Motherhood is the only Truth of Life

Hae.mi, every verse is a child of love
As I watch you with your child
I think upon the qualities of your womanhood
Your ancestry and your design upon time

The heart as a gulf, and a bridge and a blessing
I who have experienced so little true joy
Can admire the cherishing of a maternal love
That exceeds in brightness and in sport

The spring’s treasured moments of a young mother
I watch you with your child, as I would the stars
Or holding the Earth in my mind as I would
Imagine life caring for all the galaxies

Hae.mi, so when you think of me, remember
I die at dawn and daybreak, every day
To witness your majesty as a woman and a mother
With no decisions and no receiving, I’ll carry on

So as to die with the morning and the evening
We might support the future in a familiar face
Like your son or the billions of lights
That swim in the hawk-like night

And the swan-like soul of all living things
Those eyes, a little bit like our own,
Those hearts, that feel and hope and love
Like we do, Hae.mi, that is your gift

That I can love you like a father who watches his daughter
Taking care of the world while she travels it
In the years and greetings and journeys
Given to her, and what will live on in her sons

In his daughter, who will one day become a mother…

 

Photo Courtesy.

The Chant Goes On

What you love, you become
The dream of being is identity
What you feel, you attract
With the whisper of the cosmos

Always around you nurturing time
What you imagine, you create
In the Tao of sense, there’s only the future
A living universe intersecting

With every part of you, a thousand
Times per second, you are energy
Happiness does not depend on circumstance
It is a gift of perspective

There is no path to happiness
No escape into pleasure
No particular opposite of suffering
The experience is paramount and important

What you love, you will become
So learn to love the highest and truest
Of what you are, let your love encompass
The whole world, so you will not be small
Or live smally for yourself, and be miserable.

I Loved the Illusion

The only legend I have ever
Truly and sincerely loved
For the span of my lifetime
Is the future, like the story
My metaphoric daughter would grow

Up to see, I would prepare
An environment for her of strange consonants
And hope the world delivered her
To some kind of star-lit narrative
Worth living, empowering, fully alive

And the best thing about the legend is
Is I can practice it anywhere, at any time
Hope is for a better future, where and when
Time does not own us and profit is not mandatory
And we are not slaves to an outdated system

But whitebeams, creative and free
In the glowing night, waiting for the stars
To show themselves after winter
And, I’ve waited all these years
I will say nothing significant until then

Poetry begins where language communes
With the shadows and rare software that
Can encapsulate the meaning of a person’s life
We who have sleepwalked this world
Long enough, know our place

Our brief conviction of desire were hardly
Stepping stones for others, though
I loved the illusion and the sense
That legends mattered and stories were personal.

The Best way to predict the future is to create it

The Best way to predict the future is to create it

Death does not concern us
For we knew we were mortal all along
Because so long as we exist
Death is not here, or there
And when she comes

We no longer exist
Until then I may at times
Distract myself with pleasure
Not because I don’t seek
A profound sense of meaning

But because, we built this world on pleasure
And by tasking it I am made human
Made to know why people labour
Though I know there is nothing
Outside myself that can ever enable

Me to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, smarter
Everything is within
Everything exists and will continue
Without me, so if I seek anything
Outside myself, it’s only me dallying

With the inevitable reality
Of a wonderfully inner cosmos.

More About the Meaning of Life

At First, I raged for Freedom

Let us go then, you and I,
Into the evening spread across skies
Multitudes of simultaneous cries

Consciousness reborn
How many billion souls?
Does it take to make up a galaxy?
Like a work of art

We’ll never know
Well come and go, live and die
Into the room where women give birth

Where lovers visit, to serve evolution
The questions never answered
Of a million indecisive moments…

In a lifetime, that passes
As quickly as the predictable
Trail of thoughts, analytics of choice

Let us go then, you and I,
To be the only person
We could have been

The toast and the tea
The smiles and the tears
Do I dare, to dare, to be?

Into the thongs, singular yet identical
Unique and totally related
Human and trapped
In probability, function, duty, environment
Conditioned to be a certain way.

Pictured, https://www.facebook.com/ChloeBennet, Chloe Bennet (“Skye”).

