Chasing Freedom

Here there is a road that’s just opened

With scarlet leaves from November

The womb is wandering, time is skewed

Into branches of alluring encounters

 

 

Time is invisible, but I can feel her warmth and her breath

Hae.mi’s pattern of spell-binding designs

Like a new layer of myth-making and story-telling

There will be no rendezvous this time, only words

 

 

That hang between silences as soft as their landing

Passages to another state, remedies for life’s fascination

Laughing, I would unbutton your otter coat

Pour you a drink in the morning of your drunkenness

 

 

To keep you safe from your own wilderness and wildness

The lovely insanity you keep usually guarded and in check

I don’t have the heart to let you go, while

I keep traces of the sun and your honest glow

 

 

Hae.mi, does the dewy light hear our noon-time prayers?

As in an airy shrine, where our ancestors breathed

Might we know how to touch our own freedom again!?

Songs of yŏryu

There was a coldness in your flesh

As if you had been jilted by an ex-husband

Betrayed and guarded like a mother

 

I knew martyrdom was like a dress

That they wore, beneath their frisky loveliness

As flowers and candles from yesterdays

 

Unperturbed by the golden thread of the future

That’s as warm and as insatiable as the youthful heart

Free and fiery and impulsive to the sudden core

 

Where time dripped and sprayed its mischief of unity

Into the pocket books of quotes and unsaid secrets

That were festive like surprises beneath our pillows

 

That made us suffer terribly from a sweet kind of insomnia

Those were the dragon moods of a hotness in the flesh

Hae.mi, felt it just like how the flowers appear on the Earth

 

Unbuttoned with a thousand colors for everyone

Generous to the pulse of life’s irregular magnitudes

That blurred one reality and the privacy of the next

 

Like a tantrum of secret need, a nest of sparks

Cluttered beneath all the hurry and all the wonder.

All these unspoken words are left over Feelings

 

Hae.mi, I want the secret intensity of collusion

Not that I know what fiery touches are, I who have done without

The touch of the body or the needs of men

And if, my body becomes no longer mine

 

Would I pretend to blame a muse I know so well

From the darkness of time, where someone calls me

Surely she has no wings, only words to say that I am scoundrel or throng

And I, faltering through the calls of art

 

Yearn not for unity, but for intensity’s brightest wick

Where loving is for the mind, and not the senses to burn

Hae.mi, what I have become that I require not

The agony of the heart to feel alive

 

Or an army of the loins to feel as if I should possess

I am not that kind of lover, anyways

Only the poet’s unseen hand, and the touch of the eyes

Sowing seeds of language, where I am blind

 

Hoping for friendship in the ambiguity between the genders

Gone is thus rippling radiant youth and her precocious lies

Through my curiosity is still as hungry as the dawns

That first looked jeweled upon thee, for divinity suckled

 

In the womb of all things valuable and lovely

Like a beautiful dream, where I witness you Hae.mi.

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 …

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.

In Muse with Everything

In Muse with Everything

Every poem I wrote was
In a way a love poem
Dangled with stars, overboard on
How nature balances our dreaming
With a cruel reality of

Goodbyes and not-so-greats
Much earlier, I was an untamed idealist
Pure in how my poems scattered
Everywhere, with a heart for all things
And still, rain soaked vanilla fragrance

I’m still the dream within a dream
I do not hesitate the life my soul
Needed to live, there are no regrets
In karma, this dark twenty-something
Brawler with gratitude, this epic

Taster of green sparks of spring
The flowers were blue-eyed monsters
To me that I loved, I never had
Friends like dead philosophers,
I related to the gravity of literature

The way a young woman cannot touch herself
My purest joys were private, like that
Every poem I wrote was
About how our limits help us experience
What God could not lift out of us

We were born artists, in the way
Delicious music sings itself out of our sleep
And we awake, to what life brings
The tempo and the sage of us
The faces so sadistically temporary.

We Should Die Except for Death

there is a solitude beneath
street lamps and through
novembers that are anonymous
as abandonment whose elements

are through many places
once cherished, and many faces
once beloved, though
there is a time for loneliness

in the human life cycle
a time to get stronger when alone
just to know that there are no
permanent realization, even love

can be taken away at any moment
we ask for what means most
and have it taken away
I wanted the river to go on

flowing the same way, and somewhere
in wanting to possess
I lost the thing I most valued
among many other stories

in the city, death cries slowly
in the long years that drag
in our prodigal decline we
might summarize all we ever thought

in a flash of voices, in a
gesture that meant everything
and nothing, that everything
was symbolic, even the perennial

lessons in experience, mere afterthoughts
like the snow that softens moments
after it hits the pavement
the pavement that belongs to nobody
that snow that belongs to all.

All My Sorcery Nobody can Imprison

Shall I then honor and obey?
I who only heed the Autumn whispers
That my spirit might flutter and utter
Poetry who is the wife and master
Of my piercing eyes of December

Now I am filled, with happiness and quiet
I’ll hold you even dear, you passing friends
I have found my pilgrimage shelter
The gold-hammered love of words
It’s enough for me, to write a while

In encrimsoned freshening dew
For Autumn soft-wind-twisted leaves
And emotions in the freight of my heart
That abides by wild beasts, forest brothers
I take all these into my good report for keeps

And do not ask the Lord for anything
I am self-sufficient in my lonely work
And I kiss the cruelty of fate at every turn
No little thing to barter one’s life with
A little art, forsaken love of something

That brings no direct external profit
Only a sense of what the seasons serve
My Amageddon’s vast terrific hour.

