Avantgardists

Triumphant, insatiable, adorable Hae.mi, I’m stupidly in awe

Of the flavors of your moods, each word, note, flower

Happy tear of motherhood, makes me realize

 

What’s really important, Avantgardists my beloveds,

Happiness is all that matters now, I love how women bloom

And blossom in their 30s, like Evangelists of heart-ache

 

And heroes of time, reincarnating all that’s left and good in humanity

It’s warm, like warm milk to the world’s wounds, Hae.mi,

The independent woman is a twilight of nature’s strength

 

That is an epiphany of all that was meant to be

Who nurture the most equal balance between

Work and play, optimism and endurance

 

As hardy as a woman, as eager as a child

As kind and patient as a teacher

Trained by motherhood to be brave.

Songs of yŏryu

There was a coldness in your flesh

As if you had been jilted by an ex-husband

Betrayed and guarded like a mother

 

I knew martyrdom was like a dress

That they wore, beneath their frisky loveliness

As flowers and candles from yesterdays

 

Unperturbed by the golden thread of the future

That’s as warm and as insatiable as the youthful heart

Free and fiery and impulsive to the sudden core

 

Where time dripped and sprayed its mischief of unity

Into the pocket books of quotes and unsaid secrets

That were festive like surprises beneath our pillows

 

That made us suffer terribly from a sweet kind of insomnia

Those were the dragon moods of a hotness in the flesh

Hae.mi, felt it just like how the flowers appear on the Earth

 

Unbuttoned with a thousand colors for everyone

Generous to the pulse of life’s irregular magnitudes

That blurred one reality and the privacy of the next

 

Like a tantrum of secret need, a nest of sparks

Cluttered beneath all the hurry and all the wonder.

The simultaneous existence as grandmothers, mothers, and daughters

I want to lift a woman from the sand

Where the sand was her bondage and perseverance

And I would be, as a man, bold and endearing

 

Holding her breath, she would wait for him

And I would be saving and saved, found and lost

I would bring Korean drama back to her source

For the good of the heart, thrill of the body

And lift her up to Nirvanic rays

 

And she would be bright as a Hae.mi of the ocean

Savage as a Hae.mi of the jungle gardens

Of Seoul, from whence she came

 

Calm with the footprints on the sand of the great loves

Where battle dreampt a human dream

Of love and fire, and sea-salt wounds

Imprinted on a heart, as fine and as tender

As the courage of dreams, and running wind.

City Limits

It has been some time since

I had been inspired, with dimples

And the juices of hope lit on fire

Like a karosine of kaleidoscopes

 

Rose petals stuck between my lips

It’s torture to live in the pen

When the heart forgets what it is to live

It has been long, Hae.mi, between sunsets

 

In the city of so much french-this-and-that

I may not discover love at the city’s limits

For I live a hermit in my own airy castles

I’ve got to write, like an unbearable bribery of hope

 

Where I am a thief, and you are the woman I most desire

Where foreign loans are paid in poems

Poems to the lost souls and coveted mothers

Hae.mi, it has been quiet a while

 

Since I was a third thief, by writing and by touch

The slipper dress of a fleeting caress

A see-through moment in shared secrecy

Where passion stalks on the invisible up and up.

Flowers that Hurt

Hae.mi, the tongue of my poetry is unraveled

I have no shame, only bliss, my petty traditions

Are meaning less now, I to the drug of the past am unhooked

 

In the skin of tomorrow’s reckless abandon

I flee, like a moth to the stars and impressive light

The woman’s wisdom that my manhood aches

 

My lucid dreaming has pillows full of your wisdom

In my heart’s burning thirst

I’ve been secretly writing your name: Hae.mi

 

With drops of what a princess is supposed to be like

Extravagantly mysterious and obscure, partially unattainable

The tongue of my muse is blushing, bright red

 

As wet behind my ears, I feel my pulse gallop

At the speed of your attentiveness and trembling.

 

Eternity is a structure of feelings

(alternative name: Flowers in December)

Like a frenzy of mischief, I to Hae.mi must succumb

For my bright tear-brimming eyes of surrender

I to her heart must roll in her winter-fire

Delivered into the anarchy of a maiden’s smile

Where temptation is not the blue clothes of destiny

But the starry ledge where together we knelt

In between time’s curves like serpents of yin-yang

Where I inquired of you how to taste the freedom, you simply said:

“It is what it is, and loves what it loves, time is the bearer of all gifts”

In the dark alley at daybreak I spied your naked feeling there

Where from your depths, your creative-spirit was bare

Like the untouched blue sky, or the morning’s glory

I was home for a moment, in seconds with you

And your voice soothed and aroused me instantly

And I was a long imprisoned poet of the people who knew nothing

But the power of a woman, and how she played with words.

