If Loving is Destiny

These poems mine, created early
Are nothing but the soft sense of gratitude
To life, what offered us so much!
If we took her for granted

Let it be known, that I’m drenched in dream
That I hadn’t known of your art yet, Hae.mi
I hadn’t felt your little joys
As a kind of graceful thunder

In my world of watching the eyes
Of human beings doing what they do
These poems mine, are reflections of nature
That drop from fountains like

Our toes wet in the dew, this living
Is so beautiful, even without possession
The feelings melt into a cohesive whole
Integrity with identity, wishing with hope

Touching briefly as light upon branches
Making love with a spiritual connection
The poems, on youth and ruin, are fading now…
I am nothing but a spy upon your divinity

Set in your beauty, hungry for your soul
Ready to deeply bury myself in your goodness
With the water and bread, with you as the last drop of honey
These poems mine, they just whisper

And there’s no grave to them, only endings
I’m talented in endings, as I am a decoration
For the muses, to life and all that we can never touch.

 

Photo Courtesy.

Untamed Time

 

 

 

Overnight where I slept

I felt the chill of eternity

Sweep through the years of this body

 

And my brain was only an experience

It wasn’t real if real things last

The love I had I gave to the Earth

 

To her children and the soil

Where I grew a garden in my mind

There was no love there

 

Just the thrill of a destiny

Broken and churned like

The pangs of creation gone un-nurtured

 

Sleep was like that in mortality

A kind of escape from the anxiety

Of living and not knowing how to

 

Create destiny with mere tools

And hope out of loneliness.

 

Solace in the Sun

 

 

 

I received an envelope from the universe

It had your stamp in it, a sun within a cheek

Of the heart I never knew existed

And I wanted to please you like a burning star

 

But I could not reach you across

Distances or time, across the climes

Of fate and heights and wonderment

I woke to find my life had bled

 

Uncertainty and too much cowardice

I opened up the letter from my soul

To find my body had died long ago

And I knew you by your energy

 

I didn’t require eyes or breath or a brain

To know that somewhere our flames had mingled

Light with light, a hand with a hand

A home that never had a family to call my own

 

I was abandoned, brittle, and deformed

But I knew you existed, and that was a weird solace.

 

The Butterfly Card

The Butterfly Card

Eun Ji, I got the butterfly card

The Korean swimming in my mind

From watching too many romantic-comedies

Made in Korean, it makes me weary

Of how uncivilized and hungry I have become

How strange to be a poet

That I marvel most at happiness

At my most bitter hour

Like the divine sense with an appetite

For the most human hours

Pale stones of savage harvests

South American aromas and Taiwanese fragrances

The dancing burden of the dream of time

And how we lose a skin each summer

Only to climb into words once more.

Dreaming High

P r a y e r s to U t o p i a

P r a y e r s to U t o p i a

If I were to sing
A lullaby to the new world
Time and fever would burn my lips
I would be humming guilty
For what we do to a world

As a hermit who sings
To the suns supreme
I would let living creatures live

And my only energy would
Be the wind and the sun
Human faith I would discard
God, man and prosperity
If I were to speak to you

Of the future Earths
It would be an anthem of freedom
There would be no elite

Hierarchy would be banned
And politics would be the realm
Of algorithms and super-computers
Who know us better than we know ourselves
And remember how corrupt

A man can become
From playing in the simulated world
Where humans think they have power.

Silver T e a r in your P a l m

Silver T e a r in your P a l m

I can’t remember the tale
Of your sacrifice, I’ve seen
So much tragedy in history
That before the story ended

I turned away, aware, preferring
The fables we tell ourselves
Stories recited by grandparents
Felt more believable

I had held your palm
With splinters of revolutions
Most did not do anything
To bring the times forward

I recalled how you let your hands be held
As if our little measures of
Tenderness, could save us
But we knew what was coming

It’s hard to remember the future
But we could feel it in our bones
It was extinction or change
And there were moments like that

In evolution, they would arrive
At our door pivotal and in those
Circumstances, our destinies seem
Made and sung by other actors

Our Wills bend to the times
The predictive analytics told us
All we needed to know, those
Algorithms didn’t fail, had no error

So I did what a young person does
When he’s given an opportunity
To show how mature he has become
I kissed you, as if there was no tomorrow.

