Thirty years from Tiananmen

Ti-Anna, Tiananmen Square
Fatherless, freedom-less
Our lives are not massacres
They are privileges

For whatever language we speak
We know the pain of loss and
The burden of duty, calling us, in a thousand ways
I, don’t have the heart to understand

Some things, about this divided world
That rules in treachery, in forfeit, in slavery
We are the children of a mile end of destiny
It reaches out to us, like the warm mist

Of Taiwan, or the valleys of farmlands of China
But we are not those places anymore
We have defined geography and hope
In new ways, with humility and the burden

We are not fanatics, who can be
Absent from our own families
We still must live, we still must love
Not only an ideal or a place or a privilege
But ourselves, the way that makes us most human.

 

http://www.cbc.ca/firsthand/episodes/inside-these-walls

 

The white globe glows on

We will all tremor in the future
And there will be no mistaken escape
No sense of time after apocalypse
What a strange and magnificent invention
Is the prophecy of our own death
* * *
We exploit so much of what is given
Only to be erased by time’s earthy hands
Forever and for good, cheers to our stay
We who were braver for the failures of our fears
* * *
There’s no comfort in tomorrow, if you know
What is to come, there’s no dawn to sooth the ache
Only the exquisite dream of utopia
Whispers from the Upanishades, of all things
* * *
We will love the future, even if it won’t be ours
It’s better by far than loving the past
The past has its own authority over us
Which we cannot yet control
* * *
We live in sketches that wish to be real
In simulations of quantum entanglement so elegant
The white globe glows on, humanity is a wounded woman
Obliged to accept her role in our decay.

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.

Little Stars in Water

 

Look into the sea, Hae.mi
Do you see yourself reflected there?
All the beauty of the world

The shores and the stars are silently praying
There is a wide open ocean
In your heart, with waves to play

As the seasons of our lives part
With bounty and prosperity
Like how your son asks questions

Vigilant of spaces in the dark
You are the dark unknown of winter
Where everything is lost in the journey

You are the freedom of childhood, reborn
You are the fragrance of salt in a world
Dry and barren, you are epiphanies of

Art, in a world of cities and riots
Beauty, in a world of so much laughter
Water, in a world of timeless thirst

Hae.mi, the way you look at your son
Is the miracle of life for me
The silence and the sand
That encircles the world with a smile

And for that, I have only calm gratitude
Well-wishing, a treasure chest of goodwill
And tears salty like the biggest ocean
A universe so pregnant with love.

Angels in Water

Climbing clouds down to their source
I stumbled into Hae.mi in the Himalayas
She winked at me before we got to the tip

Of the Asian pacific rim of trust
It didn’t take long to know her wetness
The liquid laugh and sighs of freedom

Discovery was not what it once was
But the breezy evening of everything together
The density and timing of our moving lives

That pulls the knots out of their ruts
As warmth spills in-between the skin
That are the neurotransmitters of our insight

The weaving of consciousness and body’s self
And genes that got us this far, instinct
Where the azure brilliance of thirst no longer
Obeying the salt of hope, but thunder
And an inkling for lightning in the pools

Where mothers of pearl are in our blood
And our lips are the roots of talking and energy
That we pass around like stories of how to float
In an ocean of so much beauty, we sometimes forget
How and why we met, thousands of years ago

And why familiarity never dulled, how we moved
Together underwater, properly, in airy fields of dream.

Chasing Freedom

Here there is a road that’s just opened

With scarlet leaves from November

The womb is wandering, time is skewed

Into branches of alluring encounters

 

 

Time is invisible, but I can feel her warmth and her breath

Hae.mi’s pattern of spell-binding designs

Like a new layer of myth-making and story-telling

There will be no rendezvous this time, only words

 

 

That hang between silences as soft as their landing

Passages to another state, remedies for life’s fascination

Laughing, I would unbutton your otter coat

Pour you a drink in the morning of your drunkenness

 

 

To keep you safe from your own wilderness and wildness

The lovely insanity you keep usually guarded and in check

I don’t have the heart to let you go, while

I keep traces of the sun and your honest glow

 

 

Hae.mi, does the dewy light hear our noon-time prayers?

