No Word About Love

The clock is chiming in our wombs
Ready for a new world to be born
Time never outlasts our heroism
If only we realized the end could be near

It’s austere to love this world and her music
Too much, I think sometimes I do
Farewell to another lonely year
How had you loved? Who cares what you did!

Time is running with new longings
I feel them in you, in kind
Distance from afar, spooky action noted
Love’s feature-bliss has no casual witnesses

It’s something white hot inside of us
It’s the need to create more than
Software, more than poems
More than playing in the dark

The clock is running out of hands
And my intent is running out of eyes
I don’t have the eyes in this world
To see all the beauty, and participate

Sometimes in a revolution, when the
Activists have all died, what shall we do?
When there’s nobody to read the books we write
No word about love, in such a brutal world

No men to embrace, no women to educate us!
And this moonlight looks for the end of all adoring
But I cannot help myself, I’m foolish in all things
The clock keeps me grounded in absurdity

Never a nihilist, I laugh shyly into the wild
I’m always the honored guest at the feasts
Of the imagination, where I roam freely
But, the partners are sourly missing

I’m holding my own hand in this anonymous playground
Committing blunders for my scanty hope
So long I’d live and work alone
That I might forget all heart and mercy
Or suffer time’s designs with stronger plans.

The Chant Goes On

What you love, you become
The dream of being is identity
What you feel, you attract
With the whisper of the cosmos

Always around you nurturing time
What you imagine, you create
In the Tao of sense, there’s only the future
A living universe intersecting

With every part of you, a thousand
Times per second, you are energy
Happiness does not depend on circumstance
It is a gift of perspective

There is no path to happiness
No escape into pleasure
No particular opposite of suffering
The experience is paramount and important

What you love, you will become
So learn to love the highest and truest
Of what you are, let your love encompass
The whole world, so you will not be small
Or live smally for yourself, and be miserable.

Words from the Ocean

If a few drops of the ocean can
Reminds us where we come from
If a few drops of the ocean

Can make Mars home again
Hae.mi, there’s beauty more than skin-deep
More than spark and chemistry

There’s elemental wonder in
The way the waves move together
They are made of the same stuff

Like how human beings are 99.9% the same
If a few drops of the ocean can
Cleanse us, then when it rains

We have to remember, not to be afraid
Of getting wet, it’s how the wind moves
How time walks, in moisture

Tears that draw our worlds apart
Hope that sets our records straight
Faith that wounds us with idealism

Trust that pains us with her betrayals
Thirst that aches in us for each other
The ocean’s beauty can not fade, but we will

Being in the ocean by myself, was
What being a poet meant to me, writing
To nobody in particular, but wishing for a muse

Hae.mi, how many times in a life
Does the sailor fathom your depths?
How many times a year, do fishermen
Ask you for a look inside your heart.

Say Hey Ocean Storm

Ocean there is no battle but love
The search for love, and fight for love
So when I wonder at your beauty and innocence
I cannot sustain myself on salty water alone

Though I be by you, come from you, watch you
It’s rare that you let the sunset down, into you
And I like it when it rains on you, Hae.mi
It’s “okay” to be like a storm

Chasing the horizons, I know how wild you are
I know your feelings on humanity, your need
To discover further facets of creation’s diversity
Ocean, there is not battle here

I am like the moon reflecting the tides
I pull you down to your naked rush
Until your luminosity is reflected in me
And there I don’t need to find you anymore

Since you will live on in me, like a beautiful nest
Of experience, nothing like experience,
The ocean’s beauty does that, it impresses with
Lessons in humanity, precision of passage to freedom.

Angels in Water

Climbing clouds down to their source
I stumbled into Hae.mi in the Himalayas
She winked at me before we got to the tip

Of the Asian pacific rim of trust
It didn’t take long to know her wetness
The liquid laugh and sighs of freedom

Discovery was not what it once was
But the breezy evening of everything together
The density and timing of our moving lives

That pulls the knots out of their ruts
As warmth spills in-between the skin
That are the neurotransmitters of our insight

The weaving of consciousness and body’s self
And genes that got us this far, instinct
Where the azure brilliance of thirst no longer
Obeying the salt of hope, but thunder
And an inkling for lightning in the pools

Where mothers of pearl are in our blood
And our lips are the roots of talking and energy
That we pass around like stories of how to float
In an ocean of so much beauty, we sometimes forget
How and why we met, thousands of years ago

And why familiarity never dulled, how we moved
Together underwater, properly, in airy fields of dream.

(And If) It Was Too Late for Man

Photo courtesy of Raining Insanity.

