This Juvenile World

I’m haunted in November again
In corridors of time’s fleeting
To be a ghost oneself, to oneself
In the lonesome places
Where age meets security

To be shut up in verse
Like an artist tied and captive
To the abolishment of normalcy
The lives others lead, I’ve been
Placed inside a closet of make-believe

And when I show my head
To the world, I feel absurd
Or else, the world appears absurd to me
But what if I abolished creativity
In separate drawers, art has a smaller possession

Than it once did in dreary youth
But I’m still Nobody, Who have you become?
We’re not a pair of invisible, we’re separated
By digital noise, channels as juvenile
As the potential of a word, the possibility of a voice
There’s nothing the world has,
That I want anymore, it’s a con and a game
With every blossom and on every bush
My route to evanescence is a Saturday hush.

Musts, Shoulds and Could’vebeens

The solemn years have ended
In bliss of holidays extended
And parting with the world
Still unfair, with but a hope to dream

With tolling bell and taxes taken
It’s time for death, and nothing less
The centuries have not smiled like this
Since 1956, or else

Good news can be the common way
Our bones and teeth still have decayed
Time was not differ than what it is
You say that’s just life, I must have heard wrong

How heaven could be so sad?
And life so bottomless a well
Of mystery and anonymously clad
What’s on its way is going and gone

Time for eternity, never enough….
There are no “complete poems”
Only preferments and stations
That must dissolve, this purple state

Into a balance of modest clay and ash
The unblushing end is upon us here
So stay a while majesty and regret
That we might have loved, a little bit more

The sad world in her corrupt gown
With all the same stories and fallen angels like
The soldier, peasant, monk and squirrel:
We are just weary creatures here
Awareness of the end, is the beginning of the end.

Death Comes

If I should die, leave me here
In books, buried poems, last thoughts
For we all have the commerce to continue
Life, it will do well without us
That’s just the gentleman of Spring

Evolution with a smile
If I should die, live on as before
For I cannot help what I missed
Oh dear, I hardly lived if but for you
The final summer was not so unlike
The seasons that came before

If I should die, I’ve lived on dread
The danger of not living up to the self
The self that conjured up an identity
And some pet works for a while
If I never have children, then do not judge me

Strange that each one’s loving
Comes to nothing in the end
Sweet hours have perished here
And a heart divided by time
With room enough to ask the universe
If she too felt the thrill of the unknown.

Meeting of Artists

It was my soul, that unsuspected lay
The brilliant eyes of our meeting
In voluptuous spiritual clarity

Flattered by thy faithfulness to literature
The hidden merits of a lifetime
Of soul-searching, angelic choirs

And tears that probe the unseen
My yearning means nothing if
I resign the future to her promises

I hold part of the sanctuary
In my vision of delight in evolution
It was my soul, cast to eternity
Felt the golden skin of a future self
It was not me, it was genius incarnate

And she called me like a counsellor
To tell me of the triumph of love
In the embrace of a network
Where the internet is lost in sacred connection
Art would not lose itself but regain

The love withdrawn in declining time
That saves from soul and spirit’s tide
In a pure disseminated peaceful ray.

If Love Be

Love is anterior to life
Or is it just the plume
The hummingbird’s regard
In a lonely pilgrimage?

Prayer are my paralyzing footsteps
Of this obscure fogged air
Perhaps there is no enchanted prize
At the end of the weary way

If there are limits to our dream
Then maybe it’s the world
Not our fault, just a symptom
Of the decay of the times

If love is just a supreme moment
In a ruddy effort to survive
Than what new value has the soul?
That finds goodwill, posterior to death.

Life is not a Duty; It’s a Will

Sameness dulls the mind
And love shakes the heart
So do not be too cautious
This life is enough to sip

Do not hurry, but
Carry lovely garlands in your hair
And smile to break up the sameness
Burn with courage, to

Shatter the dullness
Remembering those things
We did in our youth….
Be young and stay beautiful

Give your heart to the world
Or live a miserable existence
We’re all inches from dying
Our genes are mutating at every instance

Instead of playing roles, play music
The music of risk and ventures
The art of losing and winning
In a speed of learning and changing

Life is too short to forget
What longing means, what reddening brows
What breasts that shoot like cupid
Whose heart is apple-plucked

Too soon must drop to the ground
But fruit is meant to be eaten and bountiful
Love is meant to be poignant and profound
Who takes joy in the wounds and errors

Finds life a garden of many delights
There is not enough courage to go around
To find a life worth the exercise of hunts
And strong muses to fill your life

With resonance, spirits, colors
How delicate and wanton the Graces
How easily we lose obedience to desire
As if a safe secure life was the goal.

