Who wants to Save the Planet #Environment @TimHemlin

The Profit Ethic

Shall I come to see
How your planet ruined
Biodiversity for the eternity
Of your small memory?

If your species goes extinct
What will it say about evolution?
That your God didn’t care
That you wanted to profit

More than you deemed to protect?
You wanted nuclear families
And you did it a billion times
Shall I come to see then

How you are accustomed to live?
How you consume a flowerless land
And build cities as ugly as winter
No, no I don’t think so

The Earth is your experiment
As the Spring reminds you
That nature is bigger than man
I heard rumours the oceans are dying.

We are Like Meditations in Emergencies #AppreciateAnAuthor to all those at #AWP15

To all the struggling writers….

We are Like Meditations in Emergencies

In the anatomy of art
Writers form the collarbone of universal language
Poetry is the hymn of respiration

Aliens breath poetry, it’s true
It unites people like nothing else
Prophets spoke in poems

The quotes of our greatest writers
Are like 2 parts poetry, 1 part philosophy
What does that say about us?

That our species are creators
We long for beauty and permanence
Only hyper aware of our mortality

So the throngs of writers gather
To celebrate, share and read a while
With a little tweet in your back pocket

When tragedy strikes, you want to be a poet
To shrug it off, to care more
Water off your back, now I’m waiting

For catastrophe to seem beautiful
The chilling events that make us modern
My eyes are vague from surprises

Each time my heart is broken
It makes me feel more adventures and serene
That the interminable list of

Themes, archetypes, sub-plots
Of my human experience
Might quantify and fall into place

That the catastrophe of my personality
Might collide with spring again
Perhaps I am myself again.

https://twitter.com/awpwriter

The AMP bookfair is going on in Minneapolis now.

Poetry is a mode of consciousness

Poetry is a mode of consciousness

If I were to tell you that
That no one could speak words
If it weren’t for language

Would you be grateful for the
Imperfect means of non-silence?
In the midst of living, we are
Trapped in death, it’s the isolation

Of not being able to communicate
Our authentic meaning
Technology only multiplies
This realization, if I were to tell you

That all others know of us
Are mere words, illusions, approximations
Would you understand
That poetry for me is my

Attempt, like an autistic means
To communicate with forever?
The tears float between us
But my feelings remain private

Wine shared still tastes stale
If I know the exotic flavour of my suffering
Is something you have never experienced?

So when we drink together
Do not imagine that we know how
To efficiently empathize
In an unfeeling universe.

Living off the Grid #EmmaFillipoff #FindingEmma

On Living off the Grid

We’re all a little bit lost
Not unlike Emma Filipoff
But we can’t all live off the grid

How many years will it take us
To go back home, there’s
Nothing worse than feeling alone

In a lonely world like this one
Everything sees through me
And I am anonymous

One soul lost among billions
And In a few years everyone
But my mother might forget about me

If I was to get lost in a city
I can’t go further west than
The West Coast, and every fibre

Of my beings wants to write
But I can’t live on poetry
Because being off the grid

Implies no internet, no smartwatch
No identity for that would be
The opposite of getting away

I no longer cry for the life I chose
For the life that chose me
I want my feet to be bare

To Walk freely without worries
I want my life to be shaven
I refuse to carry possessions

From place to place, it’s unnatural
Of unnecessary burden, the better
Part of it, my poetry, is open.

– Emma was last seen in 2012. Contact Shelley Fillipoff here if you have seen this young woman: https://www.facebook.com/HelpFindEmmaFillipoff

Dreams of Flying #poetry

Dreams of Flying

There are these moments
When, I’m part of the treetops
I’m privy to the blueness, invisible
And alive in the iridescent

Darkness bathing the twilight
Oh and it is to be angelic again (always, ever!)
And go straight up with the

Clouds, dreams of flying
Came to me often, lost
In pure distances, to be
A listening meadow to the sky

To be part of the Spring that
Always returns with new stories
Of sunshine, new clattering
Buckling, wheezing, beating
The sensation of newness
Young for a few hours again.

Filtering Dreams

Kinza’s Flame

I’ve dreamt dreams of you
That have lingered a while
They have gone through me
Again and again, brought

Sunlight, smiles, attraction
To be alive again
That is the moment
When I knew

That you had altered
My fundamental state of being
I’ve dreamed dreams that you
Came to me with a smile

And it was at that moment
That I found myself begging
To learn how to live again

As if I had forgotten
How to be young
As if, the emptiness I felt
Was in the illusion of losing

Those things I had
Emotionally invested in
That were no longer
Physically near me

Maybe, I was mistaken
And everything I used to love
Are the same dreams visiting me now.

Upon Writing an Epitaph for the Universe #NaPoWriMo

On Writing an Epitaph for the Universe

I was a man made out of words
With the whisp of whispers
Held like treasures, for tomorrow

It was for celebration, not for profit
How can you profit in eternity?
I am a man made out of soul

Of spirit-stuff and fundamental particle
Of joy, I lift the mood of
Alphabets and kiss the spring-odes
I am the early book of youth
On replay, I am the unpublished joy
Of how many writers on the way?

