As a Poet Burning Oneself Out

My swirling wants no longer want
The grammar of my soul has turned alchemic
Themes written under duress have come and gone

Passed, like the emptiness of notation
Like art, after the generation of my audience
Have died, the failure of criticism
To detract from the journey
I am a writing automation or

An experience of repetition in a simulation
On how to become a writer and bleed
Ten thousand hours into my craft

The thing most I love, the trip until forever
That’s literature to me, a dying art
Now I know what it feels like to be
A minority, like Native Americans
To have become nearly obsolete

Time takes hold of us like a draft
And the sun produces powerful dreams
That never feel completed, crimson-fingered

We draw in the earth, in the ash
But our designs are never done
There isn’t enough time and fire
To create what we had hoped to make.

Thighs of your Genius

Thighs of your Genius

(for Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach)

I brought your Jewish soul some water
For your literary festivity
We both kneeled by the muse of spiritual words
Our collarbones angled to the skies

We knew the sacrifice and the longing
We were migrants of a different sort
We had travelled with necessity
And ached to find a home somewhere

Beneath the different dialects
The open-ended wounds we had sustained
Getting from one place to another
And sustaining the years where injuries

Were slow to heal, our hearts and lungs
Felt the fear of too much shirting
Our pulse steady as a loving pupil
We felt the silence of a lifetime of breath

In the steady gaze of each other
And then we let go, for all our dreams
Had already existed in the written word
There was only an unlived memory of love

That stuck to the back of our throats
Like medicine for poetry, and dispatched anonymity
Our dance of vocabularies were
Like Piscean windows that met the Eastern symbols
An alchemy of goose bumps and organic teasing.

Eulogy to Poetry

Eulogy to Poetry

Think in the morning
And poetry has died
What would you say to her?
First language and eldest daughter
I saw you in grains of sand

Your love trapped in wild flowers
I set the seas to your lips
And burned a thousand dreams
In your skies of velvet pink
I knew you as infinity of evolution

Guiding me to future hours
The trees cried flowers because of you
And the sun made songs of her Spring
You never know love of language
Until language is gone, like Sanskrit

An exuberance of many ways
To the say the same dear familiar things
Which to another generation, might be unknown
That’s poetry, a rare bird going extinct
That’s poetry, a strange magic being replaced

That’s poetry, the kind of book not published
That’s poetry, the kind of soul that can’t be bought.

Black Swan Job Application

Black Swan Job Application
(Qualities to be a Writer)

I’ve come to recognize the synopsis
For the job, writers wanted!
Ability to isolate yourself for the cause
Being okay with alone time

Being receptive to criticism
Intrinsic motivation to explore
Narratives, boundaries, create beauty
Ability to withstand rejection

Talent for creating opportunities
Out of imaginary characters
Willingness to network with others in the craft
Perfectionism in editing and reworking

Old content, to update content and to
Explore themes for self-defining new content
Asking tough questions about one’s own identity
Gender, ethnicity, social-class, family psychology

Enjoyment of reading books, a lot of books
Devouring libraries, workshops, ceremonies
Rites of passage, ability to withstand
Years require to obtain Masters in Fine Arts

Creating writing certificates, rather important here
Explorations of own style to the point of
Exposition of vulnerability, masochism and
Notable ventures into new literary territories

Must be willing to change and use own imagination
With ultimate soul-breaking investment
For greatness, fame, poetic ecstasy, first-hand novels
Scripts, blog posts, extreme loneliness in the pursuit
Of what you love, only apply if serious.

The Joyful Good

The Joyful good

I’ve been doing a bit of Spring cleaning
Looking for an online application
On how to become a Eun Ji of lit
I don’t need some far flung MFA

If I can have that, if I Can learn to write
16 hours a day and live for what I love
And I found, the biggest word I knew
Was still love, still an open-ended sort of

Thing I can’t easily explain to lovers
I’ve been looking up how to write frankly
A requiem to an ode to a poet, I admire!

