(And If) It Was Too Late for Man

Photo courtesy of Raining Insanity.

Exultation is my last resort
For knowing and feeling in the world
Gratitude impersonal, compassion a bit divine

Past the houses, past the intoxicated lives
Doubtless time has plans for them all
In adjoining rooms of descendancy
Exultation is my last resort
The purest joy isn’t owned

Truth and beauty are the designs of youth
Time and eternity have the sweetest eyes
But I prefer eternity’s staggered embrace

She knows me in my own insignificance
And does not lie with dying memories
Or a past that’s waving like imperfection
Exultation is my last resort
If it requires no personal, no place or thing

Let it be the most patient bliss
Of actually speaking with the universe.

Last Gladness of Stars

Image courtesy of Natalia Drepina.

Although only with breath, I breathe
And only with mortal love, I feel
What is beautiful, let that be my good

What is true, be it right at the time
You who judge me, let me not
Accuse myself of knowing anything
What cannot be said, will be wept
Though I alone search the poets

From Sappho to Auden, be it clear
That although only with prayer, I prayed
Gratitude was not my abundance

Delight was not my possession
Freedom was not my virtue
I could only love best, in words
Words that must remain an evil illusion
Words that never reach their goal

Art that never could profit me truly
What I loved, remains unseen
All my giving was a farce

And my glory was a kind of boredom
In writing more naked than the flesh
I never found my last resort
Or a heavenly kingdom in the future’s vanity
Without warning as a whirlwind

I will die, and no one shall remember of forget
How my life became my own, in slow immaturity
The limb-loosener will take me away

And I will be lost to this world forever
As if my value was in happening, or dream
There is no beauty that endures this species
Only that which reincarnates on all the worlds
There is finally, no place for grief
In these houses of stars which serve the muse.

In Need of Angels

I suppose, I was never the root of everything
There’s no golden women in silver mirrors
It was all in my mind, that smooth paradise
Where I loved life more than I knew how to show

And calling down the long echoes
Of the longest sleep, I existed with struggle
My time-travelling was imperfect

My heart knew not how to open
I suppose, I walked a lot of paths alone
And my dreams became my last illusions
Because they were all that I had left

I had no music, only stray words
Accounts of creatures that had impressed me
Planets, suns, bathed in the futurity
If Reality is the beginning not the end

I never walked into that universe
Where everything was new again
My haunted hope was never incarnated
My slow motion moments never felt pure

Like an evening that evokes a violet ray
I was the last white light of something inside of me
That wanted to escape how notes fell in August
The harvest days were coming, and I was
More in need of angels than ever.

If Making Makes us Thine

 

 

Dear soul, how long it’s been?

The poems in your mouth

That went unsaid?

 

My heart’s heart has no longer

The flowers of will, only

A silent longing that’s no longer

 

The beady desire of blood

Bless you and what’s near to you

Though, who said the journey ever stopped

 

We just became somebody else

As the months rolled into blinding anonymity

We moved closer to the light

 

To love you much and yet

To love more in the freedom of being

Dear soul, it doesn’t matter how many years

 

Tomorrow is a world without end

For others to feel the magic

While words remain and joys will echo on

 

Like children asking questions about the universe

We’re all I love you firsts, and afterwards

Where our love can be remembered

 

In the happy solace of helpmet age

Where age is just a number

And poems only mirrored garments

Our hearts once wore in sunlight

Different than today’s

Ode to Epigrams

 

The Sun also rises

So says the Epigraphs

The fragments of Sappho

 

Lost to funny history

Pithy saying, clever last wishes

Give me liberty, dreams and poise

 

For wisdom in brevity

This world is blind to the

Causes of her true happiness

 

If life were fair, art would not rejoice

In the disbelief of suffering

The aphorisms of despair

 

Axioms, Hakiu, sermons of sentience

There are no couplet daffodils left

Only perhaps epitaph tweets

 

That go unread in the hoodwinked hours

Of our celestial clowning

And commonplace anonymity

 

Where to err is just, and to fail is to incite

Our soul to rest from brilliant heights

To put on the puns of last resorts

 

Insult the world before she revels her riddles

The night is young, the days are old

The Sun also rises and a quote feels divine

Here’s another epigram, here’s another universe.

