City Limits

It has been some time since

I had been inspired, with dimples

And the juices of hope lit on fire

Like a karosine of kaleidoscopes

 

Rose petals stuck between my lips

It’s torture to live in the pen

When the heart forgets what it is to live

It has been long, Hae.mi, between sunsets

 

In the city of so much french-this-and-that

I may not discover love at the city’s limits

For I live a hermit in my own airy castles

I’ve got to write, like an unbearable bribery of hope

 

Where I am a thief, and you are the woman I most desire

Where foreign loans are paid in poems

Poems to the lost souls and coveted mothers

Hae.mi, it has been quiet a while

 

Since I was a third thief, by writing and by touch

The slipper dress of a fleeting caress

A see-through moment in shared secrecy

Where passion stalks on the invisible up and up.

Eternity is a structure of feelings

(alternative name: Flowers in December)

Like a frenzy of mischief, I to Hae.mi must succumb

For my bright tear-brimming eyes of surrender

I to her heart must roll in her winter-fire

Delivered into the anarchy of a maiden’s smile

Where temptation is not the blue clothes of destiny

But the starry ledge where together we knelt

In between time’s curves like serpents of yin-yang

Where I inquired of you how to taste the freedom, you simply said:

“It is what it is, and loves what it loves, time is the bearer of all gifts”

In the dark alley at daybreak I spied your naked feeling there

Where from your depths, your creative-spirit was bare

Like the untouched blue sky, or the morning’s glory

I was home for a moment, in seconds with you

And your voice soothed and aroused me instantly

And I was a long imprisoned poet of the people who knew nothing

But the power of a woman, and how she played with words.

All these unspoken words are left over Feelings

 

Hae.mi, I want the secret intensity of collusion

Not that I know what fiery touches are, I who have done without

The touch of the body or the needs of men

And if, my body becomes no longer mine

 

Would I pretend to blame a muse I know so well

From the darkness of time, where someone calls me

Surely she has no wings, only words to say that I am scoundrel or throng

And I, faltering through the calls of art

 

Yearn not for unity, but for intensity’s brightest wick

Where loving is for the mind, and not the senses to burn

Hae.mi, what I have become that I require not

The agony of the heart to feel alive

 

Or an army of the loins to feel as if I should possess

I am not that kind of lover, anyways

Only the poet’s unseen hand, and the touch of the eyes

Sowing seeds of language, where I am blind

 

Hoping for friendship in the ambiguity between the genders

Gone is thus rippling radiant youth and her precocious lies

Through my curiosity is still as hungry as the dawns

That first looked jeweled upon thee, for divinity suckled

 

In the womb of all things valuable and lovely

Like a beautiful dream, where I witness you Hae.mi.