Masks of Liquid Fire

Lost Inès, fire-bells, storm pixie
How quickly the lightning succumbs to the flesh
And hope is squeezed so silently in our chest
That light, doesn’t flood our vision, but warps us
With a kind of fear and anxiety

Won Inès, there’s no winning in the tragedies
There’s only ambiguity and doubt and fear
The kind of thunder that makes you climb under the bed
Or paint in the closet, or immerse yourself in the unreal

Creator Inès, there’s no season when beauty dies
Because it dies each day and in every person
As we decide to label them something, to limit their light
We kill our dreams to manufacture new ones

Cowardly Inès, there no one left to run home to
Not the night of courage, or the love of art
Not even they can save us, we are just that
Solitary bandits, cats and ambitiously warped

Memory Inès, there aren’t rooms I can go to
Only drawings, a canvas of your success
Where I’m reminded of the days of summer
Where the Eclipse held the potential of everything.

The End of Desire 2.

It’s clever not to desire, isn’t it my friend?
Our worldly duties no longer
Feel weighted like fate, like we once felt
Tied to roles and roses and houses

Let’s not follow authority or impulse
But find the listening actions
The lifestyle that doesn’t inhibit

The world-soul to act through us
We were never going to be anything
But the destiny we had consented to live
The smiles and misfortunes

They were all intended
And in our grace and simplicity
We found a kind of poise to

Succumb to who we were, like sheaths and bodies
That we knew we would outgrow
To be attracted to this or that seems
Only to obey some instinct of nature

That is not false, only artificial
Desire wasn’t the bar, but it was superficial
It wasn’t the kind of skill that led us

To revelation, only repetition
Revelation wasn’t only to repeat
But to learn to be a new person.

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.

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.

Last Fragment

I know the beauty – abandon lesser truths
Unity harrows my heart
Sweeping and uprooting what was

Once me, I am a loose translation
Of disputes among the centuries
Lost fragments of mystical alphabets

Sanskrit and mandarin limbs
I know the vastness – abandon selfish thoughts
Oneness invades my calm

The wind blends with the bathed sky
Full with sunsets and greatness of all-time
I am present, future, past

Now that I have your face with a look
In features of all hearts
I am beyond, a garden, a marble figure in shade

I’ve swallowed all art in a gaze
And captured infinity with a dream.

Extinction Moment

This soul does stand half ajar
For this world of greed and troubling hours
I have to remark on all the beauty
That stands so close to death

In the materialism of this place
Before machines are born
And remake you into an everlasting race
Enjoy mortality, while you are alone

Lording over nature, poisoning oceans
Depart, before the sun languishes
Over meteors, before you are replaced
In extinction’s calm embrace

Nothing is ordained but time’s lack
Of ambivalence, each thing in
Its rightful place, prone to embark
Upon evolution’s touch and hand

Where immortality is a long next
Of the tribes that once sung
And now are mere skeletons and fossils
In another time and place.

We Can Make O u r L i v e s Sublime

We Can Make O u r L i v e s Sublime

Sweet soul, in mournful numbers
We dwindle like a lost tribe
With the beauty of dead slumbers
And life’s earnest poetry to dust returns
In our voices that will not climb

The days and decades to come
Our psalms to beauty
Will not say \time is fleeting\
Art is long and love endures
The past lives in shadows here

In our heart that holds the mystery
Of all that was great and all
That can learn and labour and wait
The poetry that is the true music
Of the human spirit pursing itself.

Poetry and you Leave the same Lasting Impression

Poetry and you Leave the same Lasting Impression

It’s not necessary to say that I loved you
Because the entire universe
Conspired to help me find you
And each day it conspires in us such a harmony
And if imagination is more

Important in our relationship, than knowledge
I shut my eyes and all the world
Drops away, and it’s just us
If I’m a victim of introspection
You bring me back again and again

To the real world your feminine pragmatism
Assures me is the important one
I know, my poetry is a tyrannical discipline
It’s not affording you a good lifestyle
However hypnotized I am by its workings

I often find myself watching you
As you eat a piece of fruit or share a conversation
So darling, if the moon smiled
She would no doubt resemble you
It’s not necessary to say that I love you each day

But I still do anyways, it makes my
Lungs dilate with the onrush of breath
That I’m a part of the scenery
Air, mountains, trees, people, thought
Life affords me just enough raw materials

To create the reality I want
To be acutely aware of for the rest of my life.

