The After Memory Feeling

For once, I will be left with the shock
Of having lived, and loved in vain
In a series of lives that I was cruelly spoken to
Where even my beloveds, would push me away

* * *

I will not settle after death, you know
I will move from star to star, crystal in hand
Shade of all the eyes I have loved
And it will be perfect then, to die

* * *

And I will not regret suicide, not regret suffering or any meeker joys
The rose spells do not forgive, we only forget
Our hearts will, I Swear it, resemble the torn pages
Of memories, drifting apart barely

* * *
Remembering the taste of our sorrows and failures
That will be it then, a sudden departure
The lift of the blue flame that bid us farewell
From deep inside our dream, I will not have won today
But it will be the end, and all ends taste the same.

If Making Makes us Thine

 

 

Dear soul, how long it’s been?

The poems in your mouth

That went unsaid?

 

My heart’s heart has no longer

The flowers of will, only

A silent longing that’s no longer

 

The beady desire of blood

Bless you and what’s near to you

Though, who said the journey ever stopped

 

We just became somebody else

As the months rolled into blinding anonymity

We moved closer to the light

 

To love you much and yet

To love more in the freedom of being

Dear soul, it doesn’t matter how many years

 

Tomorrow is a world without end

For others to feel the magic

While words remain and joys will echo on

 

Like children asking questions about the universe

We’re all I love you firsts, and afterwards

Where our love can be remembered

 

In the happy solace of helpmet age

Where age is just a number

And poems only mirrored garments

Our hearts once wore in sunlight

Different than today’s

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.

 

 

When Nature With Rubies & Stars Pelteth Me

When the night is almost done
And we have walked a life of years
Dark and light, with uniforms of snow
Steps through rain and dimples ready

To face the morning’s mist
When body is in her frightened hour
Do not be afraid, soul
Spirit that shines in smiling procession

For change bears her faithful witness
There is no fight in the Great Spirit
She’s just there, in peace and surrender
A vacancy of meditation’s ambush

On heights of piercing wild
Where stars are free above the winds
When the day has come
To look inside your self

And silence like an ocean rolls
I will hear the voice of Time
And she will fling her speech in prayer
And all beauty will unscrutinize

For nature is the bright majority
She guides the continual crowning
Of my steps, and takes me by the hand
A feminine onset of eternity
In my blood, and health in my shared oxygen.

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.

Jupiter Rising for Those Who Love

When I can look at life in the eyes
Of the heart, from the heart of my eyes
I see the calm of everything
The current of love beneath time

And it shall not be memory
For existence is only fresh in experience
Silent as a woman waiting for love
It’s not enough to act or listen

The world waits for the spring
And youth comes only once
In meagre compensation for biology!
I should be glad for loneliness

And hours to wonder what is divine
And a thirst body that amounts to
An empty heart to fill the jewels
Of single songs of people dear

And lovely melodies full of light
If I have loved much and been loved deeply
It is enough, enough to say
It will soon be over, on a hushed winter’s night.

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.

Remnants of a Thousand Springs

Remnants of a Thousand Springs

The things that one grows tired of
The longing and the loving
And how the face gets older each season
I used to hardly perceive the difference

The wonder and joy are calmer now
My senses no longer follow
I am gracious with just a few
Wheeling stars, a recurrence of spring

A belt of purity across the simplicity
A sacred look a day from a stranger
I imagine to be a good omen
I’m aware of the fuel to inner burning gold

That lets memories fly away like birds
Ascending to a winter heaven
I’m less fortunate than before, I’m lucky
Only as a nomad of the inner worlds

Learning to live without preference
My attachments burned away
Until I found a solid grasp on happiness
That didn’t require significant objects
The props of living, remnants of desire.

Art & Transience

Art & Transience

As the sweet sweat
Of roses does conspire
To give delight unto the noon
I fall idle in the routine

Of mystic admiration
I stalk slenderly the years
That pass without lament
I kiss the cherished months

One by one, in sweet succession
For a life is nothing much
But the comparisons of beauty
That art and life is everywhere

Even in the chaotic society
As the sweet breath
Of a warming sun does pretend
It knows the secrets of other stars

I fall into the embrace of
Reverent sacrifice, what else –
For there are no wounds left
To search, there are no scars

In transience, all memories
Fade like rainbow dust
In the wreaths that were the plots
Of our little love-lives and

The imagination that we were
Wronged or lucky or fortunate
We all had our due, variables
In a quantum field of evolution.

