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.

But With a Fraction of the Love

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve felt my life

In the murmur of a bee

And felt all my tears

 

In the eminence of a nest

And the daffodils blew color

Covert as April, or candid as May

I took my time to age and my time

Was plenty, in the solitude

 

Of antiquity, forgetting for answering

Only questions, guided me

At the breaking of the day

 

Where golden drops spawned

Longer looks and deeper searching

All for something immaterial

There is a flower which no longer blooms

It’s in my heart or should I say, it was

 

It’s gentle romance led me on

In the chivalry of my subjective warmth

Where I was not alone, nor humming birds left

 

The measures of days were not my smiles

My splendour was meagre, my heart

Was the moistness of oxygen

In your lungs, the breath that kept you sane

When life was a tyranny of choice until

 

There was none left and freedom hung

Like a low hanging fruit, of what our lives had become.

 

In Process of the Seasons of You in Me

 

 

 

Love, there was never an audience

Only the taste of a premonition

That died so easily in your hands

And my life was an illusion

 

But my dreams had a vividness to me

You were never old to me, I never tired of your

Native voice, the April lift of your soul

The green Junes burning in your hair

 

The majesty of your words

That my songs could never dear

Summers died at your feet

Love, I roamed beaches and years

 

Trailing the path you had fled

And white as the sun, I never tasted you

Only an invisible promise of hope

That bled in me when I thought of you.

The End of Chapters of Rhyming

 

When she transformed into a butterfly
There was no turning back
Eun Ji, we sail on point into some unknown

No thanks or apologies can make it right
There is no apology for our place on Earth
And no gratitude strong enough to repay these debts

If I feel as if the top of my head
Where being blown by the sun
I would give up poetry and become distilled
Into something the centuries crave
And I once possessed, but it would not be me

Nothing is mine, that I have done
The human heart knows no boundaries
Identity and separation, are but convenient devices

Poetry is the oldest lie, so when we leave her
Dangling, we make a personal promise
To be truthful, to be realistic

And emotion has found itself out
And no longer finds words, we are set free
If to be a poet is not a profession, but a condition
Then the former poet can go on to other things
Bringing the craft of not understanding

Bringing the dreamer to the ends of time
Where the universe conspires in secrecy
If in the end you tried and cared
Let that be enough to start your new life.

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.

Among Rivers of Dark Purple

If I should die, then let my poems live on
Or that they should die and I should
Be free, of the gurgle and of existence

That is so personal and yet so irrelevant
To the cosmos that sings of eternity’s theme
And golden birds of our dreams than burn

Against the sun that is Time’s will
Her signature that I should die
When it is her will, and I will write
Not unlike the sky to the horizon
Of sunsets and the commerce of the living

Where parts the parting skies of hours
Hours that float and rise and lift
The conduct of all pleasing scenes

* * *

All smiles, all beloveds that left
So then, how wonderful is Death
And dying to ourselves, and the spirituality

Of the waning moon that blushes over
The entire world, of heartbreak that lasts forever
Maybe, I’m numb now to the passing wonderful
The subjectivity that was once so intense
Is now a common flower, I won’t mediate

Anytime soon in cemeteries but I ponder
The seasons of my life, that drank in darkness
And could not find the light, whether in myself

Or reach the intimacy in others with
The skin of my soul, my life’s inauthenticity
Is the corpse of my doubt and cowardice

* * *

That never truly knew love, or had the courage
To wrestle danger with a smile or succumb
To the pressures of a common life, perhaps
I will die young, bohemian and a bit wild
Where I feel the breath of Armageddon

In the silence, can death hit me then like this?
When my heart already has some lack
Of oxygen, my heart-beats lack a sturdy foot
What of my brain that drips in lost memory
The better part of who I used to be.

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/

Industrial Poet

Eun Ji, maybe we were destined
To write for money, like marketers
Who were once artists, once beggars

For an audience, like people
Who once dreamed of selling books
But I’m nobody, if not a poet

And a poet has no vocation anymore
So I’m a poet on social media
So I’m growth-hacking products

At the bazaar of life, so that I might eat
And write poems in my spare time
Are you nobody, too?

