Chasing Freedom

Here there is a road that’s just opened

With scarlet leaves from November

The womb is wandering, time is skewed

Into branches of alluring encounters

 

 

Time is invisible, but I can feel her warmth and her breath

Hae.mi’s pattern of spell-binding designs

Like a new layer of myth-making and story-telling

There will be no rendezvous this time, only words

 

 

That hang between silences as soft as their landing

Passages to another state, remedies for life’s fascination

Laughing, I would unbutton your otter coat

Pour you a drink in the morning of your drunkenness

 

 

To keep you safe from your own wilderness and wildness

The lovely insanity you keep usually guarded and in check

I don’t have the heart to let you go, while

I keep traces of the sun and your honest glow

 

 

Hae.mi, does the dewy light hear our noon-time prayers?

As in an airy shrine, where our ancestors breathed

Might we know how to touch our own freedom again!?

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.

On Saying what you feel freely

Let’s not try to define ‘Poetry’

I have been self-indulgent
With the most transient of art-forms
Not music, but poetry
Embracing imagery so light and immediate
As to be considered a kind of jazz

On the beat of the unfinished work
Of moons, on the anonymous audience
That is everywhere and nowhere
Let me ready you some of my
Poetry, it’s just the sign of the whispers

That took me to another level
The comedy of being myself and learning
To be other than what I once was
Most people ignore poetry
Because it doesn’t live in their chords

They don’t have inner guitars
In the heart-chakra, that fit
Upon the little words they use
In the days, in-between their thoughts
I think poetry always lives

In-between people, in the energy
That they release when they
Come into contact with each other
Nobody ever tells us what to read
Poetry’s always dead you know

Reading it is like getting ready to die
And looking at all we have done
And said in retrospect, like a ritual
Of how we summarize meaning.

We are Like Meditations in Emergencies #AppreciateAnAuthor to all those at #AWP15

To all the struggling writers….

We are Like Meditations in Emergencies

In the anatomy of art
Writers form the collarbone of universal language
Poetry is the hymn of respiration

Aliens breath poetry, it’s true
It unites people like nothing else
Prophets spoke in poems

The quotes of our greatest writers
Are like 2 parts poetry, 1 part philosophy
What does that say about us?

That our species are creators
We long for beauty and permanence
Only hyper aware of our mortality

So the throngs of writers gather
To celebrate, share and read a while
With a little tweet in your back pocket

When tragedy strikes, you want to be a poet
To shrug it off, to care more
Water off your back, now I’m waiting

For catastrophe to seem beautiful
The chilling events that make us modern
My eyes are vague from surprises

Each time my heart is broken
It makes me feel more adventures and serene
That the interminable list of

Themes, archetypes, sub-plots
Of my human experience
Might quantify and fall into place

That the catastrophe of my personality
Might collide with spring again
Perhaps I am myself again.

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The AMP bookfair is going on in Minneapolis now.

What phrenzy in my bosom rag’d

I am but a fragment
In a history of drops
Words drip evolution
Language burn sentience
We are mystic support

Each giving voice
To a musical theme
We all intuitively felt
I am but a fragment
Residing in the muse

Of my generation
Which will be your generation
The voices of the past
Speak to me like intimate friends
Literature my sanctuary

Mystics, prophets, these are
My starting point
Greetings to the gods
Who have come and gone
And died, glory to

Philosophies no longer read
The myths we transcend
For new myths
The social construct
And many threads of our lives

I am but a fragment
A poem that the birds dismiss
A radiant charm once confessed
From a civilization that was
Too lavish to endure

In a vacuum of information
Time herself we sacrificed
For a golden roof above
For a moment of our love.

Incarnation wisp of foam taming the bark

the silence is great around our bed
especially whispering

hanging like a girlhood of dreams
our hearts still beat
attitude is destiny

even if we are sleeping!
just as gravity murmurs
of how we wear the years!

there is no cosmic reply
to the questions we were asking
twenty years ago!

time sits like an enchanted
mystery, ready to fly away!
we are still virgins to experience

we just refuse to see it in new ways!
we gather a little experience
And then we prepare to die

And then it finally happens!
since you cannot hear me
now that I have passed the boundaries

I will not say trivial goodbyes or helloes
My most beautiful ones
Live your lives.

