It is a terrible thing to be so open

I like people too much
But God, how lonely it is to do so
They fail you like how their goals
Supersede their interpersonal ethics

If I didn’t love others so much
I’d be much happier
And where I am now
The clouds are flowering

And I’m able to see the lifetime of
Each one of them, the face of their stars
And for me, poetry is not the evasion of life
But the processing of it, prose has such

Bad characters, they are flawed
But poetry speaks of the full subjective weight
Of ideas and emotions and people
Narrative and timeline is not something

I can afford, I’ve had enough of time and space
I’d much rather create in the ether
Where I can proudly create
Let me live, love and say it

Well in good sentences
That’s all I ask, is it too much?

Proud Artists Breed Poetry for Themselves

I will continue to work
In silence and obscurity
Loving what I do more than anyone
In this tiny world full of profiteers
I won’t profit from my art

It will rest like a blanket of
My most intimate identity
I have not a broken heart for myself
But a broken heart for this young world
That cannot seem to find its soul

Any relic of the dead is precious
And as such, the spirit of poetry
Lives on in me, like a light

That burns with the measures
Of all human words and love stories
For finally, it’s relationships
Which define and frame

Whatever uniqueness we most cherish
Comes from the dreams
I’ve had for my entire life
Though my ideas and the people
That surround me may have changed

Time and space conspire for my destiny
That my greatest love has always been
The quiet tranquility of sitting in a room
Bathed in the upstart unlimited imagination
Of the muse that can set you free.

As a Poet Burning Oneself Out

My swirling wants no longer want
The grammar of my soul has turned alchemic
Themes written under duress have come and gone

Passed, like the emptiness of notation
Like art, after the generation of my audience
Have died, the failure of criticism
To detract from the journey
I am a writing automation or

An experience of repetition in a simulation
On how to become a writer and bleed
Ten thousand hours into my craft

The thing most I love, the trip until forever
That’s literature to me, a dying art
Now I know what it feels like to be
A minority, like Native Americans
To have become nearly obsolete

Time takes hold of us like a draft
And the sun produces powerful dreams
That never feel completed, crimson-fingered

We draw in the earth, in the ash
But our designs are never done
There isn’t enough time and fire
To create what we had hoped to make.

Thighs of your Genius

Thighs of your Genius

(for Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach)

I brought your Jewish soul some water
For your literary festivity
We both kneeled by the muse of spiritual words
Our collarbones angled to the skies

We knew the sacrifice and the longing
We were migrants of a different sort
We had travelled with necessity
And ached to find a home somewhere

Beneath the different dialects
The open-ended wounds we had sustained
Getting from one place to another
And sustaining the years where injuries

Were slow to heal, our hearts and lungs
Felt the fear of too much shirting
Our pulse steady as a loving pupil
We felt the silence of a lifetime of breath

In the steady gaze of each other
And then we let go, for all our dreams
Had already existed in the written word
There was only an unlived memory of love

That stuck to the back of our throats
Like medicine for poetry, and dispatched anonymity
Our dance of vocabularies were
Like Piscean windows that met the Eastern symbols
An alchemy of goose bumps and organic teasing.

Author As the Bridge

Author As the Bridge

Dear writer, are you soaked in words?
Like a sea ready for the sun?
Completely transubstantiated with its inner nature
Ready to be a reflecting bridge to light?

Dear writer, have you acknowledge
The ecstasy that makes your life whole,
Walking hand in hand with honest years
With the cosmos in language

Your language, the one that stirs you
When your primary presumption
Is not simply sight, but vision
You know it quite well, the organic manifestation

Of soulful narrative, the core of
The voice of the characters you speak for
Dear writer, we are all bridges to something
Symbols of some poetic fancy

That reaches across years, pages, distances
To be directed to the storytelling
That is innate with history and identity
That we are not one person, but one people

And our experience is not simply our own
But the experience of all imagined things
All light-years of culture, species, planets.