Exultation is my last resort
For knowing and feeling in the world
Gratitude impersonal, compassion a bit divine

Past the houses, past the intoxicated lives
Doubtless time has plans for them all
In adjoining rooms of descendancy
Exultation is my last resort
The purest joy isn’t owned

Truth and beauty are the designs of youth
Time and eternity have the sweetest eyes
But I prefer eternity’s staggered embrace

She knows me in my own insignificance
And does not lie with dying memories
Or a past that’s waving like imperfection
Exultation is my last resort
If it requires no personal, no place or thing

Let it be the most patient bliss
Of actually speaking with the universe.

I Plead Myself with Thee

I have dreamed of death and mine
As if it were ungrateful of me to keep
Living and breathing, although

I have laid the rest of thy divinity
In a place so deep inside of me
That like a pilgrimage I scattered youth

The Autumn innocence that
Empties me of feeling every year
With each passing summer I leave

A part of myself well and beloved behind
And in doing so, I die enough to stalk
The future of my own gifts

That won’t be mine, but in meeting you
Will have unveiled something of the infinite
Where I can live irresponsibly and fine
Not bound by this Earth that won’t keep me lovingly
There’s no shadow’s length I bet
No growing pale as I strive

Who can understand the imperfection?
Of our humilities, that leaves
The orchard of our shared vulnerability
Open and not barren, where thrives
Scanty sunbeams for hidden fruit
Proof that we hung Springs together well.

Of It I can Say Nothing

 

 

 

Be here, by me

I who have been in love alone

Yoking the voice of listening itself

Where to pray is a kind of cherishing

Be here by me

 

I can say nothing no more

Of what it means to live

Each has their own eternity

To grieve, and brief moments to rejoice

Where a delicate fire is translated

 

Of the human condition’s reach

Be here, by me

Where time hangs – and I write

Words more naked than the flesh

Than the vulnerability of hours

 

That smite the dreams of youth

Be here, by me

I cry out to you, again

You who cared not that I sought to hear

Your emotions incommunicable

 

Be here, by me,

From aching care, to invisible language

And for what it means to be a friend

To witness the stories of lost souls

What cannot be said, will be wept

 

Like the smothered dreams of

All that is forgotten, death

The last blanket on our eyes.

 

 

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.

The Western Seas

 

 

 

Xiao Wei, if the moon hath left the sky

Be it for you, lost in the Pleiads’ light

With such a soft sweet glow,

It is midnight here, but I wonder as

 

Time slips by, why you live in me

With the ache of breeze and infinity

How does the moon disappear

Into the sea, and how does she know?

 

That time lasts as long as fruit hungry

For the ground, to transport the seed

As if it was all fated long ago

Our ancestors met and moved

 

To new valleys and new shores

Only to result in our eyes looking

Reaching over oceans as such

Xiao Wei, where do the birds roam?

 

That they look not for fragments

But they feel the whole, the earth, wind and seas

From above, how lost I am in this digital world

Where the future is a simulation

 

And a woman is a dream, I guess

I will never truly visit California

It’s only an idea lost in your voice

Where memory is graft that outgrows itself

 

From reality and between fantasy

All summer kinship dispels the mortal rose

Xiao Wei, but I will remember thee.

After Taking with Miss Sun

 

 

We, do not sleep at night

We collide with stars

Our cold part goes into the Milky way

To be swept by the tides of clarity

Neuron reaches albino heart

 

Hope bleeds victory plump as the Moon

For a time, it’s 3am when you realize

That I labour like an Asian, but to no avail

Work does not win us friends

Success does not win us love

 

Nothing else matters but poetry and love

We can die in poverty, happy, finally

For simplicity is what it is

Our soul the necessary action of

Mortal hours wasted, or won

 

Like the calm hush of a thousand winters

We’ll only see sixty, maybe a few more

I won’t live forever, I’ll go hungry

Into the beyond, writing poems for reincarnations

Where I will forget what poems were or are

 

Or who made them and by whose hands

I’ll go like a surrendered flag bloody

With no business writing, I’ll just write

For myself, like a lost soul without a Sun

No map will recover who I was, that

 

Being who was never understood, nobody knew

How the pale baby of our dreams slip away

We, do not sleep at night

We just remember that thing that escape memory

It plummets like the night sky

 

Walking past the lives we could have had

Ignoring who was our wife in an alternate universe

There’s no composure to wasting potential

It’s just all we can do in the bottleneck design

Of a capitalistic world created to eat itself

 

There’s no room for love for me, only survival

I am a masochist, martyr, beggar and dreamer

That’s the last monument to my failed Ego

I have enough ID to last me into dog-eared certainty

I’m certain I love life more than others

Even if it does not always seem that way.

