Last Gladness of Stars

Image courtesy of Natalia Drepina.

Although only with breath, I breathe
And only with mortal love, I feel
What is beautiful, let that be my good

What is true, be it right at the time
You who judge me, let me not
Accuse myself of knowing anything
What cannot be said, will be wept
Though I alone search the poets

From Sappho to Auden, be it clear
That although only with prayer, I prayed
Gratitude was not my abundance

Delight was not my possession
Freedom was not my virtue
I could only love best, in words
Words that must remain an evil illusion
Words that never reach their goal

Art that never could profit me truly
What I loved, remains unseen
All my giving was a farce

And my glory was a kind of boredom
In writing more naked than the flesh
I never found my last resort
Or a heavenly kingdom in the future’s vanity
Without warning as a whirlwind

I will die, and no one shall remember of forget
How my life became my own, in slow immaturity
The limb-loosener will take me away

And I will be lost to this world forever
As if my value was in happening, or dream
There is no beauty that endures this species
Only that which reincarnates on all the worlds
There is finally, no place for grief
In these houses of stars which serve the muse.

These Urban Rites

If the soul selects her own society
Then tell me who shut the door on years
Shared, oblivious, estranged that was
Once so intimate, divorced reality

Some things that fly – are meant to be
Don’t you know, lover, formerly Beloved?
Where we two crept through winters
Hand in hand for a short while

Was it enough, tell me lost friends?
I have known some of the most lonely hours
Sensitive perhaps to primitive emotions
Of abandonment, alienation, dependency

On a clan, a tribe, a friend, a partner
Who was not truly there, the family unit
Is then, not what it used to be
Brothers, unsistered, father impersonal and past

Faith is a fine invention, for community
But what if the world was dangerously anonymous
What if the trusting woods were no more?
And friendship, as if spoken by a distant bird

Whose voice has been ripped from evolution’s side
We, who were once two butterflies at noon
In our starry youth, overcome with glee
The tides have turned and we’ve been beaten

By men who would be our competition,
What mystery pervades such a world
Where the street and brutality have new meaning
And poverty a disfigured face to those
Who once might have shown us kindness.

Into the Stars

Into the Stars

An everywhere of silver

An everywhere of love

That’s what life is, in essence

A unity of being and becoming

Until I becomes we

And we becomes us

With breath to track the land

And a heart to hold the sky

And morning lit with a bud

Of breaking sunlight in the eyes

An everywhere of gold

An everywhere of eyes

That’s what life is, the melody

Of a trillion echoes of lives

A unity of hope

Until diversity revolts

We are splinter colonies

Lifting our little girls to the stars.

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 Womb of Everything

Eun Ji, life on the planet is born a woman
I’m not ignorant to the fact
In their wombs the magic is held
In their bosom sweet like fresh gossip
And the roots of familiar chimes

The moment of change is like a woman
Changing fairly well I assume!
Adapting and socially connecting
Though a thinking woman sleeps with monsters
We false name the beast we loved

In order to call him a Man we admired
It’s exhilarating to be alive near a good woman
You feel in her the idea that
The planet is awakening though
I sometimes wonder what a mother’s battles are for

Her child with sickness, poverty, lack of education
Waged in love and with the passion
For survival, how many women must be sacrificed?
And art whose honesty must labor through artifice
That cannot change the place of a woman

In such a barbaric society, as this?
Let them rule the world, I’d say
If they had the time, birth rates are declining
So what’s with the glass ceilings, friends
It’s their bodies, it’s the destinies of women

That have to change, to change the world
The world won’t change without them
False histories are made up of
The power, money, politics & war games of men.

I Loved the Illusion

The only legend I have ever
Truly and sincerely loved
For the span of my lifetime
Is the future, like the story
My metaphoric daughter would grow

Up to see, I would prepare
An environment for her of strange consonants
And hope the world delivered her
To some kind of star-lit narrative
Worth living, empowering, fully alive

And the best thing about the legend is
Is I can practice it anywhere, at any time
Hope is for a better future, where and when
Time does not own us and profit is not mandatory
And we are not slaves to an outdated system

But whitebeams, creative and free
In the glowing night, waiting for the stars
To show themselves after winter
And, I’ve waited all these years
I will say nothing significant until then

Poetry begins where language communes
With the shadows and rare software that
Can encapsulate the meaning of a person’s life
We who have sleepwalked this world
Long enough, know our place

Our brief conviction of desire were hardly
Stepping stones for others, though
I loved the illusion and the sense
That legends mattered and stories were personal.