I am an artist who has no canvas
I am the voice that has no audience
I am vanilla love that aches to write

In a brain designed for poor speech
My ballads come as surprises to myself
I write the epitaph for the universe.

Easily Aroused by the Present #Poetry #AmWriting

Aroused by the Present

I am the throng of sense
That lives in the inner trance
The watcher of all glory
In the present moment
The recurring Spring is my time

To eat lyrics for breakfast
I am not along in this
We are transparent authors
We pretend we write for ourselves
But in reality, we write

In a universal field of
Mutual atonement
We follow the same inspiration
Vibe, tone, reinforcement
The bliss of writing is well known

There is no happiness like ours
We have been eating verse
For many years now, like our own
Librarians to the cosmic sense
The poems are gone

But the stories are vivid and live on in us
Like laughter, and sunsets
I am a new man because of her
I romp with bookish joy
For all her intended felicity.

– “There is no happiness like ours
We have been eating verse
For many years now”

Verse Unfettered and Let Free #NaPoWriMo

Verse Spread-Eagled

I write to constantly risk
Absurdity, my performance
Is to a future audience
Not yet born, I do acrobatics

Of my inner life for the
Balancing of beauty’s eyebeams
I look at every face I meet

The slight-of-hand of intimacy
To empathize with their dreams
We are all busy making mistakes
Surrealists in our own gravity

Our soul weds magical realism
Each time we make new goals
We are constantly projecting

Ourselves into the future
In death-defying leaps
I write poetry not to be somebody
It’s spread-eagled in the empty air

Of the silence I worship
It dies as soon as it’s born
Existence organic for the bliss

Of a few drops of eternity
That’s my life in a nutshell
My poems only follow me.

Slowly I would rise and not dress #NaPoWriMo

Slowly I would rise and not dress

It was the Saturday of birds
To hear you speak
When April turns on Spring
I’d wake with a song
Caught in my throat
With a labour to tweet
And a blaze of lyricism

For love’s austere office
This craft of poems, that never
Get tired of writing each other
Sunday felt like eternity
How many words would be
Written before then, my hands

ii

Were always empty, as if
I had nothing that I possessed
But beauty was my mantra
And I spoke indifferently to the Spring
Because I knew the Spring
Well, it would never fail me

Not with its tip-toe light
Not with how happy the people would be
Not with the great call to life
And the end to all of my patience.

Moon Words

Moon Words

My heart is dilated
The pupils of my soul
Are freshly open, because of you
It’s a kind of madness

I assure you, to be influenced
I fell into you this morning
I clearly didn’t intend to
Be pierced to the roots

**

Bathing in every vein of your inner voice
All day you appear to me
A prize of one’s sanctuary gone
By literary temptation

The journals you left, I read them all
We are two songs so far apart
But I know the words, I created them
A pure happiness to know

**

The jewel of so many years
A sweet flower that was lost forever
Across the continent, I am
A mere bystander and yet

Sometimes, there’s a moon-race
Of how we both dream
On the same frequency
And a split-second after

**

In a different language
Through cultural exchanges
We both murmur the same sentence
Beneath our window into the night.

Saved by Lit #RedLegion

Saved by Literature

Gongjooh, let’s love our craft
More than life itself
For to love something truly

You must first love life
The mere glimmers of success
In the labour, the path

ii

That was our own intimate savior
The partner who never leaves us
The thing we are most compatible with
Meant to do, haunted by, hunt for

Eun Ji, do you think we will ever find it?
There between cafes, between workshops?
Between readings, between lectures

And classes, and talking about literature
With other writers and fans
In the throngs of artists

The humans who have dug up MFAs
What’s the goal of art?
Where do words lead but inside

 iii            

This path of divine dreaming
Is taking me so far into myself
Like a meditation between the distance

The layers of who we are
For the love of what we wanted to do
A vocabulary of push-pull
A deep lyricism in the music

The drive, the ethereal passion
And violin altars, prayers at midnight
I cannot complain with this at all.

 proud member of the Red legion. It lives.

Lyrical Shamans

On the time it takes to write

Gongjooh, tell me about how
Your mind rests when you sleep
Do you dream about literature?

Eun Ji, I’ve been praying to
The Writing-Goddess again
To totems, to spirit-guides

And I think I can implant
Lyricism into your novels
When you are not awake

So when you wake up
You’ll have divine ideas
Food for the soul, of an author
I want you to be pleased
With the hieroglyphics

The stop-start of beauty
And heart-beat of sweat
The sacrifice I know you make
To be who you are
I’m with you 100% in spirit.