Tomorrow is Today’s Dream

Tomorrow is Today’s Dream

March on, do not tarry
Said the tip of the soul to the pen
The pen whose laughter
Could be heard
Across the centuries
Laterally from planet to planet

Star to star
To go forward is to
Be aware of your own perfection
If love is a real force
That surrounds every being
Internally and externally

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Would my letters slowly embrace it
Like a witness, of liquid gold
To print cherry fruit fragrances
On the lyrics of my days
March on, do not tarry

Said the tip of the sword to the pen
The pen whose muse was revolution
And could be read
On graffiti walls
In some war-torn future
As if the pain we were exposed to

iii

Broke the shell that enclosed our ignorance
Out of that suffering we stood
Stronger souls with massive
Characters and impressive scars
We wore them with pride.

Dreams of Water

The Holy Well

Sunbathing on hope
Empty of acting
I came upon skywashed seas
And an older me
Ankle deep in water
Faces hanging over
The cliff of tomorrow
Trying to see their
Reflection in storms
Salt-clear distances
Opal faith lifting
Us up out of thunder
Marked footprints
Of God carrying us
Two bodies, two feed
With bright light surrender
Our limbs turned west
Leaning into the
Hips of waves
Legends merged in us
Legions moved in us
Until we visited
Constellations as promised
Long ago, halos of thirty blues.

Title Embedded Below

We Worship perfect because we can’t have it

Language, it has allowed me to dream
I’ve never done anything but dream
All experience is a simulation
Of what our senses tell us

We perceive, all relationships
Are 80% make believe
And thus, I come to the point
Where my ultimate concern

Is naturally, for my inner life
Is the book of disquiet over?
Is the meaning found that escaped me?
Are the idols ready to be pushed aside?

And the myths, are they ready
To succumb to new myths, new standards?
To make way for the new
Language, it has allowed me to feel

I’ve never done anything but feel
All thoughts have a quality of feeling
Objectivity is the greatest lie
But subjectivity is an ironic dreamer

Full of queer promises and casual observations
That do not register fully until years later
That I take a certain pleasure in the fact
Of watching daydreams go down in defeat

Words like any truth, are part duality
And what once seemed like a clever remark
Can later feel like the ghost of an imaginary friend.

Loving poetry, like a body of love

Loving poetry, like a body of love

Each of us have tasted
In ecstasies of stealth
Forever hidden alphabets
The fruit of dreamy-knit language
The stars that grow on words
Forever to be partially hidden

In the author’s mind
Tonight she lies
Naked and resembling

A word made fresh with a gesture
Of a symbol of a dream
That shares a secret gleaming
For those who know how to hear
That tattoo of wisdom
That little totem of care
Crosses the lyrics fragrant
With the pulse of beauty
Loving poetry, like a body of love.

Migration in a summer of lovely language

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These words have survived separations
Faces I can no longer remember of loved ones
Poetry has transcended my decades

Spacious and fluent like a last reminder
Of why truth is no longer as important
As beauty, inner beauty of a spiritual quality
Alphabets now shelter this candle
This life that was my hopes and dreams

These most intimate self-deceptions
Wildest faith of wonderful illusions
For a moment still I am there

With moons and roses, aware of nothing
But the shine of creativity on our inner cheek
The mineral blossoms and lotus of our imagination
It’s pure there to write like drunken water
In a light of its own color, reflecting the pauses

Silences, spaces in-between relationships and solitude
That was the best quality of the life I lived.

