Motherhood is the only Truth of Life

Hae.mi, every verse is a child of love
As I watch you with your child
I think upon the qualities of your womanhood
Your ancestry and your design upon time

The heart as a gulf, and a bridge and a blessing
I who have experienced so little true joy
Can admire the cherishing of a maternal love
That exceeds in brightness and in sport

The spring’s treasured moments of a young mother
I watch you with your child, as I would the stars
Or holding the Earth in my mind as I would
Imagine life caring for all the galaxies

Hae.mi, so when you think of me, remember
I die at dawn and daybreak, every day
To witness your majesty as a woman and a mother
With no decisions and no receiving, I’ll carry on

So as to die with the morning and the evening
We might support the future in a familiar face
Like your son or the billions of lights
That swim in the hawk-like night

And the swan-like soul of all living things
Those eyes, a little bit like our own,
Those hearts, that feel and hope and love
Like we do, Hae.mi, that is your gift

That I can love you like a father who watches his daughter
Taking care of the world while she travels it
In the years and greetings and journeys
Given to her, and what will live on in her sons

In his daughter, who will one day become a mother…

 

Photo Courtesy.

In Winter, Merits have a Woman in Mind

Listen, Hae.mi, there are no paths closed
Between you and I, where optimism points her passion
Where the door is to the universe
This is not the time for prayers

But the time to act, my lovely field
Where I play in all that is Heaven
O’, I’ve known thee in thy dress of whiteness
And in the tempest of thy insomnia

The league of ours is beautiful
Based on the soulful arts, and
I feel as though I’ve not seen the last
Of your smile, in my poet’s arms

The sacred sacrifice of the bard
Is not nearly over, the muse bends
In a festival of tempting destiny
Such being the idol of my consumption

To the beauty I know I rest in thee
To the wonder and harmony of all that’s good
Hae.mi, the secret entrance to your life’s totality
There are no citizens or policies there

Only the abode of ritual and sweet shyness
The last warm flesh of hope and gladness
And all those things not native to me
That you possess like jewels, fruit, perspective

An abundance of so much radiance I keep
Following your spark for a hint of the luminous
And at the court of your entrepreneurship
I’m firm like the dawn of the world

For your sunsets and miracles of action
Your nurturing of the beauty in all of us.

Photo Courtesy.

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 …

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.

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.

Underneath Creation’s Willow

My thoughts and titillations
have no obvious footnotes
nobody will remember

what was once said
history only repeats itself
our thoughts are not unique
this bliss submerged
forgotten lifetimes somehow

live on like karmic traces
idiosyncratic music that
lives beneath the dust

the anxiety of living
the souvenirs of images
all gone, symbols like
eccentric sunbeams only
there for a time, languages

erased, civilizations once so
flamboyant must too dim
like stars change color

time leaves no trace
but evolution is divine
omnipresence watching
and acting on everything
universal laws reap and sow

we are part of the sum
energy and matter of the
cosmos, maybe that was enough?

The ones worth suffering for

“Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another: “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .””
― C.S. Lewis

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/A-friendship-tale-116384835

i

It’s a long time since I haven’t
heard from you, old friend
though you like to live in my mind
and in those moments I imagine
you are thinking of me too

our time and place is gone
to erect for ourselves a lovers’
monument deep in the recess of our soul

ii

We give each slice to another man
another woman, but the truth is
few captivate our ideals, have values
in the likeness of our own
once we talked about who we would

be, and to speak about changes
was to speak about love,
the love we shared for our future

iii

When you wept because we had to part
did you know there was another
unlike me waiting for you?
It’s a long time since I haven’t
heard from you, I did not receive

even a little piece of paper
It’s not a lack of love
but a lack of friendship
which makes the missing stronger.

