After Insomnia

Insomnia is like, the last episode
The bouquet of roses in sunlight melting
In the mind of dreams that is free
From attachment or the relativity of experience
I’ve been there done those things
I just don’t remember, the sensations
Were like too actual and the feeling of being real
Was pretentious, like the self-importance of
Youthful moments that were as vivid
Made the seasons more bright
Maybe I choose to respond emotionally
Like April, a time of strength where
I could announce to myself my own passions
So sense could exceed all metaphor
And I could change myself once again
To awaken to the wakefulness that is not sleep
To the yearning that makes my soul on fire
To the fate that does not feel unlike destiny
The bouquet of roses then is held firmly
Like a breast, or a leaf or a life bled, breathed and loved.

The Unexpected Death of Idealism

Oh, there’s reason for these sighs
And peace, from maturity
Inertia of no longer fighting
For ideals that are bigger than self

That’s the vague grey canvas of age
Talking, strangely through time
An apathy of our youthful heroism
I can wish now late, with words and spitefulness

But nothing empties dreams faster
Than poverty, student debts, a harsh economy
I said goodbye, to art, to fantasy, to women
But my heart keeps coming back

I pray to the soft ray by the window pane
And to my peach hibiscus that has blossomed
Unexpectedly, there’s a white peacock
In my dreams, that wakes me form my silence

I brood for a future me, and for a feminist hysteria
But there’s no raspberry jam, no honey and tea
I cannot forgive a world that doesn’t fight
For a better world, that’s not the legend of love

That I’m a part of, I want a higher cause
A championed course, and kids that believe
In more than profit and competition
Oh, there’s reason for these sighs

That come with a price of actually caring
About what’s happening to the world
A world that doesn’t beg for your love
It only evolves quicker without you

I’ve no cure for happiness, when
The majority has it worse than I do.

The Pain of Nice Dreams

The Pain of Nice Dreams

Eun Ji, I am haunted wherever I go
Trust between this Earth & Ether
I am what I am, with fifth essence
Time bleeds and broods not shyly

I am hunted and descendent
In burning bright and riding light
I am the calm harbour of weary years
Death here becomes the vistas

Of life’s own immortality and passage
From one state to another, decades roll
Like leaves and sun that hits the mountain
And flowers that remember not stories past

I’m glad, I think, and what’s more
Time’s newfound speed is a grace to me
One day to sail to a freer land
The round berries red, have been thrown

Into the river, our houses torn down by the storm
But what is life, but a beating heart
And poems which have not appeared
And experiences that will not be had

And women that won’t ornament our hours
I am that which broods, chiding poetry
Of how it squandered itself on vain holiness
Sacred to itself like a passionate dream.

Lyricism Wrought from pain

And in this time, of my material poverty
I’ve come to realize an important thing
That I have no riches but my spirit
No prosperity like the kingdom of my own thoughts

The love of the universe
Trapped inside of me, so innately
Yes these must be wealth enough for me
Not friends, women, comforts, luxuries

Can compare to the range of joy
That sets its bounds of beauty upon me
In the cosmos of my heart’s secret place
I also like most all that comes

And least of all, all that goes
For change is oft too unpredictable
To draw the sunsets from my mind
Or write a golden lines that stands

As the best, of my unoriginal mind
Life is but a thought, sailing in breath
A great league of breaths that hushes
Over everything, beauty breaks the heart

In the right way, even as we
Found more joy in sorrow than
The reverse, tonight is wonderful
Tomorrow is profound, and that my dears

Is the hidden love in creativity
That the heart knows the songs
The music it must make, not me, not I, not we.

Like Golden Things

Eun Ji, will love truly heal
What language fails to know
I’ve been searching my love of words

For what seems all eternity
But if I defer the grief, will I then
Diminish the gift

All this sacrifice, all this emotion
We sift our old anomalies looking
For something new, but I think divinity

Comes less from effort, more from surrender
I want to burn in gratitude
Until my very idea of self is annihilated
Because for me, that’s the only way
To truly be, Eun Ji, can we be then

More than simply a child of time?
That our fluid love might be
More than a lost sonnet, more than

A speck of the human spirit
I miss our old city, where we spoke
Intimately in the great assembly of youth

We had golden things to convey then
And a more immediate sense
Of what love is in the first place.