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloe_Bennet)

That thing you call the hearth

the day is not our own
it belongs to our hearth
our family, our society, our nation

nature made our hearts
public calendars, followers
of tribe, so when you lust

know that you service this
your honest thoughts may linger
but individuality is a myth

you are a part of history
you came from a mother
you owe your livelihood

to the city, to the nurturance
of friends, to the generosity
of employers, to the wealth
you scavenged how to speak
to the stars, but it only

brought you closer to others
not to God, not to any beauty
no, that left you long ago.

Suicide of a Diwan

The streets are mute
And the downtrodden are cold
And the girl pretends she
Has many suitors
The handkerchief in my hands

Is nothing much more
Than a rag now
And the night only has one moon
And the fountains have
Ten thousand pennies

I carry the “No” that you gave me
Buried somewhere, as if
It was a part of me now
My love is spinning
The murmur of the masses

Grows loud and I tremble
At the greed of this society
That takes more than it gives
Until giving means giving
To those who would profit from you

The afternoon was something else
Sunlight had been forgotten
If I die like this, from regret
Leave the balcony open
The reaper will harvest

The soul of my art
In my study
Beneath my dirty sheets
From my balcony I can see him
He finds the weight of the snow

Annoying like a transparent shadow
The streets will still be mute
And the downtrodden will
Still beg at the metro of the church
And when I am gone

I will feel myself both like
The balcony, and the tower, and the skies
Moving up, in a stream of shadow-light
And there, I will
Pretend that God loved me.

Like Aristotle’s Memory

I go in search of wonder
By doing so I find it everywhere
In the savour of breath
And in the flow of blood
Biology is an antique song

Who showed you the path
Of the poets?
The heart of silk
And the pen of light?
You leave us singing

In the little square
With lost bells
The lilies and the bees
Are gone, but wonder
It’s rippled like a legend

Everywhere, enormous
Pupils of gigantic glee
Injured somewhere in the wind
Farther than the seas
Intimate as every star

And I wonder, why is
Beauty and truth sprinkled
Like leaves in the galaxies
Did Aristotle look upon
Purple plains and wonder?

It’s a broken harmony
In the mind, in the protests
Of silence, in moments
Shrouded by desire
And the frozen sleepy pause

Of cities gone to sleep
Very bitter is the wonder
Of change and time’s labyrinth
I need search no longer then
Rocking the dawn
It’s found me here.

To Creation

If yet I have not all thy love
Remember this, I was born
Into your world, strange nature
I breathe, because of you

And your Deare evolution
I shall never have it all?
Being poor, and who made me so
And all my inner beauty is yours

I have nothing to bargaine with
Anymore, time can have me all
I have no great goals for my
Lofty mortality, “it is what it is”

So they like to say, I am tree, river
Stone, and just a bit of flesh
That grew in your womb never
Saying oaths that others do

If yet I have not all thy fortune
Let me be as you intended me to be
I can only love so much, do so much
In the fragile state for which I live

My remaining days, there are no letters
Like my genes to bring me home
Home is the planet I live upon
God’s riddles are for the absurd

Faith is not the kind of jewel I wish
To store in my brain, fruitless hope
Nor was any return love vowed by thee
Life does with me what it wills

I am as a fish in a polluted sea
Or as a tree in the last forest
I am as a world in ruins
For the sake of the greed of a few

Men who could not win your love
Any more than I could make the
Universe be aware of my existence
Love is for those whose hearts are young.

I hung many shinny things on us

There is no remedy for love but to love more.
~ Henry David Thoreau

Photo Credits: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Railway-473032196

i

Love is like a foreign language
once you hear it, you want to hear it more
speak it without it sounding alien
though she will behave here

as in a schoolbook for a foreign language
where we are all beginners
all sometimes say dirty words

ii

Without meaning to, she reaps
She sleeps, she washes, she softens
to its touch because it was made for her
like attachment, and for him like pleasure

love has no vowels, no translations, no silence
only a universal physicality and spirituality
that makes you have no defenses, you

iii

Trying not to love doesn’t bring you anywhere
it’s creative to let her use you
she is the last refugee and the first politics
she comes back in the evening when

your world is torn upside down with bills
it’s love that cooks for you darling
she whispers to you, “I’m taking you home”.

