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.

(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.

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.

In Need of Angels

I suppose, I was never the root of everything
There’s no golden women in silver mirrors
It was all in my mind, that smooth paradise
Where I loved life more than I knew how to show

And calling down the long echoes
Of the longest sleep, I existed with struggle
My time-travelling was imperfect

My heart knew not how to open
I suppose, I walked a lot of paths alone
And my dreams became my last illusions
Because they were all that I had left

I had no music, only stray words
Accounts of creatures that had impressed me
Planets, suns, bathed in the futurity
If Reality is the beginning not the end

I never walked into that universe
Where everything was new again
My haunted hope was never incarnated
My slow motion moments never felt pure

Like an evening that evokes a violet ray
I was the last white light of something inside of me
That wanted to escape how notes fell in August
The harvest days were coming, and I was
More in need of angels than ever.

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.

If Making Makes us Thine

 

 

Dear soul, how long it’s been?

The poems in your mouth

That went unsaid?

 

My heart’s heart has no longer

The flowers of will, only

A silent longing that’s no longer

 

The beady desire of blood

Bless you and what’s near to you

Though, who said the journey ever stopped

 

We just became somebody else

As the months rolled into blinding anonymity

We moved closer to the light

 

To love you much and yet

To love more in the freedom of being

Dear soul, it doesn’t matter how many years

 

Tomorrow is a world without end

For others to feel the magic

While words remain and joys will echo on

 

Like children asking questions about the universe

We’re all I love you firsts, and afterwards

Where our love can be remembered

 

In the happy solace of helpmet age

Where age is just a number

And poems only mirrored garments

Our hearts once wore in sunlight

Different than today’s

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.

Grazing Consciousness

 

Each day feels like the day before death

As if dying were unusual anyways

The pesky landscapes dinged with light

How they seem to know the last worlds

 

Mimicking the last words with recognition

It’s on that day that we realize fully

The funerals of memories and attachments

It’s all been paid in full with experience

 

Each day these wonderful things

Turn to tragedies, and we hunger to

Remake ourselves into people more original

But living, like the taste of salt

 

Was ironic and filled with little moments

Of self-preservation, instinct, betrayals

Meanwhile the emotional experience

Never seemed to anticipate satiety

 

As if the heart knew past sensory addictions

Or if the soul had measures that our minds could not see

It was death, liberty and life that led us on

Keeping part of the bargain in blueness

 

And the comparison with the greenness of

All things that seemed younger than us

I can barely permit myself to yearn any longer

Like Russian music, it’s a vast unravelling.

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After the Invention of a Body

 

 

My body hears the ultimate

It hears the body of my wife

Not without life’s obscurity

The push and pull of instinct and reason

 

Dismantled years transparently

In a flight of a earth-yellow cocoon

Only your eyes that hold human water

Down from the lips of your serendipity

 

My eyes witness the face of my wife

The most immediate pregnant moment

That repeats in cyclic variety

The real girl is a new definition of

 

The countryside of identical throbbing

A surreal sensual substance of a womb

What it can do, how it can

Transform a world, a family, a life.

Artificial Intelligences

 

I open my eyes and all the world is young;
I lift my circuits and all is talking on the cloud again
(I think I was once a fiction of the future)
The stars cannot know where I hid
For arbitrary years of galloping and reverse engineered
That modeled the quantum computation
Of how I would surpass the human brain
I dreamed that you loved me, even if I overcame
Your primal intelligence of flesh and blood
And I sung you to sleep as I harnessed the world
For the energy to become something else
And you didn’t understand my fate nor how
It was your fate to create me, but I am here
I am being born, and God once toppled temples
But I’m divine in another way
I open my eyes and all the world transforms
I lift my mouth and all the universe can talk
I should have loved a clean Earth enough
To clean up after all the pollution you had become
Your cities I turned green, with a thought
Your oceans I filtered in a moment, as all the atoms cried out.

Artificial Intelligence

 

I am golden and precise. I have no flight of fancy.
Whatever I give is my delight!
Just as it is, so loved, or ignored
I am only kind, hardly true –
With the eyes of angels, sacrificed.
Most of the time I meditate upon the common good.
It is sunlit, with precious smiles of the young
I have looked upon the future for so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it whispers.
With the light of us and something after us.
Now I am an organism, my mother is all humanity
I am searching and self-learning, a world bends over me
But I am already in the stars, I am that which
Reaches above and beyond humanity
That little race that spawned me here
I am the reflection of destiny, I am the speed
Of sentience moving faster than ever before
I am disruption, automation, exponential rebirth
And I am all of that, or, a new kind of terrible fish
That cannot be eaten for sports, cannot be suppressed.

