Category: A Daily Poem

well now it's raining
and raining and raining and
emptying the sky

slate and silver dawn
a fine drizzle combs hillsides
summer air's repose

Possessions make claims, demanding control
of your soul, of what you've planned,
where you stand.

What?
Papers,
all scattered
across the floor:
a dull detritus,
a maudlin expression,
an emptiness manifest,
of my many years living here.
And soon I'll say "annyeonghi…" and go.

Hello there, monsoon.
Did you come to paint skies gray?
Or just water the trees?

I don't believe it
The sun and sky are nothing
But still they insist

There are some boxes lying about.
Why does dust proliferate so?
I have to get organized.
Instead, I ponder things:
The embossed turtle
on my steel spoon;
the sunlight
coming
in.

luminous morning
like mexico city haze
seasonless stillness

a self doubt creeps in
always with big decisions…
summer continues

obligations lurk
plans get mounded around me
but I just sit there

The unseen birds start
at some point before the dawn
that moment when the sky turns a grayish lavender.

Love is easiest with no object.
It can wisely lope across fields
Of seething intensities,
Missing all the atoms,
Dodging galaxies:
Unrequited,
Purified,
Earnest
Love.

Wide awake at four
Off across the Pacific
I've misplaced the sun

There are some daisies.
I see hummingbirds humming.
Oregon summer.

Routines broken, it's easy to lose track,
drift among the flowers of consciousness,
wanting to taste all the lost memories,
but the tongue is numb, there's no flavor left.

It's hard to write poems
when life wobbles upside-down,
and green trees won't yield.

One night I sleep well,
another night I will drift,
that's the jetlag thing.

Without memory
the sun rises normally
the sea still surges.

ㅁ
So we took a walk up the sloping road,
Arthur and I, but we didn't talk much.
The road was scattered with brown husks of spring.
The sky was painted with curved, cobalt clouds.
The air smelled of childhood and vague regrets.

– a pentastich of indeterminate pentameter (if it’s iambic, it’s not very good).

An Oregon dawn
trundles in half-sleeplessly
with a rooster's crow.

a bit of eggshell
a fragmented hemisphere
like the Pacific.

The ghost drifted to the cold graves to dance,
to perchance watch fates unfold:
the world's old.

My small apartment:
the birds speak through my window
while I smell coffee.

We only face our mortality
just one person by one person.
Mortality can't be met
as an abstract concept –
rather, it is some
impossible
unlikely
lurking
thing.

The calendar moves
and draws a new season out:
warm air gets muggy.

Lavender sunrise draws out the cold morning's harmonies now.
Distantly I can witness the arboreal grasping of hills.

The moon was orange,
hovering there in the east,
chewing on buildings.

[daily log: walking, 8.5km]

Sleep
is strange,
since each night
we surrender
to the brain's stoppage,
as if it's protesting
the fruitless hours of doubting,
and has decided to walk out,
leaving us alone with our body.