Writing memoirs, about your roots,
I don’t have a biography to tell
The body grows outside of sunsets

And this mind grew outside of time
With undue significance I went starving
Across the years, waiting for a novel

Like some great love that never came
I just watched myself become
A writer, any kind of writer
For a dime, a dollar, for a dream.

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.

The Pain of Nice Dreams

The Pain of Nice Dreams

Eun Ji, I am haunted wherever I go
Trust between this Earth & Ether
I am what I am, with fifth essence
Time bleeds and broods not shyly

I am hunted and descendent
In burning bright and riding light
I am the calm harbour of weary years
Death here becomes the vistas

Of life’s own immortality and passage
From one state to another, decades roll
Like leaves and sun that hits the mountain
And flowers that remember not stories past

I’m glad, I think, and what’s more
Time’s newfound speed is a grace to me
One day to sail to a freer land
The round berries red, have been thrown

Into the river, our houses torn down by the storm
But what is life, but a beating heart
And poems which have not appeared
And experiences that will not be had

And women that won’t ornament our hours
I am that which broods, chiding poetry
Of how it squandered itself on vain holiness
Sacred to itself like a passionate dream.

Had I Been in Love with the World

Eun Ji, is it true when they say:
The dead of midnight is the noon of thought?
I write so often after midnight
And wonder how your evening goes

When one by one our dreams are torn
How should we make a great mark
Upon the world, and finding
That there are no important objects

What shall we do with the rest
Of these years, as friends mourn
How sweet it will be to die with poems
And if it’s not what we say or think

That defines us, what can we do?
Is loving enough? I have no notion
Of loving people by halves
But if our attachments are excessively strong

Should we then be torn from
Changing the world, and piercing the soul
Of the many, forgetting the few
Who may have given us something

Or who may have led us astray from our mission
We reach a point in life when
We are no longer satisfied with being agreeable
It saves people that trouble asking us
To change for them, such a useless endeavour.

Poets are Wild Roses

Eun Ji, whatever our souls are made of
Would’t it be nice if hers and mine are the same
That we embody shared attributes
She’s more myself than I am

What if that which hugs the seas
Hugs us in our deepest heart
The sacred reason for our lives
Is blooming almost constantly

We just have to listen to its spark
Eun Ji, I bloom almost constantly for you
And you won’t see the flame
And you won’t feel the nectar

And everyone is invisible sometimes
To that which most matters to them
As stars to the sea, as green to the eyes
And sunlight to our human cheeks

The our of our everafter draws closer
And I’ve never craved friendship
The way love introduced me to
The wild rose-briars of elements of poetry
Poet who are too bright for this world.

Stuff We Learned

Eun Ji, if people forget what we said?
I don’t mind, I just want to open my eyes
With my soul, for a day
Make people feel the flush

Of love’s light and the costs
Of living for a better world
For no price is too steep to pay
For that, we have to live by those voices

That love indeed recognizes no boundaries
No barriers and we write to leap fences
We celebrate with our lines full of hope
Cascading for an open heart

Racing for an open mind
We write to lift the veils from our own eyes
That we might see others as ourselves
And decide not to be reduced by our tragedies

And grow from every encounter
And innately feel how everything in the universe
Has a rhythm and we are a part of that
Eun Ji, how easy it is to accept

That we can be changed by people
Permanently, by the quality of their tenderness
The strength of their values and convictions
It’s time we no longer apologize for who we are.

Like Golden Things

Eun Ji, will love truly heal
What language fails to know
I’ve been searching my love of words

For what seems all eternity
But if I defer the grief, will I then
Diminish the gift

All this sacrifice, all this emotion
We sift our old anomalies looking
For something new, but I think divinity

Comes less from effort, more from surrender
I want to burn in gratitude
Until my very idea of self is annihilated
Because for me, that’s the only way
To truly be, Eun Ji, can we be then

More than simply a child of time?
That our fluid love might be
More than a lost sonnet, more than

A speck of the human spirit
I miss our old city, where we spoke
Intimately in the great assembly of youth

We had golden things to convey then
And a more immediate sense
Of what love is in the first place.

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.

