Masks of Liquid Fire

Lost Inès, fire-bells, storm pixie
How quickly the lightning succumbs to the flesh
And hope is squeezed so silently in our chest
That light, doesn’t flood our vision, but warps us
With a kind of fear and anxiety

Won Inès, there’s no winning in the tragedies
There’s only ambiguity and doubt and fear
The kind of thunder that makes you climb under the bed
Or paint in the closet, or immerse yourself in the unreal

Creator Inès, there’s no season when beauty dies
Because it dies each day and in every person
As we decide to label them something, to limit their light
We kill our dreams to manufacture new ones

Cowardly Inès, there no one left to run home to
Not the night of courage, or the love of art
Not even they can save us, we are just that
Solitary bandits, cats and ambitiously warped

Memory Inès, there aren’t rooms I can go to
Only drawings, a canvas of your success
Where I’m reminded of the days of summer
Where the Eclipse held the potential of everything.

Jowangsin Come Near Me

I didn’t know Koreans had living Goddesses

It seemed strange to me, how hypnotic Korean sounded

Melded in a harmonics of prophecies, nothing felt

 

As divine as your laughter, Hae.mi, I succumbed to it

Making my heart panic in sweetness and with indecision

I no longer knew how to speak, but could only

 

Thumb your ears with heartbeats, blink with my eye-lashes

Upon your eye-lashes, like the velvet of holding hands

I dared not kiss you, as if wonder could kill my sense

 

Maidenhood, besides, you had no room for moistness

You had no desire for my warm hands to enfold you

You hunted, scavenged, made yourself one of the tribe

 

And seized me in a thousand places, all at once

Hae.mi, whispered nothings, and I believed her

Knowing she was the sap of Autumn’s bizarre chill

 

That feeling you get when you are paralyzed by beauty

Held down in a moment so intense, you cannot breathe

Your name is now oil poured out, my warming chest

 

Your gentleness was my last thrill, finally acceptance

Whose love would weep better than wine, I know

Hae.mi, you who sustain my taste for dripping delight.

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.

Last Gladness of Stars

Image courtesy of Natalia Drepina.

Although only with breath, I breathe
And only with mortal love, I feel
What is beautiful, let that be my good

What is true, be it right at the time
You who judge me, let me not
Accuse myself of knowing anything
What cannot be said, will be wept
Though I alone search the poets

From Sappho to Auden, be it clear
That although only with prayer, I prayed
Gratitude was not my abundance

Delight was not my possession
Freedom was not my virtue
I could only love best, in words
Words that must remain an evil illusion
Words that never reach their goal

Art that never could profit me truly
What I loved, remains unseen
All my giving was a farce

And my glory was a kind of boredom
In writing more naked than the flesh
I never found my last resort
Or a heavenly kingdom in the future’s vanity
Without warning as a whirlwind

I will die, and no one shall remember of forget
How my life became my own, in slow immaturity
The limb-loosener will take me away

And I will be lost to this world forever
As if my value was in happening, or dream
There is no beauty that endures this species
Only that which reincarnates on all the worlds
There is finally, no place for grief
In these houses of stars which serve the muse.

Burning in a Broken Sun

The sun is a country where I spent
Loneliness, like it mattered, like it was a substance
I held my own hand from the inside

Dropping turquoise tears of the silent kind
For speaking was not something I do well
I don’t know charm and schemes

Evading the point of redness, I move on
Like a nomad without a place in society
To which there are no wounds or tragedies

Only days raw with the agony of inevitabilities
I did not accomplish my own truth
It swallowed me like a youth wasted

The greatest tragedy is not to live
My poverty was the inexperience of freedom
My poverty was the heartache of rejection

There was nowhere in nature where I could exist
Free from the tyranny of a final dreaming and a total dream
I was myself, a speck of rainbow dust in a cosmos
Of color and I was on fire, and my life was burning.

