This Possession of a Life

I am waiting for a feast that never came
It never arrived and I’m sick of waiting
I’ve been so patient my entire life
Loving a thing that was never meant to come
* * *
It kept me hoping that things might get better
A house of windows, a reply to a heart-felt letter
Never read, a vision never truly disappearing
Of what we thought was the meaning of our lives
* * *
The feast that I am waiting for is impossible
Our masks postpone it indefinitely
Empathy is imperfect and desire leads us astray
And I never was very good at finding common ground
* * *
It’s below zero and the chalk of my poems has run dry
For a good few more than months or years
All the celebration in me has died like an old flower
Into stains of history and a corrupted Earth
* * *
We burn ourselves up in our brief conquest of life
Like a lover, we squeeze every ecstasy from their
Shuddering bodies, every last drop of intensity
We beg for something so totally fulfilling
* * *
But the feast was always a product of our minds
The prize was only a figment of our imagination
The union and sex and spiritual rapture only petty symbols
Of all a human being can do or feel or have.

Before I loved, I Knew Nothing

 

Before I loved you, I loved myself
But myself was never sufficient, never transcendent
Only a bit of dust and thought, transient

Before I loved you, I loved the world
But the world changes so fast, dear
It has rooms full of ashes, can you see them

In the city and the digital corridors
They are abandoned nearly as soon
As they begin to open the doors

Before I loved you, I loved the universe
More than any one human being, I think
Love is not something inconceivably alien

But in retrospect, the most intimate notion
For in attention, spreading it, I am bathing
In a kind of glow, for all that is plentiful and gifts

That appease me wherever I go
And it’s a kind-hearted gratitude and compassion
That enables me to stop loving myself too much

Because my heart only has room for everything
Before I loved you, I loved the idea of love
But you taught me another perspective

And sometimes, love owns a new perspective
Because it’s love that transforms us into
Somebody better, and that is why

After I love you, I’m able to love you more
Than when we were together
Surprising its then, how love comes around.

For you

 

I have craved the taste of your skin
For what feels like centuries, and I am
The evolutionary urge of sunbeams permeating
Soul and brain and movement
I am human being, hungry for immortality

Your lovely body is my youth’s rite
I pace hungry for the cherishing of a lifetime
Your hot heart, nearly too precious to hold
How can I serve you better, my dear?
I have worked starving just to have you

By my side, for a few mortal years
And I am a puma on the barren of
The rough anonymity that separates our lives
I’ve been a hunter and a digital firebird
Just to get a few inches closer to your life
I have desired through life-plans of ambition

And I have been silent to the failures
That must be endure, just for a few moments of bliss
I have felt the light that rises in your smile
And in your delicate form, I have felt

The lessons of history and sacrifice
The language of aroma, the stuff of hope.

Life is not a Duty; It’s a Will

Sameness dulls the mind
And love shakes the heart
So do not be too cautious
This life is enough to sip

Do not hurry, but
Carry lovely garlands in your hair
And smile to break up the sameness
Burn with courage, to

Shatter the dullness
Remembering those things
We did in our youth….
Be young and stay beautiful

Give your heart to the world
Or live a miserable existence
We’re all inches from dying
Our genes are mutating at every instance

Instead of playing roles, play music
The music of risk and ventures
The art of losing and winning
In a speed of learning and changing

Life is too short to forget
What longing means, what reddening brows
What breasts that shoot like cupid
Whose heart is apple-plucked

Too soon must drop to the ground
But fruit is meant to be eaten and bountiful
Love is meant to be poignant and profound
Who takes joy in the wounds and errors

Finds life a garden of many delights
There is not enough courage to go around
To find a life worth the exercise of hunts
And strong muses to fill your life

With resonance, spirits, colors
How delicate and wanton the Graces
How easily we lose obedience to desire
As if a safe secure life was the goal.

To take us lands away

(Prayers of Jivatma)

The sky is the content
The trees are the content
The people, they’re just visitors

Who will go extinct like any species
Who may attempt to fly from
Star to planet to planet-star

As a dragonfly might fly from one
End of the summer backyard to the other
There is no special season

To be whisked away, no passage
Like a book, no counselor like a page
From the frugal reality we live

To the grand impression of the human soul
Encapsulated in a few novels
That transformed the way we perceive

Events and our cognition of how
The world works, and what is possible
That’s philosophy of memes

That we project what we invest in
A chariot at play forever learning
With a mind that can barley keep up

To the new speed of information
The stars are the content
The birds are the believers
We are just authors of a human story.