I Said Farewell to the Spring

I Said Farewell to the Spring

To what purpose, April, do you return?
Do you not know I am devoted
To the Spring, her muse leaves
Little open time for leisure,

If leisure be called art
Then I am in pleasure
With the hot sun on my neck
Eaten by mangoes of life

With a full cup, strewing flowers you know
Babbling, not quieted by the redness
Of life, her femininity of shinning confidence
To what purpose, April, for thy sweet command?

My white candle skin burns
On both ends, for the puissance
Of the knowledge that time runs out
The years of bitter loving remain

Loving so much the beauty of this world
As if stricken by the golden bugs
Who in their immortality shall out live us
It’s morning now, and I’m alone

With her jewelled crown, and what little
I have left of the renaissance of youth
So intimate has the Spring
Become to me, I am in love with love

And in love with life, more than ever
Emotion brimmed to the top
With tears for sonnets and silence
And how we will all vanish.

That it is Enough

That it is Enough

I have learned
That to be with those I like is enough
To be loved as little or as much

Simplicity is the glory of enough
I do not seek more, or I would falter
My soul stands cool and pure
Composed as if for thousands
Of reincarnations

And to believe that
A leaf of grass is no less
Than the journey of stars

That the glow of oceans
Is no less than a miracle of
Being at the right distance
From a sun, that is the right magnitude
I have learned to view freely

To watch the years slowly
Not as myself, but as all life
Do I contradict myself

I am large, I contain multitudes
I am not one self but
A collection of neurons
My brain is a hologram
Of all of humanity

If I exist this way, that is enough
Stranger, if you pass me
Give me a look with the

Fragrance of sunrise and I Will know
That we walk undisturbed
With lessons of beauty at every turn
That is enough, so here I shall
Dismiss all that has offended my soul
And empty myself at the end of each new day.

Psalms of the Organic source #quote #refuges

Psalm of Souls

The spirit is a beacon
And the righteous run to it and are safe
Among those whose faith is pure
How fine their company
Trusting in what is sure

The universe becomes a world of understanding
Our path becomes straight
The world strengths and helps us
And our righteousness is reflected
Back unto us, for good deeds multiply

Do not let your hearts be troubled
For in giving peace, peace may you receive
But take heart, even unkind men
Have a glimmer of hope
And nations in strife crave the faith

Benevolent acts are our refuge and our warmth
In giving we become free of our own troubles
Therefore focus on the on high
To make thy will pure with ease
Look upon the mountains and the skies

We were not given a timid spirit
But a spirit captured by the power of love
And the heart of self-discipline
That was born to love all creatures
And do good works unto this world

In bonds of mutual faith, good works become
Doing our spirit’s will and lifelong salvation
It is found in shouts of joy and bearing
Witness to the small victories of others
As if it were our own, how fine the company

Of our sisters and brothers in this place
The fraternity of all souls is my refuge
A community as large or small
As my heart is willing to bear
I preserve life according to words

Words that are my sacred weapons
Words that are my soul’s quality
Words that stream forth in amazement
Words that embrace and answer me
With the kindness of others
And the tenderness of life’s many wonders.

To You, With Poems

To You, With Poems

I won’t wait for you, forever
My poems are faster than I read
Words tongued with fire

I’m the last of them, they
Live in me, it’s not a gift
To be self-forgetful
To urge on, the inner supply

Is endless, so who’s to say
That I didn’t witness
The destruction of all of man

Love is thicker than we forget
More thin than we recall
Because love is the price of everything
It’s more seldom than the wave is wet

And more true than the sun
Love is less alive than living
Subtract it and there is no fun

I won’t wait for love, I’ll live it
More frequently even in failure
More nobly even in error
And that’s why these poems

Multiply in landscapes rare
The architects must be most courageous
To let us love again.