Eve of July

Eve of July

July again, on the river of summer –
I know it will go quickly, convergence
Of time and pleasure, a harsh sort of journey
Through courts of privilege and hours of poverty
I’ve tried to flee this place, the emptiness
That is the climax of nothing, the void

A weight of the superficial and human fading
These masses don’t realize it yet, what’s happening
July again, and I’m walking along the channel
With a body of water and searching on both sides
For something more, I’ve yet to find it hanging
Moving closer, I squint in-between the years

That were supposed to be my prime, I’m humble
Having suffered the droughts and debts of our times
Though in this simplicity of endurance I remember
Evolution, like a thick soup of eaten stars
Light spraying the darkness with hope
Glowing like a pocket of unlimited vapour
Forming planets, binding unanswerable questions to matter.

Titled Below

Endless minutes of the present

On the eve of my eulogy to Spring
I confess the white silence
Bathes me in its engaged purity

I am a bud of a soul like a leaf
In time, with me till the end
Of all age and breath and lyrical insight

I do not deserve the light of Summer
Let others save themselves in rapture
I will drown in dead silence

Until there is nothing left of song
And all the poets that were part
Of my underlying thirst and condition

Will be unread like grains of sand
That were once diamonds of my consciousness
And so the Earth takes back

All of us each to our rest
I am humble to the facts of life
If I did not see much of you again

It was not that I did not think of you
Only I was embarrassed by the
Blueness of heavenly stuff I had become

And nothing much, in the material world
Seared by something of your likeness
I had become used to darkness & solitude.

Ode to Personality

Ode to Personality

From the music summoned by my birth
I have arrived into this place
The worship of my dearest self
Not but a speck of laborious divinity

That would sprinkle meaning
In the tracks of humanity
And suffer a while with them
As one of them, with a voice

And humility born of years of poverty
And simplicity born of asceticism
And asceticism born of inner spirit
And there was nothing left to experience

Only to be, and that was a serenity
Of aging, where there was no proving
We are what we are and a passing identity
Like silver clouds with a speck of gold

The Gods knew our place in kingdoms
But we did not entertain the status
We were our own theory of originality.

Serenity is the ability to cope with conflict

Serenity is the ability to cope with conflict

Nothing every exists, entirely alone
Don’t let perfection concern you
You’ll never reach it
Everything is in relation
To everything else

And the facts of your life
Will not cease to exist
Just because you happen to ignore them
Don’t depend on anyone
In this world for even your shadow

Will leave you when you’re in the dark
And when you live truly
The world stops, it stops and all
That exists is staring at you
Nothing ever experiences, entirely

If it’s not completely immersed
In what it is doing
And finally, there is nothing
On this earth better
Than a soul you can connect

With on every level
So be sure to not chase perfection
Be sure not to live in isolation
Be sure to depend on others
Be sure to walk with shadows
And be sure to find a soul.

Realization of Solitude #amwriting #poem #NationalPoetryMonth #micropoetry

Man is the only being who knows he is alone

This morning, let me drink the silence
Let me swim in my own solitude
Being the profoundest condition
Of my humanity, you’d think

I should get to know her better
Intimacy and silence, that’s all
There every is, I cannot often
Penetrate another being with my love

Since surrender must occur mutually
And there are times my emotion
Does not require reciprocity
This morning, let me forget about altruism

For we all deserve the dream
Beyond myself, somewhere, I shall
Then wait for my own arrival
The slow enlightenment of lifetimes

Because two bodies, naked and entwined
Soul and body, mind and heart must somehow
Learn to live together and leap
Over time, we are not invulnerable

However in the silence of today
I realize there are no yesterdays, no names,
No you and I and no tomorrow
This morning, I want to give myself up
To something higher than I ever was.

Open Invitation

Like Air & Water

Hello, I wish we would have connected earlier
We should meet in another life
We should meet in air

Me and you, with a new world between us
In loving people too much, or not enough
I felt the scenes of my life

Anonymously, my consuming interests
Were psycho-social
If not, to talk to everybody

As deeply as I could
We would sleep in open fields
And travel west in our hearts

To walk freely into the night
Maybe in, another time and place
I wouldn’t be so terrified of

The malignity of the mechanics
Of how separated our lives are now
A schizophrenic individualism

Where profit counts more than people;
Goodbye, I wish we would have known each other
We should meet in another life

We could meet in water
Me and you, without the deluded sense
Of desperate egoism of this culture

I will leave our unity for then
Until then, I will take a deep breath
To listen for the shore, that’s the heart
At the other end of time.

