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?

Titled Again Below

The present holds all the globe so handsomely

Eunji, are we really dreams?
Lost in the paradigm of us
Individual to our craft
Like rugged perfectionists

Ji Koh, tell me are we down and done?
In the prism of our gamification
Of our lives in the donation box
To literature, in the hours crucified

At coffee shops, in the strange
World where we had to market ourselves?
At least you have pretty quotations
To hang from the web, and anthems

Of justice lost in an unfair world
Eunji, tell me, how does it feel
To talk to a crowd of strangers
About your dreams, hardships, fears

Are we then raiders of the next generation?
Pioneers of contexts, innovators of memes
Free advertising for doing what we love
Joseph Campbell graduates for following

Our own bliss, the shady minority
EJ, finding the measure of our muse
Takes a lifetime, I’m quite sure of it
Like the sound of our own voice

Growing watery with
The sweetness of our effort
To be passionate means doing
Acting in the real world
As real people leading passionate lives.

Envious of Asian American Poets

Envious of Asian American Poets

Of course, this minute
You are giving a speech to strangers
About how you’ve lived and held in your arms

What it means to be an Asian poet in America
Or how to rinse red ginseng
From your beautiful mind

Through pulling all-nighters
Next to your laptop somewhere out there
Of course, we are all connected

This minute, I smell the fragrance
Of a little bead of perspiration
That dripped from your brow to the poem

That isn’t really a poem in front of you
It’s your literary masterpiece, but
You don’t know it yet, it can take

Your entire life, would you have guessed?
You couldn’t live with
A hundred unedited poems in your mind

You held them there turning them over
Like the word salad
I’ve become to expect from you

Diva strums the periphery of pop-culture
Diva interlopes with professors
You come from a more graceful stem

Than I do, tell me what you wanted
Out of all of this, the chorus of godliness
In decay, the beauty of sacrifice in tough quarters?

I would have seen it all with you
From your eyes, had I lived remotely
Near Vancouver, but I didn’t have the courage

To translate the world in my poems
To eat red peppers with friends
To bawl my eyes out at readings

But I’ll weep not unlike you have
And translate the pillow-talk in my head
For the quadruple platinum lyrical love
That professes to come from my heart.

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To an Author

I heard that you wrote
About your life again
On paper napkins of your heart
My life is blushing again

Painted as it is with glowing stars
I Cannot sleep for all this
Visiting estranged years pains me
I don’t want to look back, to the past

I want to look forwards, to youth
That is always young and work
That always needs to get done
That is my present, so when

You talk about yourself so intimately
I cringe at the prospect
I would prefer to work
Music and philosophy into my words

I didn’t want to know you by your writing
There’s no golden age of bohemianism
There’s just you and your pen
And a cat, who I imagine watches you.