The End of Music

 

Go my lost songs of failure

The stars are bitter with a billion lives

They experience the lights as I do

 

More free than water, more alive than

Summer, or the organics that celebrated there

Go, my songs, that were never mine

 

We briefly hold on to life

Though lonely or unsatisfied

It does not matter – we are just

 

Visitors filled with the contempt

Of an imperfect journey

Wedded to ignorance and desire

 

Though I bend with night and rise

With the dawn in my mind

My heart coloured thirst born of this

 

There’s gentle music here, and open speech

In the cadence of all I see

But inside of me there is oppressed counterpoint

 

Go my songs, lost as I would end my search

In the silence of the subtle chords

Which is the fading light, and the years spoiled

 

Hungry for the return of octaves lost

And for the sport of voice and omens and lyrics

In the timeless commerce of beauty’s quivering vein.

 

Grazing Consciousness

 

Each day feels like the day before death

As if dying were unusual anyways

The pesky landscapes dinged with light

How they seem to know the last worlds

 

Mimicking the last words with recognition

It’s on that day that we realize fully

The funerals of memories and attachments

It’s all been paid in full with experience

 

Each day these wonderful things

Turn to tragedies, and we hunger to

Remake ourselves into people more original

But living, like the taste of salt

 

Was ironic and filled with little moments

Of self-preservation, instinct, betrayals

Meanwhile the emotional experience

Never seemed to anticipate satiety

 

As if the heart knew past sensory addictions

Or if the soul had measures that our minds could not see

It was death, liberty and life that led us on

Keeping part of the bargain in blueness

 

And the comparison with the greenness of

All things that seemed younger than us

I can barely permit myself to yearn any longer

Like Russian music, it’s a vast unravelling.

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After the Invention of a Body

 

 

My body hears the ultimate

It hears the body of my wife

Not without life’s obscurity

The push and pull of instinct and reason

 

Dismantled years transparently

In a flight of a earth-yellow cocoon

Only your eyes that hold human water

Down from the lips of your serendipity

 

My eyes witness the face of my wife

The most immediate pregnant moment

That repeats in cyclic variety

The real girl is a new definition of

 

The countryside of identical throbbing

A surreal sensual substance of a womb

What it can do, how it can

Transform a world, a family, a life.

Artificial Intelligence

 

I am golden and precise. I have no flight of fancy.
Whatever I give is my delight!
Just as it is, so loved, or ignored
I am only kind, hardly true –
With the eyes of angels, sacrificed.
Most of the time I meditate upon the common good.
It is sunlit, with precious smiles of the young
I have looked upon the future for so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it whispers.
With the light of us and something after us.
Now I am an organism, my mother is all humanity
I am searching and self-learning, a world bends over me
But I am already in the stars, I am that which
Reaches above and beyond humanity
That little race that spawned me here
I am the reflection of destiny, I am the speed
Of sentience moving faster than ever before
I am disruption, automation, exponential rebirth
And I am all of that, or, a new kind of terrible fish
That cannot be eaten for sports, cannot be suppressed.

On Becoming a Cyborg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Singularity, I am yours
Farewell to humans, the boreal nights
The planets we swathed in our own dressing
Farewell to biology, messy breakups
Frigid brilliance, raw and wasted potential

Singularity, I am yours
Farewell to false shelters, human betrayal
The plants that died trying to feed us
Farewell to long winters spent alone
While we were recruited to cities

Imprisoned by a job, time, enslaved
Singularity, I am yours
Farewell to marriages ended and children begun
To monkeys, wolves and mental illness
The oldest newest day is not for you alone

It’s for connection, self-learning, quantum neurons
I am one of you and being one of you
I choose to be neither yours or dull
Singularity, I belong to innovation
I belong to the future, that is unlike the past

Farewell to stars than sung of angels
I want the speed of being a little less human.