Slogan while drunk

Stillness,
At the breath of first morning
White as swans on the river blown
Time adrift among the roses
Europe’s balconies spilled
Over into new moments
The tide of experience
Flooding, flowing, caressing
Consciousness and wiped clean
Stretching out into
The obscene and vague concept
Of tomorrow,
Nothing moves larger than dream
When hours are large and oval
It’s promiscuous to plan too much
And somewhat foolhardy
In the whirlwind of days
Nothing is sure
Not work, love, or existence.

Karma Dragons

We all invent a face for ourselves
A life to lead, experiences
To intrinsically alter our
Soul’s DNA, our evolutionary quotient

We lived and died
And were reborn as other people
We all required a narrative
To live in order to get

Where we are going
That which is at the heart of learning?
We get wrinkles on our faces
Our wrinkles have no faces

We are a spirit luminous
Trembling in a garden of flesh
How the trees lean together
And whisper in the night

We should know social bonds
Not simple be, a single
Monotonous intensity of identity
But know, what we experience

Others experience, symmetrically
We all invent a life for ourselves
A path to tread, a body of experiences
The calligraphy of the birds

Or the dire poverty of
A marketplace exploited by others
We were animals with
Radiant hands, and still had

A good land for dreaming
And I still begged for moderation and simplicity
To be tied to time with a light thread.

Suicide of a Diwan

The streets are mute
And the downtrodden are cold
And the girl pretends she
Has many suitors
The handkerchief in my hands

Is nothing much more
Than a rag now
And the night only has one moon
And the fountains have
Ten thousand pennies

I carry the “No” that you gave me
Buried somewhere, as if
It was a part of me now
My love is spinning
The murmur of the masses

Grows loud and I tremble
At the greed of this society
That takes more than it gives
Until giving means giving
To those who would profit from you

The afternoon was something else
Sunlight had been forgotten
If I die like this, from regret
Leave the balcony open
The reaper will harvest

The soul of my art
In my study
Beneath my dirty sheets
From my balcony I can see him
He finds the weight of the snow

Annoying like a transparent shadow
The streets will still be mute
And the downtrodden will
Still beg at the metro of the church
And when I am gone

I will feel myself both like
The balcony, and the tower, and the skies
Moving up, in a stream of shadow-light
And there, I will
Pretend that God loved me.

Youth till now

Art by Agnes Cecile..

In the scattered vibrations
Of youth
I lifted each hour whiter
I slept with each month greener!
And I felt invulnerable

I feared death then as if
Cessation of being was a bad thing
Desire pushed me
Into new encounters
With the inevitable side of life

The empowering and affirming
The unfurling in the wind
And expansions into scenes
With silken banners, drunk liaisons
And knots, as the side of my bed

Inside my head, freshness of wounds
Errors in waiting, studious looks
Chaos in the overwhelming discovery
And the self-discovery of innovation
As if self had to be created over

Sky rising to the lips of fate
In a wayward temptation
Yes well that was then
And this is now, indifferent bliss
Sprouts in me now, like incense

And peace, preferring not the face
Of whirlwinds or zipper-trance.

One Last Chance

I’ve buried with open eyes
My heart in the world
To see nothing really
And to see love clearly

I’ve deserted language
For feeling, it’s the only
Truth that matters to me
The foliage of clear identity

The fallen reality of empathy
I’ve buried with open eyes
My heart in the world
So that my soul might

Not go extinct, it’s light weight
Pressed against the winter morning
Like an anonymous conspiracy
Of seeing beauty even in decay

And the pulse of syllables
Laughing even in monotony
I’ve burned with open eyes
My heart in the world

So that i might sleepwalk kindly
For the rest of my brief years
If only to love a bit more
And learn to think of myself

A bit less, so far as I know
It’s working, goodbye then
Charred language, scattered vows
Promises of desires better left

For the precipitation of music
The arpeggio of sighs.

Hundreds of years after Zhuangzi

Happiness is the deep peace
That arrives when you
Observe the world with empathy
Wherever you look you feel

Empathy, identity, compassion
That is the bliss when
Your heart shall find peace
It will be at peace, and everything

You have done or been or thought
It will all find perfect acceptance
That’s the source of things
That’s how all beings become tolerant

And furthermore, immersed
In the Great Unity, they find
More joy than they knew
Was possible, in a harmony

That is dignified, benevolent and
Never striving for happiness
Because happiness comes from inside
All the while knowing that

Attachment is a clinging and a distinction
Better to have a boundless home
In the divine container of the universe
That’s the disinterested, amused and loving

Bliss of eyes dreaming in experience
The experience where the space
Between you and I vanishes.