The idea of order as a myth

We were crossing bridges
At every moment, like symbolic
Journeys made and left behind
Half-man, half-star

Just creatures half-aware
Through time, judging
With our sense of duality
How time and space and energy

Could interact in transience
Fate only lasted after all
Until we died, until moments
Became memories and acts

When the wind stops and the
Heart no longer beats, maybe then
We can say with some finality
That it is over, life was but a dream

A myth we perpetuated, like identity
Useful in its ability to give us
A sense of security and conformity
But somewhat misguided, calling

For pomp and drama at every turn
The ego was an incapable master
Of force, and full of fiction
Like the death of a soldier who was

Somebody’s pawn, it was all
Like a simulation, absurdity
Witness at the public square
The office room politics

And the stage, where we were
Like actors, unaware of our lines
Barren, regretful and hopelessly idealistic.

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

Forever Arriving

The world changes
While we are stuck
Looking at each other
Lost in a sympathy of meeting

If two look out into space together
Are they then transported
As far as eyes have seen?
In some bright blindness of the stars?

To love is it to undress our names
To no longer be people but
Purely, male and female
Two mirrors of forms

Drunk in the plaza of biology
To turn eternity into empty hours
Ferocious memories of being a couple
Minutes in beloved prisons
That’s how the world changes.

As you strode deeper into the world

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
~ Mary Oliver

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Horse-475589992

As you strode deeper into the world

One day you finally knew
The journey had ended where
It had begun, the voices soft
Lifted you to trembling with joy
A grace became your whole house

You were moved, divided
And put together again
Your soul kept crying raining joy
It was delight you knew, that you had
Forgotten, long since you were a child

Joy that has no purposes but to live
Observe, remark, joke to yourself
These were your foundations returned
Your memory wrapped everything
In a calm embrace, like branches and stones

You were a part of this all, energy
Came from one place and was moved
Here or there, but the world you loved
Well, it would go on, it wasn’t so much
A worry of yours anymore, little by little

Love became the silent prayers
Of your steps, until you no longer
Could exist, would exist, no more
One day you finally recognized your purpose
It was then you kept company

With death in that strange surreal space
Between Summer and Autumn when
You saved yourself, you finally did just do that.

Variations of a beauty lover

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.
~ Allen Ginsberg

I’ve made liquid nicknames for
the incomparable feelings of Earth
the peculiar surrealism of suffering

a dance of cycles and poverty in seasons
and prosperity in that experience of lack?
organic and passionate, thriving
in pure obscurity, that is the dilemma

there is no fame in doing what you love
only the pure satisfaction of being
connected to something larger than yourself

I’ve made friends with stars, books
as if I could plagiarize memories
like some ethical problem of the future
you tell me beauty is copyrighted?

I’ve charted universes in your eyes
thriving with an open soul for higher realms
of wisdom, disguised as a psalmist

I’ve seen the vital sources where destiny
Is drawn like a paradox of passion
I’ve seen the gracious gluttony
where we swallow our fate whole

only to arrive at a kind of handwriting
of who we were meant to be all along….
I’ll just keep living in that funeral free harmony

of inner renaissance, the piecemeal moments
of genius, where I am in perfect peace
with my creativity, fatherless, childless
but free, with a right to personal magic.