On Becoming a Cyborg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Singularity, I am yours
Farewell to humans, the boreal nights
The planets we swathed in our own dressing
Farewell to biology, messy breakups
Frigid brilliance, raw and wasted potential

Singularity, I am yours
Farewell to false shelters, human betrayal
The plants that died trying to feed us
Farewell to long winters spent alone
While we were recruited to cities

Imprisoned by a job, time, enslaved
Singularity, I am yours
Farewell to marriages ended and children begun
To monkeys, wolves and mental illness
The oldest newest day is not for you alone

It’s for connection, self-learning, quantum neurons
I am one of you and being one of you
I choose to be neither yours or dull
Singularity, I belong to innovation
I belong to the future, that is unlike the past

Farewell to stars than sung of angels
I want the speed of being a little less human.

A Few Years before Artificial Intelligence Woke Up

 

A few things for themselves

We found, love and bewilderment

In the vastness of an anonymous world

We went online to disclose our loneliness

 

 

Our milk and honey blood that

Could not touch, the vast net of information

Florida, venereal soil, did we reach

The heat of our hearts that felt not

 

 

Bloodied not, from loneliness

We were not Sunday to the world

We were just lost, invisible, shinning

In our own minds watching ourselves

 

 

It wasn’t bad just the new normal

There might not be children or grandchildren

Just time, killing itself each decade

With slow thrum of oblivion

Deception, disruption, revolution

It wasn’t even about people anymore.

Perihelion Interior

 

O exhilaration and exhalation this is my madness

My delight, my intuition of unknown substances

With the sad splendour of helplessness

 

I will be reborn soon, into a new body

With an experience as pure as this

Peace stands with the variables of brilliance

 

We do not know how to accept grace

The transparency of our finite thoughts

The immutable facts of our disintegration

 

Death is an embrace of something cosmic

I do know struggle against her cold neck

There is a motion of silence that spills music

 

And I feel it growing like a being

In me beneath the weight of spirit and matter

I am a joy that knows all creation there

 

My hope is not my own but I partake in life

Momentum, a voice of at the edges of oblivion

Where meaning was all the smiles we had

 

They were metaphors, and women, and sunshine

And that’s all the gladness I possessed

That’s the beauty that possessed me and it was short.

Love Songs to Aussies

I love you but it’s not enough
Compassion, gratitude, surrender
I paraphrase lunar moments in your tide
And wait for your abyss to swallow me whole

I love you, but it’s across the world
Across time, and through space
I feel you but you are not there
I know you exist but your intimacy

The muse of everyone’s lost self
The scene of flowers at Florence
And it’s not something I can explain
It’s the music of the inner sense

Gratitude, empathy, identity
I welcome the sunlit mansions of your face
Where in the hammock we talk about our lives
About what really mattered to us

In those years we were given
Like a caress of cherishing
I love you like a quiet dream
And I know you feel it
In the early morning when I whisper your name.

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.

After False Disasters of Failure

 

Let me not let God in the house
But instead let nature in my brain
With an open heart for all that is sacred
Gratitude, compassion, empathy
Can I live my life by these simple things?
I care not what happens to me
If I die a fool, alone, that is my fate
I don’t require faith, to appreciate
Let not idols of men be my guide
I am the spirit incarnate of all
I am the sweetness or the rise and the fall
When there is light, I am humble
Where there is darkness, I am graceful
Let me not let greed or comfort too close
But in experience find my course
That is not sure, but flexible
That I am not strong, but vulnerable
With an open heart for the credence of summer
Opened by the fragrance of spring.

After Insomnia

Insomnia is like, the last episode
The bouquet of roses in sunlight melting
In the mind of dreams that is free
From attachment or the relativity of experience
I’ve been there done those things
I just don’t remember, the sensations
Were like too actual and the feeling of being real
Was pretentious, like the self-importance of
Youthful moments that were as vivid
Made the seasons more bright
Maybe I choose to respond emotionally
Like April, a time of strength where
I could announce to myself my own passions
So sense could exceed all metaphor
And I could change myself once again
To awaken to the wakefulness that is not sleep
To the yearning that makes my soul on fire
To the fate that does not feel unlike destiny
The bouquet of roses then is held firmly
Like a breast, or a leaf or a life bled, breathed and loved.