All these unspoken words are left over Feelings

 

Hae.mi, I want the secret intensity of collusion

Not that I know what fiery touches are, I who have done without

The touch of the body or the needs of men

And if, my body becomes no longer mine

 

Would I pretend to blame a muse I know so well

From the darkness of time, where someone calls me

Surely she has no wings, only words to say that I am scoundrel or throng

And I, faltering through the calls of art

 

Yearn not for unity, but for intensity’s brightest wick

Where loving is for the mind, and not the senses to burn

Hae.mi, what I have become that I require not

The agony of the heart to feel alive

 

Or an army of the loins to feel as if I should possess

I am not that kind of lover, anyways

Only the poet’s unseen hand, and the touch of the eyes

Sowing seeds of language, where I am blind

 

Hoping for friendship in the ambiguity between the genders

Gone is thus rippling radiant youth and her precocious lies

Through my curiosity is still as hungry as the dawns

That first looked jeweled upon thee, for divinity suckled

 

In the womb of all things valuable and lovely

Like a beautiful dream, where I witness you Hae.mi.

With great delight I sat in her shadow

(Alternative name: Shadow dancers)

I’m going to fathom the Korean psyche

Once and fully, for an era of emotional revelry

Hae.mi, deliver me from the ritual

 

 

Where discovery is the fertilizer

Of the red blood in the rawest apple

Your cheeks to string me with ornamental majesty

 

 

At the emergency of poetry

At the threshold of clairvoyance

There is an empathy between your breasts

 

 

Where time is dense and flighty in-between

The feathers of the long agonizing months

The short breathless cycles taking you back into the artistic source

 

 

There, poetry is an oxygen of embracing

Irrationally more than we can have

With more moistness of vision that we can comprehend

 

 

A last luxury of feeling something sublime

Hae.mi, the trees will sink their trunks deeper this winter

And I will stand in solitude among their tall haloes

 

 

Pregnant with what comes next in woman’s world

A lily of the valleys of time and hope.

I Close My Eyes

 

Let me kiss the softness of the night

Hae.mi, to which I’ll never know

I am the wildness in your purity

Though if I yearn for it too much, it will go

Into the music of misaligned intention

Into the pictures of faces unknown

Back to the masses of our stories

Our stories that are always wounded

You say I remind you of some unpleasantness

Can I not exalt and rejoice in each invisible encounter

For in my poverty of heart, I’m indebted to be haunted

I am very dark, but lovely, and loving – or else

An anonymous thief, ready to be caught

As a famous beggar for gifts of tenderness

I am the mystic honey in the simultaneous midnight

I am the lonely wolf of lost time, there’s no room for me

Between earthly lives and mothers and sons, I’ve been left

Abandoned by the vulnerable timid ones so cautious

There are silver scales in my snowy pupils

And I am your student, fine-arted through the fall

Let me embrace what I cannot possess, Hae.mi, I am dumbfounded

Though I indeed was once so innocent

There’s no closure until the time of new lovers

I know how sleek the seasons move

The souls of winter are my fondest friends

We’re all souls of mothers and pieces of each other.

The Little Dew

 

Hae.mi, with the mood for loving kindness

I fall upon thee, as the last violin concerto

From some former life, which I cannot name

I copy the Korean scripture, as if it was known to me

Hae.mi, there is no life worth living, but the one

Not thine, not mine, but something else

Reminded from a child’s face, I linger there for long

Unable to remember the rapture then, of living

Of knowing with any certainty, anything

I am trapped between seasons aware of my own mortality

With a holy assembly of symbols, copied by time imperfectly

There’s no original art to this loneliness, only a kind of death

No God but a scattered Universe of galaxies, points of light

That tremble faster than I can move, Hae.mi, that’s it

You have surrounded me like water, like air, like perfume

And I am left with nothing but the memory of own imagination

That softly whispers without reply, in darkness, in the night

Where we cannot sleep and cannot name that thing between

The hours that are not tame, so sleek and pearly like the rain

Hae.mi, I’m lost to oracles and harmonics of melodic Korean

Without choice fruit, but the power to love in my own way.

Isn’t It

Haemi’s heartbeat is listening to the Autumn dew Listening to breathing with the warm sun softly nestled On the branches of our healed hearts Where there’s no poverty in loving And no boredom in risking the gift of sharing Where …