I Went to Heaven with Suffering, but I Lived

Photo courtesy of Thon94rt

A little madness for the end of Summer
Is wholesome even for a beggar
The start of the end of climaxes

Where experiments felt like a dream
And life had no soft distinctions
Only dramas that became less fashionable

Fashioned by these candid hands
Where I blush in solitude for my losses
A little crazier than before

A moment lost on the edges of lifetimes
The soul condemned to be a guest
With undisputed rights to be nobody

And fame for the fickle food of anonymity
There’s no scrutiny like self-judgement
No following like bleak humility

No embarrassment like the obliteration of need
When you as a person begin to dissolve
Remember what madness taught you

The hosts depart, the friends depart, the lovers too
But some things can be treasured

In the adventure of the self
In the bleak individualism of perishing
To passion, a broken mathematics of faith.

If Nothing Lasts

Glittering with minds I come from the future
Hopeful with chariots of voice, I arrive from the past
We meet here smiling with deathless eyes
In the present, and that’s down the sky

We are children of trees and citizens
Of oxygen, we’ve breathed our genes
Into the stones, into the oceans
And I am the cry out to you; again

We all arrive at self-knowledge through love
And that’s when we love against all obstacles
Giving in spite of ourselves, our defects
They are immaterial, we are not engineered

We arrived here by long evolution
A journey that never stops giving gifts
I am not ungrateful to the tragedies
That have taught me humility and gratitude

I will go on like a hero fallen, like a lover, lost:
Be here, by me, stand by my side
If only for a few weeks, months – I cannot
Expect years, happiness comes like a lovely child

That will grow up and maybe
Never to return, all life is miracle, altars, that flicker
If only by chance for a little while
In that timing of suppliant will, I am the mutable

Grass, birds, clouds, families, relationships
That trickle back to the ocean that knows
No cares like mortals, no breaths with heart-beats
No cheeks that redden with the humiliations of a lifetime.
That’s not important, nothing lasts.

Letters from my German Soul

I should think I’m a better ghost of a poet
Than a human being, why?
We no longer share a language
I’ve become too abstract, like

How sometimes everything seems
So subjective, until I lose myself
In the dream of a body
In the hopes of a mortal life

That nonetheless anticipates ecstasy
Even when I have learned to fear pain
Trusting the moment, walking through fire

To get to some place that was
Inside myself all along
The most solid advice my soul ever gave
Was to burn my hand about the nature of fire

To live as a poet might live
But I’m, more heart than alchemy
More curiosity, than temptation

More innovator, than life-traveller
Poetry and astrology were my mother-tongues
Until I had to learn new languages
Software and smiling, to enter

The Sunday of my brief life
Dying to myself that I might
Feel the bliss of a frozen moment
That melts perfectly into the here and now.

Like Golden Things

Eun Ji, will love truly heal
What language fails to know
I’ve been searching my love of words

For what seems all eternity
But if I defer the grief, will I then
Diminish the gift

All this sacrifice, all this emotion
We sift our old anomalies looking
For something new, but I think divinity

Comes less from effort, more from surrender
I want to burn in gratitude
Until my very idea of self is annihilated
Because for me, that’s the only way
To truly be, Eun Ji, can we be then

More than simply a child of time?
That our fluid love might be
More than a lost sonnet, more than

A speck of the human spirit
I miss our old city, where we spoke
Intimately in the great assembly of youth

We had golden things to convey then
And a more immediate sense
Of what love is in the first place.

lineage of non-duality

Accustom yourself continually to make many acts of love, for they enkindle and melt the soul.
~ Saint Teresa of Avila

on the terrace of immortals
i am laughing at mortality
I climb straight to silence

where there is no ambiguity
my eyes are like jade cubes of ice
they smile into the wind
and tear at the rainy sun

through favor or disfavor
I pay no mind at all….
in poverty or solitude

through the dreams of living
be filled with uncertainty and doubt
i speak the original language
of waiting without thinking

of loving without seizing
taking a page out of Wu Cailan’s
indifference, i find the shinning moonlight

is whiter than long ago
what’s the use of contending?
with grief or disgrace?
to both I can aptly respond

only light resides in the
city of the mind, in the
distance of the heart

that knows no separation
between places, centuries, entities
we drift happily like the clouds
our lives turn like the leaves.

The Last Sunset

Sunset, so long I’ve waited
For your fantasy of color
That I could almost taste

The beauty between your fragile
Minutes, the aches of orange
The dusk of flashing pinks

I did not expect to ever find immersion
The kind where I could truly forget myself
But it was a necessary union with nature

Sunset, now that I’m finally in you
I look back at my self with the eyes of clouds
From pale blue warmth, sad goodbyes

I can’t stop the flood of inches of beauty
The river of time, glowing with sunsets
You bathe me in golden-yellows

This is the home-star I breathe in
As intimate, as the sound of rain

Sunset, so hold me here
I’m dying on the inside.