The Unexpected Death of Idealism

Oh, there’s reason for these sighs
And peace, from maturity
Inertia of no longer fighting
For ideals that are bigger than self

That’s the vague grey canvas of age
Talking, strangely through time
An apathy of our youthful heroism
I can wish now late, with words and spitefulness

But nothing empties dreams faster
Than poverty, student debts, a harsh economy
I said goodbye, to art, to fantasy, to women
But my heart keeps coming back

I pray to the soft ray by the window pane
And to my peach hibiscus that has blossomed
Unexpectedly, there’s a white peacock
In my dreams, that wakes me form my silence

I brood for a future me, and for a feminist hysteria
But there’s no raspberry jam, no honey and tea
I cannot forgive a world that doesn’t fight
For a better world, that’s not the legend of love

That I’m a part of, I want a higher cause
A championed course, and kids that believe
In more than profit and competition
Oh, there’s reason for these sighs

That come with a price of actually caring
About what’s happening to the world
A world that doesn’t beg for your love
It only evolves quicker without you

I’ve no cure for happiness, when
The majority has it worse than I do.

Notes from the Future Underground

(Love letters to Asia)

I snow dive into you
Like the air of Autumn beating
Against your chest, the yearning

Of youth that is no longer young
Trapped in an aging body
My face knows no mercy!
I am the dove of white stitching
With a heart for a stranger’s smile

I’m an open lake of enigmas and
Surreal plaything of golden leaves
If you wish to, look into my eyes

There is nothing but guarded purity there
An endless array of ideals before sunset
I’ve cherished things and people
I will never meet, never see
But simply by knowing they exist

I am made more noble, more caring
About a world that shows only
It’s rough underbelly, it’s trials and stupidities

A civilization so vulnerable that believes
Capitalism will last forever
But I see the cracks in the system
The memory of corruption bare
And I will not agree to disagree, I will fight

For a revolution if need be, while I am young
Chilled and numb, I will not take
My place among the profiteers

Who joyless create a dead world
I drink to my soul, with the straws of eternity
And have distance foundations in my view
I strategize with machine learning paradigms
For more than flowers of written down words

I strive for an Autumn of convergence
That won’t be attainable until many years from now.

P.S. Instagram is blocked in China.

#TheStruggleIsReal

Eun Ji, do you remember me?
I was the one that heard thunder
When you most wanted storms
We’ve always been about burning stars

Our letters were unearthly and radiant
And we took all our cowardice
And wrote it down for all the women
Who never dared to speak their minds

We were, feminists before poets
And for the festival of the dead
We rot their sacrifice in our rituals
And if all is looted, betrayed, sold again

Our words will flash with the wings
Of black deaths, brief plagues
And all that was once glorious
Will be glorious again, aloof with

The smell of honey, I’ll be the one
Walking you to reincarnation
I know you know this, that when
The dust of freedom settles

We’ll be the gold smell of the
Mouth of sunlight, when the
Future ripens suddenly, in a terrible
Festival of dead leaves and brief realizations
We were made for this #TheStruggleIsReal

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.

Autumn’s True Tenderness

you have come to me, all tenderness & meekness
to give solace to me, my dear….
this portends perhaps to my forsaken doom
or to some suffering that God wants to quantify?
all things being equal, I am not here forever
no, mortality is a brief window closing
don’t you know? didn’t you?

come now, stay a little longer
won’t you, if you could, for yourself and all
you hold dear, for your health that is
to meet me with a torch, while lunar gleams
unsteadily behind you, your smile never faltered
even as your voice is strangely altered
from former years, your face hangs low now wrinkled

what might have been, had our hiding places
of timing matched, I cannot say
i’ve a certain smile, thanks to you
these years have not been as lonely
as I might have feared, and this
that’s the promise of the greatest hand
who lends their heart to uplift a fate

as low as mine, gold before me are alter and road
the fire has settled deeper now
my soul is full of light and freedom
but the mirror of my body is gathering grey
life, what a letter, what a bouquet
to think that i’ll miss this too
was once almost inconceivable

in servitude you know i languish
at the edge of awkward anguish
my fragrant heartached years weren’t what
i might have expected, i can still hear
the old gate creaking, and remember the
yellow stains of my youth, but that
is not important, we are sometimes so unaware

of our good fortune and spiritual calling
nothing is quite as glowing as
gratitude in our last autumn on the Earth.

