ㅁ In the end, my travels depressed me. Revisiting things left behind, I had to confront losses. Decisions were taken that ended old ways. In this new life, set apart, the past rots.
– a nonnet.
Category: Book 4
Caveat: Poem #2855 “Planning ahead”
ㅁ with enthusiastic diagrams I'm planning out my senescence targeted losses of things a whole, long catalog abstract memories fine procedures old journeys new thoughts plans
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2854 “The tasks”
ㅁ I had a lucid dream this morning all composed of raw emotion. I knew that I was dreaming so I set myself some tasks: experience fear; cry in despair; fall in love; know joy; die.
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2853 “Inspection tour
ㅁ Back at home: I went off to inspect trees, the various ones I've planted in the ground at spots around my domain: the oak, three maples, cherry, fir these are alive. Others, not so much.
– a reverse nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2852 “Crossing the Pacific”
ㅁ Bands of purple line the sky up here beside our flight; below, Japan. We'll leave the sun behind us, and now insert ourselves, stealthy, like angels, into the east and darkness and then dawn. Well, somewhere just south of Kamchatka, I opted to boldly declare a new, liminal approach: an opposition to exaggerations of sentience, and instead, exist. So. Later, over the Aleutian chain, there arose feelings of regret. Baroque significations unfurled their abstractions. Inaccessible, meanings were lost; nothing left, I sought sleep.
– a poem made of 3 nonnets enchained.
Caveat: Poem #2851 “Return”
ㅁ I actually feel less tired - I mean... compared to my expectations. Visiting my friends, perhaps - these friends I'd abandoned - recharged me a bit, left me engaged with living... and with dreams.
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2850 “Awake with a start”
ㅁ Then I was so tired on the airplane. I'd doze, immediately dream, enchain strange mental symbols, overdetermined signs, archeologies of lost cities, but not real... just dust, light
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2849 “The drive down from Atherton to Cairns”
ㅁ the tropic rain made downward gestures reaching wildly from bold gray clouds to caress my car's windshield and dodge the slow wipers while the strong trees leaned and cows waited patiently in green fields
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2848 “Arboreal visitations”
ㅁ A flash of green, high up in the tree. Lorikeets sometimes visit, here. It seems an exotic thing, now that I live up north, up in Alaska. Eucalyptus leaves wave; a bird flies.
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2847 “Down in Atherton”
ㅁ "You're just wanting to lock me away," my mother said to me, leaving. At the home for the aged, we'd discussed with the staff various aspects of living there. I told mom, "it's your choice."
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2846 “Night sky”
ㅁ Guilt lingers, manifests, and taking form, breeds defensiveness, and thus leads to anger. You can't really solve this thing. Instead, just try to ignore it. Let it fade away like dusk's edges.
– a reverse nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2845 “As skeletons will do”
ㅁ while entire surging seas are crossed over, something's left behind; the affective anchor lies abandoned alongside so many aimless skeletons trudging around and murmuring dreams
– a reverse nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2844 “Geologic time”
ㅁ looking down from the zooming airplane we note each cloud casts its shadow perfectly against landscapes rumpled by the passage of a time so slow whole continents have drifted like swans past
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2843 “Unmooring”
ㅁ there's a detachment that arises when traveling to old places - once willfully forgotten - they're now resurrected like shadow kingdoms and there's nothing different... faded... lost...
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2842 “Amistad”
ㅁ I have this one friend in Korea who often speaks Spanish with me - that's how we met long ago. That language is rare here. We met in Suwon, one cold winter, and we talked... became friends.
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2841 “Solvitur ambulando”
ㅁ I'm walking, trying to do magic. If I follow these well-known paths, that I walked in times before... somehow I'll reconnect my current being with some past self who knew things: what to do.
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2840 “Following lay lines”
ㅁ I crossed the geomantic ocean to visit an old, green country inhabited by those ghosts that no one remembers; but they have projects, undertakings: they make us feed them dreams
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2839 “Ode to Gyeongui-ro”
ㅁ The old highway's path once crossed rice fields and green hills; these days... all buildings.
– a pseudo-haiku. A tribute to the old highway running northwest of Seoul, the “capital road.”
Caveat: Poem #2838 “A return”
ㅁ here I have arrived at this previous abode feeling nostalgic
– a pseudo-haiku. In observance of my temporary return to my former home in Korea, this week, after a 6-year exile in Alaska.
Caveat: Poem #2837 “The suburban landscape”
ㅁ in the big city... well more like suburbs mostly: americanscape
– a pseudo-haiku.
Caveat: Poem #2836 “A declaration on the matter of the poet’s dialect”
ㅁ It's hard to write a poem about poems because the word 'poem' is awkward. We're told it's two syllables. But frankly, as I speak, it's only got one. When I write it, metric doubts rise up: "poem."