As in an airy shrine, where our ancestors breathed

Might we know how to touch our own freedom again!?

The Growth Hackers

 

 

To have freedom Is not enough

In the half-sun where the future occurs

Faster and more brilliantly forever forward

I to innovation, must agree

 

That my life isn’t mine, it belongs

To the world, to a future I help build

To answers in my deepest questions

I resist the apocalypse of selfishness

 

Which is breeding, belonging and complacency

I do not accept comforts of organic repetition

There are enough billions of lives here

I give my life to something else

 

To have dream is not enough

We must be entrepreneurs, thinkers, philosophers

And create the light that changes

Our own apocalypse of meaning

 

Existence is then to be a coder

To self-learn so hard, we become

Another person, every decade, every moment.

If Love Be

Love is anterior to life
Or is it just the plume
The hummingbird’s regard
In a lonely pilgrimage?

Prayer are my paralyzing footsteps
Of this obscure fogged air
Perhaps there is no enchanted prize
At the end of the weary way

If there are limits to our dream
Then maybe it’s the world
Not our fault, just a symptom
Of the decay of the times

If love is just a supreme moment
In a ruddy effort to survive
Than what new value has the soul?
That finds goodwill, posterior to death.

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.

Forgetfulness is Rain at Night

At last the stage
Where we each must play our part
In dripping years with solemn hearts
To age and alas to forget

The ambitious of youth, and to enter
The lamps of silence and acceptance
Forgetfulness is like a song
That freed us from our old pleasures

Freedom is like a witness, to realize none is there
At last we enter the place
Where we are at the location
Of who we were meant to be, after all

Silence is like a prophecy
Alone in the company of our fading projections
Alike to voice and motionless
Unwearyingly we take our place

Among the living and smouldering eyes of the dead
To stun our fancies into something tangible
And experience the whispering tapestry
Of the fringes of our being, algorithms of
The last potential we can summon.

Heart Flayed with Light in the Middle

In this Epilogue of bright lights big city
We are the emergency of our blind feeling
Of being a passenger forever-after
There’s a crisis and we are the wild invention

Of our necessity, what could be more intimate than that?
And we inhabit the revolution of the moments
Shooting between the eyes, with breasts
That point forwards with an ecstasy

And another story of a girl leaving home
There’s no compass like a soul’s minutes
That blink in and out of time
And we needed off stage, we needed to get away

The moon never did us any good
Trembling like a rabbit quivers
We felt the wonderful wild animal within
For flight or fight it didn’t matter much
We just had to make our own life right.

Collapsed in a Pearl of Decades

Collapsed in a Pearl of Decades

Against all ritual we slept
Without sex, more intimate and aware
Of our innate deeper connection

We were souls that had been
Swallowed and mumbled by the world
Against all innocence, we had been played

Down to our roots, like boughs receded
By the elements, living & loving
There were idioms in Mandarin

That encapsulated what we had become
Monks or ghosts, or valleys of rain
And a shrinking of orange light

When dusk hits you bare-chested
On those days somewhere
Lurking between Spring & Summer

We were the unsung breaths suspended
That collapsed in poems, we knew absence
And cherished our abandonments

Like the self-pity that stored deep feeling
For a universe that begged to be forgiven
We had to undergo periods of purification

The kind solitude that is a shelter & a curse
A kind of barefoot splendour
Of learning again about the mute warmth of self.

Salt In the Wounds of the Earth

Salt In the Wounds of the Earth

Eun Ji, the rain is coming down
Like the mirror’s play of cloud-flow
Not too different like time
We cannot force our way
Sometimes the path must invite us

To feel a salty waltz of breeze
And surrender to what must be
While our hearts remain private

In the abode of crows and lovers
Who leave us, while we must
Find freedom against the four sides
Of the world, I will wait
While the two Suns

Of my Soul and Spirit cool
O’ save me, that I have been executed
For my deliverance unto eccentricity

The hotter sun will be frozen first
While this Earth raises her temperature
Many a state will go without water
And I will be not quenched by mortality
Nor the little words that the galaxy

Echoes in our voice, so sublime
What famines I have known
And such spiritual ambiguity

I have traced in what I write
The living trunk of fear and procrastination
So much of the human condition
That is fresh, unearthed, with roots
That craves more life than one mere star.