“Love is thicker than we forget
More thin than we recall
Because love is the price of everything”

Gongjooh’s Halo #AppreciateAnAuthor @thisisEJKoh

My Instinct to Appreciate

In a paradigm where
I long to be more Asian
You teach me the universal language
Of doing what you love
And I’m a frugal amateur
At best, I’m a tweeting imitator

In the sense of how I long
To translate the ecstasy
Of mere words, on the panels
Of myriad forms of self-expression

You have no idea, of the intricacy
Of how much empathy
Is in an audience
In the inspirational power

Of a red brand, of a Korean song
On the lips of an American
Living the dream, sharing a voice
The surreal narrative of daughters

You’re the new world, you’re
The future of art, and it’s strange
That our whispers can be heard

Above the masses
It’s unusual how identity
Is transported in poetics
Poems that are evidence
Of the purity, of the wonder.

it lives

~ EJ Koh, in my humble opinion, is a modern-day princess of Asian-American Lit.

The Birds know How to be Brave

Return of the Canvasser of Birds

Though its song evokes joy
The birds of spring are not so different
Than us, they need new life
Welcome change, cherry blossoms
They insinuate what we already know
The waxing of Moons led to this

Where the stories swell over
Brimming with what
Survives the storms
And follows you home
To the fire, where you are safe
A bird’s song washes away

The bad memories, like rain
In April, the distance of dividing
Your golden moments into a person
For a silver care to serve that person
Each time you fall in love, you leave
A bit of your dreamy youth behind
And the song of birds evokes

The oracle’s voice, the prophet-time
The bud in you that refuses to
Bloom ever as fully as you know
You are capable, happiness is relative
We share a table at spring with visitors
Visitors that we have been waiting for
As if all winter, our cycles admire us

They visited our ancestors
And have returned to kiss us gently.

Fading Away Little by Little

A Quiet Distance

There are quiet features
In my letter box
Journals that went unopened
Hearts that went ungiven-away

It was celibacy all around
In my soul, that waited for years
To write the perfect sentence
The ideal stanza

ii

The deviation from without
To satisfy the necessity of within
Talking in bed to the poems
That defined a lifetime

There is emblematic unrest
Vulnerable to horizons
Autobiographies burned
In isolation, nothing shows why

iii

In all this distance reduced at night
We prune our youth with gratitude
For how things turned out
Eventually, the night takes us

Outside of symbol into ambiguity
A distance between
Ourselves and the racing stars.

Art Courtesy of :

http://kelogsloops.deviantart.com/art/devour-514855118

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In no shape for Time

Outside of Time

I am always and ever
At any given point
Aware of the space between us
How we all follow some destined path
Gold, silver, green, purple
Fates, I call them ribbons

The signatures of light
We leave in the hearts of other people
When we are gone
They can approximate
How close we came to them
Inwardly, all symbolic

ii

With bodies as translucent
As the future will afford us
I am always and ever
Taking off clothes, memories
Assumptions, judgement
To reach the stillness between us

Where I wait for you dear
If you are lonely
You can always find me
Anticipating mind-touch
And the rain together like
The fragrance of forgiveness.

Spring Perfume Fragrance

Spring Perfume Fragrance

Winter Haiku became Spring Haiku
Dragons turned into Humming Birds
That’s how it went

I long for the Nameless
Like philosophy before poetry
And poetry after philosophy

Society is unlike art, it only
Begs to change, but never truly
Manages to transform itself

Art is abrupt, like a glowing trend
As futuristic as religion is tied
To the past, dogmatically traditional

Cities that have no art are barren
They speak of love that comes to mind
The artists wake the world gone wild
Which ushers in a ballad of gold.

What Would The Ancients Say

Of Gods and Strangers

I dreamt of lost vocabularies
Lines of poet-monks
Dialects of the Tao
Encoded in obscure Buddhist texts
Mantras of the Rishis
Wisdom of the ancients

Sanskrit whispers of sages
I have heard them all in my imagination
Or, the forgotten dialect of heart
In modern man, whose hunger
For profit is a world-destroying greed
A few generations, so much lost!

I dreamt of slow locomotives of
Quantum physics, artificial-intelligence
A million times more intelligent
Than the collective intelligence of all humans
And all this comes to pass
Progress, industry, prosperity, technology

I saw them all, existing in a relative permanence
That was as fragile as an empire
In ancient times, each one thinking itself immortal
I dreamt of the prophecies of Mayan priests
On the scorched Earth where our descendants
Mourned, for their inheritance

Our legacy and our people, were yours
I dreamt the past and the future as one moment.

