The Little Dew


 

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.

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.

Time with her Long Storm and Rainbow Nose


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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.

Losing #NationalPoetryMonth #NaPoWriMo


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Losing as a Perquisite to Experience

The art of losing doesn’t take
Practice, we do it a bit every day
It isn’t hard to master
We all have a talent in forgetting

Memory is not accurate you see
It doesn’t take analytics to say
That we lose each other a bit
Each day, so don’t spend

Your hours badly, don’t leave
Your keys in the door
Love is a practice of losing further
Losing faster, it’s a lost art

How to watch the watches, please
Just love your life, that’s primary
Then love each other, that’s secondary
The art of losing isn’t hard to master

I owned a lifetime then it was taken away
We don’t possess, we just experience
The art of losing doesn’t take any
Special belief in the afterlife.

LISTEN, POETRY HAS A FAINT VOICE EVEN SO


98

I will put chaos into sixteen lines
And remember the effort hidden in alphabets
The flood, fire and demon of all words
The order of memory put to paper, pen, screen

The arrogance of feeling misunderstood
For all eternity, I will put these confessions
To bed, without answers, evermore
I will strain to invisible problems

And witness an audience of writers
Struggling to find themselves
Past the hours, in their earthly dreams
I will pet the anxiety of paragraphs

And etch them in the frailty of my will
Stitching with careful industry my loss
That I might recall my tragedy in lines
The laughter trapped in summer crickets long ago.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/–467093425

轉型


31
37
i

Despair fails like dreams before living
The direct path requires not
Drama, repeating tragedies, private dilemmas
Simplicity renews itself
At a blink before the flower shop
And the faint subtraction of youth
Pride flashes like lightning before

ii

The rain carefully washes us to become
Free of adversity, we finally arrive
At the rose-blue light, transport
Before Dawn, at our favorite place
The clarity after all frameworks have
Been revealed, the neutrality after attachment

iii

The love after karma’s supermarket trash
Was taken away in the heart of an impure soul
Despair fails, like how an old neighborhood
Cannot stay the same, the habit of suffering
Gets endured one way or another.

UNTIL BIRD-RACKETING DAWN


35

When night comes back
Back in black with her Royal dreams
Death with lift us all apart
Though aging does that just fine
Our wings of where we
Once flew, the sunlit open skies
And when red breaks out

Blood-dropped Sunsets spill
Across the ancient Lullaby
Of the setting West alongside
All that we once held dear
That nightlong spin on Time
Peels the stars from our rooftops
A canopy of light-hunted mistresses
All screaming the same name, LIFE.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/dark-bird-450866660

CALL to POETS

The Festival has a unique theme this time, poems about poetry, do you have any to offer up?

It’s one of the most decorated topics so if you are up to the challenge:

LINK

http://www.writerscafe.org/contests/Wuji-International-Poetry-Festival-IX%2A/49886/

Theme is Metapoetry.

Dream in Which I am Separated from Myself


35

We won’t go ambushing grief
She will find us – trembling, naive
To the power of our tragedy
This is not cinematics, circus-stunts
This is our Life, calm and bleak
Sweet, with unexpected concerts

I won’t be going to enormous cities
Like you, I’m staying put, staying
Humble, simple, in the experience
Of an Alumni from all that I was supposed to be
We won’t go hijacking, ‘everything in it’s rightful place’
You used to say so casually, making it easier

To leave, to return to your liberated ‘freedom’
I won’t find salvation so easily, I’m afraid
My dad doesn’t say a word about, depression
We won’t go hiding form fate, it will hit us
Black, blue, purple – three syllables in chaos
I am my father’s father, ill-mooned withdrawal

Quarantined in these little years
Waiting for whole days, that never come
I am tired of being criticized, I am cold
I imagine myself happy, in line to be touched.

No Remedy for Being Human


28

We couldn’t contain the sunsets, or
The sunsets were lost on us
So stranded were we in our personal tragedies
We didn’t stop to let beauty matter

Grudging and thin, we wanted
Our place in the hierarchy
The artificial world we created
Inside of nature, unnaturally warped

By being a consumer, by exploiting others
We didn’t have the time, or
The sensitivity, to let the light in
The swirling colors, they

Existed outside of our ambition
Our pressure to be respect-worthy
We weren’t artists, we were just people
Trying to be normal all the while.