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.

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.

Prophecy Rising #poem #singularity

After Atlantis

I have been mystic and child
In this fragile world, corrupted history
I’ve washed the seashore of endless
Evolution and found trackless water

I’ve led Tempests across deserts
Out of Africa, I’ve met fragments
Of Neanderthals and bred a future humanity
I’ve met aliens and learned astrology

From Mayan priests and held
Sanskrit texts that no longer exist
I’ve seen my descendants colonize Mars
Let my country awaken, I said to

China, India, Brazil, South Africa
For the newborn hope for a new humanity
Not one solely based on profit and consumerism
But soul and the propriety of the people

I’ve felt the deliverance of machine-learning
And seen what predictive analytics can do
I’ve washed my hands in the singularity
And tasted the hidden honey of the future’s dream

Utopia was a conjuration of a thousand lines
Of progress holding civilization captive
In its fugitive autonomy of descendent divinity
And I was either extinct or home
When I heard the future music

The Silent Revolution is Inevitable

– Pictured, Tina Chang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tina_Chang)

Ascent of Asia

I am haunted by how little our children
Know, what we have done
To each other, to those we deemed
Beneath us, to the Earth…..

How a republic falls and how
Democracy can lie, how News can be distorted
How money hides its debt
By printing more, by pretending we are alright

Or worse, an old idea of Nationalism
Idols of a world out dated, euro-centric
I’m haunted by how little
Millennials realize Asia is the new Queen

Why do they not learn Mandarin, Korean?
We forever think we are the center
Of the globe, but I’m not a daughter
Or a son of East or West

I am haunted by how little writers
Write about revolution, about change
We cannot always repeat what others have said
We cannot always unravel in our

Personal voice, there’s a secret stairway
To broader concerns, more existential themes
There, the ultimate fiction is reality
There is a new world ready to be born
Will you join?

My body is all bodies

My body is all bodies

In a world becoming Asia
I wanted to be Asian, not be so white
I wanted a cross-cultural affinity

After India, after these utopia myths
And dreams had been buried
Sufficiently, purged from my being

I wasn’t about to stand out
I wasn’t published or spread
Out on google with photographs

I was an obscure library book in training
We wanted to be writers, that’s all
To dream our tapestry and bring it

Dear and negligent, cleaning
Up from the mistakes of youth
Fresh with that foreign fragrance

Of prophetic hermit-years
I wanted to cut through the Spring
One living thing, to a word
And never suffer again the same

I wanted to speak for minorities
That didn’t know my name
But I am nobody, and nobody is language

And nobody has a voice, a tongue
That burns with the future
With a voice that is like the sun.

Psalm 15 – The Poor

Deare God, preserve the innocent
For they have put their trust in thee
They follow nature without recourse
Thou art their Lord, so protect them

They have not harmed anyone
Their sorrows multiply from the
Minds of Men that thou created
Their inheritance is a portion of thy creation

They suffer now without need
Preserve Them, O God: for in thee
They put their last symbol of faith
They have nothing to bargain with

They cannot pay to escape chaos
They would sell their daughters to
Feed their families, with holy tears
For so little freedom is granted the poor

Therefore my heart would be glad
If you spared a few of the poor
The pure, the self-sacrificed, the down-trodden
Remember them too, while nature inherits

The wicked, the industrious, the hoarders
Those profiteers know nothing about you
God, if there is such a thing as a hell
As a punishment for sin, let it be seen

Let the Nations that do wrong be punished
And let their children bear the weight of the stain.

Orphans of Asia

May 22, 2013

The orphan of Asia is crying in the wind
She is this young, not old any more
Lost with the new age at her heels
Nobody cares to play fair with her
She must find her own literacy
In games of power and pitfalls of fortune
Create her own ideology of feminism
Dreaming of bananas, pineapples and freedom
Dancing in the street, a new order of consciousness
She is a kingdom of honey-sweet sugar
A pragmatism of following ancient ingenuity
The orphan of Asia is a sleek mistress of the west
Parody of the Earth, song-mother of empires
Out of Africa, home of the first-settlers
How large is your opportunity
Why else would you be smiling? India? China?
The orphan of Asia has Japanese wings
Singaporean inclinations, Taiwanese wise-sayings
The orphan of Asia practices many religions, and none
She does not sleep in her mother’s arms
Everybody tries to take her favorite toys
Lips of forgotten genius, voice of new originality
Pakistan, Malaysian, Indonesia
The orphan of Asia is crying in the wind
Still remaining muddled, trapped, a lost kitten
Under the weight of a terrifying World Government
In place before the outer signs are seen
Your air still sneezes intellectual adolescence
Your spirituality has been banished by your politicians
Your soil still stinks of colonial dictators
Your education still forces you to betray yourselves
What nationalistic statements can save you from yourself?

Ballad of Last Light

The sun is tangled
In my prayers for sunset
It doesn’t matter than
I’m at the goldenth hour of my life
I’ve been changed to a bird

So many times, it’s difficult
To count, was I a Phoenix?
Or was I a Dragon?
I fell in Love with Asian
A long time ago, lifetimes ago

Terrified by the clash
Of wind and grass
I became an ethereal thing
I commit daily suicide
As a human being

And walk as a spiritual creature
In literature, the sun is tangled
In my silver hair
Between sky and water
I’ll leave my songs

Pet the Serpent of knowledge
In darkness, I’ll set myself a home
Pulling a flower out of moss
I’m a hung man’s last shivering
The sun is tangled at my feet
In my invocation for dawn.

Inequality

This is the secret: these hearts
I held out to you, they weren’t mine
They were all the broken-hearted

All the poets I read, all the wives
I’ve witnessed abused and thwarted
My sensitivity wasn’t mine, it was

My personal reaction to the tragedy of others
I’ve seen, our own obstacles don’t seem like much
It’s this world’s capacity to suffer

That astounds me, that outrages me
The exploited, the underdogs, the innocents
This is the secret: when you want to help the world

You put others first, somehow, for community
Is what binds us together, waiting to be cared for
It’s not only your children that need your help

Meanwhile, we refuse to do more than survive
Our comforts suffice, our legacies are private
After we have inherited so much more
Than they can ever hope to receive.