I voyage in a body

I go among the body
Of the world
I walk and breathe and talk
A roundabout human
Experience arriving forever

Passing youth together
To the sunlit center
Of a city brief
In the history of time
I go among the body

Of the planet
But I am a cell without
Knowing it, we have
This myth of individuality
It’s a pleasant thought

To imagine being free
But I am protein and blood
Like any creature
I depend upon oxygen and light
Water and the creativity

That makes my life meaningful
I go among the body
With a harvest of womb
And genes burning
For some journey

Like a dream I keep
Making children
As if the outcome is always
Better and special
And we break into

Daylight as always
Aware and alone
That the world is talking
About itself to itself
And not truly to us.

As New Rivers school Old Oceans

As New Rivers school Old Oceans

I’m in the waiting room
Called life
Between one world
And the next
It’s empty here
And quiet right down

To my bones, they are light
My mind is water
My breath is an appointment
With time, my body
Is a fragrance of the forest
All around me

These walls are not life
The cities do not grow
The skies blink with airplanes
Those birds haven’t left
In what direction
Is the waiting room?

From here to there
From outside to inside?
Babies too shy to stop
Clinging to a breast
They haven’t yet studied
Faces, but that’s soon

I’m in the waiting room
Called life
I don’t plan to stay forever
I won’t be called upon
The metaphor of surprise
Is nearly old to me

I might have been embarrassed
If I wasn’t the only one here
We are symbols to ourselves
And non-existent to reality
I’m in the waiting room
Between something and nothing

A dual mirror or voice
The echo of sanity or madness
Catching a thread in the
Silence, to remember that
I can be separate from
The fabric of the universe

If required, when ego is necessary
Like for movement or work or mating
It doesn’t seem important
I’m in the waiting room
For a lifetime of
Observation, studious observation.

Experience in perihelion

Violets, doves, girls, bees
And oh, hyacinths
Are inconstant objects
With an inconstant cause

So floods the springs
It must change, face
To face, epoch to epoch
Thought to thought

Year to year, swollen
With the mutability of life
Energy in a universe
Of light pushing the pace

The heroic part is not
Surviving it all, it’s
To learn to let go
The major abstraction

Is not to plan for a future
But to transcend the idea
Of being ready for a future
That is always just an

Illusion of what today is
The partners leave, the kids
They grow up, the money
Separates from your fingers

The memories grow exotic
Life bleeds a final elegance
In how quickly it leaves
The beating heart, the candles
That went out in the rain.

The idea of order as a myth

We were crossing bridges
At every moment, like symbolic
Journeys made and left behind
Half-man, half-star

Just creatures half-aware
Through time, judging
With our sense of duality
How time and space and energy

Could interact in transience
Fate only lasted after all
Until we died, until moments
Became memories and acts

When the wind stops and the
Heart no longer beats, maybe then
We can say with some finality
That it is over, life was but a dream

A myth we perpetuated, like identity
Useful in its ability to give us
A sense of security and conformity
But somewhat misguided, calling

For pomp and drama at every turn
The ego was an incapable master
Of force, and full of fiction
Like the death of a soldier who was

Somebody’s pawn, it was all
Like a simulation, absurdity
Witness at the public square
The office room politics

And the stage, where we were
Like actors, unaware of our lines
Barren, regretful and hopelessly idealistic.

Hero of Midnight

November is a solemn sentence
on my tongue, the fabric of scarcity
an interior intonation of the hermitage
before the hibernation, and winter
where so many soul-thoughts drift

like empty shells of the past
and i know from previous experience
the freedom freeze as soon as
your dignity is taken away, like
trying to live in poverty or to exist

when lovers and friends have abandoned you
for whatever superficial reason
that move people to be disloyal
the stern voice of necessity has never
been louder for me, in my psyche

where economic conditions have become
how the bell tolls for me, and how
the labour inflicts me with dread
longer and later, as if, the lilacs
on the other side might never open

In late march or april when the fever
rejoices after the long-cold suffering
the rich earth purified by her rituals
might once again know the candor of spring
and the touch of sunlight, not to be seen
for these harsh weeks, the depths of solitude.

We Should Die Except for Death

there is a solitude beneath
street lamps and through
novembers that are anonymous
as abandonment whose elements

are through many places
once cherished, and many faces
once beloved, though
there is a time for loneliness

in the human life cycle
a time to get stronger when alone
just to know that there are no
permanent realization, even love

can be taken away at any moment
we ask for what means most
and have it taken away
I wanted the river to go on

flowing the same way, and somewhere
in wanting to possess
I lost the thing I most valued
among many other stories

in the city, death cries slowly
in the long years that drag
in our prodigal decline we
might summarize all we ever thought

in a flash of voices, in a
gesture that meant everything
and nothing, that everything
was symbolic, even the perennial

lessons in experience, mere afterthoughts
like the snow that softens moments
after it hits the pavement
the pavement that belongs to nobody
that snow that belongs to all.

