These are the letters of my life

These are the letters of my life
Wretched and nude, wandering and alone
Nobody will open their seal of discoveries
Only I know the contents of my cells
That begged for purity in such a polluted corrupt world
* * *
Hardly even I could find a speck of kindness
In the abyss that separated us here
Only for instance, the smiles of others to each other
Were the letters ever answered?
I don’t remember, I am no longer me, no longer the writer
* * *
I only hope for little things now
For nourishment, and survival and sanctuary
But even these things, I don’t find so easily
Not friends, lovers or helpfulness along the way
I’m vilified by the same people I seek to help
* * *
Ready to feel the doom from my own hands, like is my custom
The unanswered letters gather up in me
Like memories of reaching out for nobody
The universe didn’t hear my call, my acts were too small
* * *
One day I shall reply to myself, glad and grateful
Though I once thought that day was near, now I am unsure
The world collapses upon me like speckled seasons
I am an endangered species to myself
* * *
I long for things I have never found
I have no proof they exist, in me or in others
There is no glimmer of honesty honest enough for me
No spiritual fire that washes me clean once again
* * *
Only the regret of living, only the guilt of wanting
Only the desires that lead yet to more desires
There are no great cities left for me
But the landscapes seem heavy with time
* * *
I am joyous for simple things, because
There’s nothing left of the illusions we used to hold
Those treasures like the burning sun on youthful skin
It’s gone now, as I rediscover myself alone.

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.

I Went to Heaven with Suffering, but I Lived

Photo courtesy of Thon94rt

A little madness for the end of Summer
Is wholesome even for a beggar
The start of the end of climaxes

Where experiments felt like a dream
And life had no soft distinctions
Only dramas that became less fashionable

Fashioned by these candid hands
Where I blush in solitude for my losses
A little crazier than before

A moment lost on the edges of lifetimes
The soul condemned to be a guest
With undisputed rights to be nobody

And fame for the fickle food of anonymity
There’s no scrutiny like self-judgement
No following like bleak humility

No embarrassment like the obliteration of need
When you as a person begin to dissolve
Remember what madness taught you

The hosts depart, the friends depart, the lovers too
But some things can be treasured

In the adventure of the self
In the bleak individualism of perishing
To passion, a broken mathematics of faith.

(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.

I Plead Myself with Thee

I have dreamed of death and mine
As if it were ungrateful of me to keep
Living and breathing, although

I have laid the rest of thy divinity
In a place so deep inside of me
That like a pilgrimage I scattered youth

The Autumn innocence that
Empties me of feeling every year
With each passing summer I leave

A part of myself well and beloved behind
And in doing so, I die enough to stalk
The future of my own gifts

That won’t be mine, but in meeting you
Will have unveiled something of the infinite
Where I can live irresponsibly and fine
Not bound by this Earth that won’t keep me lovingly
There’s no shadow’s length I bet
No growing pale as I strive

Who can understand the imperfection?
Of our humilities, that leaves
The orchard of our shared vulnerability
Open and not barren, where thrives
Scanty sunbeams for hidden fruit
Proof that we hung Springs together well.

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

Of It I can Say Nothing

 

 

 

Be here, by me

I who have been in love alone

Yoking the voice of listening itself

Where to pray is a kind of cherishing

Be here by me

 

I can say nothing no more

Of what it means to live

Each has their own eternity

To grieve, and brief moments to rejoice

Where a delicate fire is translated

 

Of the human condition’s reach

Be here, by me

Where time hangs – and I write

Words more naked than the flesh

Than the vulnerability of hours

 

That smite the dreams of youth

Be here, by me

I cry out to you, again

You who cared not that I sought to hear

Your emotions incommunicable

 

Be here, by me,

From aching care, to invisible language

And for what it means to be a friend

To witness the stories of lost souls

What cannot be said, will be wept

 

Like the smothered dreams of

All that is forgotten, death

The last blanket on our eyes.

 

 

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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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.

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.

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.

I Thrum for News of You

 

Xiao Wei, since whomever

I did well by, I want to touch

The dewy blanket, the space between our lives

All night long, as if ~

The youth I can’t remember

Bid me farewell, they are the very ones

Who injure me most of all

That I long to hold most of all

Xiao Wei, if I cannot say your name

Then to whose voice shall I dispel

Come now, sing this, all of you

And add your voices for the ocean whales

And the life I would have loved

Had you been of my own culture

Had you been of my own care

The unmarried woman is, a prayer gone wild

For humankind, and maidens to keep a vigil for

The brides are gone, forever more

To the genes of old, they renew their force

In little faces, and mothering grace

But Xiao Wei, how much time is left?

Until you too walk the thorny veils

I won’t be able to hear your voice

Shaking inside my breast, for much too long

That I cannot speak any more,

When your tongue breaks down and you

Are silent, I thrum for news of you.

