Tomorrow is Today’s Dream

Tomorrow is Today’s Dream

March on, do not tarry
Said the tip of the soul to the pen
The pen whose laughter
Could be heard
Across the centuries
Laterally from planet to planet

Star to star
To go forward is to
Be aware of your own perfection
If love is a real force
That surrounds every being
Internally and externally

ii

Would my letters slowly embrace it
Like a witness, of liquid gold
To print cherry fruit fragrances
On the lyrics of my days
March on, do not tarry

Said the tip of the sword to the pen
The pen whose muse was revolution
And could be read
On graffiti walls
In some war-torn future
As if the pain we were exposed to

iii

Broke the shell that enclosed our ignorance
Out of that suffering we stood
Stronger souls with massive
Characters and impressive scars
We wore them with pride.

On Learning to Tweet

On Learning to Tweet

I tweet my own quotations
Exposed in lyrical Haikus blended together
I’ve hashtags for my own symphonies

Little themes I rehash with ginger-lemon tea
After midnight, with a glass of red wine
I yearn to be defeated by greater
Things than I by myself could access
That’s the synergy of souls
We’re walking catalysts, you and I

Out in the crazy dark, we’re vulnerable
It’s a tremendous act of violence
To endure solitude, we’re not bred for it

I don’t condone you for being platonic with it
But I worry about you, I tweet
My worries about how strong you have grown
And I tried to reproduce myself
Objectively, and failed, and left

Unquestioning of my own subjectivity
Distorted, human, insufferable to myself
I left you there, truly about to sing

You wanted different breaths and
Required an excessive amount
Of space to find it, I learned finally
To let you be.

We are the same

We are the same

우리는 같은 정신을 가지고
(or we have the same spirit)

I cannot become the love
I eternally wanted to be
It wasn’t something I could understand
Get my head around, get my heart into

It wasn’t something I could feel all the way
It wasn’t something I knew
Totally how to give, or get
They say love is like the Tao

It’s a well that can never be dried up
It’s also like the eternal void
Full of new births, infinite possibilities
I meditated with the traces of it

Like lives with a spiritual tracing
So that I might inundate
My entire being in it
And If I disappeared for a while

It was only to complement
It’s omnipotent alchemy
And be submerged in its power of peace
I knew somehow vaguely that

Love was everything that exists
And also knew, I was more herself than she was
I was whatever our souls were made of
And hers and mine, well we were the same

We are the same, and sometimes
That’s all that can give me strength.

Addiction 탐닉

Addiction 탐닉

I am addicted to the sound
You make in my mind
My ball of fire, my branded rite
My April fire-cracker

The cranberry tears of holding
Onto something so dear
It’s a dream I had, but it’s
Other lives who will lead it

Spring has returned with Vengeance
And I am green, and
Everything is about to bloom
Two solitudes sing in me

Recklessly like colors at their core
And I’m an unbelievable shrieking
Of heart into the naked night
I’m the lyricism of miracles

Laying low, bowing low, being humble
All the soaring of my mind
Beings in my blood like lion’s breath
As if everything terrible that happens to us

Is in its own strange sense, something
Helpless that wants help from us
I’m addicted to the purr of the wind
The whispers that you are near

And temptation as raw as the rain
Everything in me is feminine when
The secret thing in poetry is revealed to me
The only journey is within

The only now is internal
The only event is the silence that resides in your soul
And if your daily life appears at times poor
Blame yourself that you are not poet enough

Not brave enough to love enough
For one human being to love another
Is the only thing truly worth being addicted to.

Lullaby After Brief Words

Lullaby After Brief Words

간단한 단어 후 자장가

You are a walking anthology
Of all that I love about poetics
Mysterious, clever, shrouded in unnecessary caution

A kind of secrecy pervades
Your literary movements
Your characters are arcane

Your plot is twisted like icebergs
Of your childhood misunderstood and
Seeking retribution against

A bedrock of lovely tragedies
You are a walking anthology
Of youth, the desire to be great

The discipline of perfection
A quest that never ends, does it?
Not in my heart, at least

You are brave, braver than they give you credit for
I’m at a loss as to how to console you
I used to be more gifted at listening
When my mind was not flooded with poems

I’m an emotional thing, when I read
Too much into you, like an octave
In too deep, as romantic as any reader
Enthralled with a good book.

http://magis.to/zmRaxEZh

The Flowers in the Mountains

                                     – EJ Koh

The Flowers in the Mountains

산에 꽃이있다

It’s mysterious being nostalgic
For that which you cannot place
I’m going on adrenaline
Into the dark, it’s poetry

For a little bit of ink
For the whipping girl
And the boy without a publisher
My pen is exploding with

That Korean language that looks
Like it was made up by kids
Who were speaking about
The book of the dead

And needed to translate it in a hurry
It’s mysterious to crave
The next book, by our own hand
Like love written on a leaf

That nobody saw, as they walked by
Plants cannot move, poems are invisible
So I hush, waiting
For the world to write through me
It’s like land, in the morning calm.

To Ancestors #blogencore #poetmuse

To Ancestors

I’ve taken the time to tattoo
A gun that is a pen on my arm
In remembering from where I come from
I find the inner voice again

I summon it from my belly
From my back that aches
With the years of long hours alone
Yes I have been alone, writing

Where have you been?
I travel the circuit and speak my mind
My ears and throat are sore
From the suitcase of free books

I have accumulated without error
I’m doing all that I am supposed to do
This is, the love of my life
Every word, word count, line, line count

Are the symbols I was created to write
I can feel the fieriness of fate
In my throat, hot like a tiger
When I speak, maybe you hear it too

Maybe one of my ancestors
Was a jester at a royal court
And I take after him
Maybe one of my grandmothers had a grandmother

Who was a prophet, and I take after her
Hot blooded I am here
Priestess, shaman, princess, scribe
My hands, they have silver endurance.