Letters to AEJ

AEJ Koh 2

“Do you think we’ll find love?”
She said to him, mirroring
Her utter need to give love
Then she loved him as she would
A manifestation of herself and him

Both silenced and weary
Of existence, both wounded
How people get when they have lived
And lost, both everything
And mothering, for eternity

And the years left that they had
And it wasn’t so much a matter of waiting
Or hoping, but learning how to receive
Giving was easy, as easy as writing
The symbols that poured over us

When we most wanted to connect
With the universe, as we knew how
Writing, being the centre of our gravity
Gravity being the physics of our need
“Yes I think we’ve found love”

He said to her, mirroring
Knowing the reassurance she craved
His utter need to know someone
Who loved what he loved as much as he did.

Titled Below

Like words never wholly kissed

We played our words for keeps
Aware fully of how ephemeral
They make vowels these days

Sheep, that flood the ether
The best gestures o f
The brain went unread

And the most talented beauty
Were paragraphs unpublished
I think there is no parenthesis, love

Alphabets are ruined by the internet
Poetry lives on trapped
In the syntax of the human heart

Who will never wholly kiss you
Or find the meaning behind
The trapped sentences of our lives

And these thoughts that do repeat
We played our words for keeps
Bitter for not having more

Beauty to offer, and to share
Love made our eyelids all aflutter
But innocence died

While the spring of the world
Invented a more holistic verb
To express not what was lost

But what was gained by
The new verge, enchanted vocabulary.

Mask for Sunshine

Mask for Sunshine

Spring chases death
As light softens night
Into the realization that time
Floods a clear sky daily
Time wasn’t linear

It was just our incomplete
Perspective that made it seem
Chronological like a butterfly
But our software will become
Transparent, like how buds blossom

Organic, mornings turned pink
For the nectar of new opportunity
Spring chases death
Out of the door, but
By the window we see

Our missing half of our lives
How love chases out all memory
Pruning our hearts with the infinite
We’ve studied days and yet
Still cannot find the answers

Practically speaking, there were no
Permanent destinations, no true markers
Only the aromas of experience
As perceived by our executive will
To see bare branches or

To touch and behold buds
The sun will chase us all west
Like birds along the gentle slopes
Of time’s lonely and illegible engravings.

The Light of Mornings-After

I find joy hidden in indiscreet places/
Faces crossed in ascension, pure
The unwrapped courtesy of an elderly couple
Holding hands, after exhausted labours
Possessing, more tenderness than I do!

I find joy in the cemetery trees/
That bloom, as if the flowers
Strewn beside the graves, gives them compost
Warm and lush, energy insatiable
All things have a heart, invisible but alive

Like all that Love that isn’t dead/
It was transformed into other things
Suppressing one secret, for another form
Let the labors go on, lives and flowers too –
I can admire then, the architecture

Of my own doom, the way things grow/
From passion to indifference, the way trees
Wave goodbye to different eras of our becoming
I find joy in the profound trance of in-betweens
Like the slight breeze on the lake
Where as a child I used to gaze.