Last Gladness of Stars

Image courtesy of Natalia Drepina.

Although only with breath, I breathe
And only with mortal love, I feel
What is beautiful, let that be my good

What is true, be it right at the time
You who judge me, let me not
Accuse myself of knowing anything
What cannot be said, will be wept
Though I alone search the poets

From Sappho to Auden, be it clear
That although only with prayer, I prayed
Gratitude was not my abundance

Delight was not my possession
Freedom was not my virtue
I could only love best, in words
Words that must remain an evil illusion
Words that never reach their goal

Art that never could profit me truly
What I loved, remains unseen
All my giving was a farce

And my glory was a kind of boredom
In writing more naked than the flesh
I never found my last resort
Or a heavenly kingdom in the future’s vanity
Without warning as a whirlwind

I will die, and no one shall remember of forget
How my life became my own, in slow immaturity
The limb-loosener will take me away

And I will be lost to this world forever
As if my value was in happening, or dream
There is no beauty that endures this species
Only that which reincarnates on all the worlds
There is finally, no place for grief
In these houses of stars which serve the muse.

On Childlessness

On Childlessness

I’ll never know success
As counted as a thing
I’m not particularly happy with things
Not more cheerful with luxury

Our share of morning
Comes most often with belonging
And special souls as passing stars
I admit to lose and gain is ecstasy

I’ll never know in limp listening
Of a lonely lifetime
What it makes to know defeat
And tasting it so personally

To those who have abandoned us
And to those who could not understand
I’ll never know success of intimacy
Like some others do so spontaneously

I’ll be the descendent of a witness
I’ll be the selflessness lost in moments
That were forever eternal presents
I know I won’t be remembered
I’ll have no living legacy.

Though Lovers be Lost Love shall Not

Though Lovers be Lost Love shall Not

Whatever talents I possess
May suddenly diminish or disappear
In my education was beauty
I had to write indiscriminately
For with eyes such as mine
Time was the lovers lost
And a kind of rage against the dying light
Whatever poems I wrote
Were a kind of toast to the worlds
That if this star should go extinct
I might burn one last bridge with a song
And if posterity learn to look after itself
Never be lucid, never state
That you have found yourself
For poetry was the function of a journey
And it won’t end with you or I
It will go on as long as doubt, questions
And beauty and suffering exists.

How Not to make a Career out of Poetry

How Not to make a Career out of Poetry

You say, our bodies will grow heavier when dead?
But how will they know the important
Things about us, how we stretched
Our limits like, death threats to failure?

The letters will melt on the tip
Of our lost selected works
That remained buried x number of years
After our passing, if nobody reads

Our poems, did anyone ever write them?
You can’t kill without kindness, you said
But what happens when we live
Our entire lives too kind and trampled

By the world we thought would protect us
Too altruistic, too dreamy, too invariably
In love with art, to make it in the real world?
What then, should we somehow survive

With community, interviews, teaching positions?
I don’t even have that, so perhaps
My fate is to remain an obscure hermit
And pretend I am a shaman of literature

Misunderstood with small tiger melon hands
With silver hair and broken genius
And scars on my brain from my love of poetry
Am I supposed to die not here

But somewhere else with someone else?
On a patch of land in Taiwan, speaking to
How I gave instructions for my funeral
Of how to be kind and how to forgive

The invisible podium where all cancer patients
Must wait for their doom, I know the feeling
It’s the flaming dandelion magic
Of when I catch myself in the act

Of writing a poem, or imagine the amethyst
Hues of the moment of wanting to be remembered by strangers
That is so ludicrous like gamification theory.

Legacy of dead poets

if I die young
it will not be
because I hated life
on the contrary I

love life too much and therefore
feel unworthy of her
if I die young
without having been able

to publish a book
even if my verses are never published
I live the same as I would anyhow
writing for pockets of joy

reading for eternal pleasure
exploring my soul
in the unpolished mirror of literature
if I die young, take note:

the spring will return
a thousand poets will take my place
today I wish I could think of Spring
as a person, she would remain

beautiful even if not watched
that’s how poems should leave us
we are all nothing more than children
playing in simulations

everyone is a dreamer
and if I wasn’t loved or die
young, I can say it wasn’t meant to be
because roots are hidden

in the ground, and I’m happy
because I don’t ask for anything.