Spectrum Disorder

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
~ John Cage

In the penthouse of cool August
the trees have begun to whisper Autumn
the fragrance of anniversaries

an instinct to catapult meaning
into some creative form, some relationship
where the banter of everyday
might be fulfilled in a forfeit of identity

no matter how long the hiatus
these street lamps remember me
but the people I knew are gone

we’ve gone our separate ways
you used to laugh at my love of writing
but I still sweat at the writing desk, love
these clarinet-oxytocin dreams

where I learn to be merciful with myself
my precious psyche deserved better
my rhetoric of sweet-salts left

the flower of my being coming into view
an orchid of failed seductions
a white rose of broken-hearted
love that no longer requires human love

summer was meant for vengeance
and humanity was made for loss
but my timidity is satisfied by
a more divine neurochemical
than sappy serotonin or dull dopamine.

Photography courtesy of: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Fire-471797211

Scattered Fables of Neurons, Past Lives

with the precipitations of music
I saw that my number was up
an archipelago of magic began
with the script of pilgrimage
the clarities of the green earth below
with five senses that spin
to the grin of loved ones

serendipity, my body’s mouth to be
filled with water, your body
to gush sky, cuddle naked stars
I wondered what it meant to be alive?
so I tried it, to turn with desire in self-pursuit
and run across the fields
with neurons not made for lucidity

or mouthfuls of truth, but teaspoons
of hope, and morsels of beauty
that is all i could manage to swallow
so I surfaced with kindness
syllables with a humble kind of honesty
lyrics translucent as silence
words that echo to the radiant void

just to meet you, simply to stay awhile
I who, couldn’t move the impalpable forests
or divide quick sculptures of the wind
or remember the fragrance, of rain evaporating
into thoughts I couldn’t think
mortality was limited, but with endless things
a thousand beginnings, I moved like
steps where each step was saying ‘goodbye’.

Photography thanks to: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Remembering-all-of-the-past-33648388

SONG DAWNS THE TURRETS OF YOUR MIND

Words, towards a poem
I have profited from them, quarter-hour wrenched
From these hands, survivors of poverty
Enter and exit, hope
On the corridors of Earth
From the charred tree of language
From noplace to now-here
Lost, between the good mornings and goodnights
Words, as an umbilical cord with faith
They are all made-up, I know it
Bibles, sutras, mantras, poems and history
Faceless divinities, abstractions
In the mineral belly of imaginations
The Modern poet must dare futility
To find a way out: the poem
To speak for the sake of speaking
In tongues desperate and incredulous
Hours of the somersault, myth, savior
So I spill these phrases, syllables, stars
That turn to a fixed center on paper, screen, eyes
Indelible letters that no one can dictate
Until I ignite and burn this dreamy gold to nothing
This is how poetry exists, how love exists.

潛意識

i

No map traces the street where
Where two sleeps are, lovers cast adrift
In each other, from their purpose
An evil omen, the French window ajar
Shades down, jilted by sleeping Fate
That has the odor of sexual revolution
Curtained with yellow lace were
Those youthful experiments, like the

ii

No flowers can reveal the lies
We told ourselves, in each other’s arms?
The mouth to mouth of our lost hours
Love drenched in another time, leaving
No silver track to honest feeling
Only a calamity of numbness, resignation
Ousted from the warm bed of hot adventure

iii

No sun holds us steadfast in the narrow dream
Where those two sleepers are
You and I, me and you, those are
Fantasies now held under water
Like a love affair that ruined our life
Eyelids drenched in gold
Powerless, but to stare into the sun.

A FAIRER PERSON LOST NOT HEAVEN

I remember landscapes of vanished whims
Dreamy artifices of twisted Bronze
Wishes of creamy abandoned doves
Balconies of stone sculptures

I remember gardens of younger games
Flowers where I left half my heart
Evenings that celebrated the Sun’s wild embrace
From dawn to dusk with cinnamon-trails

I remember drifting catalogs of candles
For festivals I can no longer name
I remember sins for which they
Cast out angels, fallen to be sure –

Stern to forgive warriors, only doing
What they were told, I remember
Sweet and outrageous ideals, ideas, proclamations
All to afford the luxury of a better future

I remember friends with tongues of gold
Whose sophistry was altogether too charming
And how those gilded trees melted into
The green and white perfection of Spring.