Privacy Unveiled

Privacy Unveiled

Eun Ji, remember when we
Were young? We liked to say
All that is gold does not glitter
Not all those who wander are lost?

We used to think in terms of freedom
That had the ability to feel:
So I love you without knowing how
Or when, or from where, or how lovely.

I love you simply, without problems
Of pride, like poetry
Full of sleep as you close your eyes
So intimate to the music that remains

In your heart when all words have fled
Eun Ji, remember we who could not
Remain silent, you who taught
Me so much, from so little contact

The powerful feelings of intoxicating
Mystery, to read a poem of yours
Is to hear it with your eyes
But as a nightingale, Eun Ji,

I cannot find your source
Or where you have gone
And when I feel impoverished
Socially, emotionally, materially

I remember that perhaps I’m not
A poet enough to call forth life’s riches
For the Creator, there is no poverty
Eun Ji, I have heard in your writing

The place where people can speak
Their original human mind
And there all privacy is unveiled.

When Machines Learn to Write Poems

When Machines Learn to Write Poems

Words unspoken spill
On to virtual pages
Dreams encapsulate poems

Poems selling dreams of paradise
Speculations of the infinite
Heroes of art telling commentary

Reviving in waters
Inscribed in the cuneiform
Of writing on tablets of steel

Capsules of poetic chronicles
Burning the trials of lost tribes
Into the future where language

Will travel at speeds between stars/
Trying to break surfaces
Of quantum beliefs in illusion

Engaged in poetics we’ll spill
The puzzles of machine-learners
Instead of primitive opinions

Poetry will be their thirsty key
To understanding humanity.

Inspired by: Mark Olynyk, contemporary Canadian poet.

Loving poetry, like a body of love

Loving poetry, like a body of love

Each of us have tasted
In ecstasies of stealth
Forever hidden alphabets
The fruit of dreamy-knit language
The stars that grow on words
Forever to be partially hidden

In the author’s mind
Tonight she lies
Naked and resembling

A word made fresh with a gesture
Of a symbol of a dream
That shares a secret gleaming
For those who know how to hear
That tattoo of wisdom
That little totem of care
Crosses the lyrics fragrant
With the pulse of beauty
Loving poetry, like a body of love.

Mask for Sunshine

Mask for Sunshine

Spring chases death
As light softens night
Into the realization that time
Floods a clear sky daily
Time wasn’t linear

It was just our incomplete
Perspective that made it seem
Chronological like a butterfly
But our software will become
Transparent, like how buds blossom

Organic, mornings turned pink
For the nectar of new opportunity
Spring chases death
Out of the door, but
By the window we see

Our missing half of our lives
How love chases out all memory
Pruning our hearts with the infinite
We’ve studied days and yet
Still cannot find the answers

Practically speaking, there were no
Permanent destinations, no true markers
Only the aromas of experience
As perceived by our executive will
To see bare branches or

To touch and behold buds
The sun will chase us all west
Like birds along the gentle slopes
Of time’s lonely and illegible engravings.

Composing Poems

Composing Poems

Now, we take the sun
Into the center of hearts
With bright alien eyes
We are not surprised
Life on Earth prepared us

For all possibilities
We take the moon into
Our amygdala of imaginary
Anxiety, and we let go
With the seasons of the cycles

We were given in freedom
However a conditioned brain
Might find freedom in
Urban slavery, in service to
A corporate elite, we had

Plenty of luck for love and leaves
Leaves that drank red in Autumn
And had green buds in Spring
We cannot be too careful
At the risk of not living

We cannot grasp infinity
Least of all with mere words
Having dreamt of living would we
Ever dare to truly live, it’s
Slippery to live a life less messy

Sometimes all we may expect
Is to learn how to trespass into
More simplicity, more coaxing calm.

Blessed be in weary time of beginnings

Blessed be in weary time of beginnings

Death sets a lovely significance
On all our lives and more
For each ecstatic verse

Was an instant of our mind
Held like descendent divinity
The mysticism in our genes

It’s a future we keep reliving
And a past we keep repeating
For each beloved hour

Has a sharp pang of lost years
Bitter contested failures
And love-eyed private victories

They say we err in front of the world
That cannot remember anything
But succeed in our own merit
In the private judge of a soul’s conscience.