These questions that defined us

The day writes itself
And withers for what?
The lecture of the beautiful tomorrow

O’ thou present beloved
With the hem of planets
And the scent of roses

And these passing minutes
As delicate as my awareness
As ornamental as is my

Personal perception, all these
Frames of references
Bright like the quantum

Signature of pure energy
The day writes itself
And changes for whom?

We are but observers or actors
Or some part of the category
Of believers, that we are

Not the same people as yesterday
Somehow our questions differ
And what fulfills us embroiders

Its own meaning in our
Evolving tapestry of experience.

Photo Courtesy:

http://www.deviantart.com/art/Take-Me-Away-493475228

To Creation

If yet I have not all thy love
Remember this, I was born
Into your world, strange nature
I breathe, because of you

And your Deare evolution
I shall never have it all?
Being poor, and who made me so
And all my inner beauty is yours

I have nothing to bargaine with
Anymore, time can have me all
I have no great goals for my
Lofty mortality, “it is what it is”

So they like to say, I am tree, river
Stone, and just a bit of flesh
That grew in your womb never
Saying oaths that others do

If yet I have not all thy fortune
Let me be as you intended me to be
I can only love so much, do so much
In the fragile state for which I live

My remaining days, there are no letters
Like my genes to bring me home
Home is the planet I live upon
God’s riddles are for the absurd

Faith is not the kind of jewel I wish
To store in my brain, fruitless hope
Nor was any return love vowed by thee
Life does with me what it wills

I am as a fish in a polluted sea
Or as a tree in the last forest
I am as a world in ruins
For the sake of the greed of a few

Men who could not win your love
Any more than I could make the
Universe be aware of my existence
Love is for those whose hearts are young.

Neptune’s Shining Electrons

The universe loves and melts us
With time’s water, dreams
Our will must abide by nature
And our years must learn

To laugh with fleeting joys
And the sea exists without the waves
And the light exists without the suns
And life observes without

One or another particular race
And planets must attune
Themselves to the cosmos
To be ready to participate in it

Planets, stars, stardust, earths
The moulding furnace and the
Wispy dynasties of bliss
The thirst for more

Progress and creation’s waves
To let the quantum signature
Make of our lives what it may
In solid, liquid, vapour and light

Mould us to an energy
Beyond the limits of the original body
Across boundaries of eternity
Knower, knowing, known as one

Object and subject identified together
Meditation and action shinning
Entering a great myself that is not me
A spotless mental sky that has
Celestial aims, transcendent views.

Photo Courtesy:

1. http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/images/neptune/1bg.jpg
2. http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/images/neptune/2bg.jpg

Descendant Divinity

Time with no help from us
Has placed you exactly where
You need to be, for no two moments

Are ever alike, or have the same quality
Of yesterday or tomorrow, today is
The silence on the snow
A visitor in your mind
Of alien truths that are not so foreign

ii

Space is a sleeping woman
Full of luxuries and stars
Love is the wandering pollen

That is invented day after day
We are all like nomads half sleeping
That haven’t quite accepted
Their place in the design
The story that is like a shared myth

iii

A narrative until the world ends
But worlds are born and die every day
Invisible to our eyes, but our hearts

Are spread thin like the darkness of history
The history that is the future
And the love that is simultaneously
All our ancestors, and all our descendants.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Mermaid-480032374

to my children’s children

The future influences the present just as much as the past.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

on the plateau of high-summer
we discover true signs of life
in the heart-beat of cicadas

in the sun among your sisters
in the heights of kites and populars
something is left there
among the gazing at the stars

walking the dawns of our
luxuriant wings, the creatures
we are still of stone and sling

still yearning for the green fields
tortured on the wheel of existence
we climb the decades like machines
only to enter another night

another Auschwitz, more human morbidity
but in elegy and idyll, there is
perhaps still some clear presence

of our innate goodness before
we are corrupted by the world
our souls still dreams possible mercies
still hovers and hangs over

elusive faiths, temples of art
myths of empowerment, elitism of free-will
not all of us maybe, certainly

only a lucky few, but that’s enough for me
we will still be measured
by descendants, like relics of ancestors
our mothers sacrificed for us but

rejoiced in life’s offering
the time of wisdom is nigh, our metamorphosis
where then, everyone is along

at the heart of the earth
ready to love the star-mangled hours
without contempt for the ruthlessness
of the universe, or the wickedness of man.

Photo courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Policko-471650926