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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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.

Collapsed in a Pearl of Decades

Collapsed in a Pearl of Decades

Against all ritual we slept
Without sex, more intimate and aware
Of our innate deeper connection

We were souls that had been
Swallowed and mumbled by the world
Against all innocence, we had been played

Down to our roots, like boughs receded
By the elements, living & loving
There were idioms in Mandarin

That encapsulated what we had become
Monks or ghosts, or valleys of rain
And a shrinking of orange light

When dusk hits you bare-chested
On those days somewhere
Lurking between Spring & Summer

We were the unsung breaths suspended
That collapsed in poems, we knew absence
And cherished our abandonments

Like the self-pity that stored deep feeling
For a universe that begged to be forgiven
We had to undergo periods of purification

The kind solitude that is a shelter & a curse
A kind of barefoot splendour
Of learning again about the mute warmth of self.

A Little Quiet Begs

A Little Quiet Begs

It’s a living aphorism
How our lives come together
To teach, to learn, to melt into

The wild wisdom we have accumulated
In body, brain and soul the tantalizing
Prophecy of our own death
We must live with courage then

To authenticate our secret desires
Those wishes we forgot to nurture
While we are taking care of others
Fulfilling our duty like a role of daily travels

We are enhancing our former selves
In a ripple of quiet begging to this universe
That only leaves a human a few shells
A few divorces, a few truly eloquent love-affairs

That eclipse the quality of memory
To ennoble us to the core.

In some Secret part of Her #FreeVerse #gender

In some Secret part of Her

I felt a pang of loneliness when
I watched the lives of others
I could not place the appalling self-consciousness
I felt, surely horrible and common?

The inner words we dare to utter at ourselves
Cramped in the dark for so long
God, but if life is loneliness
Then every act is one of saving ourselves

We get married for companionship
And have children to grow old together
We volunteer our time to help society
Yet does the neurotic element

Ever truly wane, wanting mutually exclusive things
And not having them, we make do
For the rest of our days, this
Is the great compromise, feeling misunderstood

We learn to not take anything for granted
As if the present is our forever
And forever is always shifting, flowing, melting
And as a woman, we are required to serve

While men can escape social roles by rebellion
Or male privilege, or utter irresponsibility
As women we were required to give life
Until we forget who we were without them.

Songs of Hedonism

Songs of Hedonism

In the seduction of the sense
We have a series of pleasures
That introduces us to
A desire that is never quenched

So is it worth then to chase?
What fundamentally, shall
Never be caught, like dopamine on a leash
The variety that takes the soul

Off of its beloved course?
Celibacy is perhaps the sunlit path
For virtue and those who have read history
Nothing so tranquil as a good library

However, should you find secret love
Or a scandalous substitute
Remember, there is no sinner like a saint

Nothing so good for the health
As a touch, no learning like
The end of solitude, each moment

A happy lover’s hour, is worth
An age of dull and common life
Right down sensual love, is
A language all nations understand equally.

The spilled blood will have no fragrance

The spilled blood will have no fragrance

Angel.
Dissolve my tears
My drama is too personal
Woodcutter.
Cut my shadow from me
The torment is without
Fruit, or just reward
Winter is the night copied
When all the stars are blind
God.
Leave some birds
The seeds that were dreams
Have been wasted
Youth.
Let go of me now
I am no longer a virgin
Or opportunistic or idealistic
Time.
Needle in the water
Of my health
Do not think we do not see you?
Melting the sun like a great center
A snake of flesh
The wood-cutter does not know
When, my heart grew pale
With stress, or
How the silence became moist and wise
Beneath the burden
Of the escaping years
Angel, woodcutter, God, youth, dreams, time
Do not imagine just because
I am now old, that I know
What experience is
Perhaps, perhaps I was hiding all along
From living.

After Journaling

There is no burnt paper anymore
My age of confessions is over
I have nothing to hide from myself
My journals are just filled

With spiritual musings
The drama has gone
And angst is dead
No saxophone haunting

From my bedroom
No squalor beneath my
Guitar-fingers, only
The meditation of poems

The slapping phantom of laundry
An old apartment, beaten up
While my screen paints silversmithing
Of this unusual alchemy

The beating of blackberry wisdom
Into ripe aphorisms, it’s enough
For procrastination and myth
We all have to cross those waters

One day, astounded souls
Leaving games of chess and flirting behind
And filter flowers for golden messages
And live in a quiet place in Canada

Where the stars are not so cold
And all dark advice of shame is gone
Open to the wilderness, ready
To learn how to be free.