When you are a big Heart, pray tell me

Heart, we will love life
We will not forget the warmth she gave
The blessed privilege and opportunities

To meet souls and flesh of trees
And experience the imperial senses
That would be stranger and lighter

And heavier than breath which came
And went in years into the unknown
Where memory cannot enter

And friends outgrow the love we knew
And time will not falter, because
Our rendezvous with life is not permanent

Life stuns you by degrees
And asks your spirit to understand
And the world falters you in its cravings

So undeniably organic and disorganized
Heart, we have known the best
Of both worlds, East and West

In months of solitude and marriages
And we have wept as change ragdolled us
Across the seasons, how we loved

The bitter sweet moments, only we
Could comprehend, and frame
In the subjectivity of our sweetest thoughts
Our noble heart always wanted to love more.

Lyricism Wrought from pain

And in this time, of my material poverty
I’ve come to realize an important thing
That I have no riches but my spirit
No prosperity like the kingdom of my own thoughts

The love of the universe
Trapped inside of me, so innately
Yes these must be wealth enough for me
Not friends, women, comforts, luxuries

Can compare to the range of joy
That sets its bounds of beauty upon me
In the cosmos of my heart’s secret place
I also like most all that comes

And least of all, all that goes
For change is oft too unpredictable
To draw the sunsets from my mind
Or write a golden lines that stands

As the best, of my unoriginal mind
Life is but a thought, sailing in breath
A great league of breaths that hushes
Over everything, beauty breaks the heart

In the right way, even as we
Found more joy in sorrow than
The reverse, tonight is wonderful
Tomorrow is profound, and that my dears

Is the hidden love in creativity
That the heart knows the songs
The music it must make, not me, not I, not we.

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.

The Best way to predict the future is to create it

The Best way to predict the future is to create it

Death does not concern us
For we knew we were mortal all along
Because so long as we exist
Death is not here, or there
And when she comes

We no longer exist
Until then I may at times
Distract myself with pleasure
Not because I don’t seek
A profound sense of meaning

But because, we built this world on pleasure
And by tasking it I am made human
Made to know why people labour
Though I know there is nothing
Outside myself that can ever enable

Me to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, smarter
Everything is within
Everything exists and will continue
Without me, so if I seek anything
Outside myself, it’s only me dallying

With the inevitable reality
Of a wonderfully inner cosmos.

We are Like Meditations in Emergencies #AppreciateAnAuthor to all those at #AWP15

To all the struggling writers….

We are Like Meditations in Emergencies

In the anatomy of art
Writers form the collarbone of universal language
Poetry is the hymn of respiration

Aliens breath poetry, it’s true
It unites people like nothing else
Prophets spoke in poems

The quotes of our greatest writers
Are like 2 parts poetry, 1 part philosophy
What does that say about us?

That our species are creators
We long for beauty and permanence
Only hyper aware of our mortality

So the throngs of writers gather
To celebrate, share and read a while
With a little tweet in your back pocket

When tragedy strikes, you want to be a poet
To shrug it off, to care more
Water off your back, now I’m waiting

For catastrophe to seem beautiful
The chilling events that make us modern
My eyes are vague from surprises

Each time my heart is broken
It makes me feel more adventures and serene
That the interminable list of

Themes, archetypes, sub-plots
Of my human experience
Might quantify and fall into place

That the catastrophe of my personality
Might collide with spring again
Perhaps I am myself again.

https://twitter.com/awpwriter

The AMP bookfair is going on in Minneapolis now.

Title Embedded Below

We Worship perfect because we can’t have it

Language, it has allowed me to dream
I’ve never done anything but dream
All experience is a simulation
Of what our senses tell us

We perceive, all relationships
Are 80% make believe
And thus, I come to the point
Where my ultimate concern

Is naturally, for my inner life
Is the book of disquiet over?
Is the meaning found that escaped me?
Are the idols ready to be pushed aside?

And the myths, are they ready
To succumb to new myths, new standards?
To make way for the new
Language, it has allowed me to feel

I’ve never done anything but feel
All thoughts have a quality of feeling
Objectivity is the greatest lie
But subjectivity is an ironic dreamer

Full of queer promises and casual observations
That do not register fully until years later
That I take a certain pleasure in the fact
Of watching daydreams go down in defeat

Words like any truth, are part duality
And what once seemed like a clever remark
Can later feel like the ghost of an imaginary friend.