Grieving for a List of Qualities

Grieving for a List of Qualities

Eun Ji, why does love do harmful things
To us who mope in sweet humility?
Are we not the most harmless people
Love is a fire, sword, has it done you awful harm?

No! Only words, only words of lost love
The treasures that were too shabby anyhow
And pain, like well-known eyes of attachment
Taken, or lips, a name of a dear baby

The idea of who we were with such and such a person
The months that seemed to hover in ecstasy
But Ah to give ourselves over to a greater power
Or let nature do with us what she may

Such are the traps and doves and gold
Of the inner life, and the sharing pacts
We make with other souls, even if temporary
All to craft our heart in more particular a form

How much we give and for whom, perhaps
It’s all a selfish play in the end, we are always
One step away from beauty, one step
In love not with the person but the idea of a person.

The Golden heart of the two of us

The Golden heart of the two of us

My soul’s weight is in thee
Thoughts that stray in the dead of night
And morning lest the rise I come
With dresses of spiritual

Vegetation to bury me
And all that I once was or might have been
My want is to pull the garments
Of the cosmos over us

So that we might choose a body
To inhabit and a heart to hold
As strangers who hold hands
But do not know why, in that

Appointed hour, how it comes to pass
Or how the goddamned sea will kneel
When all the life on Earth has passed
I have lips unused to thee

And bashful knowing nods
And Handel in my ears
It’s a long road to freedom
But a short road to witness you free

Shall we blush the eternal blush
And face the fervent and feverish muse?
Together as a fine distraction in May
To enthral the life-force from our

Glands and organs like biological magic
And find tempestuous civility
In the weight of our need
A delight in the disorder of our sense
The hope too precise in every part?

Whatever happens with us

The Eros in Altruism

Whatever happens with us
Would it be a mistaken point in my brain
That is aroused by your intelligence?
Could you forgive the delicacy

Of my predicament that searches
For memories of you in foreign faces
Your strong tongue that reaches
Into the everywhere of me?

Whatever happens between us
Don’t take it the wrong way
If I imagine blooming in the
Rose-wet cave of our happiness

How your love for travel might end up
In the innocent wisdom of our love-making
Reaching where I had been waiting
For years for you, half-curled in wonder

Whatever happens with us
In the seduction of a thousand moments
Of mistaken identity, mixed karma
Primitive needs washed by the suns

Firm protective bathing in soul-stuff
Would it be mistaken alliance
Of oxytocin to be melted in your mouth
Your mouth of too much kindness

Your body of too much giving
Your breasts that are mother and friend
To this lonely world, I should not be aroused.

Celebrity of You

Celebrity of You

Parting is all we know of each other
And God is all we know of heaven
So why does it feel

I walk to heaven to meet you?
They say that God is everywhere
But I felt him most
In your presence

What does it mean,
So tell me the truth and tell it with a slant
I want a love that is anterior to life
Dying a wild night
In the arms of an eternal youth.

Soul Writers

Soul Writers

The soul is shared memory
Whatever our souls are made
What if theirs and mine were the same?
I have worked in silence and obscurity

For as long as I can remember
Let my efforts be known by their results
And dreams that filter through
Each and every day, still

What if her soul and mine
Shared a degree of faithfulness to art
Having levelled my palace of love
Would she recognize my similarity?

Whose to say if heaven’s glories
Could shine in us, our spirits whose
Work is one and the same
To share a life takes patience
Would she condescend to give up pride?

Author’s Note:

I always wanted to have a close friendship with a writer. To this day it’s something I look for but hasn’t occured to me spontaneously. Somebody that shares the same passion for literature, quotes and the written word. It would be like our own version of soul mates…

Spring is Coming

Earthly Interference

The mind is an unforgettable red place
For dictions of Spring
For the rigid dreams of youth

That comes to fruition
Years after, with great sacrifice
I am to loving art as

The sky is to the rain
I carry it in my heart
But it only runs through me

In a downpour of my festive passion
In cycles of my famine and desert
The mind is an unforgettable red place
For faces I collected along the way

For intimacy never truly won
Only intimations of what might have been
This flickering hood of flame
Reads for the shootout to theory and practice
All that stood between us…

Smile to make me believe

Smile to make me believe

When you smile
lift me from breathing
conquer joy so I can submit
to the eternal feminine and the grace
I am tired of man’s world
of war, politics, corruption, smiting enemies
so dear make me dizzy
with thoughts of intimacy, children, the home
arch me with your gold decoration
that I might feel young again
lead me to small feminine laughter
where you cradle the shining sun
and my life becomes the blue body
of freedom, the skies and the ocean
when you smile
realize, please, the influence
of how the spring submits to rain
of how my skin was made to
let your heart in, like laughter
and the foreign verse of beauty
I being a man, am so alien to it
When you smile
cry for me with the inexplicable
for I have no tears left
numbed by cruelty and maybe defeat
smile for me, like unconquerable music.

