In Winter, Merits have a Woman in Mind

Listen, Hae.mi, there are no paths closed
Between you and I, where optimism points her passion
Where the door is to the universe
This is not the time for prayers

But the time to act, my lovely field
Where I play in all that is Heaven
O’, I’ve known thee in thy dress of whiteness
And in the tempest of thy insomnia

The league of ours is beautiful
Based on the soulful arts, and
I feel as though I’ve not seen the last
Of your smile, in my poet’s arms

The sacred sacrifice of the bard
Is not nearly over, the muse bends
In a festival of tempting destiny
Such being the idol of my consumption

To the beauty I know I rest in thee
To the wonder and harmony of all that’s good
Hae.mi, the secret entrance to your life’s totality
There are no citizens or policies there

Only the abode of ritual and sweet shyness
The last warm flesh of hope and gladness
And all those things not native to me
That you possess like jewels, fruit, perspective

An abundance of so much radiance I keep
Following your spark for a hint of the luminous
And at the court of your entrepreneurship
I’m firm like the dawn of the world

For your sunsets and miracles of action
Your nurturing of the beauty in all of us.

Photo Courtesy.

Jowangsin Come Near Me

I didn’t know Koreans had living Goddesses

It seemed strange to me, how hypnotic Korean sounded

Melded in a harmonics of prophecies, nothing felt

 

As divine as your laughter, Hae.mi, I succumbed to it

Making my heart panic in sweetness and with indecision

I no longer knew how to speak, but could only

 

Thumb your ears with heartbeats, blink with my eye-lashes

Upon your eye-lashes, like the velvet of holding hands

I dared not kiss you, as if wonder could kill my sense

 

Maidenhood, besides, you had no room for moistness

You had no desire for my warm hands to enfold you

You hunted, scavenged, made yourself one of the tribe

 

And seized me in a thousand places, all at once

Hae.mi, whispered nothings, and I believed her

Knowing she was the sap of Autumn’s bizarre chill

 

That feeling you get when you are paralyzed by beauty

Held down in a moment so intense, you cannot breathe

Your name is now oil poured out, my warming chest

 

Your gentleness was my last thrill, finally acceptance

Whose love would weep better than wine, I know

Hae.mi, you who sustain my taste for dripping delight.

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.

Open Invitation

Like Air & Water

Hello, I wish we would have connected earlier
We should meet in another life
We should meet in air

Me and you, with a new world between us
In loving people too much, or not enough
I felt the scenes of my life

Anonymously, my consuming interests
Were psycho-social
If not, to talk to everybody

As deeply as I could
We would sleep in open fields
And travel west in our hearts

To walk freely into the night
Maybe in, another time and place
I wouldn’t be so terrified of

The malignity of the mechanics
Of how separated our lives are now
A schizophrenic individualism

Where profit counts more than people;
Goodbye, I wish we would have known each other
We should meet in another life

We could meet in water
Me and you, without the deluded sense
Of desperate egoism of this culture

I will leave our unity for then
Until then, I will take a deep breath
To listen for the shore, that’s the heart
At the other end of time.

To love is so startling

To love is so startling it leaves very little time for anything else

How strange the signs that led me to you
And you who, did not make a sign
Not unlike nature’s own
Who does not knock, and does not intrude

Whatever is most sweet
Will it come again, or
Never coming again
Make the memory of you more pure?

But memory and signs
And not my estate
Nor are you obliged to recognize
What comes so naturally to my view

I’m a nobody, who are you?
Fame is fickle, human love is
Initial, but not constant
So how shall I cleave to

A reincarnating muse
Whose success is not in the taking
Whose fortune is only
In the miraculous giving

I who don’t have such
A big heart to give, or courage
To try and love yet again.

Wish

Wish

I kiss thine eyes with my soul
With mystic empathy mine
But you do not look or see me!

Ah God! If I might once again
Feel the dreamy youth of feeling purely!
With identity projected, in wondrous joy!

The old-time longing for unity
It’s thrill is still in my cells
Like a circling memory of oneness

My whole heart leaps nearly to you
There, but you do not look or see me!
There is no method to convey sometimes
The inner possibility of energy
The old-time agony within my soul

The hush of alienation, loneliness
An eclectic talent for feeling separate
If only to magnify the unity-of-all-things
I kiss thine eyes with my private feast
A light blur stirs for thee from me

But you do not look, you do not see me!
And I was in my lonely light, with frenzy begging
For faces of the spring, for golden
Words spoken to me, as if I had
Thought poetry at the ocean side

For a lifetime of romantic depths
Without the shudder of youth
That passed so quickly, I am getting old.

I’m Telling this to the Two of You

In my love-soaked bed
I thought I drank love and died from it
Though I have been alone
For how many months now?
How many years have I suffered
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My relationship with myself
I caught and wrestled in this bed
The dreams that I once sought
I scatter now to the winds
Accepting, for instance, how much
.
More clever my corpse might be
The legacy of dead songs, you see
Angels will not come to kiss my head
In my love-soaked bed, I live and died
A fantasy, created by stages of delusion
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)
I invented illusions that you existed
So that I might simulate love
That my fragmented heart, might survive
And linger a while in my mind
To obey, some entertainment of beauty
For a lonely life, of dead songs.

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.

Not With Your Foreign Wings to Shelter Me

Beneath sentiments better left, unsaid
Untouched like some dead weight
Beneath the rubble-fields of battered words
That amount to little more, mere memories

They are not tangible, precious, or alive
But constrict me from the inside
Let them try to pronounce a winter of hurt
For a floundering of spring, yet to be

With fevered heart, let them melt away in summer
Clang shut eternal gates of love, forever?
Yet, for all that, trust shall come again, as ever?
With nostrils of bleeding gold, for rich rewards?

You will not appear again, with that dusty mantle
Of golden olive skin and pouty eyes
I am sick of dissipating you in mere fantasy
As blind as I ever am, a prelude and a requiem, or a preface
Where my luckless touches, touched a foreign woman’s shore.