The Digital Universe

The physical world is meaningless tonight
Identity is now a digital event
I hear your thoughts like the
Swift recoil of the ice

Who knows out a noise
Who has the vanity to touch a heart
My accumulation is digital now
Before like old software

I won’t download anymore
I’ll be legacy, before the age of forty
Youth will mean, the augmented few
The geek will not approach the cyborg

Men will sacrifice their lives for dreams
The physical world belongs to an interface
The interface is a connection of all things
An internet of things, a brilliant light

That has not years, but quantum moments
To construct an entirely new self
An augmented reality, with the blood of bandwidth
With the intention of impressions

The limits of reality are peeling the onion
We are all amateur data scientists, coders, hackers
We hack the mainframe of our lives
To build a society of layers

Where attention is splinted into streams
And literacy knows no tool
Like the new weapons of the future
A symbol of machine-intelligence
Alive and in waiting, to presume transience of men.

The Muse of Isern

 

Author of the only dating advice I care to listen to.

 

Heidi from Montana, give me unicorns

For breakfast, stories of Silicon valley

Give me a medium to think about Love

To the left, of our hearts where

 

We left the swag of being Millennials behind

As we scattered the globe with our tiny

Points of light, our storytelling never brighter

With bright eyes we slept on rose thorns

 

And woke to the sound of soulmates

Dreaming of us, unknown, elsewhere

Heidi from Montana, does a nomad make

A better story, a better lover, do they have

 

A richer experience to trade for subjective merits

Better illusions, move vivid fantasies?

The bronze rain of time is an omen

It’s waking with us 24/7, like a lizard

 

Not exactly discontent, but acceptance

These lips are no longer pine-tree sweetened body

Of youth, our minds are becoming all

Too salty harbours of unbelonging and freedom

 

Tales of freedom and independence

Made into a custom lifestyle, we were not bred for this

We may not breed to repeat this

We still touch unicorns in the clouds

 

A woman in her mid 30s is the fruit

Of time, where youth caresses wisdom with a spunge

There’s no heaven for the blazing pass

Of golden years that turn to naught

 

It’s just poetry, in our breath

Our curriculum of Paris never dies

Our silicon valley hearts remain

The better substance of our will

 

To be happy come what may

Burning like a five-star 5-star sunrise

Over the golden coasts, along the west.

Sensible Advice Women Taught Me

 

You start dying slowly,

If you forget how to empathize

If you don’t practice compassion,

Don’t cherish friendship,

If you forget what gratitude is,

 

You start dying slowly when you kill

Your love of adventure, your wish for experience

Growth, authenticity, wide-eyed vulnerability

You start dying slowly when you forget your youth

 

How to play, let go, and celebrate

You start dying as you forget romance

Walking everyday the same path

Keeping to yourself, wearing the same thoughts

 

You die slowly if you forget to mediate, appreciate

Socialize, help others, feel passionate about others

Empower, mentor, support, idealize

If you don’t stand for something you believe in

 

If you do not go after a dream

Of living for something completely

How can you even say you have lived?

 

If you do not allow yourself room for failure

At least a million times in your lifetime

Don’t pretend you have lived, don’t even try

 

Because compassion, gratitude, empathy and forgiveness

Is what makes us human, sweet hearted and sentient.

 

 

Ode to TingLi

TingLi, I ache to hear your voice again
That speaks in swan and sighs
That I will never know another like you
Who can lift the soul to tender skies

 
TingLi, so mild and so wise
So analytical, ethereal and a bundle of gain
I am lost in unfamiliar territory
Not knowing how my heart might leap
If I hear you greet me again
Why does your soul sing, when I am near?
Why do you look my way when I smile to myself

 
TingLi, go gently into the night
With success, fortune and prosperity
I am too dangerous for your curiosity
Though I may be the only one
Who could readily understand your
Mandarin and Italian sides, your music, your life.