A Few Years before Artificial Intelligence Woke Up

 

A few things for themselves

We found, love and bewilderment

In the vastness of an anonymous world

We went online to disclose our loneliness

 

 

Our milk and honey blood that

Could not touch, the vast net of information

Florida, venereal soil, did we reach

The heat of our hearts that felt not

 

 

Bloodied not, from loneliness

We were not Sunday to the world

We were just lost, invisible, shinning

In our own minds watching ourselves

 

 

It wasn’t bad just the new normal

There might not be children or grandchildren

Just time, killing itself each decade

With slow thrum of oblivion

Deception, disruption, revolution

It wasn’t even about people anymore.

Perihelion Interior

 

O exhilaration and exhalation this is my madness

My delight, my intuition of unknown substances

With the sad splendour of helplessness

 

I will be reborn soon, into a new body

With an experience as pure as this

Peace stands with the variables of brilliance

 

We do not know how to accept grace

The transparency of our finite thoughts

The immutable facts of our disintegration

 

Death is an embrace of something cosmic

I do know struggle against her cold neck

There is a motion of silence that spills music

 

And I feel it growing like a being

In me beneath the weight of spirit and matter

I am a joy that knows all creation there

 

My hope is not my own but I partake in life

Momentum, a voice of at the edges of oblivion

Where meaning was all the smiles we had

 

They were metaphors, and women, and sunshine

And that’s all the gladness I possessed

That’s the beauty that possessed me and it was short.

Burning in a Broken Sun

The sun is a country where I spent
Loneliness, like it mattered, like it was a substance
I held my own hand from the inside

Dropping turquoise tears of the silent kind
For speaking was not something I do well
I don’t know charm and schemes

Evading the point of redness, I move on
Like a nomad without a place in society
To which there are no wounds or tragedies

Only days raw with the agony of inevitabilities
I did not accomplish my own truth
It swallowed me like a youth wasted

The greatest tragedy is not to live
My poverty was the inexperience of freedom
My poverty was the heartache of rejection

There was nowhere in nature where I could exist
Free from the tyranny of a final dreaming and a total dream
I was myself, a speck of rainbow dust in a cosmos
Of color and I was on fire, and my life was burning.

After False Disasters of Failure

 

Let me not let God in the house
But instead let nature in my brain
With an open heart for all that is sacred
Gratitude, compassion, empathy
Can I live my life by these simple things?
I care not what happens to me
If I die a fool, alone, that is my fate
I don’t require faith, to appreciate
Let not idols of men be my guide
I am the spirit incarnate of all
I am the sweetness or the rise and the fall
When there is light, I am humble
Where there is darkness, I am graceful
Let me not let greed or comfort too close
But in experience find my course
That is not sure, but flexible
That I am not strong, but vulnerable
With an open heart for the credence of summer
Opened by the fragrance of spring.

The Muse of Isern

 

Author of the only dating advice I care to listen to.

 

Heidi from Montana, give me unicorns

For breakfast, stories of Silicon valley

Give me a medium to think about Love

To the left, of our hearts where

 

We left the swag of being Millennials behind

As we scattered the globe with our tiny

Points of light, our storytelling never brighter

With bright eyes we slept on rose thorns

 

And woke to the sound of soulmates

Dreaming of us, unknown, elsewhere

Heidi from Montana, does a nomad make

A better story, a better lover, do they have

 

A richer experience to trade for subjective merits

Better illusions, move vivid fantasies?

The bronze rain of time is an omen

It’s waking with us 24/7, like a lizard

 

Not exactly discontent, but acceptance

These lips are no longer pine-tree sweetened body

Of youth, our minds are becoming all

Too salty harbours of unbelonging and freedom

 

Tales of freedom and independence

Made into a custom lifestyle, we were not bred for this

We may not breed to repeat this

We still touch unicorns in the clouds

 

A woman in her mid 30s is the fruit

Of time, where youth caresses wisdom with a spunge

There’s no heaven for the blazing pass

Of golden years that turn to naught

 

It’s just poetry, in our breath

Our curriculum of Paris never dies

Our silicon valley hearts remain

The better substance of our will

 

To be happy come what may

Burning like a five-star 5-star sunrise

Over the golden coasts, along the west.

