Soni’s Hour to Rejoice

“I must admit, I sometimes find it useful in my practice to delineate the various typologies of personality as cats and hens and ducks and swans and so forth.” – Women Who Run with the Wolves

Family, love, adventure
My skin breathes sunlight
Like women, who run with the wolves!
My heart beats stardust

Turned inside out with love
For creation, and our journeys
We who spell sacred syllables
With our blazing thrilled minds

And identity cascades in gratitude
With optimism, shining as the sun
A golden halo of all we have become
Family, love, adventure

More than thanks giving
My heart bleeds promise
With a hunger I cannot contain
For bliss, rapture, synthesis

Where we are the Earth
Where we came from, the lineage
Of so much destiny compacted
Each week is an ancestor’s mood

Each whim, a thread of Gaia’s moon
My soul contains all cosmic ingredients
Laughter, seduction, poetry
We’re like lost gifts completing each other

Where it’s not about being whole or strong
Or simply the attainment of goals
Security is following our intended course
And who’s to say what failures

Can teach us the most about ourselves
Family, love and adventure
I bounce like a nomad through the years
A boundless unfurling of miracles

A scriptive love of my own fate
The lyrics I was born to sing
If only at the center of my loving
My ability to create hope in life
And my duty to serve a higher truth.

In Need of Angels

I suppose, I was never the root of everything
There’s no golden women in silver mirrors
It was all in my mind, that smooth paradise
Where I loved life more than I knew how to show

And calling down the long echoes
Of the longest sleep, I existed with struggle
My time-travelling was imperfect

My heart knew not how to open
I suppose, I walked a lot of paths alone
And my dreams became my last illusions
Because they were all that I had left

I had no music, only stray words
Accounts of creatures that had impressed me
Planets, suns, bathed in the futurity
If Reality is the beginning not the end

I never walked into that universe
Where everything was new again
My haunted hope was never incarnated
My slow motion moments never felt pure

Like an evening that evokes a violet ray
I was the last white light of something inside of me
That wanted to escape how notes fell in August
The harvest days were coming, and I was
More in need of angels than ever.

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.

 

 

The End of Music

 

Go my lost songs of failure

The stars are bitter with a billion lives

They experience the lights as I do

 

More free than water, more alive than

Summer, or the organics that celebrated there

Go, my songs, that were never mine

 

We briefly hold on to life

Though lonely or unsatisfied

It does not matter – we are just

 

Visitors filled with the contempt

Of an imperfect journey

Wedded to ignorance and desire

 

Though I bend with night and rise

With the dawn in my mind

My heart coloured thirst born of this

 

There’s gentle music here, and open speech

In the cadence of all I see

But inside of me there is oppressed counterpoint

 

Go my songs, lost as I would end my search

In the silence of the subtle chords

Which is the fading light, and the years spoiled

 

Hungry for the return of octaves lost

And for the sport of voice and omens and lyrics

In the timeless commerce of beauty’s quivering vein.

 

Perihelion Interior

 

O exhilaration and exhalation this is my madness

My delight, my intuition of unknown substances

With the sad splendour of helplessness

 

I will be reborn soon, into a new body

With an experience as pure as this

Peace stands with the variables of brilliance

 

We do not know how to accept grace

The transparency of our finite thoughts

The immutable facts of our disintegration

 

Death is an embrace of something cosmic

I do know struggle against her cold neck

There is a motion of silence that spills music

 

And I feel it growing like a being

In me beneath the weight of spirit and matter

I am a joy that knows all creation there

 

My hope is not my own but I partake in life

Momentum, a voice of at the edges of oblivion

Where meaning was all the smiles we had

 

They were metaphors, and women, and sunshine

And that’s all the gladness I possessed

That’s the beauty that possessed me and it was short.

Burning in a Broken Sun

The sun is a country where I spent
Loneliness, like it mattered, like it was a substance
I held my own hand from the inside

Dropping turquoise tears of the silent kind
For speaking was not something I do well
I don’t know charm and schemes

Evading the point of redness, I move on
Like a nomad without a place in society
To which there are no wounds or tragedies

Only days raw with the agony of inevitabilities
I did not accomplish my own truth
It swallowed me like a youth wasted

The greatest tragedy is not to live
My poverty was the inexperience of freedom
My poverty was the heartache of rejection

There was nowhere in nature where I could exist
Free from the tyranny of a final dreaming and a total dream
I was myself, a speck of rainbow dust in a cosmos
Of color and I was on fire, and my life was burning.