 

But With a Fraction of the Love

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve felt my life

In the murmur of a bee

And felt all my tears

 

In the eminence of a nest

And the daffodils blew color

Covert as April, or candid as May

I took my time to age and my time

Was plenty, in the solitude

 

Of antiquity, forgetting for answering

Only questions, guided me

At the breaking of the day

 

Where golden drops spawned

Longer looks and deeper searching

All for something immaterial

There is a flower which no longer blooms

It’s in my heart or should I say, it was

 

It’s gentle romance led me on

In the chivalry of my subjective warmth

Where I was not alone, nor humming birds left

 

The measures of days were not my smiles

My splendour was meagre, my heart

Was the moistness of oxygen

In your lungs, the breath that kept you sane

When life was a tyranny of choice until

 

There was none left and freedom hung

Like a low hanging fruit, of what our lives had become.

 

When Nature With Rubies & Stars Pelteth Me

When the night is almost done
And we have walked a life of years
Dark and light, with uniforms of snow
Steps through rain and dimples ready

To face the morning’s mist
When body is in her frightened hour
Do not be afraid, soul
Spirit that shines in smiling procession

For change bears her faithful witness
There is no fight in the Great Spirit
She’s just there, in peace and surrender
A vacancy of meditation’s ambush

On heights of piercing wild
Where stars are free above the winds
When the day has come
To look inside your self

And silence like an ocean rolls
I will hear the voice of Time
And she will fling her speech in prayer
And all beauty will unscrutinize

For nature is the bright majority
She guides the continual crowning
Of my steps, and takes me by the hand
A feminine onset of eternity
In my blood, and health in my shared oxygen.

Wonder of Aging

It occurs to me now
How our soul is honed by love
Not the love of barter and exchange
But the love of inspiration
That changes a heart
To become a better person
You simply smiling, that is
Enough of the forever kindness
To fuel me for a quiet lifetime
There is no answer to the questions
We age, wander, wonder, mature
Until we accept everything
Like eyes on a shelf of time
Ready to empathizes and stumble
A little longer, every goodbye
Isn’t gone, it’s just the stirring
Of chatter, breath, blood, wings.

Time with her Long Storm and Rainbow Nose

Until it puzzled came
I blinded centuries with my will
To continents of ecosystems entertained
Until the arctic got her drills

For oil, diamonds and the last hurray
Of a species running stock markets
To fetch the bills
I cannot live with you

Greed of white-man firmaments
Let Indian and Chinese colonize Mars
While you flood here with latitudes
Of European migrants over-run

And Germany caught on her heels
Colonial, accustomed and common industry
Alive for the moment, without regret
Wild as the guns they keep at home

While plummets stars from these flags
Too heavy to touch the angels
Too righteous with their own sense of God
Time will interdict the blossoms

California can’t lead the world
That is destined with acute degrees
Judgement day of time and eternity.

The Pain of Nice Dreams

The Pain of Nice Dreams

Eun Ji, I am haunted wherever I go
Trust between this Earth & Ether
I am what I am, with fifth essence
Time bleeds and broods not shyly

I am hunted and descendent
In burning bright and riding light
I am the calm harbour of weary years
Death here becomes the vistas

Of life’s own immortality and passage
From one state to another, decades roll
Like leaves and sun that hits the mountain
And flowers that remember not stories past

I’m glad, I think, and what’s more
Time’s newfound speed is a grace to me
One day to sail to a freer land
The round berries red, have been thrown

Into the river, our houses torn down by the storm
But what is life, but a beating heart
And poems which have not appeared
And experiences that will not be had

And women that won’t ornament our hours
I am that which broods, chiding poetry
Of how it squandered itself on vain holiness
Sacred to itself like a passionate dream.

Jupiter Rising for Those Who Love

When I can look at life in the eyes
Of the heart, from the heart of my eyes
I see the calm of everything
The current of love beneath time

And it shall not be memory
For existence is only fresh in experience
Silent as a woman waiting for love
It’s not enough to act or listen

The world waits for the spring
And youth comes only once
In meagre compensation for biology!
I should be glad for loneliness

And hours to wonder what is divine
And a thirst body that amounts to
An empty heart to fill the jewels
Of single songs of people dear

And lovely melodies full of light
If I have loved much and been loved deeply
It is enough, enough to say
It will soon be over, on a hushed winter’s night.

