The Koh-Catharsis Diaries
There is a secret Haiku between you and I
Though I suspect only I can hear it
The words are dim and bright
You who colonized the American dream
For East-Asian writers forever
It wasn’t a banner you took on lightly
And I admired you for it:
In part because I myself
Fantasized about being Asian
Had strange anti-white guilt
Embarrassed by my British Descent
They say white people only came
Into existence eight thousand years ago
With a healthly dose of Neanderthal genes
And if, as artists we ever felt like outcasts
These invisible connections were cathartic
Lonely and abandoned, I relished
The purity of self-sacrifice
As if the poverty helped me focus
On what I wanted to do
On what the divine universe asked of me
I complied, was obedient, took it to heart
There is a haiku between you and I
It’s a wet barren emblem
Of creative arousal, like
Bards of magical realism
I endured in poems only to reach you
I became both testimonial and deviation
The inner critic in me was silent
When you were in my inner room
I never knew how to communicate
My voices was uncategorized in
The anthologies and manuscripts
I was the sun on a blanket of a lost poem
With no fine description or synopsis
Though my narrative was a dream to you
A longer poem crafted for short movements
Of the soul, like a shared hologram
That replaced skype, was more intimate
Than periscope, more alive than self-publishing
On that wick I lit the flame of your split shadows
Black honey, black light, anti-matter gravity
The eminent imminent intuition of
Of sacred intent to another person’s journey
My eyes discovered your language
A cage of sounds, an open morning
Your foliage like the blouse of the moon
Your hips shuddering in your privacy
The sifted light of your ferocious attack on art
Your daring red, your what-if-mother approach
Your shriek in the lips of Virgo
I was a scavenger of the heroes you created
And I swam in your gardens careless
Of the wholly immaterial nature of the encounter.