On the decline of literacy

“People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.”
― Malcolm X

All these stanzas look alike
they talk about the same things
with the same words, the same poem

written over and over again
like voices, whispers, copying each other
unable to feel and trust experience
differently, socialized for homogeneity

unified but dull, strong but obedient
their writing seemed the narratives
of machines unable to innovate

plagiarizing voices they believed were
their own, authentic, pure
their literary journals were a politics
of masters of arts and agendas of contests

like car commercials without a proper
enjoyment of speed, or our favorite writers
whose names we only knew because

they were the ones who died at the right time
while somebody was looking, reading them
but the bookstores didn’t know their
metaphors were weak, or their life’s work

was merely symbolic, that’s the thing isn’t it
poets are only symbols, as poems are only
fluff, paper, the labor of writers-in-residence

while the rest of the world are more
interested in serial killers and which stocks
might be worth getting into, and when to sell out
investing in words seemed silly to them

and, in my selected works there was nothing
of how to be a Poet Laureate or how to win prizes
exceptional or not, publication was left to amazon

state grants, fellowships, visiting writers
academics who never felt truly how to write
poetry at its heart was a colonization of artists
few could share what that meant, we were

the first illiterate generation, spending more time
with the internet than with books.

LANDSCAPE WITHOUT ANGELS

Bravely in a land of dust
As pilgrims we make our way
To some far country we believe is good
But the truth is, we are all immigrants

Nomads and priestesses of our faith
Sojourning in foreign countries
In heart-broken cities that endure
An agony to submit

To the volatile finger of God
Or to thrust our lives
In the climate or our Self-Will
Our solid body craving so much

In the muted landscapes of our youth
Bravely in a land of dust
As pilgrims we make our way
In forever-turning seasons

That bend in the breeze with rust
Beneath implied-expectations where
Our worth is judged, every day.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/the-city-lights-152148064

抒情詩 (lyrical poem)

i

We are asking for books which
Legends are made of, poems that are
Flowers at the bottom blue of lyricism
We felt the need for ritual acts
That respected the Volumes of the Earth
My time is precious, so is yours:

ii

Our nods of recognition were
The last living parts of poetry between
Our souls which would vanish
To other Planets, when we died
We are asking for books which
Dreams can dive into, poems that are

iii

After all, objects that have been loved
And lived fully, maybe the object of many loves
To have greatly admired stains of
Where words once lay, the honors
Of so much feeling like fragrance

iv

You will hold the stem, I will
Know the rose passing between humans
And the child that squeezes the fence
At the end of the story, that was enough
To make romantic poetry Immortal.

I WAS LEFT THE LEGACY OF READING

i

All we can read is life
Death is part of her script
Suffering and candles belong
To the living, all around us
And you will end somewhere else
Waiting to die, awkwardly loving
The world that did you some harm

ii

All we can read is beauty
The small anonymous memories
That overpowered others, the questions
Never answered, that don’t belong
To the living or the wise, but
To the great beyond, the quilt of names
That we met, the few faces smiles
By the living, for the living

iii

All we can read is life, flung by hands
That forged children from grassy wombs
Wombs that forgot their mother somehow
In the love that once felt so individual.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/I-give-life-458146106

COMFORT IN THE IDEA OF GOD OR GOOD

i

Beginning my studies on the first world
Which I had been born, I looked to you
To teach me and greet me with Love

ii

That famous biography we both read
The Truth, of evolution and beginnings
God wasn’t something that came
To our minds naturally, we believed we believed

iii

In Him, like so many other artificial
Dead clarities, fictions invented by men
Like the need for war, dominance, superiority, patriotism

iv

I gave in to sense, to the consciousness in forms
To eyesight, appreciation of beauty
Imagination with music, hearing faith

v

In the sound of the rain, or the
Faint clues of why we had been born
So recently, into such a Chaotic order

vi

These objects of reward, and punishment were
Primal, the dopamine-switch inherently misguided
Anarchic, appearing at intervals of pleasure
The signal of ecstatic songs, the faces preferred
It all seemed a breach of our inherent liberty

vii

The idea that we were free, attachment was necessarily
A device of the character, the role, the animal
Not the soul or anything particularly noteworthy.