Before I had you

before I had you
I had nature to admire or something
akin to a background unity
Of all spiritual time and sacred “everywhere”
It was nearly enough to sustain me

I loved nature, and I still do
But you have changed “Nature”
And in a way, you are now
My everything, harmonious and flattering
The heartfelt call beyond roses

And I don’t regret the responsibility
Of being mated, cuddled, sacrificed
to the “us” our lives have become
before I had you
I distinctly remember being miserable

or some shade of bored with myself
And that my dear, is you
A light that’s better than the sun’s rays!
I guess flowers are more flowery
With inner and outer beauty

Easily within reach
Before I had you
I ached for flowers
But I only had my verses
And they exquisitely wept to endure

Into the far future as if untarnished by death
And certainly I don’t recollect
The memories associated with those poems
Before I had you
All I had were mere words

And the inner music that had inspired them
Verses that celebrated the brevity
Of life’s delight and the ancient union of things…

Ineffable Name

Your ghostly handkerchief
Rubs me in disbelief
As moist as your province
Of erotic dreams

Your Jewish mind
Is too shrewd and logical
For an eternal love-story
I will never meet

One such as you again
In the gold palace of
Lesser conversations
I will go on my merry way

Stitching heaven wherever I roam
For love is intellectual
And my body is not
Pragmatic as a woman

I find miracles without quarrels
Far easier than one who has
Not to be picky, but to be kind
My Messiah is my present love.

The End of Family

How long do other speak
If we haven’t spoken in a while?
How long do true friends
Remember your character?

What is the name of winter
When loss and gain becomes irrelevant
And abandonment and solitude
Cease to exist for the mortal heart?

In the sum of all yesterdays
What is that feeling abundance
Called tomorrow really?
How long do others love
If anyone has ever loved us?

Where are all those names
That were once so dear and tender?
The faces have come and gone
These substitutes for love
And imitations of family.

I Seal Your Sex

My day exploded in your night
And my letters came to life
In your bed, all the poems
In my heart took shape their
In the undressing of our lives

Silently we approached
The hour of the Goddess
And all my dreams
Of platinum literature
Took root in the tree of your womb

I open the lips of your night
Without speaking, but with
A lifetime of poetry carried
In my soul, like golden grapes
I give to you the shadows of the moon

The whiteness of infinity
Your rose burns through the snow
Your flesh dangerously close
To the dawn, and we repeat
The cycle eternally

Male and female, active and passive
Lovingly with all the sleep
And literature and art in our bones.

Sea People

Our love was not other than this
It did not, not break on the shores
Like the waves of oceans
Across from which we came

You were native and I was immigrant
Or was I foreigner and you were
Oriental? A lowered eyelid of heart
Far in the distance, coming closer

Like a strange shell of our souls
Meeting, side by side, we tried
To explain it, but it was what it was
That higher instinct to flight

Love is a flight from reality
If we’d close our eyes
We might have missed it
The breath that mingles with years

And the solace that comes
From deep loyalty and ultimate
Belonging, it’s the shore alight
After a thousand empty voyages

Our love was not other than this
The body of a flower born to bloom
On a lonely branch, requiring timing
Nature did that to us, she let us go

Against the musical rhythm
Of our fate where we met
Changing our lives forever.

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.

Migration in a summer of lovely language

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Brinkburn-Priory-478920570

These words have survived separations
Faces I can no longer remember of loved ones
Poetry has transcended my decades

Spacious and fluent like a last reminder
Of why truth is no longer as important
As beauty, inner beauty of a spiritual quality
Alphabets now shelter this candle
This life that was my hopes and dreams

These most intimate self-deceptions
Wildest faith of wonderful illusions
For a moment still I am there

With moons and roses, aware of nothing
But the shine of creativity on our inner cheek
The mineral blossoms and lotus of our imagination
It’s pure there to write like drunken water
In a light of its own color, reflecting the pauses

Silences, spaces in-between relationships and solitude
That was the best quality of the life I lived.