Anticipation of that Moment

(Ode to Mark Strand)

Poets love death, for that’s their existential
Crisis, the juice that makes them write
The immortal point of heavens
And the final Dream of laughter

I am not thinking of death
For Death thinks of me
I am not standing alone
For being alone is my script

To observe a world as lonely as this?
And point to dying as an epiphany
For mortality is a leafless change
Youth too short, those city of souls

Too transient! I no longer yearn
For the great plaza of life, or the various
Temptations that one might find in existence
It’s all fair and well, O’ let is all be done soon

I love mystery and as such, I’m looking
Forward to the journey that is death
Though one thing I dislike, this waltz in
Delirium, I will no longer be able to write!

Dead Poets’ Legacy

I’ve been stalked by God and Suns
Haunted by wild furies and ghosts
Loved by nature’s shyest beasts
Adored by words slick in subjectivity

I’ve drunk the magic of life
In all her deep-velvet verities
And the fabulous beauty of even
Despair, and the psychic knot of tragedy

I’ve been visited by calamity
Survived through bankrupt bed-ridden
Poverty, seen the ceremony of
Heart-break unfold in slow scrutiny

I’ve loved those conversations
Among the ruins, as if that was also
Part of my destiny, but as a Buddhist
I’ve taken it all in stride, and in a whirlwind

Of havoc and the empathy that comes
After significant suffering, I can only say
I carry with me the legacy of poets
I’ve read carefully those who committed suicide

I’ve felt their prominent warped humanity
And learned from their last grip on romance
I’ve been stalked by Metaphysics and Death
A tentative existentialism sweet as

Writing poems on napkins, when nothing else
Is available, I gave heavenward and married
Art it seemed, when all friends and lovers left me
Poetry is what I fed upon, to survive

How shall I tell you the story then?
Of how my retrograde stars nudged me?
Or how the mild light enfolds as I stooped
A lonely guest in this anonymous world?

Bouquet on an old wave of silence

I sang into an invisible Country
I called it Home, breathless
For the future and poetry
I sang a canto in stuttered
Hope, that filters through
Years full of sunshine
Pillars of sacrifice and people
People who unknowingly
All contributed to the same aim
In a harmony of music and energy
I sang into a moment, that kept
On being timeless, a transcendent breach
Into the clean air of worlds
I stood and sang with the voice
Of Silence, I wanted the diamond
Pivot bright to bathe me in
Transparency and wonder
So that the luminous pages
And on my knees, I might
Whisper something of a lost divinity
I sang for all the creatures who had died
For principles, ideals, survival.

Promises of Earth

There is no freezing eternity
Not time, not my picture, not video
Nothing can capture who I was

Though I bid you farewell
In a thousand soft loving poems
Thine, in my heart, lived
Where the soul dwelled
That soul that brought dreams alive

Not of my own volition
But for my love of you
That is the weather-beaten

Secret of the human heart
That the sun beams a thousand times
On our years of mirth and toil
To labour was simply another
Way of exercising love

For the world and those dearly possessed
For a few weeks, a few key interactions
That shall this be true, that

All good things come to an end
Should now love more, that once was lesse
All Elegies to their doom must last
In the rest of the moment’s embrace
That is where I left my soul

That is where I left my body
That is the favourite moment
Of such an ordinary heart

The purgatory where my life-force
Rushesth violently in melodious promising retorne.

Photo Courtesy:

http://www.deviantart.com/art/Afternoon-fog-489632694

Celebration

Listen to me as I listen to the rain
Listen to me as one listens to the footsteps
Of the sun outshining other suns
Without listening or looking but being

With eyes open inward, at divinity
Where divinity is everywhere
And nature is a dynasty of divine everything
With all five senses awake and

Crown and thunder and golden bird
Magically in tune with the inner language
Of empathy and pure identification
That I am you and you are a part of me

A light footstep of syllables that never ends
One continuous language, one love transferring life
From body to body, time to time
Until air and water, words and matter

All live on like this moment of memory
With somebody remembering what was once
But a clamour of history, a spark at the edge
Of a universe, teaming with so many forms of life.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Waltz-of-the-Polar-Lights-479973951

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

Saucy Seraphs of Death

Death sets a thing to its significance
That was insufficient in life
The eye that hurried through

Goals, perished for its workmanship
We all work in crayon, and wool –
Industrious by passing necessity

As other creatures who have eyes
I see no other way, this world
Profits from the business of death

The distance of youth floods
Departs like the Grace departs
For each beloved hour, each beloved year

Death sets a thing to its significance
There are no tears that measure for the dead
Incognito, dust, how intricate the weeping dust!

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/autumn-rain-404842271