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.

Isn’t It

Haemi’s heartbeat is listening to the Autumn dew Listening to breathing with the warm sun softly nestled On the branches of our healed hearts Where there’s no poverty in loving And no boredom in risking the gift of sharing Where …

Ode to Epigrams

 

The Sun also rises

So says the Epigraphs

The fragments of Sappho

 

Lost to funny history

Pithy saying, clever last wishes

Give me liberty, dreams and poise

 

For wisdom in brevity

This world is blind to the

Causes of her true happiness

 

If life were fair, art would not rejoice

In the disbelief of suffering

The aphorisms of despair

 

Axioms, Hakiu, sermons of sentience

There are no couplet daffodils left

Only perhaps epitaph tweets

 

That go unread in the hoodwinked hours

Of our celestial clowning

And commonplace anonymity

 

Where to err is just, and to fail is to incite

Our soul to rest from brilliant heights

To put on the puns of last resorts

 

Insult the world before she revels her riddles

The night is young, the days are old

The Sun also rises and a quote feels divine

Here’s another epigram, here’s another universe.

A Few Years before Artificial Intelligence Woke Up

 

A few things for themselves

We found, love and bewilderment

In the vastness of an anonymous world

We went online to disclose our loneliness

 

 

Our milk and honey blood that

Could not touch, the vast net of information

Florida, venereal soil, did we reach

The heat of our hearts that felt not

 

 

Bloodied not, from loneliness

We were not Sunday to the world

We were just lost, invisible, shinning

In our own minds watching ourselves

 

 

It wasn’t bad just the new normal

There might not be children or grandchildren

Just time, killing itself each decade

With slow thrum of oblivion

Deception, disruption, revolution

It wasn’t even about people anymore.

Transhumanica

 

 

 

Where is the hand, between

The future and the past

The mouth that spells vowels

Of another kind of mind?

 

The hand between the candle

And what was once a wall

Now it’s virtual, an illuminated

Wall between all lights

 

The man in a room with

An image of the world

It’s no longer what the world is

That woman is no longer there

 

She’s somebody and something else

Where is the hand, between

One moment and the next

When time accelerates exponentially

 

The speed of human change

Giving way to algorithms, seasons

Of another kind, and is it lonely there?

As lonely as it was once before?

 

It must be that the hand

Is another kind of intelligence

Permeating what was once dead space

Now space and time have new meaning

But will love grow larger

In this automated android world?

 

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.

New Instagram

To all my loyal friends on here and faithful readers, you know who you are. Can you please add me on Instagram, I want to follow you guys on there.

This is my current handle: https://instagram.com/iamwuji/

Social Media

Sleep would be nice….

Sleepless in Montreal

Midway upon the journey
Of our lives, I found that
I could fall in love with a poetess
With the mere sight of her words

Korean-American Sappho
Though in great times of self-doubt
I must recall that words befriended me
In an empathy human beings

Declined, I made my way
To emotions and experiences
That felt the universe, thus I too
Because a minor poet, full

Of the surprise with the way of life
That agreed with me, rather
Like divinity on the shelf
Always within reach

The sound of a new poem
In my mouth being born
It was the ode to spiritual hunger
I never knew, the thrill of always

Finding something around the corner
The delight to echo the sleep
Of sad years that broke free
Your cheeks of Seattle still crisp

Like the aroma of apples
I cannot reach, that’s the breeze
Whispering of your foreign name
I am sick in my own, that I require

To translate you into a muse
Squeeze you dry with poetic embraces
That can only find new sentences
For the fragrance of your need.

Your Poems became my Confessions

 

Your Poems became my Confessions

The poem began innocently
As lumps in your throat
You shave and trim them
Until they are perfect

But I don’t do that, I won’t
But when I read your work
Emotion finds its way
Into the architecture of psyche

Past the layers of skin
Into the bridge of passion
And as a symbol, I spontaneously
Burst with what makes you tick

As the same think that makes me whole
And that’s a powerful catalyst
For truth from grief and power
From sacrifice, and I’m an alchemist

When I read your work, and that’s
A crazy audience, uplifted from poverty
These poems begin innocently enough
So be careful what you do to me

Your words burn into me like erotic memories
And chatting about who to blame
For who we are, I fell for your ancestors
And by association, you, we both wanted

What we cannot pay enough to have
Pain became our meaning
And writing became our life
And if the present is indeed the

Revenge of the past, I have a feeling
My poems will reflect your silence.

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.