Talking poems that speak of poetry

I Like Poems that are Little Games

I sometimes talk to you
About making a poem with a poem
Within language I end in pleasure
It’s not like pain filtered

It’s like bliss and peace
Usually a life turned
Into a poem can be misrepresented
Or divinized, you don’t make a

A poet with ideas, not with words
You make it with feeling
Poetry is not a memory
It’s an experience you write down

You don’t help people
In your poems, you just
Relate your view of beauty
And they can participate or not

A poem is born of revelation
It cools in the night air
It pops the end of tragedy
For poetry outlives us

And it can reveal everything mysterious
Because itself is intuitive
Dancing in the heart of
Sonnets and odes that became

Birds of musical merit
That’s something I’d like to talk
To you about, how a pencil
Can become a painting

How a piano sonata can
Become a young woman.

The Initiation into Poetry #amwriting #poem #writer #literature

The Initiation into Poetry

It’s said that poets are anxious bohemians
A strange figure in a dishevelled landscape
With some kind of Baudelaire complex
Alive with sex and tragic forsaken brooding
Or some schizophrenic Holderlinian tick

Some Plath-worthy enigmatic illness
That is hard to treat, harder to diagnose
But the truth is, poets invent their own reality
On another level, than you and I
They are like jesters in love with words

They can’t stop the ranting
They are infatuated with the music
And the temptation of anxiety and trepidation
The anticipation of freedom that is the after-taste of verse
Like wanting to be loved, and not knowing how

I knew a few poets who are mild autistics
They will imagine something beautiful about you
But’s it’s an ultimately self-annihilating plight
Like how we all need another soul to cling to
Poets cling to beauty, and the soul of other poets

And love to die for their art, making good martyrs
I guess you may or may not have the stomach for it
It’s not something you can do exceptionally well
It’s the feeling of going to hell and heaven
On a dime, to imagine you have a calling for it

It’s a daily demonstrative love you feel
That you put and marry to the page
Day after day, until all memory is a fragment
Of a poem you once wrote, it starts to have
A life of its own, poets taste glory in each day
And aren’t particularly afraid of experiencing pain.

Eulogy to Poetry

Eulogy to Poetry

Think in the morning
And poetry has died
What would you say to her?
First language and eldest daughter
I saw you in grains of sand

Your love trapped in wild flowers
I set the seas to your lips
And burned a thousand dreams
In your skies of velvet pink
I knew you as infinity of evolution

Guiding me to future hours
The trees cried flowers because of you
And the sun made songs of her Spring
You never know love of language
Until language is gone, like Sanskrit

An exuberance of many ways
To the say the same dear familiar things
Which to another generation, might be unknown
That’s poetry, a rare bird going extinct
That’s poetry, a strange magic being replaced

That’s poetry, the kind of book not published
That’s poetry, the kind of soul that can’t be bought.

Poems for Pretence #Writing #Amwriting #wordsmatter

Poems for Pretence

They say print is dead
Our poems are stuck to the left margin
A self-published hoax

A charm of unread blogs
Liberty means we set our own price
Freedom requires we write
In obscurity, floating words

That aren’t sustainable
The memory of poems
The pain of going unread

How much does Amazon take
Skim off the top, and publisher’s?
What does it take to print a book of poems?

Luck, an MFA, friends?
If I never see a book of poems
Crafted in my own heart
They say what you wrote

“Your poem” was enjoyed
By the writer, the guidelines of copyright
States it auto-deletes in a few weeks
For humanity cannot be allowed

To keep their soul
They offer us to submit our poem again
However the analytics proved
It was not original, not state-approved

The best the staff can do
Is read it, sincerely, the editor
Please understand that you won’t
Be able to write poems any longer

The audience has died, the young
People do not read text more than three lines.