Seattle Diaries

Eun Ji, I fear the richness of the mouth
That I love too many things
To kiss any one of them properly
The snare of my love for literature

Is then songs in me that prove relentless
O, I have forgotten all praise
But as a betrothed prayer
I melt as the seat of all goodness in me

Eun Ji, how I wish to read your autobiographies
Every inch of your memories
That our ancestry shapes us so intimately
The words that come from hearts and countries

Cleansed from regret will we wash
Our wounds in the ocean of all of us?
The deep seated womb of time will
Bury on, in blood and sunburnt grasses

The fear of change in us will too be overcome
By life’s ministry of new moons and traversing birds
We’ll go on thinking of love, beauty, sorrow
And in the lost delight and unwon splendour

Of the stories we create, we’ll be
The departure of words into experience
Where nothing is forgotten and remembering means
Creating new layers of memories

Memories as awkward as the flesh
Experience that burns waiting for music.

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.

What Molly Said

What Molly Said

Ye Molly, bring all your dreams you dreamer
We have more in store for dawns
And voices so dear they feel too young

In our heart’s melodies rapture and ecstasy
I know not wisdom of the palace
But I’ve met beggars, with em hearts of gold
So tell me where does the cotton blow?
And how far does the sea reach for shores?

That I could wrap the wonder of the world
In the songs we sang, those acts that were
Our parodies of private philosophical blue

Write hard and clear about what hurts
Illuminate the way, for roads diverge
For the beauty of these differences
For the burning of horizon-Junes
That stretch like cinnamon stained memories

Of who we used to be, Molly, we’re dreamers still
Aren’t we? Let’s keep our faces
Always toward sunshine, for them children are watching
Our hearts are wolves that roam wild at times
The trouble with our kind is, we think we have time.

The definitive Guide to Self-Helping

The definitive Guide to Self-Helping

There comes a time in a life
When you ask yourself what is truly important
And then you have the courage
And the imperative wisdom

To execute the building
Of your life around your answer
It’s preferable to have suffered a little
It’s preferable to have struggled a little

Before you reach this point
Because only then will you fight
For what you deserve, after all that giving
Take time to be selfish, for a change

Because love, time, health and money
Are resources that can deplete at any moment
So you owe it to yourself
To be authentic and define and redefine

Your own character and life as you see fit
If today was the last day of your life
Would you do what you are about
To do tomorrow, or take another path?

If you are going to own who you are
And what you do, do it with no apology
No masks, no cover, no false pride
If you cannot keep it simple, who will

If you cannot do it honest, then what
If you can’t keep it real, then
You may regret simply doing
What was expected of you all along

The authentic self is the soul made visible
That power doesn’t come without effort.

Dreams of Flying #poetry

Dreams of Flying

There are these moments
When, I’m part of the treetops
I’m privy to the blueness, invisible
And alive in the iridescent

Darkness bathing the twilight
Oh and it is to be angelic again (always, ever!)
And go straight up with the

Clouds, dreams of flying
Came to me often, lost
In pure distances, to be
A listening meadow to the sky

To be part of the Spring that
Always returns with new stories
Of sunshine, new clattering
Buckling, wheezing, beating
The sensation of newness
Young for a few hours again.

Filtering Dreams

Kinza’s Flame

I’ve dreamt dreams of you
That have lingered a while
They have gone through me
Again and again, brought

Sunlight, smiles, attraction
To be alive again
That is the moment
When I knew

That you had altered
My fundamental state of being
I’ve dreamed dreams that you
Came to me with a smile

And it was at that moment
That I found myself begging
To learn how to live again

As if I had forgotten
How to be young
As if, the emptiness I felt
Was in the illusion of losing

Those things I had
Emotionally invested in
That were no longer
Physically near me

Maybe, I was mistaken
And everything I used to love
Are the same dreams visiting me now.

A Pilot from Uncommon Language

Freedom in Obscurity

I never imagined I’d experience
The repetition of experience
As pure freedom
The inner grammar

Is the failure to criticize
I am walking rapidly
In the slow-motion

From death to dream
To birth again, to be a poet
Is to obey letters of water
Powers of lucidity

Discovered in surrender
I never imagined I’d experience
Freedom in self-limitation

In the simple twilight of
The same landscape
I found the underbelly of genius
Where I reached the lines

I was supposed to (have)
The drowsy nerve of soul
Where all pleading stops.