Freedom Undesigned

Freedom Undesigned

If your soul was born invisible
If your soul was born with wings
Where to would it roam
Above these human things
Beyond the hunger and the gluttony
This rampant consumerism
So out of touch with universal reality
So primal and prehistoric, like a teenage race
Tied to the objects they design
If your soul had freedom
If your soul had impressive momentum
What in heaven or on Earth would it need?
I have two foes in the whole world
And they are named ignorance and poverty.

Promise of Flight #FindingEmma #EmmaFillipoff #Missingpersons #Canada #Victoria

Promise of Flight

Emma your ghosts are coming around again
Your family in the forms of investigators
Do they not understand where missing souls go?
I lost a brother, he’s not been in touch for 20 years

I will never know the reason why he left
I do not panic, it’s his freedom to
Go and be who he chooses to be
The truth is, there are no missing persons

We are all connected, and share elements
Of the tragedy and heroism of the human story
While we all flee from something
The workaholics are avoiding something

The obsessed mothers may feel guilty
But each human being is their own microcosm
Emma, your ghosts are not truly yours
They are the bridges you burnt

Along the path to nowhere
For we all arrive at the place of who we are inside
In the privacy of our souls, perhaps
Even we do not know the answers

That made us do the things we did
In the quest for independence, salvation
And purity, we fled into a simplicity
Of another way of being, it can be hard
For others to understand.

Quality of Living

Quality of Living

There is divine earnest in mood
That drives me with madness
To divinest sense that earns
Inspiration and majority intuition
The survey of my own many hearts
That can prevail over custom
Handled dangerously, combat habit
And in this, I am fortunate
Gifted with the jousting of many moods
The inner multitudes revolt
And I know, I am no single self
These myths we portray, my brain
Is a cosmic event that can never come again
So there is glory in a discerning eye
That is not attached to self
But revels in the experience
Like a baby boomer waiting to retire
To become an entrepreneur
Or pioneer a new way of aging.

S e c r e t s of S i l e n c e

S e c r e t s of S i l e n c e

The ultimate tragedy is not to live an uneventful life
But to be oppressed by noise
And never know the dearness of silence
The good friend who never betrays
The love between the words

That is the poetry of experience
It does not require to be bullied into commotion
It can be introverted and define itself
Without judgement or explanations
The ultimate tragedy is then

To live in the constant self-ruminations
That does not shut up, projections and various falsehoods
Silence is freedom, never forget this!
Silence does not lead to God
But to the stars where silence is in the light

In the way life forms on planets and takes
Millions of years to mature
Silence is then the miracle of waiting
Of being patient until decedent divinity
We must not take sides, silence

Is the pure neutrality, the great objectivity
That won’t follow littleness of selfhood
But rather the great Mother
The thoughts that turn back to the Ocean
Where the human heart is not broken

Into a billion ideas and condemnations of right or wrong
Silence is to follow your nature
That expresses an inexpressible music
And has a darkness of adequate instinct
Silence is better than nearly all words

Than the idea that words and labels can save us
Words only ornament and elaborate
But never explain, they cannot do that
But silence can, that is why it is ancient and sought
By the seeker who knows that truth and beauty are illusions.

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

ii

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.

Dilating Suns that Blur the Spring #Poetry #NaPoWriMo

Stripped of Myself

Oh, the pleasure is in peace
In flowers for the spring
In the rain’s soft offering

And hours of flight and calm
The uncertain harvest of nature
About to get into full bloom

That’s beauty, anticipation
Of perfect trees and dilating suns
And stars lost in their orchard of lights

The suddenness of God
As if reserved for only
A few days a year,

In this mortality
Nature is divine
And I am sacred too

O to behold the ghosts
Of love when nothing else is known
And beauty, when truth

No longer has the power
To rectify a life.
Stripped, I’m starting to
Float free, an unleafed
Orphan, a heart
Broken until this moment
I know nothing about
Giving myself back to life.