Dying into Descendents

Artist is Naomi, Montreal. http://naomipaints.com/gallery/mosaics/

Dying into Descendents

Someday, somewhere, in this life

You’ll find yourself hungry

For a freedom from the necessity

Of hope or despair

To be an animal is not

The only way of being

Everything carries you to her

The evolution of your mind

How your soul aches to be

Something else, better

A future of instant information

With senses as great as galaxies

And cells and nodes like planets

And continents, that’s how

The future will feel like

Until then, enjoy your biology

Those small desires and human monotony

You won’ get to keep what you have

Not even who you once were

So borrow and blend until

You and I meet again

As the hymns that fill the worlds

As the lights that are born from stars.

Time

I am myself by Love’s design

Love’s thrill is not long
to balance out the tragedy
this poor suff’ring Heart
that must change in change herself
to endeavor the charms of fleeting
pleasures that charm when young
growing so old a few years later

Love has in store a kind of prosperity
of loyal years and pleasant goodbyes
that time and death become as friends
in time’s flight of fiery bliss
where with tender signs we review
all that has come to pass and gone
as if too soon, to sustain the memory

why is the Spring so sullen on summer’s brink?
ah, now I understand just what
beauty the flowers bear, the mothers sow
in the empathy of a lifetime and of servitude
love’s design is born to be the victim
of all mankind and instinct’s hunt
that cares not who falls and who shall rise.

This is a Heroick Haste

We must celebrate a funeral as a tribute
To a woman or a man’s life, applaud not only
Their achievements, but their character
For the notes of time in fact do not judge

We hasten to our end with hardly onlookers
Authentick by the choices we made
Or the choice of not choosing
Indecision being a kind of a choice

Apathy being a kind of vice of destiny
Opportunity does not wait, nor love
It comes and goes like the opening skies
Treason to ourselves we oft’ commit

Serving duties to title ourselves with praise
Praise as empty as the possessions we accumulate
Travel being a luxury for the fortunate
Not fortunate by merit, but oft’ by birth

This is the world we live in, the ordered inequality
We must celebrate this world before
It’s funeral, before even we go extinct
On our palms the weight of destiny

In our minds the aura of the future’s trade
Swift and restless are the seasons
To fly to wings of victory or perish
And not to a man’s stars can we assume

The choice was his or the storms portrayed
The soul of a man is indeed something else
Than the shallow roles he may have played
To subdue, to civilize, to humanize and to entertain.

On Futurism in the Moment

I don’t believe in living
In the present, I don’t agree.
With all the quotes that say so
We have to conform in the present

With how the world will be in forty years
For that will be the present soon enough
We have to know what’s inevitable
And work to speed up those changes

For in conforming to the future
We are truly in harmony with the past
For we live in a current of historical momentum
So powerful, we are agents of it

So when I hear the phrase “living in the moment”
I find it terribly naive and hopelessly out of touch
With the spirit of time and the zeitgeist
It’s counter-intuitive, however, a certain amount

Of cultural homogeneity is inevitable
So to drop our differences is a good thing
To adopt the common trend
To augment intelligence with artificial intelligence

For an older generation, it’s adopting social media
To use analytics, to partner with machine-learning
It’s the only way this species will survive
Better to be partners than enslaved
Conforming with the future is the real present.

The Biology Simulation

Life repeats herself mindlessly
So give your biology
Some presence
Unless you too want
To live on instinct
Eating, mating, propagating

Without mindfulness
Or perhaps you will go on repeating
What humans have always done
In a very mindful manner?
That too is instinct, that too
Is the brain’s dogma of self-repetition

Maybe you enjoy nature’s traditions?
We are nevertheless afraid
To live life in all possible ways
We stick to the familiar trying
To avoid disgrace, bitter, bad, dark
However, think of all the ways

You could learn by being unconventional
The sages say, experience brings maturity
So every time you refuse an experience
In a sense, it is your fear and immaturity talking
Or perhaps you are just cautious and lazy
Life is the trading on the marketplace of time
What can you give her for all she has given you?

Titled Below

Endless minutes of the present

On the eve of my eulogy to Spring
I confess the white silence
Bathes me in its engaged purity

I am a bud of a soul like a leaf
In time, with me till the end
Of all age and breath and lyrical insight

I do not deserve the light of Summer
Let others save themselves in rapture
I will drown in dead silence

Until there is nothing left of song
And all the poets that were part
Of my underlying thirst and condition

Will be unread like grains of sand
That were once diamonds of my consciousness
And so the Earth takes back

All of us each to our rest
I am humble to the facts of life
If I did not see much of you again

It was not that I did not think of you
Only I was embarrassed by the
Blueness of heavenly stuff I had become

And nothing much, in the material world
Seared by something of your likeness
I had become used to darkness & solitude.

