Masks of Liquid Fire

Lost Inès, fire-bells, storm pixie
How quickly the lightning succumbs to the flesh
And hope is squeezed so silently in our chest
That light, doesn’t flood our vision, but warps us
With a kind of fear and anxiety

Won Inès, there’s no winning in the tragedies
There’s only ambiguity and doubt and fear
The kind of thunder that makes you climb under the bed
Or paint in the closet, or immerse yourself in the unreal

Creator Inès, there’s no season when beauty dies
Because it dies each day and in every person
As we decide to label them something, to limit their light
We kill our dreams to manufacture new ones

Cowardly Inès, there no one left to run home to
Not the night of courage, or the love of art
Not even they can save us, we are just that
Solitary bandits, cats and ambitiously warped

Memory Inès, there aren’t rooms I can go to
Only drawings, a canvas of your success
Where I’m reminded of the days of summer
Where the Eclipse held the potential of everything.

The Chant Goes On

What you love, you become
The dream of being is identity
What you feel, you attract
With the whisper of the cosmos

Always around you nurturing time
What you imagine, you create
In the Tao of sense, there’s only the future
A living universe intersecting

With every part of you, a thousand
Times per second, you are energy
Happiness does not depend on circumstance
It is a gift of perspective

There is no path to happiness
No escape into pleasure
No particular opposite of suffering
The experience is paramount and important

What you love, you will become
So learn to love the highest and truest
Of what you are, let your love encompass
The whole world, so you will not be small
Or live smally for yourself, and be miserable.

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.

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.

 

 

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 Woman’s World

 

To fight alone Is not brave
It’s suicidal, the Calvary is a family
Success is empty when not shared
The heart is not a solitary thing
The kingdom needs a female ruler

A smile suffused with creation
A bliss larger than heaven
A womb whose content is hope

No, to live alone is not healthy
To hide in the virtual worlds
We all require the skin on skin
Of happiness, the fruit of labor
The ripeness of summer

Success is not devoid of love or grace
It is for relationships that we conquer
The value is always in giving

I have a missing friend in my heart
Who taught me the joy of service
Fighting is for the tribe, not the individual
A harmony of identity diffused
In a higher aim, in a greater glory

Accessible like an inherited thrill
Or a gene that shines for everything
The dopamine of a better world.

After Taking with Miss Sun

 

 

We, do not sleep at night

We collide with stars

Our cold part goes into the Milky way

To be swept by the tides of clarity

Neuron reaches albino heart

 

Hope bleeds victory plump as the Moon

For a time, it’s 3am when you realize

That I labour like an Asian, but to no avail

Work does not win us friends

Success does not win us love

 

Nothing else matters but poetry and love

We can die in poverty, happy, finally

For simplicity is what it is

Our soul the necessary action of

Mortal hours wasted, or won

 

Like the calm hush of a thousand winters

We’ll only see sixty, maybe a few more

I won’t live forever, I’ll go hungry

Into the beyond, writing poems for reincarnations

Where I will forget what poems were or are

 

Or who made them and by whose hands

I’ll go like a surrendered flag bloody

With no business writing, I’ll just write

For myself, like a lost soul without a Sun

No map will recover who I was, that

 

Being who was never understood, nobody knew

How the pale baby of our dreams slip away

We, do not sleep at night

We just remember that thing that escape memory

It plummets like the night sky

 

Walking past the lives we could have had

Ignoring who was our wife in an alternate universe

There’s no composure to wasting potential

It’s just all we can do in the bottleneck design

Of a capitalistic world created to eat itself

 

There’s no room for love for me, only survival

I am a masochist, martyr, beggar and dreamer

That’s the last monument to my failed Ego

I have enough ID to last me into dog-eared certainty

I’m certain I love life more than others

Even if it does not always seem that way.

