On Choosing Higher Causes

How a willing heart thus
Adds a feather to the heel
A rose petal to the thorns
And a cold drink to the road
It is not enough to journey

We must be as loving passengers
Sweeter than man’s profiting
Ready to pamper not our starved pride
Or comforts of vanity
Every man is a damn tool

But wisdom consists in choosing
Better masters, wider causes
More eloquent rules of service
I have seen the day and found

Ridiculous wild people that run
The margins and know nothing
Of attempting accomplishments
And happier I would be to live as them

And happier I would be to learn
How to be free, use software that
Enables me to find my gift.

Free association in Red-ness

From the sneak peak to the Novel, Red, by EJ Koh.

 

Koh-Catharsis Diaries 1

A brief study in the

Implications of literary angels:

Pause and follow the direction

Of the innocence and passion

Of the birth of language

Of the pangs of poetics

It’s our sanctuary of hope

It may be disobedient to become a writer

But if it’s our calling, is it not

Our moral obligation to oblige

The inner universe in us bursting forth?

It’s where the hero’s journey

Became the writer’s journey

Alchemy of lonely years

Lonely years that were not truly lonely

Like an orphan from another country

We left behind traditions to pursue

With pause, deliberation, a lifetime of editing

Translating, giving speeches, marketing

With only the barest silver light

Of recognition from the sun outside

Like the attempt to piece together

All the things that occurred in our psyche

Without success, we were doomed

Trapped in the fiction of our own myth

Like a journal of Sera and Azel

Unending, serpent biting its own tail

Experience the Guru, Sera

Youth the dreamer, Azel

The Koh effect implied objectivity

A truth that was not Justice when there was none

A magical realism of our bone-split

Rain covered tears, the vision that

Encapsulated our prison room

Untold labor of conscious hallucination

The way eyes flit away in internal direction

When the shaman wakes the brain

These I have seen, these have I witnessed

A trinity of Spirit, Earth and Wake

And the lost sense of no-time in the dream

The dream that was our life

The surrealism of the spirit that

Liked to study our human past

Dissect it for significant moments

Summarize the way memory plotted inaccurately

Like tear-stains on letters from mother

It was a lottery of bright moments, pale

In the forgiveness that altered them

The primitive familiarity of the search

For belonging, in an anonymous modern world

Full of condemnation, virile self-criticism

Waging wars of inner doubt

Mover, spirits, humans, animals, planets

The blatent hierarchy fostered responsibility

Consciousness required us to rebel

Gendered pods took on ethnic-matter

Race became part of snickering identity

Identity became a frame of reference

One glowing figure in our own night

Author.

– EJ Koh

In the Haiku between you and I

In the Haiku between you and I

In the Haiku between you and I
You and me, there is only silence
For I followed you blindly
Without words, like a fool’s errand

And our experiences were finite
But as poets we were prophets
Taking the ordinary
To make it all-beautiful

Immersed in the variables
Of relationships, I became
My own kind of poetic analytics
Poetry defined as immediate
Identification, and you were there

A myth in my eyes of incarnations
A lost journey of mine without a home
I followed you through time like a nomad
Of a poem our lives once wrote together

So pure and profound a calling
A writer-seer’s blind spot of pleasure
Ethereal, unattainable, self-sacrificial
That’s how the poetry between us sounded

Transparent, with a red dress of infatuation
Still warm, the muse of powerful
Barefoot cravings and blue-stretched out
Mythical bed of alphabetical nipple-tested
Vowel-slurring sweet anarchy.

I Admonish Thee

Hope is the circumference of life
Faith is the circle of the fall
Creation the mighty exponent of
Oxygen and water, blood and time

History notes love is posterior
To fate, that seal of light
That spreads what we were
And mixes it with the cycles
*
That never stop, only recede to start again
Revelation cannot end with
Going blind, we learn to listen
Silence is the jewel of posterity

The future, the brimming Deity in our eyes
Perhaps we ask too large a place
No less to explore the furthest skies
Hope remains the circumference
*
Faith ends all beliefs of smaller bundles
Creation the happening where we exist
Open to all accidents of loss
Yes, oxygen, water, blood, time
These too will be taken away.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/autumn-sun-402106762