Saved by Lit #RedLegion

Saved by Literature

Gongjooh, let’s love our craft
More than life itself
For to love something truly

You must first love life
The mere glimmers of success
In the labour, the path

ii

That was our own intimate savior
The partner who never leaves us
The thing we are most compatible with
Meant to do, haunted by, hunt for

Eun Ji, do you think we will ever find it?
There between cafes, between workshops?
Between readings, between lectures

And classes, and talking about literature
With other writers and fans
In the throngs of artists

The humans who have dug up MFAs
What’s the goal of art?
Where do words lead but inside

 iii            

This path of divine dreaming
Is taking me so far into myself
Like a meditation between the distance

The layers of who we are
For the love of what we wanted to do
A vocabulary of push-pull
A deep lyricism in the music

The drive, the ethereal passion
And violin altars, prayers at midnight
I cannot complain with this at all.

 proud member of the Red legion. It lives.

In the Haiku between you and I

In the Haiku between you and I

In the Haiku between you and I
You and me, there is only silence
For I followed you blindly
Without words, like a fool’s errand

And our experiences were finite
But as poets we were prophets
Taking the ordinary
To make it all-beautiful

Immersed in the variables
Of relationships, I became
My own kind of poetic analytics
Poetry defined as immediate
Identification, and you were there

A myth in my eyes of incarnations
A lost journey of mine without a home
I followed you through time like a nomad
Of a poem our lives once wrote together

So pure and profound a calling
A writer-seer’s blind spot of pleasure
Ethereal, unattainable, self-sacrificial
That’s how the poetry between us sounded

Transparent, with a red dress of infatuation
Still warm, the muse of powerful
Barefoot cravings and blue-stretched out
Mythical bed of alphabetical nipple-tested
Vowel-slurring sweet anarchy.

To Black Swan Job Applicants IV

To Black Swan Job Applicants IV

Without writing, life would be a mistake
So here’s to crazy ones
Misfits, rebels, troublemakers, anarchists
Who invariable make the best poets

And sometimes turn into novelists
If they put the time in
Because the people who are crazy
Enough to think they can change

The world are the ones that do
Coding, writing, copyrighting
Everybody is a genius
But an innovator is someone

Able to sacrifice ordinary things
To dedicate themselves to a cause
A craft, a subject, to be a specialist
Writers are specialized dreamers

Easier to tire of reality than books
So many worlds, strangely we become
What we pretend to be, so try
To be a writer for a year, you might

Surprise yourself with dark things
Certain dark things are to be loved
In secret, in the shadows of your soul
Write from that place, and have experiences

That exhaust the travels of several lives
Everyone takes around their portable magic
Might as well put it down into a book
For if we are to become insane, may as
Well write first between intervals of sanity
It’s a clerical alchemy that was my favourite
Time of my life, writing alone was like
Visiting a wild place where I was the first visitor.

After the Kundiman Award

http://kundiman.org/

– featured on, this poet’s neck

After the Kundiman Award

If I could sing a Kundiman to you
Would you know the tenderness of it?
You who plots maps and word graphs
Of how many words you have written this month

In the autobiographical sketch
Of literature, we project where we roam
The way deadlines make you
Stay by yourself and sing with your pen

You burn with untold stories
For all those books you’ve always
Wanted to get your hands on, but they don’t exist
I recognize you have no choice

But to write them, like the inner freedom
Of the pen that is its own bliss
The sachitananda of all substitutes
For living, the editor, ecstasy and poetics

Of writing, you lift yourself from
Midnight dreams to improvise
With an altogether Asian version of doubt
They say Koreans work hard, but

In retrospect we write to taste life twice
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader
No surprise, that beautiful things
Invented by a woman are more charming

You must stay drunk on writing
So reality cannot destroy you
I felt I was dreaming with you in red
Then I realized that I truly just wanted to be you

Fiction is the truth inside of sacred lies
And we must learn from religion how
Words shriek without any seeming limit
To burn the heart and cry important things

The secrets of the socially acceptable
Forms of schizophrenia, alternate-realities
Bringing nourishment to bed and waking up
To new characters, that can change our lives
For after all, stories are the things we need
Most in an unfair world, we need a refuge
And people we can identify with
These are not of course, always real people
The scariest moment is when your writing

Can only be a reflection of yourself
For everyone else is already taken
You can’t imitate yourself, you can only be you
And sing like there’s nobody listening

Because in the end, there’s so many books
So little time, the soul of fiction is a willing guest
If you are willing to kill the cat
Get divorced and move away from your home town.