One unexpected delight

-Wanting Qu bridges cultures, namely Vancouver and China, and I have to admit, I’m a bit smitten of this song (that inspired this poem).

One unexpected delight

You exist in my dreams
Like an intimate breath of hope
A radiant inexhaustible humour

That becomes a voice
And when I see you in the world
A voice whispers in my mind
That we are all connected
If you had the desire

To do good or beautiful things
I know you will, even as you live
In my heart, like a shade of light

Not like a stranger, but a feeling
That needs no explanation
An unexpected delight
That has a queer power of destiny

In the grace of your eyes
I see the youth of everyone’s dreams
Like an intimate sign of

How the world is big and small
The fate of all the worlds
That becomes a voice
I see you in all life

A voice whispers in my heart
That we are all connected
If you evolve to find a way

Out of selfishness, remember
The others who stood by you
Were not always the expected ones
Where the moon can set below
The Pleiades and familiar stars
You exist in my dreams
Without any hesitation
So I leave you there until
I am able to perceive you
In the blessed days ahead of me.

—————————–

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanting_Qu

What went wrong with capitalism

yesterday I heard a preacher of truths
otherwise known as “advertisements”
they are everywhere

stand in my way
the speak to me in personalized
machine-learning pitches

but they don’t feel biological anxiety
I really don’t care about
the latest car or clothes

I’d prefer to think about injustice
inequality, racism, intolerance, sexism
actual human truths and problems

how happy the man must be right?
who can contemplate the
unhappiness of others

or does altruism and activism
no matter how insignificant my impact
make me feel better somehow?

I who cannot be cursed from the outside
since I am poor, ugly, unpopular
having nothing, owning nothing

being anonymous, I can ignore
the better part of capitalism
gluttony, profit-memes, exploits
of privilege and status

abuse of power, corruption
and mental hoopla taken for granted
that’s why, in a word
I could never live in America.

Fossil Fuel mentality

I heard a man say
We are part of the Environment
He was maybe the truest Canadian
That he spoke for us all

Had the courage to say
The economy is imaginary
Compared to the biosphere
Nobody was allowed to talk

Like that again, the scientists
Were muzzled, by conservatives
The loggers kept doing their thing
Kicking people off of their land

To reduce a wilderness
Into profit, and so the world went on
With pipe-line deals and broken treaties
If I am dumb beside your body, Nature

Know that my kind didn’t appreciate you
Scientists had been warning us
About global warning for decades
But we didn’t do anything about it

Here in Canada, we believed we had it all
Water, oil, space, forests, lakes
But the privileged don’t know what it means
The man went on:

“We humans are an infant species
A mere 150,000 year old baby.”

The Pleasure Before and After Poems

What is poetry?
Poetry is the night-magic
Of prayer, the last resort
After reality has hit

It’s the splash of appreciation
For beauty as the eye of
All tenderness and last lyrics
Poetry is the sound device

Of your heart as it
Smiles in metaphors
And transforms in tone
To the pattern of your genius

There is no good or bad poetry
It just exists, like language or
A calligraphy of sense and style
Mood’s personification in

The haiku of lasting resonance
A punctuation of grace
A syntax of serendipity
What is poetry?

It’s the last smile of movement
In alphabets, in the joy
Of laughter for any age
Poetry is what we feel

Before we say it
It’s uncensored melody
With a human voice
It’s the flower on a page

Of what we love in word-play
It’s the gratitude of being able
To see beauty and cherish the sacred
What is poetry which does
Not save nations or people?

I Lay Roses Across my Belly

I could live on bread and water
Rice and dal, bare essentials
Habitation of sustenance
Wonder of childhood
Morsels of divine association

Sacred foundation of the body
Raw materials of
Elements like flour, salt, oil
The meditation diet, water and fire
Or the Mediterranean diet

Olive oil and red wine with dark chocolate
Moments of food like pure vision
The pause of hope through
Long winters, where the light deprivation
Must be treated with other

Senses of life, bread is nourishing
The pagan morsels in your mouth
I dislike going in public
When I am hibernating
And require ageless cuddles

And making love like
Knitting a body
A miraculous body with veins
And a face and a purified heart
That gazes intently at you.

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.