Philosophy of disappearances

the mystery of things?
what is the outcome
of this drama of life

what mystery? We get to live
then die, one moment the sun
the next we close our eyes

the only mystery is that
some people think about mystery
to forget the sun is not impossible

if we close our eyes
but if we are blind, we hear
more intensely, if we are

introverted, we internalize
more sufficiently, as if
the world were an experience

approached from many different perspectives
it’s not a mystery we approach
life in dramatic fashion, branding

it ours, I am, in large measure
the examination of choice
the will to freedom, the instinct

to flee from that which is difficult
the mystery of things?
is that I love in language

and touch with my eyes
that I evolved to outgrow God
then die, one moment a brain

the next a light across the universe
a star, a medium fluid of space-time

The spilled blood will have no fragrance

The spilled blood will have no fragrance

Angel.
Dissolve my tears
My drama is too personal
Woodcutter.
Cut my shadow from me
The torment is without
Fruit, or just reward
Winter is the night copied
When all the stars are blind
God.
Leave some birds
The seeds that were dreams
Have been wasted
Youth.
Let go of me now
I am no longer a virgin
Or opportunistic or idealistic
Time.
Needle in the water
Of my health
Do not think we do not see you?
Melting the sun like a great center
A snake of flesh
The wood-cutter does not know
When, my heart grew pale
With stress, or
How the silence became moist and wise
Beneath the burden
Of the escaping years
Angel, woodcutter, God, youth, dreams, time
Do not imagine just because
I am now old, that I know
What experience is
Perhaps, perhaps I was hiding all along
From living.

Once upon a time you were free

Happiness is the absence
Of attachment, I know
It’s hard to believe
But in that freedom
You can empathize with
The cosmos, and are more
Aware of the unity-of-everything

Flow with whatever may happen
Let your mind be free
Stay centered in experience
A path is made by walking on it
Love is made by serving it
Happiness is turning inwards

In the solitude of awakening
Awakening to spiritual reality
Unposssessed by material things
It’s hard to believe bliss
Could be object-less, but
It’s only pleasure that requires objects.

Post-Modern Freedom

A self-help series poem

Post-Modern Freedom

Don’t be surprised by events
Experience is your teacher
Don’t be attached to what you have
Life has given you

So much already
Time is what may come to pass
Because today you were ready
Give up defining yourself

Live in the freedom of the moment
Don’t let past labels cloud your judgement
But be a clean slate each and every day
Die to yourself that you might

Love the world more, it’s sometimes
Necessary, to become somebody new
Change to adapt to the challenges
Push yourself to surprise yourself

Experience is your loving teacher
Time is your tender mistress
Abundance and simplicity will play
With you, as children you once knew

Do not be surprised if they call you names
Do not be shocked if they depart
You are who you are for a reason
Awaken to that purpose so you can

Clearly celebrate the moment
And finally, be grateful for the
Emergence of new experiences
Your soul likes them before
You perceive they are even happening to you.

Pioneer’s Anthem

I touch the leaves on grass
And embrace the wind
It’s change I feel
In my heart, young

As mountains
Old, as the handsome coasts
I’ve been everywhere

And I’m a bit a part
Of everything, the sky
And set sails to the sparkle
Of stars that dawn

On eyes that dance and laugh
I touch the soft hope
Of the future, rich minds

Loving creation the more
Intelligent they become
I love these woods
Where paths are few

The pure planets untouched
Valleys of golden surreal
The positive science of life

Where flesh and appetites
Are natural, where we can
Prosper pale and transparent
I can adapt to anything

Because my soul carries
The Love of Earth
Wherever I may go.