Photo Courtesy:
1.
2. http://www.deviantart.com/art/Autumn-267769428

Something to be Learned

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Estella-472873000

Wonder where the hard years went

Up and down and lost like blood and sweat

The monumental dramas have all but disappeared

For maybe love and peace

Can win the day, yet again

I passed a bridge, calling maturity

I broke into a dive, of self-acceptance

It wasn’t a matter of effort

I think it’s a function of

Synaptic pruning, lost memories

All the grown-up people say

The wine from these grapes

Tastes sweeter now, like wonder

Taken at a distance, with some measure

Of quiet detachment, where failure

Dulled by grief disappears

And joy is the only thing that can

Possibly take its place

No longer with boots of the hunter on

The chalk of a thousand sunsets

Has left its mark in nodding understatement

Of all the dreams left like alder leaves

Posterity knows Autumns well enough

That by disks of splendour, all that something

Set in a lusty tune, rust of dormant boughs.

Autumn painfully chafes

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Kriszti-n-Darwin-476002094

Another year gone and going
Soon autumn will return with her
Spices of colors, rejoicing change
Chanting loss, let’s say it again

Soon the uneaten fruits of our lives
Will turn to moss, and whispers
Once loud will grow so very dim
The symbols we tell ourselves

Will change, even our language
Will be more mature, us and we
These particular islands will change
Our subterranean castles will gleam

New possibilities, among the white
Of the harvests we carried from spring
Into the golden colds, the forever pastures
Of momentary pauses, the reckonings

Another year where we give up our plans
To the experience, our wanderings for water
Our return back to the source
All the efforts to be and have what

We already are, shadows crumbled damply
By the side of our journeys, how we once
Mattered so much to ourselves, now we can
Relax in a more divine detachment.

I had no rest against her autumn cheeks

Autumn closes in on me
Soft as the bed in the earth
Cool as marble above the clouds
Her arms and her hands bleed

Red & orange maples, rain on leaf
The smell of rich damp pores
A cloak of darkness before cold
The chilly air bringing dark to

My eyes with her lack of usual sunshine
Autumn closes in on me
Bringing me into a spiritual transitional
State, the quiet time together

Of pondering what was, in buds of what will be
I am swollen with change for
Her racing weeks of busy months
Like the pounding of horses in the mud

I awake to find leaves have changed
They have fallen in groups of colors
To form the imaginary kingdom of
Mountains of mirth, sometimes I believe

We all invent our kingdoms
To cope with all of life’s many states
So the body of autumn might detain me
So I might bare my branches for art.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Motherland-Chronicles-34-In-the-Secret-Garden-404198254

Autumn Festival of Dawns

I have kissed the Autumn dawn
laughed at the blond of her lips
running beneath the orange finger-tipped red
half-moon, the vital breath

of silver summited dew glistening
on the stones of marble
the damp violets enslaving conclusions
of winter’s breath over the last butterflies

I have kissed the meadows of october
laughed at the clouds dissolving
through a pillar of the treasured-sun
running through the breeze against

the memories of a few dozen autumns
it all comes first circle as life dissolves
but beauty remains a poor man’s dream
it comes every Autumn like an old traveler
ready to submit to red and gold.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Home-is-where-the-love-is-403015730

An open Autumn Day

Autumn leaves lie strewn in October
With the hopes of childhood’s day
That are now so faded and decayed
Happy moments fled, do they come again?
Forgotten, changed or dead –?

All over the gardens shrink
Memories impress with their wild colors
Birds sing with buried scents under wings
Honey is made, above where children play
Autumn leaves lie strew in October

Corn, watermelons and pumpkin pie
The fruit must be kept for another day
Autumn is the season where I cannot forget
What came in Spring and blossomed in Summer
Autumn is the secret I can never tell –

With the hopes of dreams treasured beyond all
The dark of the gentle winds that blew
Behind Autumn rain, a new world breaks forth.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/autumn-328739751

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

I’m Waiting for September

I’m waiting for September
walking upriver, wishing for
whiskey at midnight. concentrate
on how to give your life full meaning?

the changing of karmic bed linen
pink sheet on, up for anything
the future and past no longer matter
I’m waiting for September

bread and butter for old dreams
that never came to fruition
the past three months have bloomed
moments that didn’t forget the ‘bath’

I’m clean so soft and light
bleached from the prudery of old grief
I’m wishing blessings down upon us
I look away from savagery

beauty’s shadows shine beneath the black
as a smothered laugh, a sudden lifted care
it is humane to suffer and to dream
the wife that embraces you

like the sharpening air –
i am content to remain a dabbled herbivore
with knees and elbows together
in the window, I will find solace here

I’m waiting for September
I’ll set it down into the leaves
and let it flutter home, as
any red maple melts into the ground.

Photography Courtesy of: http://www.deviantart.com/art/September-Mornings-6-326956485