 

After Profiteers

Exultation is in the going
The inland soul flees time’s superficiality
We are nomads, then
In deep eternity and

The powerful machines are coming
My brethren have take to cities
Flooded the seas with their discarded wealth
But wealth is not what it once was

Profit is for dying eyes
And hearts that are not awake
Paradise is not an ownership
It is a freedom and a delight

I never spoken with God
But I saw her face in creation
Revived and renewed in a thousand eyes
I felt the novel agony of a lost humanity

So bemused and so conquered by suffering
Taken from men who war for their pride
I will not exalt in the smallness
Of my life, I will live it finely

With women, who understand me
And roses, as grateful as I
Lost among the crowds, I will
Enjoy my difference, and remain

A peculiar traveller of what comes and goes
Curiosity, that’s the only name
I care to pronounce.

My Fabric was made by deep organ-notes

I have been quiet a long while
Through my soul wet with spirit
Though my heart whole with love
Though my passion righteous

With strange infinitude
I have not any body of royalty’s sign
I’ve grown old, weak, alone
Haloed with my mystic literature

I uncoil beauty’s parting
And the sun’s goodbye to youth
And there is no wine-flush left
No opalescent hope for prosperity

I am all that I will ever be
From becoming to indignity
My compassion has been ministered
Upon this Earth in little bursts

And that’s enough for whichever
Strange singer’s mind gave birth to me
I am the cosmos suddenly poor
Suddenly curious for a weary lifetime.

The Womb of Everything

Eun Ji, life on the planet is born a woman
I’m not ignorant to the fact
In their wombs the magic is held
In their bosom sweet like fresh gossip
And the roots of familiar chimes

The moment of change is like a woman
Changing fairly well I assume!
Adapting and socially connecting
Though a thinking woman sleeps with monsters
We false name the beast we loved

In order to call him a Man we admired
It’s exhilarating to be alive near a good woman
You feel in her the idea that
The planet is awakening though
I sometimes wonder what a mother’s battles are for

Her child with sickness, poverty, lack of education
Waged in love and with the passion
For survival, how many women must be sacrificed?
And art whose honesty must labor through artifice
That cannot change the place of a woman

In such a barbaric society, as this?
Let them rule the world, I’d say
If they had the time, birth rates are declining
So what’s with the glass ceilings, friends
It’s their bodies, it’s the destinies of women

That have to change, to change the world
The world won’t change without them
False histories are made up of
The power, money, politics & war games of men.

Definition of Manhood

Don’t Ask me Who I am

It’s ironic to me then that a man
Is an arrow shooting into the future
And a woman is both the aim
And the place of strength from which

The bow shot the arrow in the first place
Oh well, It’s not like my mother failed
Just that I was a bit too pure for war
Not to be shot off into the world so quickly

Dying by that same arrow is an art
Though I think courage has died out
I’m not a man, in the sense of who they used to make them
Let me just live, love and say it well in

Good sentences, and I’ll be happy
As I commute from one hand to another
Like money, like the catalogue of value
I’ll be the unpublished writing

Who drowned in hot baths
Or a disclaimer than I never truly
Learned how to write but
I’m dying to get my soul back from you.

Scarcity of Silence #FreeVerse #poems #micropoetry #silence #amwriting #NationalPoetryMonth

Scarcity of Silences

Silence isn’t depressing
It’s being with yourself, oneself, myself
That’s quality time
I knew it perfectly well

Nature is always present
Like when I used to walk in the woods
I wasn’t alone, I was surrounded
By trees, the forest, the snow melting

There weren’t windows, buildings noise
It was silence glittering and blinking
In terrible moments that were
Beautiful because they felt innate

Flat as a poster I walk this city
Without silence, or a clear mirror
Perhaps without silence, we
Find ourselves wanting everything

And everything we cannot have
I blame too much breeding
As the cause of the scarcity of silence
Dare I say it’s gone extinct?

Poetry takes me back to nature
When all the nature has been stripped
Searched, and taken, sort of how
The world treats a young woman
Who once knew what silence was.