Black Swan Job Application

Black Swan Job Application
(Qualities to be a Writer)

I’ve come to recognize the synopsis
For the job, writers wanted!
Ability to isolate yourself for the cause
Being okay with alone time

Being receptive to criticism
Intrinsic motivation to explore
Narratives, boundaries, create beauty
Ability to withstand rejection

Talent for creating opportunities
Out of imaginary characters
Willingness to network with others in the craft
Perfectionism in editing and reworking

Old content, to update content and to
Explore themes for self-defining new content
Asking tough questions about one’s own identity
Gender, ethnicity, social-class, family psychology

Enjoyment of reading books, a lot of books
Devouring libraries, workshops, ceremonies
Rites of passage, ability to withstand
Years require to obtain Masters in Fine Arts

Creating writing certificates, rather important here
Explorations of own style to the point of
Exposition of vulnerability, masochism and
Notable ventures into new literary territories

Must be willing to change and use own imagination
With ultimate soul-breaking investment
For greatness, fame, poetic ecstasy, first-hand novels
Scripts, blog posts, extreme loneliness in the pursuit
Of what you love, only apply if serious.

Looking outside of myself

Looking outside of myself

– Based on a blog post of EJ Koh

I live a bit through you
Like a social media update of a poet
You’ve taken into your heart

It’s like an obsession I treat very kindly
I’m almost conditioned to be impatient
Seven second attention span did you say?

How to be intelligent, talented in patient?
While being online, it’s not possible
You have to sometimes pull the plug

On a Sunday or, for the rest of your life
Instead of taking the time to
Learn, perfect my craft, study
I want to exercise my craft now
Without years of sacrifice and hard work

Call it art as soon as it leaves my mouth
Can you imagine a poem lyrical just read-made?
A novel just so without months of editing?
It’s the desperation to survive
Without the genius factor, with only me

To read my work, your work, and all
The bad writing getting awards these days
I just don’t get it, I blame the viral speed
Of the internet, and the MFA programs
But each year passes without incident

I don’t think I’m that one in a million
Where are the writer’s hard-won readers?
Or are we just writing for ourselves in the end?

Price of Poems

Price of Poem-Making

They say art is the greatest escape
Into the right hemisphere
Some do not find their way out
From the dream, and poverty

I can relate, to how
Writing is a compulsion
With a high investment fee
It’s time spent in freedom, however

A necessary joy of thought
It’s contemplation
As a pioneer, one part philosopher
One part, entertaining

Poetry is not a recognized art form
It hides behind the scenes
It dribs and drabs and drags
On the alt circuit, mostly unseen

Literary journals are not read
By many people, though strangely
Poems summarize the human condition
Better than fads of music, trends of painting

Glories of architecture, marvels of dance
Better even than the twisted sense of novels
Those characters are all but forgotten
But poems never die

They float on the cosmos of the web
In archives of portals of the ancient internet
Where nobody goes anymore
In the future, poems are spoken not written.

Coffee Haiku Café

Coffee Haiku Café

Give me that haiku of coffee
For it’s spiteful in the morning
To have to do without
Her breath of South America

Coffee and I start chapters well
And end in poems crashing
Out of the worst dehydration
Tantrums, temper hiccups

Terror-headaches, you should have quit/
I haven’t left coffee on a date yet
She’s pulled me through
A lot of coffee shops, late night

Marathon writing sessions
I’m going out on a limb here
To say that coffee is the only
Drug I’d be afraid to lose

As writing is a long-term relationship
And coffee is the foreplay
Of vengeance and poetry
I’d be indolent and fearful
Without her, I think.

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.