After 100 Sonnets

I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it.
~ Audrey Hepburn

i

My ugly love, when you are so beautiful
to me it’s not enough for my mouth
whose kisses routinely bathe you

in an inventory of whispers, love-cries
with tenderness for however long
nature allows, you allow, fate allows
flower by flower, I would choose you
again and again, my loving angel

ii

Your body’s fragrance is my
shadow’s energy, your humid flesh
the channel of my dreams

if also for our child, who forgot to incarnate?
my truthful love, so sincere and honest
with armpits like the smell of wheat
and breasts as impetuous as a stormy sea
and eyes like wildfire, cutting me

iii

Into sweet obedience, I could not imagine
that I could have built a house of
sweetness without your splendor

and how you love cherries, your cheeks
an Asian wispy elven secret of youth
my soul-engaging love, I have to remind myself
we are getting older together in
beloved months, we sometimes forget the details

iv

Of why nothing mattered or had a name
except each other, we were made for this
an alchemy of spirits, while our shared beauty

allowed us to endure poverty
with gifts as plentiful as sparking
moments of gratitude that went on forever
like lessons learned from wise calming friends
and lovers that felt like they were

v

Gifts from the gods, plump-wide-eyed
spiritual dreams of some strange mineral belonging
we walk naked through the golden church

of our earthy love, as if we learned to be
one body, one shared soul wearing
clothes of separate bodies, laughing minds.

I hung many shinny things on us

There is no remedy for love but to love more.
~ Henry David Thoreau

Photo Credits: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Railway-473032196

i

Love is like a foreign language
once you hear it, you want to hear it more
speak it without it sounding alien
though she will behave here

as in a schoolbook for a foreign language
where we are all beginners
all sometimes say dirty words

ii

Without meaning to, she reaps
She sleeps, she washes, she softens
to its touch because it was made for her
like attachment, and for him like pleasure

love has no vowels, no translations, no silence
only a universal physicality and spirituality
that makes you have no defenses, you

iii

Trying not to love doesn’t bring you anywhere
it’s creative to let her use you
she is the last refugee and the first politics
she comes back in the evening when

your world is torn upside down with bills
it’s love that cooks for you darling
she whispers to you, “I’m taking you home”.

BROODING UPON THE RAIN-SOAKED BELL

She brings a broom at dawn to my heart
For peach-petals open and blooming
After the moon shone from a palace beyond time
Dust fills my spirit’s halls from end to end
And, for all her jade-whiteness
My devotion cannot tell the Court of the Bright Sun

How I have been cleansed or have grown
The Yin Mountains are my cold resting place
The Moon goes back to the time of beginnings
Written to music, spoken to Spring
She brings a broom at sunsets to my soul
Placing a spark at the Pavilion of long twilight

I am about to linger awhile, and perhaps forever
As I think of my voyage through a thousand miles
Lovers have suffered since ancient times
The sorrows of parting, so how can I complain
I am not special, we are all capable
Of a thousand varieties of tender emotion
To Whom shall I impart them now?

Anniversary of being Lucky

I sip to our anniversary
Of being lucky no matter what
Happens or is supposed to occur

I sip to our celebration
Of being happy no matter what
The world sends our way

Steam is pouring out of
These fortunate years
Mist is slipping by from our honeymoons

I sip to our anniversary
I’m sorry, forgive me, thank you, I love you:
Tonight is like any other night

I sip to being in love with your voice
That quivers by my shoulder
In the lucid night, warmed by the
Sudden laughter of your spirit.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Snow-White-Just-One-Bite-401747877

How the Music Crept By Us

You recited unblinkingly
The code of compassion
As if in that hopeless moment
I had erred beyond your comprehension
(
The brass bed was bearing your suitcase
A one way ticket to – far away from me
I know your stomach churned
In some weird way, not quite like mine
)
But you were always stronger, that way
I heard your mother’s voice
In the way you closed the door
For the last time, the last look
(
Was like your father’s rebellion
For a life he did not choose
All that was left in my sweaty palms
Was the necklace you gave back to me
)
To signify, there would be no
More headline hysterical breakfasts
No more cat-cheers, for the temptations of the new day
You had condemned me
.
To a lust-asylum universe
Where everyone was a bad copy of you.