The Sapphire Memories

I’ve cut my soul into divine strips
To deliver me into my own bliss
It is selfish to crave altars

Whose bright shaking leaves spell Autumn
I am a flowing here like honey
My heart is liquid and melts
To the touch of beings, the sight
Of worlds, I am a bit of everything

The festive joy that resides
After bodies, experience, simulations
The game of roses is nearly done

ii

I am a flicker of a spirit
Drawn in incense and silence
Can you feel me there too?
And pour all that is left of me
Into golden midnight and moons

With the fragrance of nature’s delicacy
The vulnerability that never departs
And the safety of a trillion glittering forms

I am all of those and shine still on Earth
No matter the ruined paradise of cities
Old and wretched, and empires,
Keen to exploit the people, it’s always
Been the same, silver tunics, obedient daughters

iii

It’s easy to make a vision with the ones you love
But the truth is never what it appears to be
To unloose the beauty of your eyes

Is to find the rapture of nature once again
There is no equal of that among the Gods
That which most excites the mind is divine
Abstract, like the fuel of the centuries
Whose voice is sweet yet so impersonal.

The Focus of my Little Prayers

I started early, took my dog
And visited the sea of poems
There in the basement of dreams
I found the lilacs staring back at me
I was impressed by the melody

How the sea withdrew in felicity
There was no turning back, it was set
The moon waltzed above my head

And I like mortals swooned
On the page of my youth
Where slow-motion still loved
The quietness distilled
From silence of the dove

And the summer made me beautiful
Inside, to protect me from the dying
Change was enhanced in song

Through sequestered scattered afternoons
And I was as much, my own sun
As the light escapes across the white
Across the wet throngs of spring
To be a poet of all the things we might become

Enlarging loneliness, with an inner smile
Finding joy in emptiness, that’s what
I know best, and it’s how I’ve survived

These books of bronze and blaze
And haloes of another time
I’ve felt the wizard suns
From distant eyes and praised
It’s all I have to bring today

All I am is me, and it’s a meadow wide
And it’s a storm’s encircling pride
And in my heart there is no setting or rising
There just lives a poem, that cannot die.

The Last Offering

I come, to the void of myself often
It is the soul of my solitude
It is where all the curtains are drawn

And I am in my own privacy, in touch
With something of the divine
I go there like an escape from the outside world

It is my heart of subjectivity
And I do not find it at all terrifying
It’s a splendour to own such a place

A piece of art, an order of nature
The soul built by spiritual suffering
A palace of mysticism who could understand?

What to an artist is their dream
To the cruel world how futile and juvenile
But we all require a soul to function

* * *

A spirit to push us through those terrible nights
Where the world is truly against us
And we are abandoned by friendship, love, profit

How many days of my life have I slept there
Alone, for that is the self-indulgence of
Risking and of striving illicitly, stubbornly

Against the peer pressure of such a conforming world
That cares for profit, reproduction, tradition
Perhaps we are not all made for that, I do not know?

But friends do leave and a dull pragmatism does
Set in, like the idea of responsibility for ordinary things
As when mates leave us for our idealism

I would have imagined it would be a virtue
But what if in all of this, the world is wrong?
And my soul is right, and I am doing what

I was meant to do all along, how shall I forgive myself then
For squandering my talent in subjectivity
And loving my own doom through it all

* * *

There is no room in this world for poets
So perhaps we shall do it as if in secret revolt
The revolution is always born inside

I need no solace from existence, only
My divine food, my guise of dream, my birthright
Of sacred psychology, that is why I write

It’s not a delusion nor in glowing pink afternoons
A mistake I made in being who I chose to be
It’s my exercise in the cosmos and empathy

It’s my last belonging to simplicity
It’s me mimicking all I thought was beautiful
To be grateful for a moment, together
With silence, whiteness, bareness, authentic authority.