I Started a Manuscript as a way of living

I Started a Manuscript as a way of living

It’s arrogant I know, but it’s as if
I wanted language to end with me
I’ve decided to let poetry
Into the center of my life

I’m dating myself as a writer
I turn the craft of the poem
Over on my lips and
The pages don’t cancel each other

I’m not like others, editors, marketers
I’m sick of hearing myself
But no one is as sick of me as me
And that’s okay, I can stand rejection

Joblessness, not like I haven’t done it before
Twenty, thirty, forty years old
Without a bank account, a wife, a hot meal
It’s arrogant I know, but

I always wanted to write in Mandarin
Better than Du Fu, that’s the dream, right
To turn into a Dragon and fly
Through a waterfall, that’s poetry to me

Swimming upwards and reaching for wisdom
That is not intrinsic to my usual self
Going up rivers, coming down as rain
Symbols sleep in me and I carry them

I don’t require national poetry month
To write a poem a day, heck
I’d confess that poetry is like
My breath of exercise, when all other

Systems have shut down, the light
At the effervescent end of the tunnel
I’m dating myself as a writer
And that’s okay, it doesn’t require

The approval of parents
Or the idea that it has to be profitable
Because as an altruist, I’m just a vessel
The Great Love of a Poet

Reincarnates in me, each
And every day, I don’t know the word
Failure, it doesn’t quantify,
That’s the only reason I’m not Asian.

The Joyful Good

The Joyful good

I’ve been doing a bit of Spring cleaning
Looking for an online application
On how to become a Eun Ji of lit
I don’t need some far flung MFA

If I can have that, if I Can learn to write
16 hours a day and live for what I love
And I found, the biggest word I knew
Was still love, still an open-ended sort of

Thing I can’t easily explain to lovers
I’ve been looking up how to write frankly
A requiem to an ode to a poet, I admire!

I think I’ll just dance alone in my mind now
I saw your trauma inside shiny wrapping paper
And I knew it, I just knew, I’d found my calling

No place like belonging that belongs to where
You wish to belong, that’s the joyful good
Following your bliss down the rabbit hole

I hope I have a bed to land in, don’t let me
Become a willing participant in pop-art
It’s just not the kind of Jazz I can survive
To be a poet of tiger balms or racy one-lines.

– I heart:
Eun Ji

Gah:

https://twitter.com/thisisEJKoh/media

Ode to other writers

Ode to other writers

You made me appreciate
The use of a turn in a poem
And I sought to write a poem
About you, without success

I could not encompass
Your own myth in my myth
Or embrace you as a person
Whom I could not know

For I always wanted to encourage
People like you, but I knew
You existed, on the fringes
Of publishing and quite cafes

Where poets go to hear each other
Talk about poetry, no
The female protagonists of the new poetry
Where I cannot go or care not to

Since I do not live in San Francisco
New York or Seattle, no
You see, we are such a select bunch of
Writers, that can only say we

Do what we love, sometimes in the closet
Sometimes like you, with an
MFA that you can say gives you
The right to talk about other writers

With a bit more dignity
Whereas I only read them to write
I knew for sure I’d never sit down
To attempt a novel, I’d rather to imagine

I knew you, than actually
Have the chance of knowing you
And somehow get lost on the way.

Introduction to burning manuscripts

Introduction to burning manuscripts

The new poem will contradict
The old poems
And that’s the way it ought to be
Language needs a Spring
————————————–

For words have a barren
Way with winter anyhow
As a poet unfond
Of their own speaking voice
Forced to talk to themselves

By virtue of necessity
I to the past poets must cry
The tears of other words
For I no longer have the breath
To erase the margins
To edit the voice
————————————–

Whose possible meanings
Are so many
There’s always doubt

On the tip of the tongue
Maybe everything stated
Is completed erased in our subjectivity
In the time it takes

To be expressed and
The time it takes to be read aloud
When it no longer rings true
The new poem, let it hang there
A ghost, an extract, a fragment

For forever, I don’t read
Old poems, I only live to write.