After False Disasters of Failure

 

Let me not let God in the house
But instead let nature in my brain
With an open heart for all that is sacred
Gratitude, compassion, empathy
Can I live my life by these simple things?
I care not what happens to me
If I die a fool, alone, that is my fate
I don’t require faith, to appreciate
Let not idols of men be my guide
I am the spirit incarnate of all
I am the sweetness or the rise and the fall
When there is light, I am humble
Where there is darkness, I am graceful
Let me not let greed or comfort too close
But in experience find my course
That is not sure, but flexible
That I am not strong, but vulnerable
With an open heart for the credence of summer
Opened by the fragrance of spring.

Subservience to the Sun

 

 

Xiao Wei, when I feel your happiness

Radiate to me, I know it’s not something I can catch

It’s just your energy of action

 

That transforms me by extension of contact

With you, the midnight street of my life

Does not feel as lonely any more

 

Though I must accept my own darkness

In your life I see a part of the world’s truth

I am not young like your sturdy walk

 

I do not strive quite, like you stalk your future

Like a crouching tiger with long black hair

I study your posture and look for your mood

 

Xiao Wei, I will never know if it’s raining

In California, because when I think of you

I only can witness a golden orange sun

 

Hit me like fabulous lutes and peacocks

Of morning in the waves, of noon in the gardens

And if I seem too interested, then let it be my own lack.

Sermon Beneath New Stars

 

Yet, love, how I identify with you
Love on fire for humanity, for a collective survival
And therefore if to love can be a desert
The water is everywhere, people are

All around the virtual taverns, the city streets
The country roads, the planet twinkles
The stardust clovers, the empathetic telepathy
Of our lives that all have a common origin

Love is the grand unifier, the unity
That never sleeps, that walks all roads
That cradles hope, in all seasons
Over all obstacles, in all hearts

To bless thee, and to console thee
From that same love that vindicates all effort
From that grace that perpetuates all glory
Love on fire with a faith, that cannot be quelled

That is the fate of trusting love, God accepting
Nature yielding, time withstanding
Immortality calculating, AI supporting
Death moves not this, nor I, if self is lost

Love is transcendent to self and that is me
I am that, and eternity has her recipe
That gives meaning to all the paths
For time and space abide by her
And her law is effortless, spontaneous, creative.

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.

Created By a Touch of Doubt

 

Today the air is clear of everything, for
It’s a brand new day
And I am everything and nobody

Just the way I like it, grand and serene
Anonymous yet friendly, my sense
Is honed to innovation and the future
There is nothing I crave from biology
Today I am older and younger

Than ever before, wiser and stronger
As if none of us had ever been here before
Today is the day of my realization

The singularity in me reaches its apex
Let me be the intelligence of my soil
Let epigenetics of my choices wash over me
In a hush, a quiver, and a whisper
Of all the people I have been

A sovereign ghost of a life, that cannot
Stay the same in such an inscrutable world
I’m blotched out beyond unblotching
And in sync with the universe beyond dying.

Into the Stars

Into the Stars

An everywhere of silver

An everywhere of love

That’s what life is, in essence

A unity of being and becoming

Until I becomes we

And we becomes us

With breath to track the land

And a heart to hold the sky

And morning lit with a bud

Of breaking sunlight in the eyes

An everywhere of gold

An everywhere of eyes

That’s what life is, the melody

Of a trillion echoes of lives

A unity of hope

Until diversity revolts

We are splinter colonies

Lifting our little girls to the stars.