I think I’ll just dance alone in my mind now
I saw your trauma inside shiny wrapping paper
And I knew it, I just knew, I’d found my calling

No place like belonging that belongs to where
You wish to belong, that’s the joyful good
Following your bliss down the rabbit hole

I hope I have a bed to land in, don’t let me
Become a willing participant in pop-art
It’s just not the kind of Jazz I can survive
To be a poet of tiger balms or racy one-lines.

– I heart:
Eun Ji

Gah:

https://twitter.com/thisisEJKoh/media

Protégé

Protégé

Take me back to the dawn
Of clouds when you knew
You were going to become a writer

Juxtapositions of mean business
Drafts of volunteering with the moon?
The truth is, I was there too

I fell in love with watching you
How you reshaped alphabets, stroked
The necessary motion of your poetics
Touched the wallpaper of your dreams

Slipped crawling with angels back
To the Earth, to wherever West Coast
Because I was the ghost on your lampshade
I was the whispers of your pillow

And we were witnessing something
Of the bright side of you that is willing to share
Be influenced and collaborate
Like a marketing hook of what you would become….

As the Sun Sings along the Navels of Prophets

Art by: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Prophet-26476972

But now he sleeps without end
His potential buried forever
Now the moss and the grass
Flowers the dreams of what

His life would have been
Better maybe than some fates
The dew will simply blanket
Darkness, his soul will retreat

Maybe one day to take form again
And he will seek a confident profile
And his goal will bewilder him
And his beautiful body will carry

The tiger-thirst of the multitudes
And he will play his role
Below the stars like an actor
And the horse-clouds will see him

And the groups of silence
In the corners of the Earth
Will whisper of him
Like Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus

Or Kalki whoever, it goes on
A lament for what a man stood for
A symbol for what truths can mean
Across generations; a philosopher,

A poet, a prophet, an innovator
Because, tomorrow’s love does not wait
Evolution does not falter
Her veins of coral are never mute
But flow with the pride of genius itself.

The ghost writers

Art by: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Salzburg-s-unicorn-499959719

But as for me, the smell of books
Is perhaps enough, my bride
The gracious literature

Who does not threaten to leave
Or say I do not make enough gold
The holy emblem of this art

Whose pen is its own reward
A kind of artistic altruism
That plunges itself without restraint

On a canvas, spelling “freedom”
Over and over until
My heart might warm divinity

From the cold world’s touch
But ah, the libraries are lonely places
And the authors must fight

Lofty ghosts, that swim in the brain
For to write is to sacrifice, I know
It well, so find delight, go

In cheaper things, more easy investments
For this is a passion not for the meek
And this is a love that is not
As fickle as the illiterate barbarians out there.

Between Silence and Music

I will defy the movement of language
With syllables soft before the snow
For Autumn in the fewest chosen words
Along lines of simple alphabets

In the palm of my listening
I will observe you walk as a poem
Skips across ethereally this earth
With colors and bodies of Christmas

An instantaneous impression of beauty
I will sing a lullaby to the irreproachable sky
And kiss the poem-greeting letters
That dissolve as a soul among the trees

And the centre of music
That is a living expression of the times
Today the sun comes out in your poem
And I listen for the poem I will write in reply

I will be a hero of a recluse today, again
With an inner smile of jewel-pointed clarity
That the imagination is a universal thing
The night’s sheerness of black gardens

A voice from which religions spring
Spiritual movement completes itself
In an intuitive release of meaning
A letting go of the sadness of having come

And gone, like death, poetry takes me there
As a river of music, entering my blood
Chilling me with a serotonin symphony
The joy of being here, the glances and reflections

Of existence, mirroring poetry
Between silence and music
The snow and sun, men and women
The rain and drums stalk my fantasies.

Photo Courtesy:
AGNES CECILE
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http://agnes-cecile.deviantart.com/gallery/23399055/Featured
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https://www.facebook.com/SilviaPelissero

POETRY: III

I know you are reading this poem
Toward a new kind of love
That filled you last night from somewhere
You cannot name, it’s source

The latitude of rush-hours where
Revelation comes, who knows why
The bedclothes of our last
Tattered garments of faith

Towards a new kind of breath
Your life has never allowed
That speaks of volumes of flight
Before the alphabet of precious

Dedication of some philosophical flowering
The enormous sense of being more
Than what our lives seems, as pure
As early spring days covered in doubt

A good kind of anticipation for
Beauty, health, renewal, the touch
And the thirst to live, like reading
A poem silently in our open minds.