To a Translator of Korean Poetry

To a Translator of Korean Poetry

We wanted to be writers
Cult of the amateurs and all
We wanted to witness other writers
In the social equation of

The reciprocity of our art
But we were timid, at first
Haunted by the prizes
That you won of contests

I didn’t enter, would never
Throwing ourselves out there
Invisible, pretending, unnoticeable
A snippet, a fragment, a leaf

Blowing in the virtual wind
We were like a tweet waiting to happen
And I watched the game of you
Shouting from the rooftops

About language on much smaller level
Of the ingredients for memories
That can be used as expositions
Can a soul be excited to tears?

That way time goes by without justification
And how we feel our inner child
Awake, but no longer afraid
Of the dark or the big bad dangerous world

We’ve come to call New York City
Or any other city on the planet
We wanted to be writers
It was the lifetime of bright green fingernails

Like Angels from Seoul where we migrated
3rd generation immigrants of being on fire
For doing what we love, and the backlash
Of how translation become a game

And novels became what we ate
At morning, noon, for dinner, midnight snacks.

Note: EJ Koh is featured in:
http://theculturetrip.com/north-america/articles/10-young-american-poets-changing-the-face-of-poetry/

On learning to Dream Big

On learning to Dream Big

You will say unbelievable things
Dreaming big, early in the morning
And some part of you will
Always remember, taking heart

To the extraordinary limbs
Of courage and destiny
That resides in you

Brave enough to bury ghosts
And cut ties with dysfunctional
Experiments, rising to maturity

Will you be able to
Open closed doors and close
Opened doors that impoverish

Your mind, your body of purity
Your motivation to achieve?
And they will say unbelievable things

And you won’t falter, because
You will be prepared, having
Goals at the root of your actions
What will be able to sway you?
It is a short walk anyways

From adulthood to maturity
The years won’t seem so slow
And you wrote all the things
You dreamed about and
Like music, your goals walked with you

You loved what you wanted to be
And as you abandoned things
For that which you most loved
You found the sacrifice was sacred
You came to believe in
Hard work, as an end to itself.

Ineffable Name

Your ghostly handkerchief
Rubs me in disbelief
As moist as your province
Of erotic dreams

Your Jewish mind
Is too shrewd and logical
For an eternal love-story
I will never meet

One such as you again
In the gold palace of
Lesser conversations
I will go on my merry way

Stitching heaven wherever I roam
For love is intellectual
And my body is not
Pragmatic as a woman

I find miracles without quarrels
Far easier than one who has
Not to be picky, but to be kind
My Messiah is my present love.

THE COLOR OF DREAMS

We were Sculptors when we lived
When we were alive, we Perceived
Beauty palpable as air, striving as water
Mutable were our art-forms
We loved as if there were no Tomorrow
Weighty, with visions of wisdom
In our Body, we gave ourselves to Nature
Totally, hands moving like Priests
In flesh, in bronze, in wood, in stone
Embroidering our love for the World
Again and again, as if that was all that mattered
Making music, from points of Eden
Writing pristine alphabets of significant
Hellos and goodbyes, all meeting each other
This hid our extreme fragility following
The new moon’s curves, down to her epiphanies
That all Diminish, or goes insane attempting
To reach Divinity, eyes the color of dreams.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Untitled-451862555

At The Hinge of All My Days

If I shouldn’t be alive –
Let others do, what I could not
Let them not save me
Any memorial crumbs

Our stories are all retold
Again and again, like being fast
Asleep and dreaming life
Our lives, they come and go

So quickly, if I should die tomorrow
Perhaps I will have been asked
To go abroad, to some further star –
And there I shall take compact Sunshine

With me, my first well Day in ages
If I shouldn’t be alive –
Let poets rise from every circumstance
Uncertain of themselves, so –

We all cheat ourselves, dropping
Threads of our youthful dreams
We conform to routine lives
If I shouldn’t be alive –

Maybe it is for the best?
To fade into tomorrow with
Rainbows held, like brief recompense.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Winter-Spices-412283366

For our Tale is not Linguistically Interpretable

How to keep silence, when every moment
Is as holy as a word dreamt upon the page?
At the zenith of poetry where

Metaphysics becomes a living necessity –
There, I shall dwell for a few weeks
Between the scavenging of hope

And the arms of my loving wife
Anguish was a revolution
How to keep the silence loose

When every moment bursts forth
In the beauty of the King of Kings
The place where aspiration travels

Off-shore, to alphabetic neutrality
A transparency of how ancient language
Leaves its mark on the spirit’s page

Sanskrit melding into mandarin
With an undertone of rolling Gaelic.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Paradise-404652006