– a reverse nonnet. To be clear, “poem” rhymes with “home,” for me.
Caveat: Poem #2835 “Stories on the rocky beach”
ㅁ Tides refute the shore's rocks, expose secrets, and as the sea goes, so the kelp and starfish must surrender to ravens who pick at the bright detritus while confabulating noisy tales
– a reverse nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2834 “An intervention”
ㅁ So. Let's talk. To explain reverse nonnets, you should understand that since they start narrow, with curt words and ellipses, you're left with the vague impression that you're starting an intervention.
– a reverse nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2833 “Vaguely definitional”
ㅁ A nonnet can break monotonies of a neverending word-stream. Its waning rhythms lull you, hint at finality, suggest some closure, reductively. It's in fact only rules.
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2832 “Detour”
ㅁ While I was sleeping I tried to think. But that's hard when dreams interrupt. Here you are, thinking along, and suddenly you see... a desert landscape, former students on buses singing songs.
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2831 “The ongoing war”
ㅁ The days stretch out like empires of light, encroaching on night's defenses, and the night's rearguard actions, sniping at dawn's edges, fail to slow the tide; aggressive beams of sunlight push through, win.
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #2830 “Expectations”
ㅁ I found a small box as I cleaned out some storage. But it was empty.
– a pseudo-haiku.
Caveat: Poem #2828 “Promises”
ㅁ "Immortality! Via a kind of machine"... but it won't boot up.
– a pseudo-haiku.
Caveat: Poem #2827 “Antes de un fallecimiento”
ㅁ vida me sueña vida de cansancio vida es muerte
– un seudo-haiku.
Caveat: Poem #2826 “A signifying system”
ㅁ Seen objectively, they'll be overdetermined: that pile of big rocks.
– a pseudo-haiku.
Caveat: Poem #2825 “Dysphoria”
ㅁ Sometimes I despair. There's no satisfaction, now. It's just plodding through.
– a pseudo-haiku.
Caveat: Poem #2824 “Another bus-riding poem”
ㅁ
On the bus, today, …
… I saw fields green with the young spring barley.
… I saw a man kneeling beside the tollway next to his SUV, which had a flat tire.
… I saw a banner with a Japanese flag and the words (in English): “Don’t give up, Japan.”
… I saw a motel designed to look like a Russian Orthodox Church.
… I saw a single broad patch of snow on a hillside of brown grass, near Gongju.
… I saw a shed on fire, in a field, with a great billowing cloud of white smoke.
… I heard “Aguas de março” sung by Elis Regina and Antonio Carlos Jobim, on my mp3 player.
… I saw a cow sleeping in some dirt.
… I saw a reproduction of a watercolor painting of Paris’ St.-Germain Square on the wall over a urinal at a tollway rest area.
… I heard grumpy old people with thick Jeolla accents pronouncing Yeonggwang as Yeom-gang.
… I saw a tall young man with tight jeans and shiny purple combat boots yelling into a cellphone and dropping his iced coffee onto the pavement.
… I heard Talking Heads’ “Found a Job” on my mp3 player.
… I saw brick farm houses with solar panels on their flat roofs.
… I read 50 pages of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.
… I saw many, many pine trees dancing under the sky, their roots sunk in the red-gold earth, looking like ink-drawings.
… I heard The Cure’s cover of David Bowie’s “Young Americans” on my mp3 player.
… I saw tiny villages packed up into narrow valleys, limned with leafless trees, where all the houses had blue tile roofs.
… I saw an angry-looking euro-dude with Miami Vice sunglasses, spitting onto the sidewalk like a Korean.
… I saw a giant statue of a squirrel.
… I ate something vaguely resembling tater-tots, with a spicy sauce.
… I saw a bridge over the tollway that had trees planted on it.
… I saw hundreds of plastic greenhouses, filled with hothouse vegetables growing, looking like large worms swimming in formation through the still wintery fields.
… I heard Juanes’ “Fijate bien” on my mp3 player.
… I saw families having picnics at the graves of their ancestors at random locations on hillsides alongside the tollway, and there were many children hopping happily, too.
… I saw a crow perched on the sign that indicated the Yeonggwang County line. I was almost home.
– a “prose poem” I wrote long ago, in March, 2011. It memorializes a bus trip from Seoul down to Yeonggwang, South Korea, where I was living at the time.
Caveat: Poem #2823 “Risk assessment”
ㅁ Let's consider this proposition that he says: "It's never so good, that it couldn't be better." It's my uncle's mantra... quite pessimistic, a performance to forestall risky joy.
– a nonnet.