Happiness Didn’t Pick Another Day

I’m happy with a new content It’s called feeling altered By the Universe’s care That comes unbidden like Appreciated Air, and a gratitude For clean Water, abundant Green Such a fate that I was ministered Must conclude in happiness The …

The Privilege to Write

I travel in words, as some Would travel on feet I call my home, the written word Though in her curious rooms I’ve found a part of myself The Inn to which I am most fond Where in language I …

Sad Eyed Lyricist

I’ve spotted it with tears (I pronounced to all my living verse) Your infant faces are proof of it ! The crumbled years, the kissed cheeks White as snow, red as apples The harmonics of a life enriched By syllables …

Ode to Writing

I bring to the table
That which arrests the sun
I am a writer, to raise a finger
To my weary mortal lips

What I speak has been spoken before
What I say, will never
Be said again – I am
The vowel attempting

To pronounce, metaphors unknown
On the table’s wilderness
The writer pretends
Enough failed ascension

For a lifetime to know
My pen has tipped over the page
Spilt the ink in a trickle
Of heart to the goose quill

That which once said:
Can never be quite said again
Representing a moment
Unique in the history of art

I bring to the table
That which the light can attest
I am a writer, to raise an eyebrow
To the stars sunk in the air
That hang low across the sea.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Writing-49291934

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

With Specimens of Song

– Where Hart Crane once jumped

You love the invisible
You write IT everyday
You claim your little notes
Further the language of the Day

With ample letters, of your love
To witness the light which delights
The air is clear and transparent
Where your voice speaks like a melody

Your love is for the invisible
With incorporeal pillows vain
Your sunrise is a spiritual event
Somewhere inside your little brain

Your love, it is for the invisible
A dreamer interrupting his own ground
You write journals for eternity
God bless your suddeness
that which you call dear poetry.

http://www.deviantart.com/art/Bridge-at-night-II-403312876

I Admonish Thee

Hope is the circumference of life
Faith is the circle of the fall
Creation the mighty exponent of
Oxygen and water, blood and time

History notes love is posterior
To fate, that seal of light
That spreads what we were
And mixes it with the cycles
*
That never stop, only recede to start again
Revelation cannot end with
Going blind, we learn to listen
Silence is the jewel of posterity

The future, the brimming Deity in our eyes
Perhaps we ask too large a place
No less to explore the furthest skies
Hope remains the circumference
*
Faith ends all beliefs of smaller bundles
Creation the happening where we exist
Open to all accidents of loss
Yes, oxygen, water, blood, time
These too will be taken away.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/autumn-sun-402106762

Prince of Fools

In the warm sunshine, of a beautiful mind –
I rest my head, I do weep
I of all people know, what it signifies
Brief mortality, organic vulnerability

I could die of shame/
For knowing, how a writer
Is circumcised, like love without a clitoris
Who can pounce upon that

Dream, there is no rule/
Who wins in literature
I won’t get an MFA
Or become a publication whore

But in the countryside of /
Amber singing alphabets
I’ll die of humility
As if I lived in unemployed Spain

In some little villages, where the flock is thin/
In the warm sunshine
Of a fellow artist, I’ll cross my heart
And shed a tear, and tell them

‘Nobody mourns the giver’
Because the beauty
Is in the message, I see a sadness in this
There is no salvation here

Back to the king’s court/
Where everything is political
And everything is ugly
I strive towards your mandalas

That you hide in the courtyard/
There is no such thing, as the death of the muse
Beauty lives too brightly in us
I’ll be destroyed like a prince of fools.

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 Prophet in Me

I’ve driven myself mad

With the world like a Prophet

To nobody, I am not special

 

With my private ardor

For poems and the eyes of peacocks

All this worshiping

 

Will bring me nothing

Dots, like lost saviors

Lines, like hollow martyrs

 

I resign myself to poverty

And horrible lethargy

A vast elegy of dissonance

 

I’ve driven myself mad

With hope and anvils

I’ve unfinished and extended myself

With water and disquietude.