Dreams of Flower Corpses

Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.
~ Khalil Gibran

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We were all dreamers it would seem
we made our myths and spent
nights in the middle of them
until dawn broke our even
darkening-shapes, because

it took an entire life to decline
or go insane, or might I awaken?
the night dragged our covers
off of us, out of the light
we felt the sleep of our routine

enfolding us like eerie fingers
from some window, or control-panel
might we have been enslaved long ago?
by whom or the government
we still flicked with our ghostly beams

seeking more intelligence, faith, energy
to be who we required destiny
to shape us, our souls knew
the secrets of our mortality
we were dreamers and I swear

we created melodies out of our own fears
musicians of fate, jennies in training.

i dreamed of a familiar stranger

Until one has loved an animal a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.
~ Anatole France

We’ve lived our lives and not
Seen each other, never met
we looked up at the same stars
felt the same things, tried

to give kindness to strangers
oh what an evening it is now
together in the same light
beneath the same lamp?

we were young and vigorous
for a time, and now both have
graying temples and diamond truths
to take from the particular obstacles

of our birth and fate, though
your exclamations stir my heart
with the spiritual truth of your wonder
and the honesty of your perception

we ask if we could have become good friends?
perhaps it as as though we were there
all along, from what direction did we come?
that such similar souls could have

not known each other, it seems unreal
in the rainy summer night, walking in the dew
with ten cups of things to talk about
tomorrow we will just be two spirits
in a boundless world of human affairs.

Light Builds Temples on the Sea with Mere Words

In my animal belly, into the belly of time
I swear prophecies, and make melodies out of
Melancholy, I avenge God and poor fathers
With armed lyrics, assault on secrets
With fingernails, frantic for a Divinity
Lost in language, in sanskrit manuscripts
In Mandarin idioms, I hunt for these idols

Behind words, in between nouns
In the devotional songs of women unremembered
I beg the many beings that meet in a word
The worlds that cover narratives
The brink of nothing that the writer must uncover
In my biological neurons, into the future where history

Is lost forever, at that point of extinction
I am gifted the existential proper nouns
The streaking supermind verbs that fulfill
The eruption of white music, this spring-water
Hymns among the ruins, sentences to represent
The suffering of sentience, these momentary truths

Mimicked forever by broken statues gnawed by light
And beings, partial and hungry-eyed
I stretch my senses to hundreds of millions of living planets
I hear their call, heavy with the minutes of
Politics, mating, wealth-accumulation and self-discovery
Eternity’s brimming cup of art, sex, sun-shivering love.

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HOW STRANGE THAT BOREDOM AND ALL HER HOPES RUN DRY

There are no ballads, crown-nests, no Songs!
That can relate living Experience
But the dreamers attempt the impossible
The translation being their variety
Of experience, the music goes on

Dying by the movement of our
Glossy selves, impermanent transactions
The drift of what we considered
So pragmatic, so terribly necessary
Years later appears as foolishly stubborn

There will be no great feasts at the
End of this, only nature and time
And other transparent necessities
The leafless hours and departed ships
Are no more, all that we know intimately
Will become extinct, such is the exqusiite
Depth of belonging, and not belonging.

Treatise on Akhmatova

You will hear thunder and remember me,
It is not just, to be stingy with your spirit!
Think then upon wanton storms

The rim of the sky spoke to you
With her hard crimson sails
Your heart on fire, we’ve all

Seemed to ourselves, as if in a dream
Our lives an accidental guest
If the world were music

How our bodies would brighten up –
My shadow it must then, serve
As the friend I crave, on such nights

Where memory must be slaughtered
For tomorrow’s warmth, with a still
Beating breast, the carnival of life keeps

Still, seeming like someone’s delirium
Or a reflection in somebody else’s mirror
I’ve lived without a name, my destiny

Haunted by incompletion, I’ve been
Touched by grief, as the future that ripens
In the past, I’d rather not recall just now

Forgive me, I’ve managed badly to
Console you, I’ve left only traces
Of myself in songs, Russian can lip these –

The voice so wild and simple
As to be untranslatable into any one tongue
We learned not to meet anymore

Our youthful dreams in starry words
That chill, at the bottom of hope whiter than chalk
Where the rosy limbs of youthful idealism

Must take root in new minds, favourite hours
That are no longer mine, but yours
I will not condemn you to repeat my mistakes

Though you will, without spilling your blood
Too much, you may not know the wild honey
Smells of freedom, or how the dust fled from sunlight

But then again, I do not wish too much
Revolution in your times, or dying friends;
As for me, you will hear thunder and remember these
And think: “she wanted beautiful storms.”