Sad Eyed Lyricist

I’ve spotted it with tears (I pronounced to all my living verse) Your infant faces are proof of it ! The crumbled years, the kissed cheeks White as snow, red as apples The harmonics of a life enriched By syllables …

The Last Sunset

After I have reached The West for clothes of new colors I will perhaps know the rows Of ancient trees, like my ancestors I will know the two worlds That separated past and future Sunken to Ocean, lifted to skies …

Stop Loving Never

I feel the autumn air
bringing an autumn slack
my bones beneath the black
colors of suffocated dares

the brother who is never seen
the parents who leave their bodies
the blowing rain of enormous quickening
change, I knew she would not struggle

only time can sleep like this
running crazily here on these fields
I feel the autumn air
giddy with the eagerness of hope

in a flutter it is gone
like everything I once desired
space is at the center of my room
time haunts my mind’s ornaments

my palms don’t know what to touch anymore
the world, or some dreamy ‘forever-after’
will I feed on days only to die?
and lick the sunshine reluctant to let
my heart stop? stop loving never.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/La-Piscine-Et-Plouf-395085816

Who never lost, cannot win

Who never lost, do not know –
The thirst that will never be quenched
Plato’s fires in the weary league of Shakespeare
The Greatness that stretches

To the Revolutionary Day?
Who never lost, are unprepared
For the tragedy of a dull life
The cooling tamarind, the gazing tumeric

A legion of spices sought, in vain?
Who never knew, the Royal scars –
The lovers who left, loved in vain!
We are all soldiers in our hearts

With love on our brow, and not always
The Will to overcome, common ruins;
Who never lost, do not fathom more.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/sleeping-on-the-cold-dirt-392663547

Author’s Prologue

My life has been an author’s prologue
Godsped the days of summer’s end
That let me love, and forget to write
My hands trembling, at my seashaken house

With the foam of the Gods spraying me
Until my lucky stars fall into sunset’s net
Eternal waters tackle me into the clouds
I kneel with my fishwife by the coast

Where I stab heavenly birds with beloved eyes
All I have known and seen has come to this –
The poor peace of a timeless song
The rest beyond pan and flute and melody

And a comfort beyond prayers and pain
My life has been an author’s prologue
And as a poet to a thousand strangers
I gave my heart, the fire of birds
The world’s turning light, that is never enough.

Photography Credits: http://www.deviantart.com/art/our-390450759

Light Relates to Us as Distant Offspring playing

All night we were dreamers
Of the light of the moon, our shared dream
It was by the right of body
That we felt the dead words: “We loved”
And I could never trust enough
It came as if, too easily to me

I heard the testimonies of Earth
As if the touch of silverware
On our finger tips, for the last meal
With the chop sticks of the
Meal of the happiness of a lifetime
*
All night we were dreamers
And I rushed to miss you
As if my night is attached to the fish-mouth-nipple
Of the weeping after all we have fled

You tell me to not remember the past
All night we’re together and I think
“This is it”, there are no sticky feelings left
Only the dreaming of lifetimes
&
That flee in earnest for new suns
To speak a new language to your body
And make a substance older than light
Out of our Eleventh hour together.

Photography Courtesy: http://browse.deviantart.com/art/Walk-into-someone-elses-dream-380281898

I Spoke in Praise of your Mortal Hips

I stroked your hair, after the hundredth kiss
These kisses were desert over the pillow
A cheese-cake stamp of time stopped

Or she shot ahead in letters of your name
I touched your mouth, for the quiet year
Of no longer looking, listening

For the prophecy of your dreams
It hurt to sleep away from you
I touched your hand, which you never felt
*
But with the fingers of water, we laughed
We talked again all night, for another night
I loomed over your soul, like a lantern

With butterfly wings and glad melody
In the middle of your full eyes
I found a part of myself I had left

From previous lives, the forget-me-nots
Of spiritual centuries glued and tightening
Of the great loves we left ourselves on the long journey
&
I touched you with the world falling asleep
And I didn’t care, that I Would be late for bed.