If Nothing Lasts

Glittering with minds I come from the future
Hopeful with chariots of voice, I arrive from the past
We meet here smiling with deathless eyes
In the present, and that’s down the sky

We are children of trees and citizens
Of oxygen, we’ve breathed our genes
Into the stones, into the oceans
And I am the cry out to you; again

We all arrive at self-knowledge through love
And that’s when we love against all obstacles
Giving in spite of ourselves, our defects
They are immaterial, we are not engineered

We arrived here by long evolution
A journey that never stops giving gifts
I am not ungrateful to the tragedies
That have taught me humility and gratitude

I will go on like a hero fallen, like a lover, lost:
Be here, by me, stand by my side
If only for a few weeks, months – I cannot
Expect years, happiness comes like a lovely child

That will grow up and maybe
Never to return, all life is miracle, altars, that flicker
If only by chance for a little while
In that timing of suppliant will, I am the mutable

Grass, birds, clouds, families, relationships
That trickle back to the ocean that knows
No cares like mortals, no breaths with heart-beats
No cheeks that redden with the humiliations of a lifetime.
That’s not important, nothing lasts.

Among Rivers of Dark Purple

If I should die, then let my poems live on
Or that they should die and I should
Be free, of the gurgle and of existence

That is so personal and yet so irrelevant
To the cosmos that sings of eternity’s theme
And golden birds of our dreams than burn

Against the sun that is Time’s will
Her signature that I should die
When it is her will, and I will write
Not unlike the sky to the horizon
Of sunsets and the commerce of the living

Where parts the parting skies of hours
Hours that float and rise and lift
The conduct of all pleasing scenes

* * *

All smiles, all beloveds that left
So then, how wonderful is Death
And dying to ourselves, and the spirituality

Of the waning moon that blushes over
The entire world, of heartbreak that lasts forever
Maybe, I’m numb now to the passing wonderful
The subjectivity that was once so intense
Is now a common flower, I won’t mediate

Anytime soon in cemeteries but I ponder
The seasons of my life, that drank in darkness
And could not find the light, whether in myself

Or reach the intimacy in others with
The skin of my soul, my life’s inauthenticity
Is the corpse of my doubt and cowardice

* * *

That never truly knew love, or had the courage
To wrestle danger with a smile or succumb
To the pressures of a common life, perhaps
I will die young, bohemian and a bit wild
Where I feel the breath of Armageddon

In the silence, can death hit me then like this?
When my heart already has some lack
Of oxygen, my heart-beats lack a sturdy foot
What of my brain that drips in lost memory
The better part of who I used to be.

Ecstasy Once Leapt, but Not in Me

Ecstasy Once Leapt, but Not in Me

I felt a cleavage in my brain

For hope and faith and love again

That the Earth did not do good

Or my heart knew not how to summon

The friendship I so desired, but could not find

The slumbering pain of tragedy

Lingered like a shell next to the lost sea

Of if my human nature could survive

*                      *                      *

While I aged in years that

Only secrets could keep pacts

With immortality, I was bare

A bird, a sky, a planet’s lone summit

And the barren ethereal throng

Could not feel what I maybe once was

All the love of youth had fell

For nature’s curtain of harsh reality

That the Earth did not do evil

Perhaps it was just I that felt the

Sequence of the ravelled fate

Where destiny parted with thee.

The Death of Songs

Eun Ji, the pen that must lift from the heart
Is the poet tired of the sensation of addiction
So we commit suicide to art, knowing it will set us free
Like adolescent love, that must one day too must pass

And the tragedy that became our comfort zone
We sublimated it into something else
Obsession for the ritual that represented
Our salvation from loneliness, though

It made us immortalize the lonely ache
O’ Eun Ji, it was me who watched thee on
The stage, I watched a thousand Korean dramas
Just to get a hint of who you might be

I grant I never saw a goddess go;
Nor found a literary mistress in the poetic snow
Seattle being too distant a dream to me
But roses are forever sometimes, like poems

That burn not with false compare, but mimic
In the twilight, the cheeks that we ours
Who swore in loneliness, that they found comradeship
And yet still, by heaven, I think you are as rare

As any poet I hoped to know, hoped to read
And if I ever had a love of the pen, or a muse
Or wished the music of the soul, of pain
Or whatever note the throat could soar
And swear that art was something more real.

P.S. http://thisisejkoh.com/