All these unspoken words are left over Feelings

 

Hae.mi, I want the secret intensity of collusion

Not that I know what fiery touches are, I who have done without

The touch of the body or the needs of men

And if, my body becomes no longer mine

 

Would I pretend to blame a muse I know so well

From the darkness of time, where someone calls me

Surely she has no wings, only words to say that I am scoundrel or throng

And I, faltering through the calls of art

 

Yearn not for unity, but for intensity’s brightest wick

Where loving is for the mind, and not the senses to burn

Hae.mi, what I have become that I require not

The agony of the heart to feel alive

 

Or an army of the loins to feel as if I should possess

I am not that kind of lover, anyways

Only the poet’s unseen hand, and the touch of the eyes

Sowing seeds of language, where I am blind

 

Hoping for friendship in the ambiguity between the genders

Gone is thus rippling radiant youth and her precocious lies

Through my curiosity is still as hungry as the dawns

That first looked jeweled upon thee, for divinity suckled

 

In the womb of all things valuable and lovely

Like a beautiful dream, where I witness you Hae.mi.

The Little Dew

 

Hae.mi, with the mood for loving kindness

I fall upon thee, as the last violin concerto

From some former life, which I cannot name

I copy the Korean scripture, as if it was known to me

Hae.mi, there is no life worth living, but the one

Not thine, not mine, but something else

Reminded from a child’s face, I linger there for long

Unable to remember the rapture then, of living

Of knowing with any certainty, anything

I am trapped between seasons aware of my own mortality

With a holy assembly of symbols, copied by time imperfectly

There’s no original art to this loneliness, only a kind of death

No God but a scattered Universe of galaxies, points of light

That tremble faster than I can move, Hae.mi, that’s it

You have surrounded me like water, like air, like perfume

And I am left with nothing but the memory of own imagination

That softly whispers without reply, in darkness, in the night

Where we cannot sleep and cannot name that thing between

The hours that are not tame, so sleek and pearly like the rain

Hae.mi, I’m lost to oracles and harmonics of melodic Korean

Without choice fruit, but the power to love in my own way.

Hero of Midnight

November is a solemn sentence
on my tongue, the fabric of scarcity
an interior intonation of the hermitage
before the hibernation, and winter
where so many soul-thoughts drift

like empty shells of the past
and i know from previous experience
the freedom freeze as soon as
your dignity is taken away, like
trying to live in poverty or to exist

when lovers and friends have abandoned you
for whatever superficial reason
that move people to be disloyal
the stern voice of necessity has never
been louder for me, in my psyche

where economic conditions have become
how the bell tolls for me, and how
the labour inflicts me with dread
longer and later, as if, the lilacs
on the other side might never open

In late march or april when the fever
rejoices after the long-cold suffering
the rich earth purified by her rituals
might once again know the candor of spring
and the touch of sunlight, not to be seen
for these harsh weeks, the depths of solitude.

We Should Die Except for Death

there is a solitude beneath
street lamps and through
novembers that are anonymous
as abandonment whose elements

are through many places
once cherished, and many faces
once beloved, though
there is a time for loneliness

in the human life cycle
a time to get stronger when alone
just to know that there are no
permanent realization, even love

can be taken away at any moment
we ask for what means most
and have it taken away
I wanted the river to go on

flowing the same way, and somewhere
in wanting to possess
I lost the thing I most valued
among many other stories

in the city, death cries slowly
in the long years that drag
in our prodigal decline we
might summarize all we ever thought

in a flash of voices, in a
gesture that meant everything
and nothing, that everything
was symbolic, even the perennial

lessons in experience, mere afterthoughts
like the snow that softens moments
after it hits the pavement
the pavement that belongs to nobody
that snow that belongs to all.