Life is not a Duty; It’s a Will

Sameness dulls the mind
And love shakes the heart
So do not be too cautious
This life is enough to sip

Do not hurry, but
Carry lovely garlands in your hair
And smile to break up the sameness
Burn with courage, to

Shatter the dullness
Remembering those things
We did in our youth….
Be young and stay beautiful

Give your heart to the world
Or live a miserable existence
We’re all inches from dying
Our genes are mutating at every instance

Instead of playing roles, play music
The music of risk and ventures
The art of losing and winning
In a speed of learning and changing

Life is too short to forget
What longing means, what reddening brows
What breasts that shoot like cupid
Whose heart is apple-plucked

Too soon must drop to the ground
But fruit is meant to be eaten and bountiful
Love is meant to be poignant and profound
Who takes joy in the wounds and errors

Finds life a garden of many delights
There is not enough courage to go around
To find a life worth the exercise of hunts
And strong muses to fill your life

With resonance, spirits, colors
How delicate and wanton the Graces
How easily we lose obedience to desire
As if a safe secure life was the goal.

Notes from the Future Underground

(Love letters to Asia)

I snow dive into you
Like the air of Autumn beating
Against your chest, the yearning

Of youth that is no longer young
Trapped in an aging body
My face knows no mercy!
I am the dove of white stitching
With a heart for a stranger’s smile

I’m an open lake of enigmas and
Surreal plaything of golden leaves
If you wish to, look into my eyes

There is nothing but guarded purity there
An endless array of ideals before sunset
I’ve cherished things and people
I will never meet, never see
But simply by knowing they exist

I am made more noble, more caring
About a world that shows only
It’s rough underbelly, it’s trials and stupidities

A civilization so vulnerable that believes
Capitalism will last forever
But I see the cracks in the system
The memory of corruption bare
And I will not agree to disagree, I will fight

For a revolution if need be, while I am young
Chilled and numb, I will not take
My place among the profiteers

Who joyless create a dead world
I drink to my soul, with the straws of eternity
And have distance foundations in my view
I strategize with machine learning paradigms
For more than flowers of written down words

I strive for an Autumn of convergence
That won’t be attainable until many years from now.

P.S. Instagram is blocked in China.

Deprived of Flight

I’m tired of days drunk
With the sameness that doesn’t realize
Innovation, experience compressed
Time encapsulated with love

O but are we exiles then
Migrants who must walk mountains
Slumbering in the mire of silences
My blue memories are fading

Like the pure golden statues of youth
That were maybe nothing more than
Projection, silver mooncraft gone
Discovery and identity shaping embarrassments

My mouth dry and caked with dust
My love departed in their early faces
I’m tired of being plundered by experience
As if the rogues of time knew something
I do not know, do not possesses, cannot reach.

Wonder of Aging

It occurs to me now
How our soul is honed by love
Not the love of barter and exchange
But the love of inspiration
That changes a heart
To become a better person
You simply smiling, that is
Enough of the forever kindness
To fuel me for a quiet lifetime
There is no answer to the questions
We age, wander, wonder, mature
Until we accept everything
Like eyes on a shelf of time
Ready to empathizes and stumble
A little longer, every goodbye
Isn’t gone, it’s just the stirring
Of chatter, breath, blood, wings.

When you are a big Heart, pray tell me

Heart, we will love life
We will not forget the warmth she gave
The blessed privilege and opportunities

To meet souls and flesh of trees
And experience the imperial senses
That would be stranger and lighter

And heavier than breath which came
And went in years into the unknown
Where memory cannot enter

And friends outgrow the love we knew
And time will not falter, because
Our rendezvous with life is not permanent

Life stuns you by degrees
And asks your spirit to understand
And the world falters you in its cravings

So undeniably organic and disorganized
Heart, we have known the best
Of both worlds, East and West

In months of solitude and marriages
And we have wept as change ragdolled us
Across the seasons, how we loved

The bitter sweet moments, only we
Could comprehend, and frame
In the subjectivity of our sweetest thoughts
Our noble heart always wanted to love more.

Extinction Moment

This soul does stand half ajar
For this world of greed and troubling hours
I have to remark on all the beauty
That stands so close to death

In the materialism of this place
Before machines are born
And remake you into an everlasting race
Enjoy mortality, while you are alone

Lording over nature, poisoning oceans
Depart, before the sun languishes
Over meteors, before you are replaced
In extinction’s calm embrace

Nothing is ordained but time’s lack
Of ambivalence, each thing in
Its rightful place, prone to embark
Upon evolution’s touch and hand

Where immortality is a long next
Of the tribes that once sung
And now are mere skeletons and fossils
In another time and place.

