America the Illiterate

I want to go on beyond words
But language stumbles in me and I am
A prisoner to her gateway of being
I open it to arrive at duality

Without Oneness, where can I pass?
Into machine worlds of simulation
Into holographic organic imagination
Into symbolic abstractions that are

Fountains of light in the dark of matter
Words go roundabout and arrive forever
In a kind of disassociate state of
Of object and subject, doing and scene

That separation doesn’t really exist
It’s part of the linear illusion of the brain’s
Incapacity to understand the cosmos
From multiple frames of reference

In senses which we do not possess
To see dimensions, possibilities, variables
So I am trapped in a kingdom of micro pronouns
A pigeon-eye view of the same layers

A public square of the corruption of men
In a futile marketplace of bartering
Where people profit over others
And art in literature has long since

Become unfashionable for being less glamorous
People stopped truly communicating
Rather they are watchers of videos, images, screens
There’s too few Socratic questions and

And discourses of platos’ and emersons’
There’s no Nietzsche in the youth of today
Only the boring pragmatism of American determinism
A language of impoverished politics and

A caricature of news, of an enormous campaign
To make the masses dumb, and it’s worked.

We A r e What we R e a d

We A r e What we R e a d

To some of us, failed writers
Poetry is the human heart beat of language
Something that vaguely “saved us”
At some point in our destiny

When we maybe had nowhere to turn
No one to see us through our ordeals
Poetry began the telling of all tales
It lived and breathed our history

It immortalized our most grandiose love-affairs
And insulated us from our tragedy
To some of us, word lovers
Poetry is the human heart

On a tree of life where each voice
Is a sacred leaf, each a note
In the immortal prayer of poetry
Back to the nature of language

Odes to evolution, mirrors of our neural states
There is a discourse in the wane of beauty
And when art dies, we lose a bit of our human spirit
And the memory of renaissance

And the reincarnation of golden ages
It’s a failure of society of literacy
That goes from books to computers to cell phones
Not really a cultural apocalypse

But a monopolization of the channels of content
The incorporation & assimilation of our attention
But who I am to say if we are literate
I don’t have time to read seriously
Only enough time to write moderately.

Some things poets seem to have forgotten

Some things poets seem to have forgotten

My Grandmother turned me on
Poetry and philosophy
She used to collect clippings
Of poems from the local newspaper

I read Tennyson, Yeats, Blake
In her book collection
She read those poems often
The pages were old and bent

Years later, I would write
My philosophy in poems
With my own clippings
Of Taoism, Buddhism, Sufism

And transhumanism, but I knew
By the time the singularity reached us
Poetry might have gone extinct
The poetry of the high-bow

Is now so inaccessible, without
Seemingly, any deeper meaning
The trend to write dead things
That passes as coldly as a poor display

Perhaps the future of poetry
Lies in the fringe verse
Of the downtrodden and in the
Privileged academic babble

Of poets who make art without
A true connection to the zeitgeist
I don’t need a Masters in Fine Arts
In poetry or creative writing

To feel entitled, but women like my grandmother
Will die out, millennials are making
Other choices, they don’t need to
Be starving artists to get that poetry is dead

And even the idea of becoming a writer
I once had a roommate who became
A famous journalist, maybe he
Knew something then that I only realize now.

Uninterrupted Poetry

These poems are lost to me
Like the dead, there is no returning again
To what was, old loves

My mind feels them shouting there
Those who have died to us
Once here, now gone

It is the same with the music of the night
Grief dies to my renewal
I regenerate my lips, my ears, my thirst

Like a mausoleum of longing
I am, without ever being satisfied
I wake up to radiant mornings

Each and every day, jasmine at my feet
And I write poems, like lost waterfalls
Missed sunrises, broken comets

Stars on the tips of forgotten inheritance
These poems are lost to me
Like the emptying fulfillment of breath

Like a kind of solution to what I am
I create a rhetoric of distinguished ambiguity
Legislating my soul to be free

An embroidery without worldly cares
These poems are lost to me
I am not a thief of possession

But rather, a common beggar
With the guarantee of unearthly words.