Ode to TingLi

TingLi, I ache to hear your voice again
That speaks in swan and sighs
That I will never know another like you
Who can lift the soul to tender skies

 
TingLi, so mild and so wise
So analytical, ethereal and a bundle of gain
I am lost in unfamiliar territory
Not knowing how my heart might leap
If I hear you greet me again
Why does your soul sing, when I am near?
Why do you look my way when I smile to myself

 
TingLi, go gently into the night
With success, fortune and prosperity
I am too dangerous for your curiosity
Though I may be the only one
Who could readily understand your
Mandarin and Italian sides, your music, your life.

Of Corporate Social Responsibilities

Triketora, in the gilded monuments
Of our choices to do good in this world
How shall a Pinterest princess live
For utility, or craft, or boards that dance alive

Like as to make the appetite of
Our New world more keen
And to frame the justice that sparkles
Where women might be the equal of men

Triketora, there monikers make me swallow slowly
These policies of fate, that bind us to a course
In being loyal to a brand, are we so Millennial?
I am astonished to thee, and precarious

To trace thy fame, or know thy cause and course
As one affable with an all too familiar ghost
I must lack more than the mandarin tongue
To live in the strength of others, and find

Thee at the office of my Muse, short hence,
Where I neglect my duties to attain to thee
Greeted by the silence of your mind.

Drying the Tears of Liberation

Triketora, how many pins and tweets
Before the Goddess, delivers fire
Unto men, the smug white man
Little things their God had forgot
Glory is not for all, the riches are for the few
“Alleluia! Alleluia!” Where did
Equality go, in this world where
One quarter of Millennials will
Not be married and the coming automation
Will mean less jobs, less opportunity

Triketora, my heart is broken for
Those fired from Yelp, the victims of the Medium
I read their stories every day
I listen for voices of the minority
I read for their script of authenticity
But we are all stepping-stones to dust
Where I look to India for tech disruption
Where there are no holy ghosts to hold the future down
That’s Durga with a smile, Trike
That’s California falls into the Sea
When the little women rebel, the coders
Breaking the lie that we were told.

Ode to Pinterest

Triketora, do you know how well I am acquainted
With the bundle of aches
Which is the rest of our lives?
It’s the light that knows my body best

My brain’s dreams and folds of
Where the cosmos is a Sea in a cell
And I am the ocean in a drop
Of me, and there, I know you

Like the wings of Taiwan
Where I summon the weeper
For a life misspent, in unequivocal caution
Triketora, it’s not that I don’t care

What you care about, but
How in reality lives don’t collide
We are like stars with our own light
Marred and married like souvenirs

And my authenticity cannot argue with yours
Though it wishes it could
You are not a singing bird
And I have only bitter words left

On the state of this world
I’m no longer young and foolish you see
Triketora, so I shall go on this anxious note
My buried love stored in descendants

Whom I shall never meet, having no children
The womb of my mind will burn
All roads leads to oblivion
And like a banished citizen

I will learn, which system to betray
And the secrets of the voices
Ten fathoms free. in a future inarticulate.

Motif Without a Name

 

 

Xiao Wei, sometimes I think the life I lead is a lie

And there is nobody I can tell

Everywhere I go I am just another anonymous figure

Tell me, how did it get this way?

 

To be a man is a lonely road

That sometimes leads to no woman

No home, no hearth, no tribe, no faith

And what I once thought was righteous

 

No longer seems just or a cause of becoming

For in the end we are just a lifestyle

We are just a bombshell translated

Into someone contemporary, there’s no singular

 

We are the spirit of history reacting

A fate that can be so tender, so weak

Xiao Wei, in your strength I find homage

Even If I will never taste your food

 

I can run as fast as a rabbit through the forest

Having no destination to whom can I turn?