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.

fragment

Lost Fragment of a Renaissance Poem

I have been swan-ned by a partial muse
In earliest offerings of youth’s goodbye tendencies
I sport wild flowers only in jest
To quell the dear delusive art of my faith

That people are good and that my heart
Was made to be tender, always
No matter the worldly costs
I shall not afford elegiac sonnets

Nor write at the close of spring
I speak instead from Summer’s mound
Summer’s mound of a woman’s fertility
How she celebrates her humid hands

Against the skin of the world
How she kisses poor humanity
Even when we have barely a hope
In her thoughts and smile, new urgency thrives

And the songstress rainbows stresses near
Against the weary pilgrims of our place
And garlands wild, and feasting on eyes
So alien I’d imagine them asian-elves
Belong to an ancestry of pleasing and acceptance…

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.

On Choosing Higher Causes

How a willing heart thus
Adds a feather to the heel
A rose petal to the thorns
And a cold drink to the road
It is not enough to journey

We must be as loving passengers
Sweeter than man’s profiting
Ready to pamper not our starved pride
Or comforts of vanity
Every man is a damn tool

But wisdom consists in choosing
Better masters, wider causes
More eloquent rules of service
I have seen the day and found

Ridiculous wild people that run
The margins and know nothing
Of attempting accomplishments
And happier I would be to live as them

And happier I would be to learn
How to be free, use software that
Enables me to find my gift.

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.

Time

After-Simplicity-Glow

With shy solemnity I swallow experience
And with gold amenity of gratitude
I bathe in the life created for me

By tardy flowers of my nature
They will bloom simply
And I will arch to the sky effortlessly
O dark bright glittering stars

Visible is the universe to me
Wide from the world, I’d leave it behind
With stolen hours for another tomorrow
The world can jealously be all those things
That I wish not to see, artificial motivations

Memes divorced from physicality
I’d prefer to stay organic, neutral, unallied
To the treachery of information corruption.

Forgetfulness is Rain at Night

At last the stage
Where we each must play our part
In dripping years with solemn hearts
To age and alas to forget

The ambitious of youth, and to enter
The lamps of silence and acceptance
Forgetfulness is like a song
That freed us from our old pleasures

Freedom is like a witness, to realize none is there
At last we enter the place
Where we are at the location
Of who we were meant to be, after all

Silence is like a prophecy
Alone in the company of our fading projections
Alike to voice and motionless
Unwearyingly we take our place

Among the living and smouldering eyes of the dead
To stun our fancies into something tangible
And experience the whispering tapestry
Of the fringes of our being, algorithms of
The last potential we can summon.

I Have been a Seeker Up till Now

When I ache to open the window
Inside of my chest the universe
Sends me people like you

For I am easy led by youthful enthusiasm
Traveling a road made for
One, only understood by self
While I share this road with fellows
I know it’s the light of this heart

That will help me find my way home
And if there, I come across you again
Well I hope it’s with purity and our inner persons

That we can discuss the light and truth
Of the few unconditional moments that
Made life real, and there wherever we stand
It will be the soul of that place
And time will collapse

And there will come a time
When I can stop asking
The stars and books for the answers
But instead, listen to my soul.

The Last Ballerina

The Last Ballerina

And there’s no grave my love
That wasn’t this heart a grave all along?
Dreaming with death and fantasy weddings

And hoping to arrive at last
At life’s banquet, with her evening cup!
And there’s no end my love

That wasn’t this spirit an end in itself?
With faith enough in things unseen
To arrive with langhter at the end

And ask with a common smile
Was it enough? “What is enough?”

P r o p h e c y for P o e t s

P r o p h e c y for P o e t s

A poet’s competition is silence
A poet’s competition is extinction
For they are the voice of the living
More importantly, all who will live
Poets obsesses over the dead because
They inherit and continue the tradition
It’s a tradition of voice and narrative
Of beloved meme as an offering to beauty
Language lives evolving like an organic thing
If you can, translate foreign poems
Into English and into Mandarin
Everyone is your teacher, an interesting life
Comes from inside, the void will ask you
Many times, to stop writing, to put down your pen
Don’t do it, writing is hard work
So, burn, like a lost soul in time
And find yourself in a poem, in the margins
Notes, insights, faith that you have always loved.