together

All the things that occurred in our psyche

Without success, we were doomed

Trapped in the fiction of our own myth

Like a journal of Sera and Azel

Unending, serpent biting its own tail

Experience the Guru, Sera

Youth the dreamer, Azel

The Koh effect implied objectivity

A truth that was not Justice when there was none

A magical realism of our bone-split

Rain covered tears, the vision that

Encapsulated our prison room

Untold labor of conscious hallucination

The way eyes flit away in internal direction

When the shaman wakes the brain

These I have seen, these have I witnessed

A trinity of Spirit, Earth and Wake

And the lost sense of no-time in the dream

The dream that was our life

The surrealism of the spirit that

Liked to study our human past

Dissect it for significant moments

Summarize the way memory plotted inaccurately

Like tear-stains on letters from mother

It was a lottery of bright moments, pale

In the forgiveness that altered them

The primitive familiarity of the search

For belonging, in an anonymous modern world

Full of condemnation, virile self-criticism

Waging wars of inner doubt

Mover, spirits, humans, animals, planets

The blatent hierarchy fostered responsibility

Consciousness required us to rebel

Gendered pods took on ethnic-matter

Race became part of snickering identity

Identity became a frame of reference

One glowing figure in our own night

Author.

– EJ Koh

Indeed well, Here I decode the Koh effect

The Koh-Catharsis Diaries

There is a secret Haiku between you and I
Though I suspect only I can hear it
The words are dim and bright

You who colonized the American dream
For East-Asian writers forever
It wasn’t a banner you took on lightly

And I admired you for it:
In part because I myself
Fantasized about being Asian

Had strange anti-white guilt
Embarrassed by my British Descent
They say white people only came

Into existence eight thousand years ago
With a healthly dose of Neanderthal genes
And if, as artists we ever felt like outcasts

These invisible connections were cathartic
Lonely and abandoned, I relished
The purity of self-sacrifice
As if the poverty helped me focus
On what I wanted to do
On what the divine universe asked of me
I complied, was obedient, took it to heart

There is a haiku between you and I
It’s a wet barren emblem
Of creative arousal, like
Bards of magical realism

I endured in poems only to reach you
I became both testimonial and deviation
The inner critic in me was silent
When you were in my inner room

I never knew how to communicate
My voices was uncategorized in
The anthologies and manuscripts
I was the sun on a blanket of a lost poem

With no fine description or synopsis
Though my narrative was a dream to you
A longer poem crafted for short movements
Of the soul, like a shared hologram

That replaced skype, was more intimate
Than periscope, more alive than self-publishing
On that wick I lit the flame of your split shadows
Black honey, black light, anti-matter gravity

The eminent imminent intuition of
Of sacred intent to another person’s journey
My eyes discovered your language
A cage of sounds, an open morning

Your foliage like the blouse of the moon
Your hips shuddering in your privacy
The sifted light of your ferocious attack on art
Your daring red, your what-if-mother approach

Your shriek in the lips of Virgo
I was a scavenger of the heroes you created
And I swam in your gardens careless
Of the wholly immaterial nature of the encounter.

In the Haiku between you and I

In the Haiku between you and I

In the Haiku between you and I
You and me, there is only silence
For I followed you blindly
Without words, like a fool’s errand

And our experiences were finite
But as poets we were prophets
Taking the ordinary
To make it all-beautiful

Immersed in the variables
Of relationships, I became
My own kind of poetic analytics
Poetry defined as immediate
Identification, and you were there

A myth in my eyes of incarnations
A lost journey of mine without a home
I followed you through time like a nomad
Of a poem our lives once wrote together

So pure and profound a calling
A writer-seer’s blind spot of pleasure
Ethereal, unattainable, self-sacrificial
That’s how the poetry between us sounded

Transparent, with a red dress of infatuation
Still warm, the muse of powerful
Barefoot cravings and blue-stretched out
Mythical bed of alphabetical nipple-tested
Vowel-slurring sweet anarchy.

Clearly the Biggest EJ Koh Fan-page Ever

Black Swan Job Application V

There’s something ritualistic
About eucalyptus candles
About applying heat, mint and flickering
To a writer’s body

First drafts, personal ink, editing
Our bodies know
There are absolutely no
Physical benefits to writing

But the psychic benefit is intense
The spiritual benefits are neurologically
Verified by functional MRIs
But, nothing changes a brain like

Becoming a poet, it’s a Chosun Dynasty
It means to have a heart that is free
Of attachments; poets belong
To their own social class

I’m an astrologer too, so in ancient courts
I’d be called poet-astrologer, now
That’s a vocation, or a joke
Since modern times spurns writers

There’s little doubt my spine is bent
My pelvis is sagging from so much sitting
I don’t have tricks for health
I only have the destiny of words

And a music in my cells
Stress relief comes from transparency
Realization comes from simplicity
Honour comes from prodigal creativity

But without reputation or profit
I just want to have some fun with it.

Learning to Have Nothing

To Summon the Complete surrender of love here

I have to summon up desire day-to-day
Not to do what I do, or be who I am
But, to become an unexpected
Friend with desire, I don’t like

To recognize my own needs
I’m not comfortable
Imposing them upon the world
I eat for sustenance

I have sex for bonding
I write to experience beauty
I have to summon up desire day-to-day
I don’t require much money

To be happy, I don’t have literary friends
Okay, that’s maybe a problem
Should I desire to network, I’m quite inept?
I have to summon up the desire day-to-day

I have to remind myself, you’re still
A person and even if you have nothing
I’ve never possessed much, not even goals
I experienced all this like a child

And on special days, a bit of a child
Remains to wonder at all that I’ve
Set my soul upon, all that I’m giving up
As if all must be fair, or as if

Sacrifice wasn’t part of ordinary living
I have to summon up desire day-to-day
To remind myself I’m separate from you
So I do my own thing, you remind me to have goals
I have to summon up courage, time-to-time
To give myself time to ripen, what’s the hurry
The journey encompasses all my desires anyway.