Treatise on Zhuangzi

Once upon a time, I dreampt I was a butterfly
I flew with whatever happened
Letting my mind wander freely
I felt the ultimate in words because of meaning
A unity or forgotten words in silence

I was conscious only of my happiness
I lived in peace and now I fly
I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man
A path is made by walking it
A life is loved by living it

Do not reward or punish yourself
It is the lowest form of education
But rather speak to the Tao in everything
Watch your own and the turmoil of beings
Knowing you will return to the butterfly-state
Kindhearted as a grandmother, amused as an uncle

Happiness is the absence of striving for happiness
To be truly ignorant is enough, be content with your own knowledge
Leap into the boundless and make it your home
Forget the years, forget separation, forget distinctions
And duality, during our dreams we do not know

We are dreaming, we may even dream of
Interpreting a dream, that is why
After a great awakening, we laugh at them.

To have lavender lips under the leaves of the world

In poems anything can be said
eyelids don’t obey the night
hearts might float as silver flying machines

throats might have a spiritual flicker
in poems anything might fly
slow heart breaths to music’s touch

lavender creeps in through the bedroom window
and fragrance tell us a bed-time story
In poems dreams collide, with the ocean’s floor

with stars that spring loud as the streaming sun
treasures could last for centuries
on eager notes of autumn amusement

In poems anything can zealously work
for the beacon of the times had a candle
that said to each morning how much I loved you

with a mouth for cranberry tea and the bluest glow
In poems I miss you always
for even careful words are too numerous
To be taken seriously.

Salvation of Many Wings

I am content when wakened birds
Wake me from my dream
Before they fly, they test reality

My reality is an illusion
Remote as a vision in perpetual flux
Of misty fields, by sweet questioning

I live a half-life of indifferent blue
Upon the grey and white shores
Of what I call birth and death

The years pass, I am a biological spark
Neither the golden underground
Or the woman of my dreams can release me

I am content when wakened birds
Whisper to me that I may fly too
They wake me from my dream

With feminine whisperings of procreation
A much more friendly part of paradise
Where labor seems natural and eventful

April’s green endured desires for June
Tiptoed and spent on wings of consummation.

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True Nature of Spring

I have sung the songs of first birds
Of morning’s wish of the flying away
And clapped my hands for the sun
In the loving gold grace of your eyes
The fault must be mine to
Not know the silence

That comes before the dawn
The minor birds of dream
Have fled my grasp, slippery doves
The humming bird seen once in a lifetime
I have sung the songs of peacocks
To the uncertain harvests of Mandarin

The orchard white, the orchids of Taiwan
All the spring stored of so many years
Of youth’s last wish for love
Those joys usually reserved for God
All this celebration that is the springing of the year
To jump in prayers more subtle than pleasure.

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You Brought me a Smile of Clarity

It seem when you come in thought
I welcome you in
Like a mouth of nectar
Like a spiritual distance
Getting closer
Like a forgotten melody
My heart calls you
Between our lives
There is room for you
Here in the open-space
Of quietness, and longing
It seems there is a tingle
I am enclosed
In my awareness of you
Feeling you at a distance
That which creates
A strange proximity
And a shelter, or
An imagined intimacy
Tonight in this room
I’m more aware of you than ever
But, you are not here
Only a rumour, a whisper, an after-taste
Of somebody I barely know
I have thrown your blouse
To the floor, in my head
Like a gentle darkness
That I want to wrap myself in and devour
A blanket, or a feeling, or a sensation
I cannot tell what you truly represent
As a suite fantasy, a moment, a lost token
Of an experience of subtle exactitude
That my life cannot embody
That my youth cannot taste
I cannot lead you here
I can only hold you like this, in my mind
The sun will come through
The white sleeve of the plum curtain
And in your eyes, I know the sun will be gold
Folded, melted, like cotton drifting down
To the fountain of spring
And into your flesh, where the world
Is joyous, free, ecstatic
There is no longer room for my self-pity
I must discard it like an empty dream
Replaced by the gift of your longing
Poems held naked waiting for you, on the floor.