Photography Courtesy: http://browse.deviantart.com/art/0440-380099860

Fragment: Human Love

Aye, Music, thou art the food of love
As is divine speech, as is the eye’s regard
Love feeds then upon the beauty
Of the secret sweet self of the other
Till all becomes music once again
And silence in love, another fragment of hearing
For giving’s glow is a virtue unto itself
Aye, it’s all a part of the warm return
That thine heart follows pure thoughts
To return to our Dear home at last
As if with all earliest hopes and joys
And all the treasures that memory can make
Lovely recompense for bitter former tears
A fragment of music, a shelf of home comfort
Aye, human love is but a portion of the Great Spirit
That nurtures our humanity of unimagined caves
Giving a voice to the mysterious waves
Sound, heart, touch, moments freed in harmony.

Musical Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9ayN39xmsI

Photography Courtesy: http://browse.deviantart.com/art/Come-As-You-Are-378579685

This Too Shall Change

This too will pass
Dreams of my heart linger
Nothing stays for long
I have been a child

Amidst the deep solace of song
If that should ever leave me
Call me no longer young
That too will pass

And I will be reborn
After death, rain, memory
After the most beloved parting
I will find you everywhere

And awake in the night for you alone
She too will pass
Or I shall lay down my nights
In shafts of fire to follow you

With a child in your womb
Winged are thus my last desires
The alchemy of spring
Is not forever, love too shall pass

As yellow daisies in the rain
My heart has been the most lovely cup
To carry and hold; flower, pain and leaf
Easy to behold, and easy to call

Upon the gleeful wine, the living gold
That your laughter changes
All my grief in an alchemy of timeless joy.

Photography Courtesy: http://browse.deviantart.com/art/Dandelion-377468128

Like Morning Realizations

I’ve got to tell you
There are morning moments when
How I realize I have loved you always
More than the essential nutrients
More than the sunlight
You are in my heart and mouth
Like burning juice
Like noiseless snow
I miss you always
In my little moments
Between “play” and “work”
I’ve got to tell you
I can never truly weep again
While you are here in my life
The clouds of loneliness
Have been washed away
And every thought is like a flute-ring
And every step is through blossoms
There are flowers next to me
When I wake up to your kiss
Last night the stars were not
As numerous as today
I have grown into a beloved passenger
Where love is home
I beg you to stay here
In a crossword puzzle lifetime
Of loving more than life itself.

Pathos of the Street Walker

Another year is gone
As a frog takes a plunge
The octopus’ fleeting dream
Wakes in the trap
Of the summer moon
I still wear poverty on my heart
Like a beggar for divine mysticism

Along this road of withered fields
My dreams wander sick of journey
I long for Taiwan, under the willow
Enhanced by the cicadas simmering song
The pervasive silence weighs on me
Another year is going smoothly
My choices have sowed a whole field

A lifetime of paddy-field where
The girls planted me until I did leave them
Dividing the clam shells between
Summer & Autumn, I stretch across
The Milky Way in Rice-planting song
Beneath trees that remind me I am homeless
My teary cry lost in the supreme trance

My deep autumn neighbor, how does he live?
When bamboo children must suffice
And starry alphabets hidden between the nets
A cypress hat my shrine of morning dew
Where my silver coins, are vision of the moon
Dancing on the sea, cliffs of pines that remind me
I am only chasing a light-hearted precipice?

Creating a charcoal festival of frost and lunar prayers
Another year is gone and I hunger
For the small thing of peace and the light of snowfalls.

Photography Credits: Calvin Wu, illustrator: https://www.facebook.com/CalvinWu.Illustration