Art Credit to: http://www.deviantart.com/art/mermaid-tattoo-469620382

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

LISTEN, POETRY HAS A FAINT VOICE EVEN SO

I will put chaos into sixteen lines
And remember the effort hidden in alphabets
The flood, fire and demon of all words
The order of memory put to paper, pen, screen

The arrogance of feeling misunderstood
For all eternity, I will put these confessions
To bed, without answers, evermore
I will strain to invisible problems

And witness an audience of writers
Struggling to find themselves
Past the hours, in their earthly dreams
I will pet the anxiety of paragraphs

And etch them in the frailty of my will
Stitching with careful industry my loss
That I might recall my tragedy in lines
The laughter trapped in summer crickets long ago.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/–467093425

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

REINCARNATION & MEMORY

I

Forgetfulness is like a song,
So sweet as freedom’s Bell
When I forget my measures
I know I am living well Enough
Forgetfulness is like a Bird
Whose wings are reconciled
To the wind, as I am to my Fate

II

That whispers the saddest lines
And buries itself into Prophecy
Memory unwearyingly leads us
Home, back to the blasted tree
Where I promised the world
Grander things than I could reach!

III

I can remember much forgetfulness
As a fool, I who tried to forget
On the old fringe of silence
I snapped a twig, my heart
So that I might behold an ancient face
Whispering not gloom, but
Shattering possibility, reincarnation.

LEGENDS & NARRATIVES

i

As a moth bends no more than the flame
I to regret must part, and say
I am not yet ready for any final silence
Until the bright logic of Spirit is won
I must do my part, perfect my Cry
And cast the mirrors one by one

ii

Whispering to ourselves is believing
Restless though are the Legends of our Youth
That come to haunt us asking for
Repentance, for which I shall
Never perhaps oblige fully
As the light asks the skies for
A touch of rain, I shall look down at

iii

All that I was, and forget clearly
The sulfur dreams of long ago
I could never remember well anyways
We are all legends to our hunches
That we one day arrive at the place
We dreamed, love it shines in Tyranny
More brightly, to balance the world
And give repose to the stories we tell ourselves.

Photography Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/–457001355

EXILE

It was Not a heart beating
On the night-shift, for it always does that
It was not the chill of memory
Not the blood in the ears
Of Fate, it was the nativity
Of time confounded by
How inept the hours felt
In the Silver factory of the void
There were indefatigable facts
That drove in the company
Of self-judgement, that seemed
Extraordinarily bright in the quiet
Night, and my heart circled
The Shadows before a rising sun.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Cloudz-451854121

A FAIRER PERSON LOST NOT HEAVEN

I remember landscapes of vanished whims
Dreamy artifices of twisted Bronze
Wishes of creamy abandoned doves
Balconies of stone sculptures

I remember gardens of younger games
Flowers where I left half my heart
Evenings that celebrated the Sun’s wild embrace
From dawn to dusk with cinnamon-trails

I remember drifting catalogs of candles
For festivals I can no longer name
I remember sins for which they
Cast out angels, fallen to be sure –

Stern to forgive warriors, only doing
What they were told, I remember
Sweet and outrageous ideals, ideas, proclamations
All to afford the luxury of a better future

I remember friends with tongues of gold
Whose sophistry was altogether too charming
And how those gilded trees melted into
The green and white perfection of Spring.

I COME TO BUY A SMILE OF LIGHT

I was burned in the Night
Awoke to my own blister of Dream
Awaiting Dawn, I heard the voice
With every Morning’s Beam

I felt the lids of Memory break
Like an open Seal of all that
Can ever be Experienced
My Sense featured only Beloved images

Which I saw to my surprise everywhere
I was created Mystical in the Night
Distilled from Sunday Twilights
I Harvested from every Sun

A bit of madness in the Source
That was a Love no mind or soul
Might Contain, only envelope
For a very short interval.

Prologue to a Lifetime of Seduction

I cannot remember her face
She was my biology teacher at eighteen
With the tense wait of seduction
In her limbs, the feast on youth

Through golden binoculars
I used to sit, looking at the
Golden chain near her blonde hair
And everything around her

Used to burst into song
At the end of an avenue
Was her smile, I know she was kindness
Her body the buttons of immature eyes

Like blind fingers vaguely aroused
By a feminine voice, like a soldier’s
Last memory of love, before war
I cannot remember her face

The lion of her Madonna of stealth
That lifted my erogenous Genesis
To a good-natured grin, the touch
Of a fragrance that could only mean

Celebration, a great rose of a nipple
That my adolescence could only imagine.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/arch-412281192

Running Songs of Memory

Gather quickly
Memories from your life
Pluck them from a season
Before they fade like running mice

Gather without suspicion
Out of darkness
All the light songs you know
Throw them into the fields
Before they melt like buds

From summer’s bouquet of dreams
Gather quickly kissing from the rain
Those silver liquid drops
May never come again
Kiss your love like a lullaby

April’s Rain song seems like
A lifetime ago in hot June & July
These are the memories
Of the roof of night
Little pools on the sidewalk
Of your hushed heart

Gather quickly
Kisses and the rain
Before they pool and gather
Transforming into something else.