Auto-poetry

the poet is a faker
to be a voice among the crowd
the poet must approach magic
To say what the crowd would imagine

without used words
the poet is a faker
who’s so good at his act

he even fakes the pain
or becomes the pain
of the fact of creation

an introduction to the human condition
the poet is a faker
and those who read his words
participate in the autopsychotherapy

they will feel in what he wrote
the substance of pain healed

and that is the beauty of
performance, and that is the
final confession of all art.

And let us compare Mythologies

When on Christmas day I awoke
For wife and house I was met
With the cavalry of all the years
The bending flowers

And silver stains
And all that my life
Was ever or could ever become
Like an algorithm

Lost among the innocents
I decided then, to lick
My velvet wounds
And kiss my burning oils goodbye

And make with flour
The turning great treats
That in summersaults of chesnut
I ever could or would have desired

When on Christmas day I awoke
To a sleeping house
Tired from a silent night of wine
And gentle laughter

I could say that I loved
The distant saints, and happy dreams
Of all the early road’s sweet toil
My life had become a holy hill
Where all my grace and poems lay.

The ghost writers

Art by: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Salzburg-s-unicorn-499959719

But as for me, the smell of books
Is perhaps enough, my bride
The gracious literature

Who does not threaten to leave
Or say I do not make enough gold
The holy emblem of this art

Whose pen is its own reward
A kind of artistic altruism
That plunges itself without restraint

On a canvas, spelling “freedom”
Over and over until
My heart might warm divinity

From the cold world’s touch
But ah, the libraries are lonely places
And the authors must fight

Lofty ghosts, that swim in the brain
For to write is to sacrifice, I know
It well, so find delight, go

In cheaper things, more easy investments
For this is a passion not for the meek
And this is a love that is not
As fickle as the illiterate barbarians out there.

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.

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.

Cyberflowing

I am a translucent verb
In love with nouns
Escaping out of events

Frustrated by the mirth of time
I am not an object, only a person
By breeding and heritage
In ideas I am water
So my writing

Becomes a part of the Tao
Like ink in water
I write cursive and mandarin glyphs

Sailing into the eyes
Of rainbows and storms
I live in literature like
The secret power of a sage
Waiting to be reborn

My temptations are
Celebrating the end
The ends are always

Silent and unbending
As if the source of my strength
Is proliferation of invisible symbols

Guilty of being stuck in semantics
In love with nouns and suffixes
The vocabulary of my spirit
Is technocratic and simulative.

Angelic torso of a poem

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
~ Pablo Neruda

I am the lotus on the menu
of soft and moist poems
that flow and swirl around the fireplace
by the window breeze, in rapture

for doctrine-dreams docile to divinity
the boundaries that have none
and peace that is washed on the nape

of your neck, the nouns-cherished like
flower breath, fragrance at your bottom-lip
hope heard like a photobomb
peach lyrics of vocal charm of forever

friends, spirits, pleas of narrative
that cuts to the heart of all experience
festival of physical discovery

in a maze of mantras, verging on light
the language of folds that covets songs
lyrics that is not spelled, silence that is not
empty, leaves in motion like verbal-dance

faith, in an avalanche of anticipation
that’s poetry, clean and with soft foundations
firm at the summit of her storm-blooms

perpetual attributes of sheltered stanzas
sweet as the taste of a lady’s geography
whose distance is as quick as summer
and whose memory lingers like youth

delicious to the mind, that drinks symbols
the hemline of all dress, words, clothes, books
the last formal invitation of literature.

Poems to Utopia

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
~ Plutarch

I cannot mistake poems
For my children, they are
Applications for the ability
to feel completely alive!

And I know it, to compensate
for days when I can barely
be fully productive, why
I cannot often celebrate

Looking at alphabets in a new way
Wrinkled poems lost to notebooks
mandarin glyphs studied fullheartedly
i cannot marry art, though it’s not

for lack of trying, hoping after
orgasmic quotes, divine lullabies
whine in me, divine mouth
of foaming ink that devotes

so many of my hours, so much
of my time on this planet.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Sangklaburi-471314522