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.

This Juvenile World

I’m haunted in November again
In corridors of time’s fleeting
To be a ghost oneself, to oneself
In the lonesome places
Where age meets security

To be shut up in verse
Like an artist tied and captive
To the abolishment of normalcy
The lives others lead, I’ve been
Placed inside a closet of make-believe

And when I show my head
To the world, I feel absurd
Or else, the world appears absurd to me
But what if I abolished creativity
In separate drawers, art has a smaller possession

Than it once did in dreary youth
But I’m still Nobody, Who have you become?
We’re not a pair of invisible, we’re separated
By digital noise, channels as juvenile
As the potential of a word, the possibility of a voice
There’s nothing the world has,
That I want anymore, it’s a con and a game
With every blossom and on every bush
My route to evanescence is a Saturday hush.

The Last Offering

I come, to the void of myself often
It is the soul of my solitude
It is where all the curtains are drawn

And I am in my own privacy, in touch
With something of the divine
I go there like an escape from the outside world

It is my heart of subjectivity
And I do not find it at all terrifying
It’s a splendour to own such a place

A piece of art, an order of nature
The soul built by spiritual suffering
A palace of mysticism who could understand?

What to an artist is their dream
To the cruel world how futile and juvenile
But we all require a soul to function

* * *

A spirit to push us through those terrible nights
Where the world is truly against us
And we are abandoned by friendship, love, profit

How many days of my life have I slept there
Alone, for that is the self-indulgence of
Risking and of striving illicitly, stubbornly

Against the peer pressure of such a conforming world
That cares for profit, reproduction, tradition
Perhaps we are not all made for that, I do not know?

But friends do leave and a dull pragmatism does
Set in, like the idea of responsibility for ordinary things
As when mates leave us for our idealism

I would have imagined it would be a virtue
But what if in all of this, the world is wrong?
And my soul is right, and I am doing what

I was meant to do all along, how shall I forgive myself then
For squandering my talent in subjectivity
And loving my own doom through it all

* * *

There is no room in this world for poets
So perhaps we shall do it as if in secret revolt
The revolution is always born inside

I need no solace from existence, only
My divine food, my guise of dream, my birthright
Of sacred psychology, that is why I write

It’s not a delusion nor in glowing pink afternoons
A mistake I made in being who I chose to be
It’s my exercise in the cosmos and empathy

It’s my last belonging to simplicity
It’s me mimicking all I thought was beautiful
To be grateful for a moment, together
With silence, whiteness, bareness, authentic authority.

Ecstasy Once Leapt, but Not in Me

Ecstasy Once Leapt, but Not in Me

I felt a cleavage in my brain

For hope and faith and love again

That the Earth did not do good

Or my heart knew not how to summon

The friendship I so desired, but could not find

The slumbering pain of tragedy

Lingered like a shell next to the lost sea

Of if my human nature could survive

*                      *                      *

While I aged in years that

Only secrets could keep pacts

With immortality, I was bare

A bird, a sky, a planet’s lone summit

And the barren ethereal throng

Could not feel what I maybe once was

All the love of youth had fell

For nature’s curtain of harsh reality

That the Earth did not do evil

Perhaps it was just I that felt the

Sequence of the ravelled fate

Where destiny parted with thee.

The Death of Songs

Eun Ji, the pen that must lift from the heart
Is the poet tired of the sensation of addiction
So we commit suicide to art, knowing it will set us free
Like adolescent love, that must one day too must pass

And the tragedy that became our comfort zone
We sublimated it into something else
Obsession for the ritual that represented
Our salvation from loneliness, though

It made us immortalize the lonely ache
O’ Eun Ji, it was me who watched thee on
The stage, I watched a thousand Korean dramas
Just to get a hint of who you might be

I grant I never saw a goddess go;
Nor found a literary mistress in the poetic snow
Seattle being too distant a dream to me
But roses are forever sometimes, like poems

That burn not with false compare, but mimic
In the twilight, the cheeks that we ours
Who swore in loneliness, that they found comradeship
And yet still, by heaven, I think you are as rare

As any poet I hoped to know, hoped to read
And if I ever had a love of the pen, or a muse
Or wished the music of the soul, of pain
Or whatever note the throat could soar
And swear that art was something more real.

P.S. http://thisisejkoh.com/

In Times of Trouble

I know what my heart is like
It’s everything and everyone
Dying inward for a bit of belonging

Hoping to touch a bit of life
For the sake of being reborn in identity
In sharing experience and tenderness
Was it for this I once uttered prayers?
That I should retire alone the years?