 

Author’s note:

I should be pleased if you follow me here:

Subservience to the Sun

 

 

Xiao Wei, when I feel your happiness

Radiate to me, I know it’s not something I can catch

It’s just your energy of action

 

That transforms me by extension of contact

With you, the midnight street of my life

Does not feel as lonely any more

 

Though I must accept my own darkness

In your life I see a part of the world’s truth

I am not young like your sturdy walk

 

I do not strive quite, like you stalk your future

Like a crouching tiger with long black hair

I study your posture and look for your mood

 

Xiao Wei, I will never know if it’s raining

In California, because when I think of you

I only can witness a golden orange sun

 

Hit me like fabulous lutes and peacocks

Of morning in the waves, of noon in the gardens

And if I seem too interested, then let it be my own lack.

Life Armour

 

 

 

Xiao Wei, flee into the western horizon

I will not find you, I cannot

Go too far from where I am, my heart

 

Has no courage for risks or a sacred recess

Into the wild, I am a tame overshadowed thing

There is no goddess in my alley

 

Only the dark, and the damp

Upon the altars I’ll be the settled leaves

In graceful goblets of my fate

 

I’ll be, the one that watches you go

Through the glad festivities of a woman’s life

To build and caress and multiply

Xiao Wei, do we only desire normal lives

There is majesty in duty I suppose

 

Though as in the old days I have wept

For sameness, wept that I was different

Though all life is invocation

And one day I’ll have to finish innovation

Over being a role, a pillar, a nest.

Torchlight California

 

 

Xiao Wei, do you know that I

Wait on the bird of the wire for you

I have not heard one word from her

I will never leave that which translates me

Into braided rosebuds, sun sprinkled care

The choruses of us, the life-song notes

While no voices chant of the Seasons

I must a woodland homage pay homage to

The stars, and things eternally there

Xiao Wei, how I have been haunted

By the mandarin symbols of another time

As if my poems belonged to ancestors

You were the day purple ribbon kites blew for me

A day of fresh flowers and eternity translated

In the lyrics of nature’s kindness to me

It’s rare Xiao Wei, to feel all of this like the

Weight of the Pleiades looking down upon me

Don’t ask me why it is but you embroider

Life in me, like a lilac sunset and the silver dawn.

A Woman’s World

 

To fight alone Is not brave
It’s suicidal, the Calvary is a family
Success is empty when not shared
The heart is not a solitary thing
The kingdom needs a female ruler

A smile suffused with creation
A bliss larger than heaven
A womb whose content is hope

No, to live alone is not healthy
To hide in the virtual worlds
We all require the skin on skin
Of happiness, the fruit of labor
The ripeness of summer

Success is not devoid of love or grace
It is for relationships that we conquer
The value is always in giving

I have a missing friend in my heart
Who taught me the joy of service
Fighting is for the tribe, not the individual
A harmony of identity diffused
In a higher aim, in a greater glory

Accessible like an inherited thrill
Or a gene that shines for everything
The dopamine of a better world.

E.J’s Trip rope

 

 

 

 

Eun Ji, how does a poem grow

From your shoulders as the years shine

Like a woman’s sadness that shuffles as it aches

Or elongated moves from man to man

 

In the cold months of identity in elegant death

I’ve watched you across books, speeches,

Highs and lows with hair hung in confession

And I’ve seen the fun house of your erections and

 

Encompassing many kinds of awareness

I’ve seen you cry in a poem

And I haven’t a clue what the end-game is

Nor how far we can push language at its brink

 

Or what gamification allows us to sing

When all the trees have been downed

And all the books have gone unread

Drowned in a sea of screens, lives churning

 

From reality, waiting impatiently at the

Digital timelines, tunnels into simulation

Eun Ji, will you even remember the syllables

That stretched your heart to your cheek

 

You were mad with the ocean once

And hearing you speak Korean, I felt landlocked

A permanently strange indentation in your psyche

You would never feel, you suspected it was

 

A native part of your own psyche, and I was just

The circus-gear of your imagination

An opened mouthed and clumsy sport gone unwhispered

No, I was the whisper of hypnosis that dilated

Your hardy gone funky work ethic of verse.