Quarantine

Eun Ji, why is this life a workhouse?

We are quarantined in our little lives

While the freezing stars never arrived

We are cold of being hungry for something

We cannot name, toxins from the whole history

Read to implode in who we have become

Because we have let the world become like this?

There aren’t love poems that can break this threshold

And there aren’t people who can get through to me

Eun Ji, when the worst hour of the worst season

Of our lives came, was anyone there?

There is no place safe from the merciless inventory

Of time, I’ve seen them all drop dead and leave

Like lonely years where winter doesn’t have a name

I’ve felt the quarantine of immortality, and the blessed

Relief of change, these temporary moments

Cannot hope enough, to save the world

And we are stuck getting ready for oblivion.

Black like the Canvas of Night poems

Eun Ji, my somber heart seeks an always
That’s what literature is to us isn’t it?
A lifelong friend that never leaves us
So long as we don’t stop writing

There are many drugs and games in this world
I learned about life from life herself
She was dressed in black like a love
That is a clash of lightenings

But art is a feat of pain
And I’ve loved the world without knowing why
And maybe loved the words
Only as a poor substitution for experience

A kind of poverty, that became my only wealth
While lovers left me and my parents died
I remained the friend to literature
And poetry well, it stuck in my mouth

Like the taste of our most familiar beloved food
The cherries of summer, and blueberries of autumn
And my love, it feeds on what you love
The writing in us is a secret between
The shadows and the soul of distant suns.

Seattle Diaries

Eun Ji, I fear the richness of the mouth
That I love too many things
To kiss any one of them properly
The snare of my love for literature

Is then songs in me that prove relentless
O, I have forgotten all praise
But as a betrothed prayer
I melt as the seat of all goodness in me

Eun Ji, how I wish to read your autobiographies
Every inch of your memories
That our ancestry shapes us so intimately
The words that come from hearts and countries

Cleansed from regret will we wash
Our wounds in the ocean of all of us?
The deep seated womb of time will
Bury on, in blood and sunburnt grasses

The fear of change in us will too be overcome
By life’s ministry of new moons and traversing birds
We’ll go on thinking of love, beauty, sorrow
And in the lost delight and unwon splendour

Of the stories we create, we’ll be
The departure of words into experience
Where nothing is forgotten and remembering means
Creating new layers of memories

Memories as awkward as the flesh
Experience that burns waiting for music.

The Butterfly Card

The Butterfly Card

Eun Ji, I got the butterfly card

The Korean swimming in my mind

From watching too many romantic-comedies

Made in Korean, it makes me weary

Of how uncivilized and hungry I have become

How strange to be a poet

That I marvel most at happiness

At my most bitter hour

Like the divine sense with an appetite

For the most human hours

Pale stones of savage harvests

South American aromas and Taiwanese fragrances

The dancing burden of the dream of time

And how we lose a skin each summer

Only to climb into words once more.

Immigrants to Shared Language

Eun Ji, through you I kissed
The Dreamtime of common language
Not Korean, I only wish I knew

The melodic meaning behind those terms
Or the cartoony cute reverent figures that is Korean
Some far-fetched video-game looking script

I say it all, as a poem I wanted to show someone
In the gravity of their blog, their small snippets
Of social media performance, with only a hint

***

At the grave, private, intense character beneath
I chose to follow you in half-blotted darkness
In the crevices between greetings to the moon

And chilled reminders of who we are
In the post-modern deconstructionism of our times
In the academic wanderings of the MFA-prototype

The studious academic workaholic woman
And how to draw a circle around such a speaker
And what secrets might be locked in-between

***

Her sentences, like rugged wounds left there to heal
I am like a fabled half man, half dragon
Chasing the poetess across Taoist distances

Where even in Korean memory it took shape beneath
Time and I got lost in the middle of nowhere
But that somewhere was always with you

And our final notions are rarely our final resting places
Though it touches you through your ribs
Like diamond memories so transparent

Tough and delicate are the intimate seasons
That gives us not enough time to whisper
To the invisible spirit that drives us

***

Relentlessly as if to accomplish novels and books
We required some champion of inspiration
Tragic in the anonymity of the performance

As if I’ve reached for your lines (I have)
Beyond experience, or from alternative universes
An anomaly of letters that strike the dead

In the thirst of the living, in the throats
That beg for water, for the magical language
As a pilot might touch your finger in the dark

***

To find fresh-drawn poetic language
That composes itself with petals and sun-beds
To blunder over literature and those golden lamps

We are prospective immigrants ready
To land into the prosperity of language
Even if we do not speak the same tones

You make no promises in your infrequent correspondences
And there is risk I’ve remembered you
Without enough light to enter the windows.