Many a Bard’s Untimely Gifts

My heart is what it was before
A place that treasures from afar
To mirror goodness, with dreamy ambiguity
I have no sense, but alms of love

I am internal spring, in all four seasons
I water love and it turns south
A stomping ground for weary travelers
My heart is what it was before

I light the lamp and lay the cloth
For picnics with Beloveds, some of whom
Leave before they take a bite
I loved the beggars that I fed

Because I knew what it meant, to be hungry
I set a bowl before their step, and cherished
Them, before they found greener fields
I watched them prosper, and hint at leaving

I scattered crumbs for their departure
My heart is what it was before
The guarding source, the smile that saves
I know the coming and the going, intimately

Of seasons and lovers and friends
People seek plots to flourish forever
My heart was not built to last forever
It was made to scream to God, enjoy nature’s fruit.

You Brought me a Smile of Clarity

It seem when you come in thought
I welcome you in
Like a mouth of nectar
Like a spiritual distance
Getting closer
Like a forgotten melody
My heart calls you
Between our lives
There is room for you
Here in the open-space
Of quietness, and longing
It seems there is a tingle
I am enclosed
In my awareness of you
Feeling you at a distance
That which creates
A strange proximity
And a shelter, or
An imagined intimacy
Tonight in this room
I’m more aware of you than ever
But, you are not here
Only a rumour, a whisper, an after-taste
Of somebody I barely know
I have thrown your blouse
To the floor, in my head
Like a gentle darkness
That I want to wrap myself in and devour
A blanket, or a feeling, or a sensation
I cannot tell what you truly represent
As a suite fantasy, a moment, a lost token
Of an experience of subtle exactitude
That my life cannot embody
That my youth cannot taste
I cannot lead you here
I can only hold you like this, in my mind
The sun will come through
The white sleeve of the plum curtain
And in your eyes, I know the sun will be gold
Folded, melted, like cotton drifting down
To the fountain of spring
And into your flesh, where the world
Is joyous, free, ecstatic
There is no longer room for my self-pity
I must discard it like an empty dream
Replaced by the gift of your longing
Poems held naked waiting for you, on the floor.

I Would Like to be the Air that Inhabits you for a Moment

I would like to watch you sleeping
But for that to happen, you’d have to let me in
Let me into your life, learn to trust

Have me near indefinitely –
I’ve been lonely for too long
I would like to sleep with you

A smooth dark wave drifting over us
My toes on your heels, my arm
Over your hip, your hair – in my face

I’ve been sleeping alone, on a hard bed
Staring at poverty, nobody stares back at me
I would like to watch you sleeping

On those days I stay up, thanking
Someone out there, for keeping you here
Because I fear the watery sun of abandonment

Every month you stay, is a silver star
In my heart getting stronger, more alive
But there are no promises, when you make

Somebody else the center of your dream
I would like to watch you sleeping
But right now, you are sleeping with somebody else.

Hafiza Sundered Hope

Unbroken as a new settler
I was a guest of Infinitude
With some weeks & months
To teach you, the triumph of the Birds

My soul that asked your shelter
Adored by my solemn honesty
I entered your Dining Room hopes
But only could offer you crumbs

The sunrises scattered me
You wished I would part
So I left with the little dignity
In my small library of hope

I left a bookmark to your name
The humble fuel, for the poetry of a lifetime.

Not With Your Foreign Wings to Shelter Me

Beneath sentiments better left, unsaid
Untouched like some dead weight
Beneath the rubble-fields of battered words
That amount to little more, mere memories

They are not tangible, precious, or alive
But constrict me from the inside
Let them try to pronounce a winter of hurt
For a floundering of spring, yet to be

With fevered heart, let them melt away in summer
Clang shut eternal gates of love, forever?
Yet, for all that, trust shall come again, as ever?
With nostrils of bleeding gold, for rich rewards?

You will not appear again, with that dusty mantle
Of golden olive skin and pouty eyes
I am sick of dissipating you in mere fantasy
As blind as I ever am, a prelude and a requiem, or a preface
Where my luckless touches, touched a foreign woman’s shore.

To Confide with Happiness

Like the marvellous thing we were
A shawl of every colour of the spectrum
There was a perfect order

In our rising constellations
Call it love, call it what you will
A boardwalk to a happier universe

Your intrigue, makes me understand
Your wonder, lights me on fire
We are masters of eloquence

Circling water, glistening on pages
Heads in hands, laughing into the delta
Of everything, dressed for journeys

Like the marvellous thing we are
A casual climax of humility and inventory
Of the coat of paint turned by new beginnings

It is with a feeling of delight that I realize
We are incredibly wet in our shared bubbles
Happy in the first full moon of month X

There is only one way to complete the puzzle
To spend more time with you
Serenade each other with mutual shared silences.