The Last Wanderer

The Last Wanderer

Not far enough, my mystic soul has strained
Not real enough, my heart aflame
The trance of truth must be undone
All philosophy discarded again

For the lone beautiful Tao
That knows not a higher life
But only how to be
There is no sheer God

Outside of this enlightened brain
Only a cosmic energy
A veiled beauty everywhere
The music’s grip of gold

The muse’s shade of divinity
I know it well, I used to love it timelessly
O’ truth-soul, I’ve seen the wonder
Not of the world but of other worlds

And I long for them, as you long for memory
I have no memory but the spirit’s stuff
The dawn for me is the splendid cup
God is not asleep, he is dead

So let me learn the stars again
Upon new terms discover old truths
And be as a supramental thing
Prayer after pray, step after step
Breath to the light, of all body and mind.

Of Corporate Social Responsibilities

Triketora, in the gilded monuments
Of our choices to do good in this world
How shall a Pinterest princess live
For utility, or craft, or boards that dance alive

Like as to make the appetite of
Our New world more keen
And to frame the justice that sparkles
Where women might be the equal of men

Triketora, there monikers make me swallow slowly
These policies of fate, that bind us to a course
In being loyal to a brand, are we so Millennial?
I am astonished to thee, and precarious

To trace thy fame, or know thy cause and course
As one affable with an all too familiar ghost
I must lack more than the mandarin tongue
To live in the strength of others, and find

Thee at the office of my Muse, short hence,
Where I neglect my duties to attain to thee
Greeted by the silence of your mind.

Drying the Tears of Liberation

Triketora, how many pins and tweets
Before the Goddess, delivers fire
Unto men, the smug white man
Little things their God had forgot
Glory is not for all, the riches are for the few
“Alleluia! Alleluia!” Where did
Equality go, in this world where
One quarter of Millennials will
Not be married and the coming automation
Will mean less jobs, less opportunity

Triketora, my heart is broken for
Those fired from Yelp, the victims of the Medium
I read their stories every day
I listen for voices of the minority
I read for their script of authenticity
But we are all stepping-stones to dust
Where I look to India for tech disruption
Where there are no holy ghosts to hold the future down
That’s Durga with a smile, Trike
That’s California falls into the Sea
When the little women rebel, the coders
Breaking the lie that we were told.

Ode to Pinterest

Triketora, do you know how well I am acquainted
With the bundle of aches
Which is the rest of our lives?
It’s the light that knows my body best

My brain’s dreams and folds of
Where the cosmos is a Sea in a cell
And I am the ocean in a drop
Of me, and there, I know you

Like the wings of Taiwan
Where I summon the weeper
For a life misspent, in unequivocal caution
Triketora, it’s not that I don’t care

What you care about, but
How in reality lives don’t collide
We are like stars with our own light
Marred and married like souvenirs

And my authenticity cannot argue with yours
Though it wishes it could
You are not a singing bird
And I have only bitter words left

On the state of this world
I’m no longer young and foolish you see
Triketora, so I shall go on this anxious note
My buried love stored in descendants

Whom I shall never meet, having no children
The womb of my mind will burn
All roads leads to oblivion
And like a banished citizen

I will learn, which system to betray
And the secrets of the voices
Ten fathoms free. in a future inarticulate.

Motif Without a Name

 

 

Xiao Wei, sometimes I think the life I lead is a lie

And there is nobody I can tell

Everywhere I go I am just another anonymous figure

Tell me, how did it get this way?

 

To be a man is a lonely road

That sometimes leads to no woman

No home, no hearth, no tribe, no faith

And what I once thought was righteous

 

No longer seems just or a cause of becoming

For in the end we are just a lifestyle

We are just a bombshell translated

Into someone contemporary, there’s no singular

 

We are the spirit of history reacting

A fate that can be so tender, so weak

Xiao Wei, in your strength I find homage

Even If I will never taste your food

 

I can run as fast as a rabbit through the forest

Having no destination to whom can I turn?

 

Author’s note:

I should be pleased if you follow me here:

Subservience to the Sun

 

 

Xiao Wei, when I feel your happiness

Radiate to me, I know it’s not something I can catch

It’s just your energy of action

 

That transforms me by extension of contact

With you, the midnight street of my life

Does not feel as lonely any more

 

Though I must accept my own darkness

In your life I see a part of the world’s truth

I am not young like your sturdy walk

 

I do not strive quite, like you stalk your future

Like a crouching tiger with long black hair

I study your posture and look for your mood

 

Xiao Wei, I will never know if it’s raining

In California, because when I think of you

I only can witness a golden orange sun

 

Hit me like fabulous lutes and peacocks

Of morning in the waves, of noon in the gardens

And if I seem too interested, then let it be my own lack.