Experience in perihelion

Violets, doves, girls, bees
And oh, hyacinths
Are inconstant objects
With an inconstant cause

So floods the springs
It must change, face
To face, epoch to epoch
Thought to thought

Year to year, swollen
With the mutability of life
Energy in a universe
Of light pushing the pace

The heroic part is not
Surviving it all, it’s
To learn to let go
The major abstraction

Is not to plan for a future
But to transcend the idea
Of being ready for a future
That is always just an

Illusion of what today is
The partners leave, the kids
They grow up, the money
Separates from your fingers

The memories grow exotic
Life bleeds a final elegance
In how quickly it leaves
The beating heart, the candles
That went out in the rain.

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.

The Young Brain

In memory of the
Germination of words
I held dreams to the
Mansions of meaning

Remembering that myth
Permeated culture, a million
Notes within symbols
Hidden between the context

And the semantics
Of the dawn-wet architecture
Of how to think the same things
Each generation has thought

The important questions were
Immutable, a meeting place
Where all minds wound up
A municipal garden of intelligence

The corners and plaza where
Feelings, instincts and awareness
Intersect, like lightning
And the words meant nothing

They were only a bare minimum
Translation of experience
And experience wasn’t much
But a simulation of variables

An algorithm of sense
The salt and pepper of pulse-beats
Of time, but how the present
Was as untouchable and intangible
As ever, like a child who never ages.

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To Name is to Create

I draw these letters
Alphabets I was taught
The day draws its images
The night will blow them over
Forever, they are mere words

Writing in the sand
Symbols do not return
They are invisible
For the rest of years
No one will read

Poems left unpublished
No one will read
Novels burnt before
Marketing, but writing
Is my way out, my music

And my bread, the milk
And wine of my loneliness
So what am I to do?
These poems sharpen
My emotions, they love me

Across the night
Where I am but a ghost
In the conjunction of stars
I drew these letters on
A white canvas, they are

More me than anything
Else I have or will own
They know me better
Than the women who come
And go in my life

I will tell them my secrets
Poetry has set fire
To all poems, but I am that
Living fire, I am that warmth
Of a thousand glorious sunsets.

Dreams of Flower Corpses

Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.
~ Khalil Gibran

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We were all dreamers it would seem
we made our myths and spent
nights in the middle of them
until dawn broke our even
darkening-shapes, because

it took an entire life to decline
or go insane, or might I awaken?
the night dragged our covers
off of us, out of the light
we felt the sleep of our routine

enfolding us like eerie fingers
from some window, or control-panel
might we have been enslaved long ago?
by whom or the government
we still flicked with our ghostly beams

seeking more intelligence, faith, energy
to be who we required destiny
to shape us, our souls knew
the secrets of our mortality
we were dreamers and I swear

we created melodies out of our own fears
musicians of fate, jennies in training.

Flutes of Light

we’ve retold the stories
of our lives like prehistory
so many times we forgot the white morning

or the gulls that drove us
to listen to traces of infinity
we become our own museums
sort of broken accounts of what

happened to us, a thousand photos later
we still can’t tell you the truth
about ourselves, that’s second-guessing

or the lack of objectivity with self
the sun leans low on the trees
of our youth, it passes faster
than you can name your old favorite songs

driving home, the moon draws close
we left our city lights, hoping
to become somebody we could respect

i love’ed you all day, all days
and felt the intimate street lights
bathe me against all my worries
which seem in retrospect, a bit petty

heat won’t leave the pavement
until night is almost over
and we’ll do it over all again

for the last freeway of summer
for leaving all the lights on
just to see you from the corner of my eyes.

Light Builds Temples on the Sea with Mere Words

In my animal belly, into the belly of time
I swear prophecies, and make melodies out of
Melancholy, I avenge God and poor fathers
With armed lyrics, assault on secrets
With fingernails, frantic for a Divinity
Lost in language, in sanskrit manuscripts
In Mandarin idioms, I hunt for these idols

Behind words, in between nouns
In the devotional songs of women unremembered
I beg the many beings that meet in a word
The worlds that cover narratives
The brink of nothing that the writer must uncover
In my biological neurons, into the future where history

Is lost forever, at that point of extinction
I am gifted the existential proper nouns
The streaking supermind verbs that fulfill
The eruption of white music, this spring-water
Hymns among the ruins, sentences to represent
The suffering of sentience, these momentary truths

Mimicked forever by broken statues gnawed by light
And beings, partial and hungry-eyed
I stretch my senses to hundreds of millions of living planets
I hear their call, heavy with the minutes of
Politics, mating, wealth-accumulation and self-discovery
Eternity’s brimming cup of art, sex, sun-shivering love.