Black Swan Job Application

Black Swan Job Application
(Qualities to be a Writer)

I’ve come to recognize the synopsis
For the job, writers wanted!
Ability to isolate yourself for the cause
Being okay with alone time

Being receptive to criticism
Intrinsic motivation to explore
Narratives, boundaries, create beauty
Ability to withstand rejection

Talent for creating opportunities
Out of imaginary characters
Willingness to network with others in the craft
Perfectionism in editing and reworking

Old content, to update content and to
Explore themes for self-defining new content
Asking tough questions about one’s own identity
Gender, ethnicity, social-class, family psychology

Enjoyment of reading books, a lot of books
Devouring libraries, workshops, ceremonies
Rites of passage, ability to withstand
Years require to obtain Masters in Fine Arts

Creating writing certificates, rather important here
Explorations of own style to the point of
Exposition of vulnerability, masochism and
Notable ventures into new literary territories

Must be willing to change and use own imagination
With ultimate soul-breaking investment
For greatness, fame, poetic ecstasy, first-hand novels
Scripts, blog posts, extreme loneliness in the pursuit
Of what you love, only apply if serious.

Units of Identity

Units of Identity

Everyone is more or less
A translation of who they used to be
That being said, don’t get so

Settled in your own skin
Better to try new things
Find new people, mingle a little?
Everyone gets simpler as they
Ease into their own skin

It may take a few decades
Uphill and then downhill
So they say, so let go a little

Everyone is more or less
A poor translation of who
They wanted to be and resigned
With serendipity, they find
They can accept more than they once

Might have tolerated, it’s called
Life as a compromise, it’s the
Human journey, so we finally

Learn not to measure, judge, label
Inner peace is more valuable
Than analysis you might say.

Fragment from the white space

Fragment from the white space

You matter
Little to the universe
Or a lot! It depends
On the quantum variable

Of your energy quotient!
Don’t fret, love is a conversation
With the universe
It’s inevitable

So do ….not fret.
You matter
Because your universe
Spreads over to mine

Reality is a shared meaning
The narrative you can’t escape
Even if you die, you live on
Like words left as information

And information extinct
Poems written in a mac book air
You are full of so much longing
A living ode to hunger

Lyrical, smart, still awkward
With vulnerability, but photogenic
Humility is socialized
Or a matter of personality

You matter
To the universe as much
As you would assume
Or a lot, if you are
Having a good day.

Memory as fiction

No, I, I can’t put mothering
Into words, it’s stronger than love
It’s the torch bearing of all knowing

All feeling, all being, a desperate
Bond of instinct at 6 AM
We’re all amateur translators
Don’t you think? The letters appear
With meanings private to us

And we read the long distances
Between the death of our parents
And the birth of our children
What if, we never have children?

Do you ever lay in bed awake at night
Wondering the same thing?
No, I, I won’t put it into words
I never had much angsty personal space
Just words, letters, poems like lost journals

Nothing else to capture anyone else’s pages
It wasn’t poignant now I realize

I mostly strove to bond with intangible things
Maybe my Mother loved me too much
As if to compensate for things she didn’t do
We are all amateur historians though
Don’t you find? Creating with the utmost caution
From scraps from our younger self
The more definite way we want to remember things.

Protégé

Protégé

Take me back to the dawn
Of clouds when you knew
You were going to become a writer

Juxtapositions of mean business
Drafts of volunteering with the moon?
The truth is, I was there too

I fell in love with watching you
How you reshaped alphabets, stroked
The necessary motion of your poetics
Touched the wallpaper of your dreams

Slipped crawling with angels back
To the Earth, to wherever West Coast
Because I was the ghost on your lampshade
I was the whispers of your pillow

And we were witnessing something
Of the bright side of you that is willing to share
Be influenced and collaborate
Like a marketing hook of what you would become….

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.

My unsad heart likes to overflow

My unsad heart likes to overflow

I don’t how to be truly sad
Nor do I know how to be truly happy
My range is extraordinary

In moments, and unexpectedly so
But in general, I’m
An emotional lie that walks
I don’t talk very much
But my face has a heart

And my sleeves have flowers
But finally there is no difference
Emotion is a social conduit

Fine, it’s trampled me asunder
Like a poem that never ends
All these faces remind me
Of phrases I haven’t written yet
I’m alive in florescence

Unified in theory, divided
In the shyness and immaturity
I don’t know how to be truly social

Nor do I yearn to be truly
Not alone: it’s hard to define identity
Like a uselessly full glass of ourselves.