Photography Credits: Calvin Wu, illustrator: https://www.facebook.com/CalvinWu.Illustration

How Lovely Now are Little Things

I am swept in silence dear
With beauty swept clean
Alone in my little summer green

Give me the old silence of
The little wood, like childhood
Where grass is quieter than the sun

I am swept in holy silence dear
With dearest hopes dead love
Unable to recapture Spring memories

Of years passed, I walk now aerial
I drown in the leaves of surrender
Nature takes me smelling the days

Past the brief snatches of wonder that I knew
I am swept in silence dear
There is nothing left of me

But trunks of rain, running wood
That catches the roots of scents.

The Duty of the Poet

I will take thee, as a Poet
To candidature for ethereal thrill
Subtle as the inner champers
Portions of visions, phrasing that

Dwell as full as an image – the red Rose
I will transport thee, as a Poet
To Cathedrals of fraught mortality
Joys of darling spontaneity

To risk all for the Scarlet Shelf
And usher in liberty for arcs of white
I will love thee, as a Poet
Until the house is full, that of the dream –

As conquering as love’s palaces
As secure, as divine intercourse
I will lead thee, as a Poet
As a carpenter on hands & knees

With opened palms, known to nobody –
As a stranger speaking of the elder tongues
I will speak of summer fields
And unheralded flowers dropped from memory

As a juggler turned wordsmith
As a prayer turned literary
I will take thee in, as a Poet
As the original artist of creative Vermilion

The pressed dust of symbolic projection
Of minds painted with brief beauty
That warrants pricelessness, with every line
These bards never awake from midnight’s trance.

Eros in Retreat

I am waiting for my white butterflies
Summer’s babble of small noises
Where I can feel insignificant again
Behind crickets and proofs of God

I’m hoping that timely intervals
Will save me from this grief
Amidst the healing weeks
Of mourning and mornings

I have the patience of heart-breaks
That fly with delicate wings
Of youth’s love-sheath so tender
Bemused by nature’s glory

I am waiting for my sampled flowers
That have no flaw, but their unchanging beauty
That diamonds are only accomplished
After eternities, epochs long enough

That they forget what they once were
I am waiting for my single aims
To be accomplished in-between
The death of memories, it shall be sweet

To no longer recall who I have been
Or why art mattered, why love was cruel
And how the seasons fell, little squire anti-climaxes.

Chronicle of Comet-Like-Jewel Eyes

I am alive with lucid memories
That are mere moments
Of my future, ribboned sequences
Of the pure enactment of miracles
The little crazy buzz
Of kindness, the gift of giving

The altruism principle, in full bloom
Flowering of big-sky belonging
I am alive with the joy-in-chaos
Of hours stretched to the bottom
Of every corner, every error, deployed
Like sentinels of the state-of-wonder

Fresh like cinnamon roses-buds
Moving colors of wispy vanilla
Chocolate resplendent autumns
I am alive to the best of the world
Where harvests come from strange occurrences
And accidents lead me to love

The old jewel box by the side of the road
Where you smiled at me
And changed me forever.

Portrait of the Void

These hours are not pregnant
Maybe in reversed tempo
I must be broken to love again
I wake up to the smell of pine needles
The hours of my humanity were edited
Performed memory autopsy
By the impotence of our toppled world
Yesterday or today or tomorrow
Blend into one, like a reconstructed
Holographic life, a quantum signature
With the breath of a fairy
Erected from lost discipline, cheated disciplines
These hours are like a miscarriage
Of all the love we stored in each other
Moments as brutal as magnetic suns
Whose ballet of light is unrelentless.