Blooming into Native Serendipity

(Lost in Gaia)

I love you for not knowing me
But echoing me, like some stranger’s lost invincibility
I love you for your kindness
In the same sorrows we have all fled

Like youth’s retreating eyebrows
Like songs we used to sing
I love you for your no tomorrows
For your doomsday moods and emotive vitality

For your hairy shadows, and Costa Rican reunions
I followed how the healers move the mystics
Just today, as if it was a story I was familiar with
I love you for being in love and falling

In love with something bigger than yourself
I love you for your storytelling and your
Witnessing, the quiet birth of the apocalypse
Of every blue moment entombed in rapture and in awe

I was captivated by your Venusian fertility of art
And poetry and the musing of eternal questions
I love you for loving deeper in sweeter tones
Than I found use in doing, after doppelganger loneliness

And Aspergian humility, I played in shadows
I love you for not being there, when the divine stood on
Inside of me like a flame always glowing
I love you for your absence, for being

Especially preoccupied with your own drama
For your personal story of mirroring and copying
The feelings we all had all long, they still seemed
More blessed in your company

Somehow more vivid on your face
In your essays up the Western coast
Entwined and enshrined, I love you for the book of poems
You told the ocean you’d share with the world
I’m still waiting for my copy, by the way.

F o o t p r i n t s of Loneliness

F o o t p r i n t s of Loneliness

I am hunted by my father’s lack of approval
And haunted by my mother’s naiveté
How a family can live on inside
A psyche, for good or ill, but one day

Our parents die; we may even lose touch with a brother
The empire in which we were born
Might lose its world-power and prestige

Taunted by a ruined name, we live on
With each version of our childhood we remember
We must pass a threshold of regret

And carry a student’s debt into the decades
I don’t know if it’s secrets which I carry
Or simply the dread of ancestors and descendants
The broken chain that started with me

Hypnotized by shadows, too poor to settle anyhow
Our ovaries will dry up one day
And my fleshy handle won’t be operative

If I were a dream you could say I unravelled
My mortality, but truth does not matter here
Only that answers we tell ourselves at the end of a long day
And the souls who save us with kindness and security.

Translations before Novels

Caution & Awe

I would rather steer a song into flowers
than see your past self hurt, witness your regret
Over drugs or the years before novels
Bring me your hoodie intensity

Your tendency to be unable to hold your bladder
I want the all of you, the soul
Of the immigrant who translated Korean
In her bedroom as a reminder of who she is

Let’s not eat dinner, let’s create
Let’s accept love in what we do
Without any exchange, barter, trade
I know how it feels when a mother leaves

I would rather be an archaeologist
Of the human psyche than a lot of things
Where our fossil memory is connected
Strangely to our ancestors, I sometimes wonder

Will I even have direct decedents
Or only students of my mind , if that
There is no writing to be done, without
The commitment, honesty and labour

Of the thriving voice within, it knows
The epitaphs are made to be combined with flowers
You were the kind of flower whose
Fragrance lingered, enough for me

To proceed with utmost caution and awe
In my own translations of your poetic voice.

On the truth in gossip

listen to the stories women
tell other women, O’
I miss my women friends
who would talk a history in a needle
listen to a name, gossip a little
that sound of other places
with a foreign taste
the ripeness of a voice
made vulnerable and accessible
I am no longer a hunter of women
I have only empathy left
In my bones, in my half-smile
You can only live and learn
In this world, there is no disgrace
That lasts forever, only heartbreak
That is extremely normal
So don’t fret, the falling seas
The falling snow, we’ve seen it all before
Listen to the stories of women
To the wisdom passed down
On hearing a name long unspoken
Take a guess as to why you hear it now
Our cries echo in unique ways
And our voice reaches the heart
At the appointed time, maybe
Centuries later, our love is recognized.