During our Love Festivals Lasted Longer

It’s High Holidays now
Between us, fate intervened
That’s an ideal Religion

It’s love of course, with friendship
I’ll blow the Ram’s horn
And you can tell me it’s Spring

Emotions for close combat
And this army of happiness
Machines are really missing out

No hiding back in function and task
It’s High Holidays here
Asleep in our spiritual biology

But not alone, there’s no duty in love
It’s all service for one cause
And Beloved mystery for the same

Unity of eternal heart burning red
And the words here are never bitter
Jerusalem is where the heart is.

Photo Courtesy:
1. http://www.deviantart.com/art/In-the-fall-481647459
2. https://www.facebook.com/SilviaTraviesoPhotography/photos/a.10152225989444734.1073741830.253380864733/10152880482654734/?type=1&theater

Dreams of Flower Corpses

Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.
~ Khalil Gibran

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/O-472291540

We were all dreamers it would seem
we made our myths and spent
nights in the middle of them
until dawn broke our even
darkening-shapes, because

it took an entire life to decline
or go insane, or might I awaken?
the night dragged our covers
off of us, out of the light
we felt the sleep of our routine

enfolding us like eerie fingers
from some window, or control-panel
might we have been enslaved long ago?
by whom or the government
we still flicked with our ghostly beams

seeking more intelligence, faith, energy
to be who we required destiny
to shape us, our souls knew
the secrets of our mortality
we were dreamers and I swear

we created melodies out of our own fears
musicians of fate, jennies in training.

Flutes of Light

we’ve retold the stories
of our lives like prehistory
so many times we forgot the white morning

or the gulls that drove us
to listen to traces of infinity
we become our own museums
sort of broken accounts of what

happened to us, a thousand photos later
we still can’t tell you the truth
about ourselves, that’s second-guessing

or the lack of objectivity with self
the sun leans low on the trees
of our youth, it passes faster
than you can name your old favorite songs

driving home, the moon draws close
we left our city lights, hoping
to become somebody we could respect

i love’ed you all day, all days
and felt the intimate street lights
bathe me against all my worries
which seem in retrospect, a bit petty

heat won’t leave the pavement
until night is almost over
and we’ll do it over all again

for the last freeway of summer
for leaving all the lights on
just to see you from the corner of my eyes.

BUT COLORLESS

i

You flicker, and I cannot touch you
Or give you a name that holds up
To the touch of Time, it sings
A mouth for Poppies in July
And hands for prayer beneath
August skies, you do me no harm

ii

To believe in God, or something
Like a Universal Spirit that moves
In all things, some soul of energy
You flicker, and I cannot reach you
Cannot tell what is my own or socialized
We are made dull by a consumerist machine

iii

And where are the Real Dreamers now?
You flicker, and I am no longer a mystic
What are these words, these words?
That cannot seem to call you back in my heart
Where was once simplicity and bliss
Without a need to have, to own, to belong.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Loreley-453221206

THE SLEEPERS

There is no map of trees Just as
There is no History of lifetimes
We are ‘free’ to experience here
The French window ajar
Another restless rainy day!
Let the silver dew rise
Let the white mists roll
Let them say what they will –
There is no height like Eyes
No soulfulness like, pure kindness
We are sleepers some of us
Should we forget to sleep through
The years, of mornings and afternoons
There is no replay button, no reset
Only the silence after dreaming.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Untitled-451918526

Art is my Self-Giving Friend

My Art is no art
It is the simple flowing
Of my humble being
I sit in a mood of reverie
Desires and sensations beautified

I subscribe to beauty
For a version in harmony
For a way out of suffering
Art strums completion
By thriving creativity in life

When I paint or draw or write
I am playing mysticism
In my private dream world
This hide-and-seek suggests
My soul illuminates with nature

Let me submit to art
Blending impressions without a name
For the sake of distinct
Eternal memories that are replayed
In every artist-painter-poet-writer’s soul.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Cold-summer-morning-408822206