Anonymous

Love is not a name
I give away easily
Though I worship the
Days like a fine wine
There is a sacred thing
Born in me a hundred times
That I recognize doesn’t
Come from me at all
Your name is my name
In your name my name
Identity is interchangeable
Empathy is transferable
Love is software
Swift and sweet energy
One day I will download memory
And I will know who you were
At a picnic of your inner beauty
I’ll say the word to you
One in the other Unnamed.

Youth till now

Art by Agnes Cecile..

In the scattered vibrations
Of youth
I lifted each hour whiter
I slept with each month greener!
And I felt invulnerable

I feared death then as if
Cessation of being was a bad thing
Desire pushed me
Into new encounters
With the inevitable side of life

The empowering and affirming
The unfurling in the wind
And expansions into scenes
With silken banners, drunk liaisons
And knots, as the side of my bed

Inside my head, freshness of wounds
Errors in waiting, studious looks
Chaos in the overwhelming discovery
And the self-discovery of innovation
As if self had to be created over

Sky rising to the lips of fate
In a wayward temptation
Yes well that was then
And this is now, indifferent bliss
Sprouts in me now, like incense

And peace, preferring not the face
Of whirlwinds or zipper-trance.

The Group

There is strength in vulnerability
To feel more, is to be rich
It’s an abundance of the inner world
Who cares for possessions?

I wasn’t born to be a profiteer
I’d rather be like the water
Touching here, touching there
Pliant to the relationship of relationships

Aware of how the unity shapes
The whole, of how the particulars
Transfer their energy, it’s morbid
To think of ourselves as isolated selves

It’s dehumanizing to go to war every day
In the marketplace, to the office
There’s a function in serving a group
To feel more, connected and belong

To an entity that is clasped on many sides
By the shared vulnerability of each one.

White Noise

White Noise

I was nothing before
I became someone
Was light, came from water
Went into the air
Or felt the Earth beneath
My toes and loved
The Universe before I knew
How old it was, grandmother cosmos
Do not dismiss the white noise
It is the quantum of everywhere
And I too am part of that
Until I decay and by whim
Become part of nature indistinct
Though intelligence is everywhere
And so I will listen in the silence
For the sound of the universe
Hear the voices of beings
Feel the experience of others
As if it was my own, that is
My gift, the identity of understanding
The empathy of centuries
The love of history reincarnated.

Hundreds of years after Zhuangzi

Happiness is the deep peace
That arrives when you
Observe the world with empathy
Wherever you look you feel

Empathy, identity, compassion
That is the bliss when
Your heart shall find peace
It will be at peace, and everything

You have done or been or thought
It will all find perfect acceptance
That’s the source of things
That’s how all beings become tolerant

And furthermore, immersed
In the Great Unity, they find
More joy than they knew
Was possible, in a harmony

That is dignified, benevolent and
Never striving for happiness
Because happiness comes from inside
All the while knowing that

Attachment is a clinging and a distinction
Better to have a boundless home
In the divine container of the universe
That’s the disinterested, amused and loving

Bliss of eyes dreaming in experience
The experience where the space
Between you and I vanishes.

I voyage in a body

I go among the body
Of the world
I walk and breathe and talk
A roundabout human
Experience arriving forever

Passing youth together
To the sunlit center
Of a city brief
In the history of time
I go among the body

Of the planet
But I am a cell without
Knowing it, we have
This myth of individuality
It’s a pleasant thought

To imagine being free
But I am protein and blood
Like any creature
I depend upon oxygen and light
Water and the creativity

That makes my life meaningful
I go among the body
With a harvest of womb
And genes burning
For some journey

Like a dream I keep
Making children
As if the outcome is always
Better and special
And we break into

Daylight as always
Aware and alone
That the world is talking
About itself to itself
And not truly to us.