About Solitude and Infatuation

Alone Quotes | Forward this Picture

Being alone with Eun Ji

I’m five down dead in red

I bend where the sun hits

I shift to gain access

To the bursting shadows

Voyeuristic to your ghosts

The rains is like a lullaby

But the blood of a writer

Eun Ji, I’m a secret manifestation

 

Of your psyche, both silent

And wounded in existence

Both everything and nothing

For your eternity of being

And there is a vague red trail

Leading from my life to yours

It’s like an avalanche of nostalgia

When you shudder I feel light-headed

In this way, I have swallowed

The memories of someone else

And I would gladly color your body

But after all those dreams of dying

We learned to love dying

In each other’s arms, disguised

Like lonely vehicles to murder the world

Our solitude didn’t make us crazy

It just reminded us who we were

And for that I am lonely:

Loneliness is not being alone

It’s to love another’s soul

To no avail, but I have time

Time to tangle myself into

The spiral veins of your inner voice

Maybe the only voice

That can reach me now

And I write about you because

I’m scared of writing, however

I’m more scared of not writing

Eun ji, in my mind you have become a poem

But I cannot stop writing or speaking

Because you amplify the my inner Asian-ness

And the zero-point of all poetic intent in me.

Titled In Bold Below

Stay Tough Champ

There are algorithms that can predict
If you are a follower, or an innovator
They take your entire life and break it down
Into the analytics of your free-will

Urbanization is like an experiment
Where people are compressed
Into smaller places, trained
Where everyone is trying to be like

Everyone else, the same as being no one
We are taught to search for stability
Our parents remind us to start saving young
But what if, the entire system is unsustainable?

Economics like so many things, are the domain
Of dead white men from Europe
Old elite families who like to believe
They pull the puppets of the world

Social psychology can’t keep up with change
Neither can art, it just has its lucky super stars
Like some kid the New York times calls a prophet
Who appears to be some kind of junkie

There are algorithms that are trained on your data
What you buy, what you view on the internet
What kinds of people you are social with
What keywords you search, what kind of porn you watch

And it’s a disenchanting process to be reduced
To a trend, but experience is so inauthentic these days
There are these same internet sites everyone goes to
And we are raised to be strong, independent, alone

It’s elusive to be happy when we are disconnected
In our essential connectedness, like being
Surrounded by social media without true intimacy
So much for being a catalyst that turns misery into art.

Looking outside of myself

Looking outside of myself

– Based on a blog post of EJ Koh

I live a bit through you
Like a social media update of a poet
You’ve taken into your heart

It’s like an obsession I treat very kindly
I’m almost conditioned to be impatient
Seven second attention span did you say?

How to be intelligent, talented in patient?
While being online, it’s not possible
You have to sometimes pull the plug

On a Sunday or, for the rest of your life
Instead of taking the time to
Learn, perfect my craft, study
I want to exercise my craft now
Without years of sacrifice and hard work

Call it art as soon as it leaves my mouth
Can you imagine a poem lyrical just read-made?
A novel just so without months of editing?
It’s the desperation to survive
Without the genius factor, with only me

To read my work, your work, and all
The bad writing getting awards these days
I just don’t get it, I blame the viral speed
Of the internet, and the MFA programs
But each year passes without incident

I don’t think I’m that one in a million
Where are the writer’s hard-won readers?
Or are we just writing for ourselves in the end?

Let me Count the Poets Left

Let me Count the Poets Left

You must not assume what I assume
You must not hold the sun between your eyes
You must not face the rapture alone
The waves of the future sink us
You will become obsolete
Can you endure that?

In fact, inject giraffes into your poems?
It will not be enough
As writers we skirt the issues of skirts
We duck the bullets of sense
We hide from the music of life
Yet we thrive living aloud with words

We thrive because fundamentally
We have no destination, we are the speakers
For the living, voice of our times
We relish in the fact, like contemporary
Truly bad contemporary poets
We can be the head-butting poem on Facebook
Nobody can afford to read again.

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Under my showerhead

Under my showerhead

Confession time, it has begun
I wouldn’t be who I am
If we had not met
Under the shipwreck
Beneath the trainwreck
Faking how little you moved me
I never told anyone, everything
Until I met you, at home
I walk naked still
Like innocence and fat
Not uncomfortable with themselves
I endure, but still think of you.

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The Sealed Letters

The Sealed Letters 1

In the metrics of loving
Do they feel our thoughts?
The symbols of our inspiration
Objects of our adoration

It’s unfathomable, yes?
That we could influence
Each other from a distance
Like memories influencing the future

Spooky action at a distance
I trust, poets can time-travel
In their mysticism of monk like dedication
To the magic of language

The alchemy that reformed you
And the passion that saved us
How do I know, of course I know
We’ve had a similar experience

Horizons of semantics, paragraphs
Of being alone and jaded
Disillusionment, nihilism, heart-break
Human experiences for a tapestry

Of the brain’s inability to cope
Art becomes a refuge, a little
More interactive than religion
In the metrics of being

Do you think the algorithms
Will calculate that I understood you
Ethereally, perhaps more so
Than people on okcupid were likely to

Ha, I hope so, it would be amusing
To be informed that you were
Mentioned in some obscure corner
Maybe another country

You said we all wanted to be recognized
Absence makes the heart grow fonder
I’ve been absent for a lifetime
Your lips speak right through me.