With the Language of the Birds

There is an order of love
That knows no boundaries
It’s the serving that affirms existence

It’s being out of the senses
With gratitude, conversing with compassion
Where devotion is sustenance

And the Beloved is formless, and thus
Present at all peculiar times
The sagest source of moments

I’m half heart, and spirit
I’m half clay, and water
I met the Beloved last night

In an open field of dream
I was told to live like a drunken gypsy
That my true income was measured in Bliss

So I wobbled left and bobbled right
Not knowing how to do it
Until I let myself go a little mad
To live among strangers & lovers.

The Duty of the Poet

I will take thee, as a Poet
To candidature for ethereal thrill
Subtle as the inner champers
Portions of visions, phrasing that

Dwell as full as an image – the red Rose
I will transport thee, as a Poet
To Cathedrals of fraught mortality
Joys of darling spontaneity

To risk all for the Scarlet Shelf
And usher in liberty for arcs of white
I will love thee, as a Poet
Until the house is full, that of the dream –

As conquering as love’s palaces
As secure, as divine intercourse
I will lead thee, as a Poet
As a carpenter on hands & knees

With opened palms, known to nobody –
As a stranger speaking of the elder tongues
I will speak of summer fields
And unheralded flowers dropped from memory

As a juggler turned wordsmith
As a prayer turned literary
I will take thee in, as a Poet
As the original artist of creative Vermilion

The pressed dust of symbolic projection
Of minds painted with brief beauty
That warrants pricelessness, with every line
These bards never awake from midnight’s trance.

Paddling With Breathlessness on Stilts I Write

Until now, I knew I possessed nothing
Damned by decrees of my own
Selfishness, I pretended

Behind a circus show of reason
At the Ball of tantalized feeling
But now, I know the way the world ends

Whatever else I might succumb to
It will be the poetry of freedom
Without rhetoric, or tricks of lying

Or slang speech particular to my times
Until now, I hid in incredible musical scales
Behind melodies, beneath the chorus

All poets pick themselves out of rivers
I’m half-deceived, by the lovers who left me
Because I was nothing but a poet

But it’s my first white wave of climbing hope
The last word I say before my doom
Whatever else, poetry is my first freedom

So don’t ridicule me for loving a kind of art
My dream is an impatient cadence pure
That gives me resurrection, when life

Offers me none, these flaming parenthesis
Have become my means of transcending you.

Like Wandering Bards Falling in Love on the Road

I sleep
With the bosom of the moon
Inside my belly
An ache so ethereal
I take back language

From my spirit’s script
I dream
Outside of indifference
With a contempt of sensitivity
So prophetic when I awake

I burst for reveries
Paths diverging until
I want your truths
Like the beauty you hide
In your remnant mind

I wait
To taste your victories
With you like choruses & refrains
And canvasses where our
Hearts melted together

On a page like words
Next to each other, following
Thrust into life
Without punctuation
It was

How you and I met
Sweet nudes of lyrics
The expired caress
Of love-beams
Shown into the

Darkness of our paragraphs
Much like the bed-side goblins
We became
So walled-in
The pink snow of our

Wild Spring of fauns
Piscean gardens
And purity in vocal-speech
I decoded you in strips
Of lingering poetry

And I spoke myself through
Your tongue into
The sorcerer’s longing
Grafted with lightness
Into the bridge of your
Armenian nose

Your secret parodies
I sung through your
Transparencies.

Without a Sequel

Today I am in the longitude of faith
Last night, I did not fight for sleep
I became a legend of my own struggle
And in most lovely lapsing

I forgot my self importance
My little raw soul on a row like this
Turned its slow features on like warm milk

Towards the greatest goal
Today I am in the latitude of invisible
Reaches, last night I let yesterday go

The golden echo of those sobs were drowned
I have begun to die, each and every day
I become a legend to my own gains

The lovely body of my unique mind
A blank interim before divinity
As a fury of flowers and light

My sacred earth in my day was my curse
Today I am compass at my own reaches
Inextinguishable like a most treasured dream.