BUT COLORLESS

i

You flicker, and I cannot touch you
Or give you a name that holds up
To the touch of Time, it sings
A mouth for Poppies in July
And hands for prayer beneath
August skies, you do me no harm

ii

To believe in God, or something
Like a Universal Spirit that moves
In all things, some soul of energy
You flicker, and I cannot reach you
Cannot tell what is my own or socialized
We are made dull by a consumerist machine

iii

And where are the Real Dreamers now?
You flicker, and I am no longer a mystic
What are these words, these words?
That cannot seem to call you back in my heart
Where was once simplicity and bliss
Without a need to have, to own, to belong.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Loreley-453221206

SILENCE IS A GREAT GEOGRAPHY

Silence has stripped me bare
An influenza of silver nothing
Stretched like a skin

Over meaning, Bud of transparency
Music clouds the inner listening
Philosophy, a simple play on duality

Silence, is my legitimate voice
Nearly impossible to put
Into words, the feeling of transcendence

Absence of self, how do I exist?
After questions, I will not
Let answers influence me

I become pure neutrality
I would love to cease to hear
My own thoughts, then I might

Finally clarify us together
In a stare, as wide as our unity
Where poetry could say
As much as the quiet night.

Photo courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Riihivuori-450664430

MEETING AT THE UNMARKED STRIP OF AUTHORED LIGHT

We nudged literature until she
Fell like a picked mushroom from her spot
We sought an old revolution that needed

To feel reborn for us to write our greatest work!
This wasn’t a Sanskrit hymn
Or a Russian poem or a Mandarin glyph

This was our life unmarked in neon, black and white
And I won’t tell you where it is
In the pocket of necessary madness

We talked about trees and the sense
That we were meeting in an abandoned
And persecuted tea-house, that existed

Across centuries, the place where
Hieroglyphics and calligraphy reappeared
In a cross-cultural hodge-podge of our form.

your name is already on the passenger lists

Like our bodies imprint
not a sign will remain
that we were in this place
so live like this, let sand

straighten itself, let nature
smooth the fabric of destiny
Like words that float
dates are already in view

in which you no longer exist
and what was your place in
the names alone that deaden no hearts
the languages that i know

can only briefly convey
we borrow meaning for a season
and treasure love as a tool
like our bodies imprint

our truths will have died with us
and many a person will
have similar fates, or so
we can imagine easily

who will help me? none will come
to the beck and call of desires
that were so brief as to be shadows.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Singapore-394870973

The Male Myth of Success

Let fame never find genius
And love fuel crazy sacrifice
Who nameless died attacking
For a cause forgotten, that’s a funny truth
That men specialize
For imaginary battles
That may mean nothing
For posterity, but the simple
Games of boyish dreams
Tons of bronze, statuses buried in the Sea
A kind of prostitution, to inferiority
You said it was rocket fuel
An inconsolable force to drive us on
I called it my survival-mode
My leap before looking
Of the few things I loved.

The Language in Which I was Trained

What am I doing here, I mean here
I do not know if it’s true what I’ve become
I do not know if the world has lied
Or have I lied, to myself, on repeated occasions
Until, I became something, someone –

I did not intend to be, I would have hated
Once, to turn out as this
I have conspired into a strange brotherhood
Of anonymity, lost contact
With my true self, felt tortured by life

The life I did choose, so why!
What am I doing here, like this –
I do not know if lies or justice prevail
Under the cold tap of facts, I am what I am
But at this point I have my full share of confessions

To find out my poems and dictions meant nothing
In the grand scheme of my fate
The women I adored the most, meant nothing too
Each decade, it’s as if the world speaks another language
To my heart, that hoped creation had one root.

I’ve Watched Myself Perform Small Nobilities

When I look around for proof
That I am alive, epistemology aside
I am a living metaphysics scattered

In the wind, dreams bought by books
There is no defragmenting this love
It’s the self-search of sheltered legacies
*
And I become a candidate
For door to door sustenance
Looking for proof that I exist

In these empty faces, these cynics with luggage
Perhaps I should be practicing not having
Because possession, isn’t in the cards

I’m no longer waiting, I’m simply
Pressing my ears and eyes into everything
Hoping that I don’t abandon hope too easily
*
I won’t rush death a bunch of dust
But leave what I am, stuck with you.