Lost worlds of writers & being

Our words are lost worlds
where we may never come again!
a thousand fragments for

each person, thoughts that pass
everything will pass, said the Seer
the boats inscribe our circles

the fish lead us to our new world
the day there’s not a single gull
the world will sink, in change

hang on, words will leave you
memory’s roots will drift
across an inkless body, your hands

which once yearned for flutes in frost
for flowers on branches of other worlds
will find being and form in

the imagination that comes from
another kind of life, musical torture
for language, that is never fully at home

to express spirit, to re-live all that has
been lived, and which can never fully
come again, alone in the sun

we are all unique, you write:
i am the self like all other selves
that draws beauty in the night.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Ocean-50422805

This is the poetry

This is the poetry of all my years
with the rhythm that drops like water molecules
and the tongue of holy fires
that shoots with the breath that never-stops

This is the poetry designed for rants
that elegantly convey the big-mouth chanting
of an oppression and growth
of a thousand preaching words of subjectivity

This is the poetry of freedom
it gets enchained in singularities
and skips over synchronicity for thrills
of divine flavors past Shakespeare

This is the poetry that dares to search
for new manners of the riddle of words
into the silence of the great canvas
of art always becoming more personal

This is the poetry of body shaking pride
the quick and childishly glib facade
of the imagination stretched as far as a new nation
that connects all philosophers and poets in time

chanting a single written phrase
This is the poetry from the universe of life
the experience that no sociology can comprehend
the dreaded degree of loving necessity

when I talk to myself in poetry I talk
through all the wild poetry of your eyes.

Poetry Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/The-zoo-397858926

Thought

“There is no frigate like a book
to take us lands away” – Emily Dickinson
——————————————————-

There is no reverie like a book
No dream like a religion
To take us lands away
Prancing into the make-believe

There is no reverie like a world
Shared by only a few
That oppresses many, by select
Random and most inopportune

There is no right or wrong in inequality
Nature bears not a human soul
No good or evil in hierarchy
Only rules to play a meaningless game

There is no reverie but society
Social norms of the zeightgeist if you please
No dream like politics
To let a few outrank us by decree

Civilization is a long oppression
There is no falsehood like history
Art whose use is only temporary
Thus all of man is mostly make-believe

Though they pretend to be most important
How frugal is the chariot of the human soul
That takes so little from open life to barren life
Where does it go? What does she learn?

There is no reverie like an evolution
That cannot be seen, cannot be touched
No dream like a God
Who never shows a power, or a face.

Photo Courtesy: http://browse.deviantart.com/art/Badass-London-Sundown-382329516

On Essential Matters

I am not alluding to the ‘lost generations’
So much has changed of what it means to be lost
Long live the people of prosperity
Who sacrifice freedom, for the power of superiority

Maybe they see life differently
Act more decisively, set more goals
While dewdrops moisten my emptiness and loneliness
After prayers in the snow, that went unanswered

I am not typical of my generation
So much has changed from East to West
My longings have grown and been crushed
Like dozens of times, a broken-heart gone unanswered

The twinkling of stars do not care
There is no Eastern River to sail down, where I live
The tea is cold, my true love is only inside
A Shepherd of my soul that I sometimes hear

Sometimes after, sometimes ahead of hope
This silver frosty world is like transient snow
Laughable as we find the problems of history
There is no road for you but the essential matter
Where do you place your heart, and what do you count?

God in a Secular World

Nothing impels action like
The love of God, which has –
So many forms, teeming sub-shoots
Like subcategories of Evolution
Sects of harvesting Will
Offshoots of motives of the Beloved

God will not give anything in return
But we will act, in brief necessity
Dying to the art of our years
With the bare hearts of our fleeting youth
I think the hope of loving

Keeps us going, even when
We are unable to adapt, unable to act
I have been like this for a while now
The love of God, it’s not lost on me

I’ve translated mysticism even when
I’ve wept for the light that didn’t reach my heart
It is said God is always ready for us
But we seek him without, not within.