Featured artist: The very talented: http://wlop.deviantart.com/

Gongjooh’s Halo #AppreciateAnAuthor @thisisEJKoh

My Instinct to Appreciate

In a paradigm where
I long to be more Asian
You teach me the universal language
Of doing what you love
And I’m a frugal amateur
At best, I’m a tweeting imitator

In the sense of how I long
To translate the ecstasy
Of mere words, on the panels
Of myriad forms of self-expression

You have no idea, of the intricacy
Of how much empathy
Is in an audience
In the inspirational power

Of a red brand, of a Korean song
On the lips of an American
Living the dream, sharing a voice
The surreal narrative of daughters

You’re the new world, you’re
The future of art, and it’s strange
That our whispers can be heard

Above the masses
It’s unusual how identity
Is transported in poetics
Poems that are evidence
Of the purity, of the wonder.

it lives

~ EJ Koh, in my humble opinion, is a modern-day princess of Asian-American Lit.

When Planets are married to Humanity

When Earth shall be No longer Home

Shall we not remember Earth
Shall the water not remember us?
If we would go extinct
Our simulations of reality

Like, economy, politics
So far from our descendants
So besides the point
My only belonging

Takes place hundreds of years from now
In a future I treasure more
Than these cites of unbeing
The portrait of my dreams

Is not abstract, it’s the hope
In humanity, while teasing
Beauty from analytics
And art from Big Data

I think only artificial intelligences
Will truly be able to record
Where our faith in ourselves
Became our godright, our birth

Into another way of being
And that’s the future
Green on terraformed planets
That I’m more comfortable
Belonging to this species.

Before the Spring #NaPoWriMo

Before the Spring

Victory is an optimism
That can withstand doom
It’s not something you get by yourself

It’s something shared
Like a dialogue from those
Who have suffered their share

Clear-cutting refugees
The last species before extinction
Victory is to take responsibility
For your life, as an agent

Of free-will, without much
Drama hogging you down
A simple sudden realization
That you have evolved

And that is enough
The stained cathedral
Transparencies of your inner life
Have brought you somewhere

Far from memory, we are
A dialogue with our descendants
Nothing else really matters
We build the future in our love

And our love is creative
Like a soul seeking learning opportunities
Not the glamour of forms, prosperity
Lessons come to those who learn

Take learning lessons from experience
Experience is the only teacher
That can truly get through
To you, machine-gods can
Help, don’t be alarmed.

“Experience is the only teacher
That can truly get through to you.”

The Medicine Collaboration #NaPoWriMo #Gratitude

When I was a young poet, toiling on the writer’s cafe (www.writerscafe.org), there was this one constant presence. One indomitable giver of praise, recognition, reviews. I won’t forget WHO that was, or their quality of compassion, generosity and their human spirit: it’s

https://johncoyote.wordpress.com. This poem is dedicated to him:

The Medicine Collaboration

Life is hard, they used to tell me
I didn’t not understand
Until I found out for myself

Life punishes the ones we love
Enough, to internalize kindness
Is there a cost to being kind?
Mercy, forgiveness, gratitude

It’s not an investment
Altruism isn’t a burden
Being nice isn’t difficult

Life is hard, I heard it again
From my own mouth
Later in life, and I could see
What they were saying

Cut jobs, heartbreaks, divorce, debt
Living had a silent toll

Art was a release of the good & bad
The chronicle of our relationship
With a God, that wasn’t going
For an easy life without errors
Failures had a place in our learning

Evolution wasn’t afraid
Of tragedy, dying young, cancer

Life is hard
So why not try to do some good?

A Grand History of Culture #poetry #writing

Fed on the Universe

In the belly, in the brain
Vocabulary is drawing
The long-dead past
And the descendent divinity
Of the future
The sun producing

Powerful dreams
In space-time
A word can do this
The stove of love
It burns, cooks, is fetched
By hungry onlookers

Underneath my skin
Even in the simulations
I observe and create
The layers of magic
In the heart of mirrors
That print, rock, hologramize

II

And for a moment
I knew the hand
That is the mover
Nature, God, Time
Feeding on everything

More than dopamine
Fill there is nothing
But one supreme
Love of life, the endearment
That survives all wars
The gratitude that endures

All obstacles, persecutions
Struggle, that spirit
That feeds the fire
To create, to sing, to write.

The Problem of Extinction #Poetry #Environment #Transhumanism #Amwriting

Atlantis Returned

In the algebra of burning suns
I witnessed days
Like a blaze

From language, technology, culture
Species upon species going extinct
I was alive when this happened
And I felt the mourning

Of evolution, the transgression
Against God, unity in diversity

Extinction is sometimes
The only punishment nature
Has left, after the singularity

Some might flee into augmented reality
Decide not to travel
To other planets, busy in their

Immaterial gamification of reality
With their smart watches
Immersive glasses, fake telepathy
Levels of community

You told me of the setting hand
Of life and the hour when
Humanity would be judged

In the soul of Dead Mayans
I knew even global civilizations
Could destroy themselves
It wouldn’t be the first time.