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.

AEJ Koh 1

AEJ Koh 1

I heard you were a word mother
I read your lines, pretty beyond
The beautiful world I know
If the present is the revenge of the past

I think karma loves you
As I turn inside-out every word
The internet says belongs to
Your strange initials, I feel as if

If I were to trace you
In symbols, I might divine
A bit of your experience
I’m so easily haunted by your

Privilege, your coffee-nails of grit
Just when you think nobody notices
I cannot imagine a gamification of poems
The way you do, carried up levels?

That’s insanely sweet, and quite orderly
Compared to the way I scribble
Six past midnight, miles from you
Do you think we are maybe

A little bit autistic to love something so much?
A blister on the face of art?
A poem lost in a dialect of ancestors?
I have no friends with prospects of a real career

Does that make me an eccentric
When I put my hand out to the world
I’m not begging, I’m just checking
For a pulse, I won’t forget how unforgettable

You are, I’ve stumbled upon you
A few times, like a magnetic map
Back to our favourite lines
I can find profundity

And even the most oblique of conversations
How can I be seduced by mere words?

A question of talent and work

A question of talent and work

If, you have discovered your talent
And if, it is something you love
This is the world on a tightrope

Do you choose to focus?
If, you have a certain potential
Are you ready to squander it

And give in to future years
Of holding your breath with regret?
If, by some sense of folly
You put the needs of others
Ahead of your own, can you

Reckon with the realization
That you squandered your talent?
Between your thoughts
As you walk to the place

Where you do your labour
In the morning, inching across
The space-time of your private
Agony and written there

In your soul’s secrets
Would you let yourself admit
That you once had talent?
I guessed as much, so

Teeter and succeed, and do not
Accept failure, but walk ahead
For talent is stranger that we
Might imagine, it requires
An incredible amount of work
To fulfill, make it work for you.

On the pursuit of Beauty

Beauty is not
In what words you use
But in that which you say
Without having to use words
My rhetoric never felt

The true impact of silence
My naked veils never
Completely came undone
So I remained an imitator
An imposter of art

Armed with repetition and homage
But in art, there is non one
Behind and no one ahead
We are alone on our own path
And beauty is neither here or there

That is why we must continue to write
That is why we became writers
Became we felt alone
And in finding our way
We felt the beauty

Of the passing years
In a whole new way….
Beauty is not
In what fine craft you make
But in the effort to love your craft more.

Poetry is the First Pleasure

What is poetry?
Poetry is a whisper
The quiet voice of dreaming
That can never die

So long as civilization
Makes art, poetry spreads
Poetry is the eyes of things
In the soul of words

She is the ancients
Transcending time itself
Poetry is beauty
Unchanging unlike truth

A rhythm of sentience
On the face of rhyme
She is the admired song
Of the sweetest voice

She is the heaven-rapture
Dancing on the tip of bliss
What is poetry?
Poetry is of the wood

Poetry is the making
Of water and stone
She is the building of
Literacy in a world

Of discrete poems, where
We originate, create, evocatively
The poisis, the first-awakened
A realized feeling expressed

For all our eternities
So imagery, form, rhythm and sound
Might trumpet, flute and come
Alive in the music of our
Deepest lack of inhibitions.