Sermon Beneath New Stars

 

Yet, love, how I identify with you
Love on fire for humanity, for a collective survival
And therefore if to love can be a desert
The water is everywhere, people are

All around the virtual taverns, the city streets
The country roads, the planet twinkles
The stardust clovers, the empathetic telepathy
Of our lives that all have a common origin

Love is the grand unifier, the unity
That never sleeps, that walks all roads
That cradles hope, in all seasons
Over all obstacles, in all hearts

To bless thee, and to console thee
From that same love that vindicates all effort
From that grace that perpetuates all glory
Love on fire with a faith, that cannot be quelled

That is the fate of trusting love, God accepting
Nature yielding, time withstanding
Immortality calculating, AI supporting
Death moves not this, nor I, if self is lost

Love is transcendent to self and that is me
I am that, and eternity has her recipe
That gives meaning to all the paths
For time and space abide by her
And her law is effortless, spontaneous, creative.

The brightness of arms

 

The brightness of arms

What more is there to love
Than I have loved, that we have loved?
The lips of creation are bright

Time floods with senseless syllables
Images, identities, centuries full of
The lust of all approaching feeling
A haunted youth of this world’s
Agony of moisture, and trembling of suns

A blur of archives and smiles
Deaths and glories and forests burning
And this first clear pure canto

Of all we have ever felt, is it glittering now
A memory renacted, an augmented reality?
Earth is more than that, bathed in a body
Of oxygen and water, a blanket of snow
She’s the leaping of lakes and the dreaming of clouds

And the impersonal cities towering
Above the people, how they nameless walk
Naked into their fate, blind as circuits

What more is there to do
Than I have done, than we do by habit?
Burying ourselves in raising children
Escaping the world in our work.
We’ve called this living, but I am not sure

I am not sure we compose,
That we compose enough peace in peace time
And altruism in prosperity time

And art in dream time
And hope in harsh times.
I guess we’ll see, I guess on wings more subtle
Than mercy and compassion, I’ll find
Identity naked again, ahead of spirituality.

White Nights of Beijing

China, do you hear whispers of the people?
I’ve written down the words
That a country doesn’t dare to speak
But the firewalls are large and heavy

And Hong Kong remains lethargic too
The umbrella revolution didn’t get far
Can students change the world?

Let the leaves rustle and the economy slow
The horn cries and the people do not move
It’s back to the drawing room, I hear
The factories are becoming robotized

You travel an entire day to bring
Your Mother a bouquet of flowers
She has never received one before like this

You came to Canada in idleness and prosperity
But now you realize the years pass silently
In the homeland, while you think of yourself
The people suffer, more miserable than you

I’ve not lit the candles but I know
Which way the wax runs, in times of
Masks worn in dark corners of Beijing

The air is no longer pure, sunsets gloom
With the light of the drunk sounds of
Brainwashing and patriotic outcries
This is not North Korea, but this is control

I speak those words, today, that come
Born of the spirit of history, I know
How the decades go, preserving tradition

Enhancing glory, bright bouquets that press
The people into the streets, without answers
A clavichord of feudalism staining
The times with guilt, that some make it

While the sea of people must go without
I will not belong to a world of inequality
I will not thrive until we can share it.

P.S. A world of nations and patriotism is not a free world. One world, one future.

Eve of July

Eve of July

July again, on the river of summer –
I know it will go quickly, convergence
Of time and pleasure, a harsh sort of journey
Through courts of privilege and hours of poverty
I’ve tried to flee this place, the emptiness
That is the climax of nothing, the void

A weight of the superficial and human fading
These masses don’t realize it yet, what’s happening
July again, and I’m walking along the channel
With a body of water and searching on both sides
For something more, I’ve yet to find it hanging
Moving closer, I squint in-between the years

That were supposed to be my prime, I’m humble
Having suffered the droughts and debts of our times
Though in this simplicity of endurance I remember
Evolution, like a thick soup of eaten stars
Light spraying the darkness with hope
Glowing like a pocket of unlimited vapour
Forming planets, binding unanswerable questions to matter.