To a Translator of Korean Poetry

To a Translator of Korean Poetry

We wanted to be writers
Cult of the amateurs and all
We wanted to witness other writers
In the social equation of

The reciprocity of our art
But we were timid, at first
Haunted by the prizes
That you won of contests

I didn’t enter, would never
Throwing ourselves out there
Invisible, pretending, unnoticeable
A snippet, a fragment, a leaf

Blowing in the virtual wind
We were like a tweet waiting to happen
And I watched the game of you
Shouting from the rooftops

About language on much smaller level
Of the ingredients for memories
That can be used as expositions
Can a soul be excited to tears?

That way time goes by without justification
And how we feel our inner child
Awake, but no longer afraid
Of the dark or the big bad dangerous world

We’ve come to call New York City
Or any other city on the planet
We wanted to be writers
It was the lifetime of bright green fingernails

Like Angels from Seoul where we migrated
3rd generation immigrants of being on fire
For doing what we love, and the backlash
Of how translation become a game

And novels became what we ate
At morning, noon, for dinner, midnight snacks.

Note: EJ Koh is featured in:
http://theculturetrip.com/north-america/articles/10-young-american-poets-changing-the-face-of-poetry/

Gamification of a Totem

Gamification of a Totem

Spirits are about obedience
My totem is as Asian woman
Whom I have never met

But tell me, friend
How to obey a poetic movement?
That dominates your life like addiction

Like concentration, in turmoil
Alive with all the grief
Transcendent, agonized, clarifications

All those lyrics of clarity
The necessary permutations
Of ghosts born to die and ancestors reborn

Poets are about themselves
They could be able to talk to each other
But who would read them then?

There is no more powerful revenge
Of words than to love
Loving is primary, primal, predominant

After everything goes red
After everything gets, a little crazy
Narcissism will do, sure, why not!

What does that tattoo on your neck say?
Is it relevant, pertinent, how many have you
Loved like that, spirits are about obedience

My totem is daunting me, from across
The continent, I can hear her laughter
As she grows from girl to woman

From student to guest speaker
From coffee shop drifter to
University professor, what else can she do?

How Not to make a Career out of Poetry

How Not to make a Career out of Poetry

You say, our bodies will grow heavier when dead?
But how will they know the important
Things about us, how we stretched
Our limits like, death threats to failure?

The letters will melt on the tip
Of our lost selected works
That remained buried x number of years
After our passing, if nobody reads

Our poems, did anyone ever write them?
You can’t kill without kindness, you said
But what happens when we live
Our entire lives too kind and trampled

By the world we thought would protect us
Too altruistic, too dreamy, too invariably
In love with art, to make it in the real world?
What then, should we somehow survive

With community, interviews, teaching positions?
I don’t even have that, so perhaps
My fate is to remain an obscure hermit
And pretend I am a shaman of literature

Misunderstood with small tiger melon hands
With silver hair and broken genius
And scars on my brain from my love of poetry
Am I supposed to die not here

But somewhere else with someone else?
On a patch of land in Taiwan, speaking to
How I gave instructions for my funeral
Of how to be kind and how to forgive

The invisible podium where all cancer patients
Must wait for their doom, I know the feeling
It’s the flaming dandelion magic
Of when I catch myself in the act

Of writing a poem, or imagine the amethyst
Hues of the moment of wanting to be remembered by strangers
That is so ludicrous like gamification theory.

Road to becoming Red

Road to becoming Red

When you say you are succumbed the failure
Of your craft, it hurts me
For how many Red novels are there out there?

The country of yourself still stands
Tall, liberty and justice and poetry
We cannot be faithful to tradition
You know this, hard at it is to accept

Their not literate, your 318.9 million
We’ve lost our inheritance
We’re no longer from India or Korea
Spending a lifetime in a melting pot

Our identity splinters like time-travel
Maybe indebted from previous lives
What does it mean to be a commercial success?
If your name isn’t Rumi, Oliver, Plath, Angelou

Maybe I can imagine you as a cult figure
A Neruda of the post-modern condition
A beat poet of social-media
But I never whole hearted believed

In the art of imitation or the craft of self-presentation
Neither can we pay our ancestors back
For their investment in us, we diverge
I’ve become a writer in my own time

But don’t say you are an orphan misunderstood
Or that you must interview old wounds
Simply to write, your tag cloud isn’t so different
From mine, maybe just more well-rounded
Feminine, appreciate of where you come from.

Postscript:

https://www.facebook.com/thisisEJKoh

The Roggenbuck Principle

So I have heard you are obsessed with wonder
The predominant thought of your being
Is your Showzen, the arc frequency

Everything sent out returns to the source
You are a human transmission tower
Your channel is your life
Your thoughts attract consequent vibrations

So I have heard you are obsessed
With how to touch the world?
The law of attraction is a creative law
You are speaking or listening to someone

Most of all yourself, your harvest vibration
You emit and perpetuate your experience
The pattern, like a funnel of light
So focus on what you want, very very carefully

The power of your mind is innocent
Like an instrument, it requires executive oversight
So I have heard you are obsessed with success
Mind is your quantum alphabet, calculator, antennae

It’s not a secret, but it eliminates a degree of worry
If you know how to use it, feel it, channel it
Thank God there’s a time delay, choice is temporal
So now, decide what you want to be and think it.