As New Rivers school Old Oceans

As New Rivers school Old Oceans

I’m in the waiting room
Called life
Between one world
And the next
It’s empty here
And quiet right down

To my bones, they are light
My mind is water
My breath is an appointment
With time, my body
Is a fragrance of the forest
All around me

These walls are not life
The cities do not grow
The skies blink with airplanes
Those birds haven’t left
In what direction
Is the waiting room?

From here to there
From outside to inside?
Babies too shy to stop
Clinging to a breast
They haven’t yet studied
Faces, but that’s soon

I’m in the waiting room
Called life
I don’t plan to stay forever
I won’t be called upon
The metaphor of surprise
Is nearly old to me

I might have been embarrassed
If I wasn’t the only one here
We are symbols to ourselves
And non-existent to reality
I’m in the waiting room
Between something and nothing

A dual mirror or voice
The echo of sanity or madness
Catching a thread in the
Silence, to remember that
I can be separate from
The fabric of the universe

If required, when ego is necessary
Like for movement or work or mating
It doesn’t seem important
I’m in the waiting room
For a lifetime of
Observation, studious observation.

Experience in perihelion

Violets, doves, girls, bees
And oh, hyacinths
Are inconstant objects
With an inconstant cause

So floods the springs
It must change, face
To face, epoch to epoch
Thought to thought

Year to year, swollen
With the mutability of life
Energy in a universe
Of light pushing the pace

The heroic part is not
Surviving it all, it’s
To learn to let go
The major abstraction

Is not to plan for a future
But to transcend the idea
Of being ready for a future
That is always just an

Illusion of what today is
The partners leave, the kids
They grow up, the money
Separates from your fingers

The memories grow exotic
Life bleeds a final elegance
In how quickly it leaves
The beating heart, the candles
That went out in the rain.

The idea of order as a myth

We were crossing bridges
At every moment, like symbolic
Journeys made and left behind
Half-man, half-star

Just creatures half-aware
Through time, judging
With our sense of duality
How time and space and energy

Could interact in transience
Fate only lasted after all
Until we died, until moments
Became memories and acts

When the wind stops and the
Heart no longer beats, maybe then
We can say with some finality
That it is over, life was but a dream

A myth we perpetuated, like identity
Useful in its ability to give us
A sense of security and conformity
But somewhat misguided, calling

For pomp and drama at every turn
The ego was an incapable master
Of force, and full of fiction
Like the death of a soldier who was

Somebody’s pawn, it was all
Like a simulation, absurdity
Witness at the public square
The office room politics

And the stage, where we were
Like actors, unaware of our lines
Barren, regretful and hopelessly idealistic.

Flutes of Light

we’ve retold the stories
of our lives like prehistory
so many times we forgot the white morning

or the gulls that drove us
to listen to traces of infinity
we become our own museums
sort of broken accounts of what

happened to us, a thousand photos later
we still can’t tell you the truth
about ourselves, that’s second-guessing

or the lack of objectivity with self
the sun leans low on the trees
of our youth, it passes faster
than you can name your old favorite songs

driving home, the moon draws close
we left our city lights, hoping
to become somebody we could respect

i love’ed you all day, all days
and felt the intimate street lights
bathe me against all my worries
which seem in retrospect, a bit petty

heat won’t leave the pavement
until night is almost over
and we’ll do it over all again

for the last freeway of summer
for leaving all the lights on
just to see you from the corner of my eyes.

CAN YOU WRITE ABOUT LOVE?

Death is a preferable subject
For a poet died of writing about love
These diseases, suicides, war, religions

Have to be put into perspective
Why? Because love turns
Literature into a poor resurrection
Of dead poets, it’s better they stayed dead

To be honest, Death teaches us immortality
Reuniting with our parents who
Didn’t have the courage to face
Their psychologically flawed relationships

Worse than unhappy, to be indifferent
I’d prefer to die honestly, though
It just so happens I forget
For the sake of lyrical exercise

What I once considered so important
To summon a single moment I felt
Completely loved, it’s that absence
That makes Death a literal personal subject.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Never-Want-To-Say-Goodbye-467542629