Salt In the Wounds of the Earth

Salt In the Wounds of the Earth

Eun Ji, the rain is coming down
Like the mirror’s play of cloud-flow
Not too different like time
We cannot force our way
Sometimes the path must invite us

To feel a salty waltz of breeze
And surrender to what must be
While our hearts remain private

In the abode of crows and lovers
Who leave us, while we must
Find freedom against the four sides
Of the world, I will wait
While the two Suns

Of my Soul and Spirit cool
O’ save me, that I have been executed
For my deliverance unto eccentricity

The hotter sun will be frozen first
While this Earth raises her temperature
Many a state will go without water
And I will be not quenched by mortality
Nor the little words that the galaxy

Echoes in our voice, so sublime
What famines I have known
And such spiritual ambiguity

I have traced in what I write
The living trunk of fear and procrastination
So much of the human condition
That is fresh, unearthed, with roots
That craves more life than one mere star.

Who Came Sure from a Sea of Light

Who Came Sure from a Sea of Light

O’ the silent stealth of wind
And the transparent cool glance of green
The chide and call of open sky
The pass of years in the bright and brave
The natural, and useful elements
And water and where all doubt recedes
In time’s incessant lack of memory
Where subject disappears in objects
Recurring objects of glorious liberty
And channel of the soul
That washes the body and a life
To streaming rings of sun
And cells of gold for the immortal estate
And the spirit hiding behind the veil
Of a lifetime of walking the path.

some stars

Some Stars

These are amazing, each
Fleeting with the light of each other
As a performance in the night
Arranged by chance

Floating like trees in morning
To meet as far as the eyes can see
As far as things can travel
Exploding to tell us that

ii

Life is everywhere
Something so simple
Like oceans or trees but more distant
Gazing into history with a chorus

Of smiles and a canvas that
Felt like the face of eternity
Placed in a puzzle of so many pebbles
As to dance by the waves

iii

In the sunshine, moving slowly
Across the skies with their
Own accents, own astrology
An astronomy of amazing indifference

Fortitude, prophecy, design
Intelligence in a quantum physics kind of way
These are joining a neighbour or moving
Towards a friend, and does it mean something?

The way they double up, have baby planets
Disappear, we may touch, love, explain….

Mask for Sunshine

Mask for Sunshine

Spring chases death
As light softens night
Into the realization that time
Floods a clear sky daily
Time wasn’t linear

It was just our incomplete
Perspective that made it seem
Chronological like a butterfly
But our software will become
Transparent, like how buds blossom

Organic, mornings turned pink
For the nectar of new opportunity
Spring chases death
Out of the door, but
By the window we see

Our missing half of our lives
How love chases out all memory
Pruning our hearts with the infinite
We’ve studied days and yet
Still cannot find the answers

Practically speaking, there were no
Permanent destinations, no true markers
Only the aromas of experience
As perceived by our executive will
To see bare branches or

To touch and behold buds
The sun will chase us all west
Like birds along the gentle slopes
Of time’s lonely and illegible engravings.

Before the azure sister of spring

Before the azure sister of spring

I met a traveller from an antique land
With golden lips and stories of the future
He spoken of love outlasting weary fate

The lone and level destiny we all must face
I would have sung his song
Had I known the lyrics of dreams

These echoes and lights unto eternity
And seasons that pass with a blink
Of tears and farewells, and all

That is beautiful will come yet again
In another body and mind, to be sure
We are all nomads travelling

From one place to another
And we know where we go
Even if we feign ignorance

The rivers have always mingled
With the oceans and everything
Has always been single, by laws divine

And the Earth never could kiss
High heaven, and the birds never stooped
To eat long there, but preferred

To stray among the clasps of sunlight
What is this sweet embrace of youth?
Is it the cry of life or the nudge of death?

On Carriage held but just ourselves and Immortality

On Carriage held but just ourselves and Immortality

I cannot stop for death
One man’s heart breaking
Is another woman’s birth
I cannot live in vain

For there has never been
Another one quite like me
Not I, unto the nest again
Descendent divinity shall wrap

All my mortal wounds
Filling me with light
Hope is the thing with feathers
That fly on dreams that dance

At every dawn, at every twilight
I cannot stop for death
But I must risk it all
To live the life I want

Death will not ask me for directions
When it is to Immorality
Of the soul for which I walk
I know no haste, for I believe

In my appointed hour and place
I cannot stop for death
For Fate has me in his civility
I labour past leisure for a cause

Of which all previous acts accumulate
I cannot stop for death
For eternity will feel jaded
If I stop for long for anyone.