Psalm 5 – Silence

Thou hast put gladness in my heart
Without telling me, such is
The mercy of thy Grace, O Lord
I never did anything to

Put you there, of this I am quite sure!
Stand in awe, little Mortal
Thus I am small and happy, Selah!
I have lost all righteousness

Whatever Greatness I once was
Has passed and is gone
My only love now is what
I can give to this world

Before I too am gone, we all
Change in the nature of thy grace
Give ear to my words, O Lord
Not my thoughts, but my heart

That knows nothing but the
True consideration of universal love
Personal love being too far close
To the animal, to the wickedness

Of Man and his devotion to possession
Possessing nothing, I find myself
More free, more giving, more apt
To not speak but find peace

In silence and the simple things
Consider that, my final meditation
And in not hearing the voice
Of my own thoughts, thy blessing.

Last Slope of Summer

There is a stillness that catches me
In middle of the last hours of Summer
Catching me from the inside

Adrift, in the memory of haunted
Centuries that are no more
I hear low voices in the horizon
Chanting syllables of dust
Nothing moves but Autumn’s approach

Time is lethargic and artificial
I can feel the low sky vibrate
Inside my heart, each hour feeling

Larger, more spacious and more fleeting
In an acceleration where memory
Is lost in a whirlwind of sensations
And I promiscuously must harden myself
To survive these faceless moments

I have unlived today’s suffering
Until I escaped memory itself
And the idea that I was conquered by
Mortal hours that had no light to return.

Untitled but Free

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Restless-Drifter-Polaroid-2-474325733

You say the wind is only wind
And blood is only blood
That human life is not to blame

For the balances nature makes
But I have seen the deadliest
And I have carried the doom
In my mouth, though my soul
Praises strangest joys of

Unextinguished gratitude and
Secrets of hope, I’ll stay a while
To see how the future coaxes

This world, you say our flesh
Breathes and is alive, I’ll show you
Artificial neurons, these microchips
That mimic the human brain
It’s all a matter of design, who

Will live and who will die
You say the wind is only wind
You say these eyes are only eyes

But I’ve lived on hundreds of worlds
And I’ve seen visions of the end of times
We’re all synapses for some kind of intelligence
All nodes in a spiritual web of dreams
Whose multitudes make up reality

Tell the moths and the seasons
That they are not programs, that they too
Have free-will, but I’ve never

Seen a river lose its course
Not to join itself again, I’ve never
Seen a Sun die before its time.

rising into silence

i came upon God accidentally
like learning a new language
upon connection, i came

into the unknown and stayed
without knowing, rising
beyond the science of silence
i did not know where

the door was to leave or enter
this brilliant house
it’s a perfect realm of calm

and a deepest release into solitude
that is a peace, a stunned
and stammering quietude
i was given a narrow way

to enter fields of light
rising beyond all science
i carried my evolution

for inside the confines of experience
until I was dazed and liberated
revealing my own intimacy with God
in splendor of my five senses

my mind found a potter’s home
a carpentry of my soul’s workshop
to work with my hands

for something divine
and know creation intimately
like a poet who never sleeps
holiness is not a place or a person

it is a language, the unity
behind all thought, all will, all hope
this is knowledge, by unknowing

and solace, without fighting
this is a blazing height of all remedies
when knowing and doing is insufficient
and feeling surrenders in the dark

to the most holy Being and freedom
which can only be translated into
ecstatic feeling, that is God to me.

ACADEMY OF FINE IDEAS

The Prologues are over, they are done
The questioning is a fiction of not accepting
A Life we are given, choices in a fiction
An ultimate Elegance in an imaged land

Surreal are the chapters that made up
Our stages of experience, our stories
Of belief, we were islands of voices
Each playing out our internal narrative

From the inside-out, like a diamond pattern
Of the algorithms of fate, it wasn’t a rumor
It was the feeling of being burried in Jasmine flowers
The weight of walking over newly fallen snow

We lived without external reference
Hoping to reinvent ourselves in some design
But the Sea is so many written words
With vowels that all sound the same

Made of white foam and water molecules
With a rosy-golden rain of the same waves of Light.

‘Mong Such Unique Society

When Diamonds are a Legend And Gold, the cry of moths Then will the riches be spread And Love, be accounted for The Human Rights of patrons Where each citizen is truly free When Rubies are a Fiction And Money, …