The Last Jury is How we Linked

Nothing has been broken –
Nothing could ever have been broken
You were the air and I was the breeze
.
>
There was love in every shadow
It was all familiar, each corner of
Fleeting minutes, every look
It already happened, we already occurred
Before we met, on that gentle day
You made my day as a blue butterfly
Landing on eyelashes of forgetfulness
.
)
Nothing has been done, it already happened
Thrust like dragonflies from futurity
Simultaneously vivid, quantum deja-vu
I heard it in your French, you counseled
Our marriage, before we got married
You taught children, before ours were even born
.
>
Nothing has been broken – nothing is lost
Though time would electrocute our heart
That’s life at the window of movement
You were the flowers, to my sun.

Ballad to Half-crazed Summer

I am looking for Summer Nights
Where the moon will dangle these
Half-plucked eyes, with hearts thrown open!
.
)
As if, bright friends might transport
The rapture back into these Wounded Skies
I can’t ask for much, or maybe Everything
.
)
The eternal attitude of little human music
These yearnings which elevate time to Perfect Pitch
I am hunting Spring mornings for
.
)
The tried and true naked stones, that glimmer
The Sun’s best Intrusion of happiness
Where light is a bull-frog’s croak of oblivious motivation
.
)
Our bright flesh where there are no scars
I am looking for Mortal Embraces of hot July
Where I can let my expertise in simplicity go
.
)
Like a poem where words are said so beautifully
that I might as well be speaking the name of Love
That give themselves to life so intimately, we might
.
)
Silence the blossoms on all lips, to climb stairs
Outside Plato’s cave to the throat of outside innocence
I am looking for Salvation, on the fly.

Alas, Thou Art Flown

I know a hundred ways to die.
In each season, I look anew
A scavenger that possesses nothing truly
They call me clingy, but I do not cling

To the spirit’s freedom I belong
Not love or duty holds me here
I know a hundred ways to live
In breaths of wonder, horseshoe wants

Walking a bridge, from girl to girl
The melodies of the Earth are soft
As wine from these grapes
As my return to the infinite Source

I know a hundred ways to pray.
Unshaven, hopeless, anonymous
Barely able to find shelter, friendship
The food for my spirit’s make –

I know a hundred ways to say goodbye.
Defiled, depleted and forlorn
Forward, in level flight the night propels
Me a better man, I am not sure

I know a hundred ways to love.
The chalk of toxic trampled grounds
Cities where I made my way, jostling doors ajar
People I grew old with, until Spring’s colours swallowed me.

Sing Your Little Heart Out

Heart, have you not sat
At the feet of other hearts?
Do you not know the pain

We all bear a part, our share
Or more, gilded to our golden tenderness
If you have suffered, know this:

To become more sensitive is a gift
To possess new vision for compassion
And more pearls for empathy’s sincerity

Heart, without your scales of highs and lows
Who would we be? Just another
Organized machine, artificial winner of what?

But Heart, don’t wander too long
Out in the market full of exotic perfumes
But focus on one intoxication, one purpose

That your secret parts might come to fruition
And you art of miracles, might manifest
Something genuine from your humble services.

That I Did Always Love

Two butterflies went at Noon
Chasing distant birds
As my heart chases the pleasure

I believe is love, the last privilege
Of meaning, Life could not convince
Me that, there were more important things

I was not logical, or cruel, or sober
A martyr-poet loses syllables
In pangs, better left unsaid…

Like a caterpillar going at Noon
Motivation has dissolved in the search
As my heart chases the unity

I believe is love, a territory of decay
Where I feel impotent to declare
Myself any lasting victory.

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.

Filling in the Blanks

Heaven, you see, is blank like an angel
Such a vast blank of silence
Filled to the brim with wonder
That it requires no labels
It’s like the purity of death

The trance that is registered
Before breath, in the genealogy
Of all cosmic cells, the flavour

Of a spring afternoon that doesn’t
Know kinsmen, but feels
How everything is related
In some indescribable unity
Heaven, you see, has no father or husband

Requires no sense of propriety
No status symbols, no possession
Heaven, you see, allows us to simply be.

Poem-3