The 10th Day of Trials

After a black day, there is no forgiveness

Only the solitary confinement of our mind

And prayer, I feel the little warmth of my hands

Not that I have skin, only a kind of soul –

 

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It’s not what I would have expected, blank

There are no keys left, no passengers, no partners

Only the brevity of this, the journey that felt like nothing

That sounds that led to the sound of falling rain

 

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The way I fell asleep to not hear or hold my own tears

There are no pockets of music, of pillows of love

Only maybe, the sound of myself breathing, the beat of seconds

I lasted as long as I could, given to foolish courage

My calm was a kind of white shade, the devotion for other things

 

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That I myself possessed, it wasn’t that I felt no hungers

For the wider world of experiences, but I couldn’t afford them

I had my obsessions and inner dictates to attend to, and they were rather considerable

The movements and acts of love, they were silently expressed in me

But so passionate, so invisible, so faithful to their course

That I could feel them embrace me like their own curse.

The Betrayal of August

 

Fire-flower, there is a sweetness in your cruelty
The abused becomes the dispossessed
The martyr becomes a sadist, I saw it though the colours
Of your ember bows, the way you’d turn, night into day

There, we are all rogues, swash-buckling heroes
Where even the victim in me can repose at the feet
Of another abused child of the world
We are not equals in the games of power

I am not a man, you are not a woman
We are only mythologies, projections, illusions
Fire-flower, I taste raspberry hiccups
When I think of you, the fruitful vulnerability

Of your moods, where like a jungle of helplessness
Is born the more severe and thwarted beauty
An artist needs to suffer to possess their genius
Like a naked child wanting to become somebody

Fire-flower, there is no pain in your adornment of betrayal
When you expect the dog to bite, the wound is cute
The nature of narcissism is entirely predictable
In the traits that define our social norms

Even the women are not truly rebels
They already fight too many battles to disobey
Their sense of pride and back-water morality
Art is not like that, it’s wild and ferocious

I am not a lesson, and you are not my teacher
You are a stranger that I know so entirely
It would shock you if you knew, my deep understanding
Of your own pain, mirrored back silently at you.

I Close My Eyes

 

Let me kiss the softness of the night

Hae.mi, to which I’ll never know

I am the wildness in your purity

Though if I yearn for it too much, it will go

Into the music of misaligned intention

Into the pictures of faces unknown

Back to the masses of our stories

Our stories that are always wounded

You say I remind you of some unpleasantness

Can I not exalt and rejoice in each invisible encounter

For in my poverty of heart, I’m indebted to be haunted

I am very dark, but lovely, and loving – or else

An anonymous thief, ready to be caught

As a famous beggar for gifts of tenderness

I am the mystic honey in the simultaneous midnight

I am the lonely wolf of lost time, there’s no room for me

Between earthly lives and mothers and sons, I’ve been left

Abandoned by the vulnerable timid ones so cautious

There are silver scales in my snowy pupils

And I am your student, fine-arted through the fall

Let me embrace what I cannot possess, Hae.mi, I am dumbfounded

Though I indeed was once so innocent

There’s no closure until the time of new lovers

I know how sleek the seasons move

The souls of winter are my fondest friends

We’re all souls of mothers and pieces of each other.

(metaphor for thriving)

Meanings and Musings

Each of us pursues his trade
Some of us, we hold a spark
For a whole life of fancy on the hunt
For learning ardent and inner-life prosperity

Among my books of study
And favourite people and gratitude
I myself became the mouse
To life the cat whom I admired

And I smiled before being eaten
For I enjoyed the running and all the play
I turn mine squeal unto destiny
And care not if I was a good or bad mouse

For what we lived was our symbol
And I ask no greater comfort then
To be content with my own merit
For there are riches in poverty

And there is learning in ambiguity
And trust in anonymity
Like some difficult and handsome problem
Of living, we must each craft

Our favourite solutions, temporary
Until our cat gets us.

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.

Inner child metaphor of a tree

The trees they rise up
As if up from their own free will
Into the light, wild, happy
Strong, if only I could be that way
But nature did not make me strong
And I was not born free
But chained, enslaved, shy

But what if the dreams
Were grafted to my branches
Like fruit and I could see
The horizon with replanted forests
What if I could breathe clean fresh
Perspectives for breakfast?
Fit with buds for birds to ransack

Or pollen to spread nature
The true nature of our spontaneous
Selves, the inner-child without her mask
The trees they rise up
For too many generations, with
The secret of the ancient taste
From our growth what silver fir

Reveals the truth that was our destiny?
It was not the water, wood, air, light
These were only elements
Of how we found what we were made of
It’s just that way if I am a barren stem
I won’t be blown around as much
Nor catch the eye of creatures

But what could I then become
In an open sunlit field, left as I was…

CELEBRATION OF THE ETERNAL ROSE, 永恆玫瑰的慶典

If I confess your body is
The only civilization besides Roses
I long to experience, do not say

Do not say that I only adore blooming things
A Rose at any stage of life is gracious
Moist petalled or dropping wearily

The rain on her lips is like butter-music
If men, were created before women
It is only to appreciate their fullest creation

Like the beauty of the rose whose temptation
Is somehow feminine, a scent spinning
Into oblivion, as flesh seeking to born out living flesh

In blessed and blushing confessions
Or the redness of the weight of the body
The Rose that has told in one simplicity

That never life relinquishes a bloom
But to bestow an ancient confidence:
A man gives a woman a Rose

This symbolic gesture mimics evolution
Women are not roses, they are not
Oceans or stars, I would like to tell her

But I think she already knows.
As a misty dream, our path emerges
Like days of wine and roses, celebration.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/where-the-wild-roses-grow-131859161

HOW STRANGE THAT BOREDOM AND ALL HER HOPES RUN DRY

There are no ballads, crown-nests, no Songs!
That can relate living Experience
But the dreamers attempt the impossible
The translation being their variety
Of experience, the music goes on

Dying by the movement of our
Glossy selves, impermanent transactions
The drift of what we considered
So pragmatic, so terribly necessary
Years later appears as foolishly stubborn

There will be no great feasts at the
End of this, only nature and time
And other transparent necessities
The leafless hours and departed ships
Are no more, all that we know intimately
Will become extinct, such is the exqusiite
Depth of belonging, and not belonging.

CLEARLY PRONOUNCING FAREWELLS

i

In the freezing nightgown of Meaning
Poetry is a torn Rapture
Chronicles of departing youth
Would it gladden you to think

ii

The dripping names to purify
With a few hundred goodbyes
Life after youth is Peace
On a fabric of loving repetition

iii

Writing is the changing of swans overheard
The voice in the silence that glows
The letter to another young Poet
The alphabets that want

iv

A vividness to distract
A laboratory of delicate Escape
Metaphors without movement
Inner time without false actors

v

Poetry is clearly pronouncing your
Spirit, for a moment with Everyone
As if I wanted to be a last star
There not so alone between the light.