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SONG DAWNS THE TURRETS OF YOUR MIND

Words, towards a poem
I have profited from them, quarter-hour wrenched
From these hands, survivors of poverty
Enter and exit, hope
On the corridors of Earth
From the charred tree of language
From noplace to now-here
Lost, between the good mornings and goodnights
Words, as an umbilical cord with faith
They are all made-up, I know it
Bibles, sutras, mantras, poems and history
Faceless divinities, abstractions
In the mineral belly of imaginations
The Modern poet must dare futility
To find a way out: the poem
To speak for the sake of speaking
In tongues desperate and incredulous
Hours of the somersault, myth, savior
So I spill these phrases, syllables, stars
That turn to a fixed center on paper, screen, eyes
Indelible letters that no one can dictate
Until I ignite and burn this dreamy gold to nothing
This is how poetry exists, how love exists.

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.

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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.

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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.

CARTOGRAPHIES OF LANGUAGE

A sentence begins with a lie
The common language already
Filled with duality, an imperfect means
Of understanding, semi-true literacy
Of our unity, the loneliness of
The liar endures, like false-love

A poem can be torn up
Never read again, but
The innovocation has already been set
Words of anger, cannot be taken back
Words, infiltrate our blood
With cortisol and neurochemicals

A sentence begins with a pause
For the heart’s twisting dials
There is no technology of silence
Only rituals of communication
Etiquette of what was not said –
The blurring terms of our inadequacy

At connecting, our inability to hear
Words in the music of our faces
The blueprint lost of our authentic sameness.

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.

FINAL FANTASY

The Soul selects her own Society
A county of Faith, path to Ideas
And Friends that point to her

Divine majority, that include
The chief work of our Fate, if any:
The unmoved low gate-river

Of how we made the World
A better more beautiful place
Life’s opportunities do not always

Escape the circumference of our birth
But sometimes an alien Will
Gives our spirit ideal conditions

To do what we were meant to do
Our bit of Bliss before we forget the light
Those dawns and sunsets that

Stamped our brow, the soul meanwhile
Lives on, in the sweet curve of years
And desires wonderfully renounced!

Requiem for Everyone

Everything has its own hour
Where loved, treasured, not sold –

becomes our everything for a time
Until ‘nothing can last forever’ becomes
the day, the month, the mysterious year
where fate can unravel in a turn

So be it, looted, betrayed, traded, doomed
Our life is a mystery of cherry perfume

of laughter and fountains, transparent
as the constellations which depict
the cosmic story of individuality
miraculous, dark and the stories

We have always known until they
Happen to us, we encompass everything
Eaten by time’s hunger, under the wing of stars.

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The Social Welfare of Myth

I am thinking of becoming Bahá’í
Nailing my dreams to the sky
While the summer sun is high!
To blindfold my skin, in community

Lost in the darkness, our bodies would reach
Another gentler humanity
But Krishna was lost somewhere
On the edge of time, like folklore

Like summer yawning with orphans serene
And the miracles we secretly wait for
I’m losing why I must thank you, world
For being alive, I am thinking of converting

To religion, simply for human convenience
Which means I’m still left with pure longing
Secret arrangements of the necessity of God
And the luxury of our opera of history books

Somebody is smiling with independence
Beyond the myths, I’ve been a historian
Watching you sleep, as if all of my life.

Paradise for Insomnia

There is a skylight in my heart/
That keeps me up at night
An insomnia of philosophers
That won’t shut up, I’m stumped
To get a bit of sleep tonight

In the middle of the floor/
Of the terror of what I call
My life, I don’t fight to sing
The saddest songs, they are

My special ritual of forgetting/
I can feel biochemical processes
Trigger in my brain, the amazing feat
Of learning and laughing, inside of experience
There is a nuance in the way you speak
That is reproducing in my mind

Like coal and roses, it doesn’t involve letters/
Only sweet I-wish-you-wells, that gently spill
Like an age of Gold, my dear insomnia
Where I make the best of living
In some age-old night, I’ll build little fires

Like a creator of my own fruit/
Beauty, like fish and flesh, not blankets
Will allow me to slumber, at 2 AM
There are no curtains on my pain
The window is open, the myth of
My own doom, could become my own Paradise.