I Made a Fire

Eun Ji, I thought I knew
Every side of you, like
A student of your lifetime
Experience is us, the ones

They stick it in, perhaps
Human beings just use each other
The red wall of our heart
Winces, every time a lover

Shames us in misunderstanding us
Not comprehending why
We put our passion before them
Ironically, it’s the quality they

Love most about us, or envy
Our drive, the talk of immortality
In our will to produce and take action
A bit like how Sylvia Plath
Far outranks Ted Hughes in quality

And merit, it’s obvious now
How women are forced to sacrifice
Or become lonely women

Who labor a lifetime to have a literary baby
For another glass ceiling
Until we burn all our letters
Of love, well, and tiredness
Until the wastebasket is full of love’s lies

And letters full of their death rattle
And rubbish other women buy into.

To Leave this life so Shattered

To Leave this life so Shattered

Eun Ji, before I die, let there be no mistake
I will be nothing, as autumn leaves

So burning with color they require oblivion
Of the ground to become all colors
Before I die I need to be a soul

That allows every secret in
Every nervous prayer to rush and transform

The inner-state, a mediumship of
Identity, empathy and moreover, identification
It’s the process of identification

That I really find so key, like the pull
Of the moon on the eyes

And the refreshing vistas of the stars
On a tame trusting heart like mine!
Before I die, let me be absolutely clear

I want to love the world so much
That I wake music in the bones of the dead

And carry with me a few minutes of
Such an utter beauty, I won’t be able to transport
Myself back to the mundane routines

There solitude will be my refuge
In a cocoon of our grand unity

And I’ll keep the safety of futurity
That does not require a past to change
The shooting stars don’t decide to shine

They just point the way, to heartbeats
And tears, and to the place where
I can build a spiritual shelter
and pay my rent in poems and silent anniversaries.

The Unnameable Fiction

The Unnameable Fiction

Eun Ji, on days when I know
The top of my head will be taken off
I know that I have reached the immensity
That is the poetic-state of illuminated evidence
I’ll wear those Sunday clothes for sure

With a dangerous beautiful illusion
That the words that grace my presence
Are secrets that are essential
To a spiritual state of well-being
Poetry ennobles the feeling journey

Of our souls, which is why our
Machine-learning descendents will know
Humanity, through a poem, the algorithms
Will unlock the psyche of the brain there
Here, in the burning life of poetry

That can resurrect a life from disability
And take a lonely introvert into surrealism
So deep into the mysticism of life
That heartstring are no longer in the heart
But by the majesty of the universe all around

Nature’s delicate web is an essential graffiti
That poetry which is an eternal scripture
In the heart of everyone, like a Ferlingghetti whisper
Or a Hart Crane ode, until we become priests
Of the invisible, and stumble into Paz-like palaces

Legislators of dream and queens of our own amazement
The poet listens for the cosmos to act
In a melting symphony inside of them
That frosted fire that is an alchemy of the genuine
Finally, to be a poet may be a condition, rather than a hobby

More vital and representative of the human spirit
A bird of the flight of language that ignores all frontiers.

I Had Been Leaving Stars for You

I Had Been Leaving Stars for You

Eun Ji, I have been leaving behind all
The things that no longer matter
I made a list, discarded those objects
How divine it is, to let go of possessions
Both animate and inanimate, and identity

Segments of identity no longer salient
That dingy firmament, I know all that harp
Music no longer required for well-being
For we must transcend even our dreams
And arrive at the education of a lifetime

Cry, youth! Love, cry! World, sob!
It’s all no longer so important, it’s natural
Organic symphonies of cycles and timing
Let every virgin sob, and man cast with too much doubt
And duty that is no longer true to innermost self

It’s as beautiful as poetry, to experience this
The shadows and rays, valleys and mountains
And mist, fog like diamond webs of imagination
And still, a trillion stars call my name
Under my breath, I wait for universal sentience

It’s reaching me, in telepathic cues from the beyond
I cannot strip the curtain bare of wonder
My constant state of wonder is all that matters now.