Bear me a crown of golden foreverafters
Love is the gold gown I’ve worn
In good times and the bad

If I grow a bit bitterly on life’s low shrub
Do not say I knew not flowers or
That I did not give everything
To the ones who truly mattered
Spring on horseback, Autumn on these lips

I knew and loved all that I could
My thin fingers lifting bright threads
Of music from the clouds

I know what my heart is like
Eun Ji, don’t you? I won’t sit smiling
But I’ll listen with Dandelions
And some brief word from you.

Letters from my German Soul

I should think I’m a better ghost of a poet
Than a human being, why?
We no longer share a language
I’ve become too abstract, like

How sometimes everything seems
So subjective, until I lose myself
In the dream of a body
In the hopes of a mortal life

That nonetheless anticipates ecstasy
Even when I have learned to fear pain
Trusting the moment, walking through fire

To get to some place that was
Inside myself all along
The most solid advice my soul ever gave
Was to burn my hand about the nature of fire

To live as a poet might live
But I’m, more heart than alchemy
More curiosity, than temptation

More innovator, than life-traveller
Poetry and astrology were my mother-tongues
Until I had to learn new languages
Software and smiling, to enter

The Sunday of my brief life
Dying to myself that I might
Feel the bliss of a frozen moment
That melts perfectly into the here and now.

Proud Artists Breed Poetry for Themselves

I will continue to work
In silence and obscurity
Loving what I do more than anyone
In this tiny world full of profiteers
I won’t profit from my art

It will rest like a blanket of
My most intimate identity
I have not a broken heart for myself
But a broken heart for this young world
That cannot seem to find its soul

Any relic of the dead is precious
And as such, the spirit of poetry
Lives on in me, like a light

That burns with the measures
Of all human words and love stories
For finally, it’s relationships
Which define and frame

Whatever uniqueness we most cherish
Comes from the dreams
I’ve had for my entire life
Though my ideas and the people
That surround me may have changed

Time and space conspire for my destiny
That my greatest love has always been
The quiet tranquility of sitting in a room
Bathed in the upstart unlimited imagination
Of the muse that can set you free.

As all the earth is holy ground

I dream of you to wake the soul
A soul that dreams of remembering
The future while we are still young!
I lock my door upon myself
That I might write the most beautiful books

Better by far you should read
The eternal present’s experience
Than follow in my footsteps dear
The silence is more musical than any song
The goblin market of our mind is dreary

Say then, that your heart is like a singing bird
That forgets not to smile, and the world
Like hope trembling, will smile with you

Unsure of the hurt it caused you
But grateful for your attendance just the same
Do not take your injuries so personally
They are but the foam of the ship
Upon which we travel through the night

Of choosing love not in the shallows
But in the truest depths of the deep
Where my heart is breaking for a little love.

Souls Frozen like Software

Eun Ji, maybe our soul is lost in time?
Our mother will die one summer
And what will the rain collect of who we were
Empty desk chair, our manuscript and tombs

The scrolls that amounts to our life
In a garden of words dissolved
Our ancestry may never find
Its singularity, we may never have

Our own family, selfishly breeding
I heard once, that the body is
A sacred element of love pregnant in time
Though I suspect we’ll be cloning soon

My father would have been saved
His lungs 3D printed by some technology
Not yet invented, and so it is with words
They change with the reader, like an audience

Not yet born, like an AI that can read
All of our work in one sitting, what would they
Know of us then? Perhaps judgement day
Comes the moment machines can understand us

Totally, from the sum of all of our words
All of our online searches, all of our data
Maybe our soul is just our Big data
Inside my speech are virtual streams
Unreliable grief, vivid memory of dying.

Time

A Favour to Ask: Attracting Poets & Writers to WordPress Campaign

1 – Sign in to your LinkedIn

2 – Go to the link below

3 – Share on social sharing icons, just under the title.

Hello everyone,

I hope you are having or had a good weekend. Could you please share this following post on social media, especially if you have a writer’s LinkedIn profile or reblog it here:

I’m trying to drum up support for the WordPress medium to attract more writers & poets to our community,

“Why I Recommend WordPress to other Writers”

The post can be found here:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-i-recommend-wordpress-other-writers-wuji-shiu?trk=prof-pos

Poets and writers need a community that is friendly and easy to create beauty and art, and network,

WordPress is the best I have found of late, do you agree? What are some others you enjoy?

Thanks.

I am the Last Poet

I am the Last poet
And an echo asking a shadow to dance
I am the freedom between vowels
As empty as the light between darkness
I’ am the poetry everywhere, been to each
Carried burdens like the weight of time
And it’s been a beloved journey
With dream herself as my riches
I have not sought more, asked for things
We are masters of the unsaid words
And we must discover them, less we
Lose the ability to identify with this world
Nature is art and human beings are mere animals
The human heart has increase
I wake up every morning determined
To become transparent in poetry’s whiteness
Blank and beautiful as an empty page.