(For We Know Silence Already)

You tell me that silence
Is closer to God, than poetry
Who am I to disagree –
The best words have always been inner
Like empathy, breathless & unsaid
.
You tell me that silence
Is nearer to your heart than your writing
Though you write from a truer
Place than I do, I can feel
The peace in your few aching words
But I can bring your silence
.
It’s built in my calm, my meditation
Before I had a voice, a body, a life
I was a gift of silence, unborn –
You hand my poems back to me
With a slow smile and I retreat
.
Back into the silence of our
Shared understanding, it’s sweeter
There, than before – when all
I was, were poems strewn across the floor.

Paradise for Insomnia

There is a skylight in my heart/
That keeps me up at night
An insomnia of philosophers
That won’t shut up, I’m stumped
To get a bit of sleep tonight

In the middle of the floor/
Of the terror of what I call
My life, I don’t fight to sing
The saddest songs, they are

My special ritual of forgetting/
I can feel biochemical processes
Trigger in my brain, the amazing feat
Of learning and laughing, inside of experience
There is a nuance in the way you speak
That is reproducing in my mind

Like coal and roses, it doesn’t involve letters/
Only sweet I-wish-you-wells, that gently spill
Like an age of Gold, my dear insomnia
Where I make the best of living
In some age-old night, I’ll build little fires

Like a creator of my own fruit/
Beauty, like fish and flesh, not blankets
Will allow me to slumber, at 2 AM
There are no curtains on my pain
The window is open, the myth of
My own doom, could become my own Paradise.

The Death of Love

Now we return to what we were
A solitude, very gentle, very dear
It’s all I have, like an animal without
The language of love, primal

So instead, I fall consistently –
In love with words, like little vows
That I will write again, to live
Now I return to what I am

A solitude, an oracle of isolated inner beauty
There will be no prophecies which wash
Over the night, or rise at Noon
Only, the little gains of meditation

A finality to be invisible
Or create autonomy as an order of survival
The earth has vanished, I am alone
Nothing proves I am alive

I become transparently slowly rippling
My years away, though I’ve
Come to cherish them, tenderly
They say at the threshold of birth

We come into the world alone
Now I’ve come to terms with certain things
Like birth and death, and the necessity
Of loving or falling back to only, loving ourselves.

Mapping That Which Brought Forth Honey

It’s breathwork to play with syntax
Like underwater synastry of phrasing
The cadence is a cukoo of metre

I refuse consensus of syllable-count
I’m articulate without parameters
A free-verse bird’s call, a terrible fret

Of the higher forms of expression
A particular stanza, the way the wind blows
Agreeable in a certain slant of light

It’s breathtaking to shape music
And juggle fiction like ethereal plot
The trees, they have a last-chance

Threshold of dispossessing the wind
The poet, purifies language
In ceremony that ponders our hulking innocence

Those parts in us which are still raw
To the core of world-class lyrical topography.

Portrait of the Void

These hours are not pregnant
Maybe in reversed tempo
I must be broken to love again
I wake up to the smell of pine needles
The hours of my humanity were edited
Performed memory autopsy
By the impotence of our toppled world
Yesterday or today or tomorrow
Blend into one, like a reconstructed
Holographic life, a quantum signature
With the breath of a fairy
Erected from lost discipline, cheated disciplines
These hours are like a miscarriage
Of all the love we stored in each other
Moments as brutal as magnetic suns
Whose ballet of light is unrelentless.

Like Slanted Shadows on the Road

Our notion of afternoon had to do with

The siesta of passing bleeding hopes

A semi-minute it took to breath well

On an empty stomach at the past for good

To truly feel the processing of all afternoons

 

All passing transparency of light

The trembling waving lyrics left unnoticed

Aches better left internal, misunderstood

 

Lost to attentive passer Byers

The future remained a heathen country

Full of autonomous regions, gentle reminders

Of what we could become, though

There would be no rest, and that was fearsome

 

Only the shapeless volume of technology

Merging with mind, intelligence launched

Headlong into the speed of secret stretches

Where time became something eventful.