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.

I have a Daughter, who is my heart

I have a Daughter, who is my heart

Eun Ji, today I saw a street musician
Who made me cry, his guitar cover read
“Funding album”, he was talented
It makes me wonder, where do

The downtrodden authors & artists go?
That we may encounter many defeats
But we must not be defeated
For in being a rainbow in somebody’s cloud

Maybe we can find a sweet sort of salvation
Like the way you influence younger authors
I know we all give back to our craft
What we can, and if we can laugh as much

As we cry, I want to accept the love of this world
In return, even if it’s barely convinced
It’s worthy to survive, I know all the attitudes
If love recognizes no boundaries, no barriers

Let our art penetrate right into the destinations
Of hope, the grandeur inspiration and
The sum total of everything that allows us
To carry on, in our darkest moments

We’re all illiterate in how to manifest our dreams
At first, and nothing will change unless we do
Our entire lives amount to the ache
And how bad the ache is, and what we do about it

We may rejoice in our small comforts
In our timidity and spinelessness, or take
Risks for what we believe should occupy our time
That may just be, the difference
Between living and existing, I know you feel it too.

Hoarding Poems Mine

Hoarding Poems Mine

Eun Ji, our hearts were like poems
Resilient, created early, so unknown
We’d had the patience to count words like coins
Not that we wanted to accumulate
The ruin and heartbreak that comes from this work
The unread poems of ruin and youth
And dreamy sanctuaries that would
No doubt ultimately devour us!
We disappeared in our dusty craft
Without readers, sometimes silent and forlorn
We craved the ultimate turn of poetry
In our hearts, that racing feeling of being alive
And we more or less went about our way
To get it, to achieve the neurological experience
The nirvana-state of what a poem could mean
To a pen, to a hand, to a little voice
I had never fallen in love with a poet
The sparkles, jets, black flame, the idealism
Of it all, being poor but doing what you love
It’s something I think I could bare, bourne, become.

To The place-names of the Future

To The place-names of the Future

You soul, are terrifying and strange
And beautiful with the spirit of poetry
When you weep, everyone knows
How to love and regret and want
Leaning on the balcony railing
Of literature, is enough to be read

If you know how the universe holds
Itself together, with the hands of
The downtrodden sharing, and the
Masters hoarding and profiting
There is no revolution that lasts

Corporations become the new feudal kingdoms
Holding monopolies like Google or Apple
Mere footnotes in the future I am sure
You soul, make up your own destiny
And that’s what I am here to witness

How patient is language, waiting
To be reborn in ovals open all day
To live behind sunblinds and countrysides
And to be spoken on new planets
Where restless silence no longer

Must hug the barren innocence
Of uninhabited landscapes
You soul, are wild and terrifying
And in your sovereign intensity
I think I’ve been changed by your advertisements
The archaic bleached faces of who we were.

Gospel of What we Have Writ

Gospel of What we Have Writ

Eun Ji, I found that perfect love casts out all fear
That I could love one another as
Nature hath loved us, or ancestors, or descendents
If our refuge can be found here

Let its strength be a very present solace
In the sorrow, trouble, obstacles
If love be the way, then we must
Work together for some greater good

That salvation might not be personal at all
But something shared, given, freely?
Is this not then the altruism of art
That it gives freely like the Saint

And loves the sinner as much as anyone
For how different are we truly in our weakness?
That strength is just life and youth
I can do all through meaning that strengths me

Finding meaning in this or that, does it matter?
For psalms, poetry and the sweetness of labor
That only gives in the doing and revitalizes all experience
That the inner flame in me can only be sufficient

And such is the inner-life that buds and bleeds and jewels
A stronghold of beauty, a tender gratitude which ascends.