WHITE JADE, FEMALE POET, ORANGE PITCHER

Heaven bless the babe
Orphaned by divinity
What queer books she will read
Granted, to be a poet isn’t easy

When she is older, she will say:
“Till the Spring, my murdered lover
Till our souls meet in another form
The language of my foolishness
Will be the bridge I swear”

Heaven bless the babe
Who suffered for the world
To make a cheerful song
That could outlast the centuries

Quiet, suavely clothed in sacrifice
Hurling, golden spears of martyrdom
Up the lines my silver runner
With a pen and a canvas
Bearing the banner of lost poets

In a siege of a dead poet’s society
Heaven bless the babe
Who became a writer
When critics were white rich men

Come now Aphra, be content
You and I have nothing to do with music
Akhmatova’s cannon is all about
Death beating the door in
For women fraught with inequality

Emily knew in her circle of white
Edna urged a certain possession of zest
For being born a woman, is a clarity
In the pulse, a sonnet gone unread.

P.S. To female poets: Aphra Behn, Anna Akhmatova, Emily Dickinson, Edna St.Vincent Millay.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Sylvia-II-460402222

Treatise on Akhmatova

You will hear thunder and remember me,
It is not just, to be stingy with your spirit!
Think then upon wanton storms

The rim of the sky spoke to you
With her hard crimson sails
Your heart on fire, we’ve all

Seemed to ourselves, as if in a dream
Our lives an accidental guest
If the world were music

How our bodies would brighten up –
My shadow it must then, serve
As the friend I crave, on such nights

Where memory must be slaughtered
For tomorrow’s warmth, with a still
Beating breast, the carnival of life keeps

Still, seeming like someone’s delirium
Or a reflection in somebody else’s mirror
I’ve lived without a name, my destiny

Haunted by incompletion, I’ve been
Touched by grief, as the future that ripens
In the past, I’d rather not recall just now

Forgive me, I’ve managed badly to
Console you, I’ve left only traces
Of myself in songs, Russian can lip these –

The voice so wild and simple
As to be untranslatable into any one tongue
We learned not to meet anymore

Our youthful dreams in starry words
That chill, at the bottom of hope whiter than chalk
Where the rosy limbs of youthful idealism

Must take root in new minds, favourite hours
That are no longer mine, but yours
I will not condemn you to repeat my mistakes

Though you will, without spilling your blood
Too much, you may not know the wild honey
Smells of freedom, or how the dust fled from sunlight

But then again, I do not wish too much
Revolution in your times, or dying friends;
As for me, you will hear thunder and remember these
And think: “she wanted beautiful storms.”

Requiem for Everyone

Everything has its own hour
Where loved, treasured, not sold –

becomes our everything for a time
Until ‘nothing can last forever’ becomes
the day, the month, the mysterious year
where fate can unravel in a turn

So be it, looted, betrayed, traded, doomed
Our life is a mystery of cherry perfume

of laughter and fountains, transparent
as the constellations which depict
the cosmic story of individuality
miraculous, dark and the stories

We have always known until they
Happen to us, we encompass everything
Eaten by time’s hunger, under the wing of stars.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/colours-of-nature-404205374

With the ease of angels

I don’t like weddings – they remind me often
Of divorces, debts, bad resolves
I ache for the presence
Of flowers at the diner tables

When love’s dinner calls
With wine and roses, simple charm
Which was my solace as a child
I stayed with Bach’s ever-living hum

I don’t like romance – it reminds me often
Of dreamers, youth, bad choices
Though I still ache for the touch
Of eyes in the sleep quarters

When sleep comes, who shall I sip
As I wrung my hands to dream
Of reckless light veils, and the
Ease of angels in the flesh.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/flowers-in-my-head-401750232

Anniversary of being Lucky

I sip to our anniversary
Of being lucky no matter what
Happens or is supposed to occur

I sip to our celebration
Of being happy no matter what
The world sends our way

Steam is pouring out of
These fortunate years
Mist is slipping by from our honeymoons

I sip to our anniversary
I’m sorry, forgive me, thank you, I love you:
Tonight is like any other night

I sip to being in love with your voice
That quivers by my shoulder
In the lucid night, warmed by the
Sudden laughter of your spirit.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Snow-White-Just-One-Bite-401747877

Song of These Last Encounters

I have lost self to love
Permanently, now by this heart
Furled, in primitive ecstasy
My relationship with the world
Is now a suppliant violin’s moan

That drags itself to dovelet cooing
These moments are lucid gifts
Of touching and nearing
The broad brightness where self is forgotten
Pain lurking in an unknown smile

I have lost the bravery of battle
Against this harsher world
I have only whispered steps enshrined
Left to twist my path, a needlework
Of rustling greenery, I am not real

Life’s touch is an unflinching desire
I follow her narrow canal to the light
There I will consent to rest my head
On your womb, enter you heartlose on the scale
With lots of luck, songs of last encounters

I have lost self to love, cast adrift
In one-night stands of the dark house
Where lovers whisper “come die with me!”

I Must Now Conceded the Victory & Listen

My cries have called the world home
No woman of my past heard them
They were, the flight of fathoms lived in the past
The women were better at reality
My sentence of stone was hard years
Where memories were crushed
Into a powder, the mark of many
Flowers thrust into dyes
My cries have made the long white nights
A spilled affair of burning right through
Belief, youth, and lofty deaths
Rebirth was the rustling heat of summer
Fresh, from the lonely walk to an empty home
My cries were poisonous heart-beats
Of the breast and beast in the worst of me
I personified something ridiculous and chilled
Something to fill my window with a festive tone
Of hope staring me straight in the eyes
From some momentous star that shone and fled.

Through Posthumous Twilights Given

My arrival into discrepancy isn’t new
It’s as old as bristling diamond sparks
My glory in grief is minor
My shifting sequences are brittle
The love I bear is getting weaker
While to others, I’m merely a gentle fire
Unremarkable in illumined simplicity
My arrival into anonymity isn’t new
It’s as old as the Tao beclouded, austere
I go strolling and my dreams kiss older women
I’m almost unafraid to settle for silhouettes
Of the life I thought I’d lead
My glory in evergreen, cherry bloom shutters
Life is racing without consolation
Life, she will not be sending any more letters
To my heart ablaze at the stake
No warrior of God’s battalion of merits did I become
Simply as worried as if I’ll be able to forgive
The self-neglect of so much meaningless grieving.

Some are no more, others are distant

My life has become
A poem without a hero
As if, I am not the center of my life

I’ve observed the translation
Of experience to verse
Like somebody who doesn’t
Truly care where they may end up
My life has arrived quickly
At the end without an Epilogue

I become a secret chorus
Of my own mental instability
Without justification to survive
Or opportunity to love
I hear their voices and I remember

Solace, is my spoon of golden-milk
My life can become
A poem with other beloved characters
As if, I was living my life for others all along.

Ode to Jacqueline

He did not know his threshold was a woman
The afterword, when boundaries
Flared like the settling of silver-spun swans
He imaged he’d kiss that neck
A thousand times, not simply once

She has been the road
Open before him
The editor of his most ardent obsession!
He did not know in her mischief
Resounded such a caressing doom

Souvenirs of her lost forever
In her departing scurry of wild rabbits
In the great silent epoch of meeting lives
He did not know she would send him trembling
With the insanity of not being a hero

Like a funeral procession of what could have been
And the flowers on the floor, white lilies
How she peered at herself in the mirror
And snarled a cartoon phrase of self-mockery.

May 16, 2013.

Not With Your Foreign Wings to Shelter Me

Beneath sentiments better left, unsaid
Untouched like some dead weight
Beneath the rubble-fields of battered words
That amount to little more, mere memories

They are not tangible, precious, or alive
But constrict me from the inside
Let them try to pronounce a winter of hurt
For a floundering of spring, yet to be

With fevered heart, let them melt away in summer
Clang shut eternal gates of love, forever?
Yet, for all that, trust shall come again, as ever?
With nostrils of bleeding gold, for rich rewards?

You will not appear again, with that dusty mantle
Of golden olive skin and pouty eyes
I am sick of dissipating you in mere fantasy
As blind as I ever am, a prelude and a requiem, or a preface
Where my luckless touches, touched a foreign woman’s shore.