ㅁ I miss the city. Though it's not that I'm social. I just like its feel.
Category: My Poetry & Fiction
Caveat: Poem #1740 “Shattered”
Caveat: Poem #1739 “숙제”
ㅁ 선생님, 왜요? 숙제 할수없어요. 그래서 미안.
– a pseudo-haiku in pseudo-Korean – because I sometimes still dream I’m in a classroom in Korea. Here is an English-version pseudo-haiku, which approximates the meaning.
ㅁ But, teacher, why me? I couldn't do my homework. So, sorry for that.
Caveat: Poem #1738 “Unchanged opinions”
Caveat: Poem #1737 “Reversal”
Caveat: Poem #1736 “Speak only to the world”
ㅁ Moods can be nebulous, days tend to blur. No one is listening, which I prefer: telling some stories to stones or to trees, even the birds as they sing to the breeze.
Caveat: Poem #1735 “At the window”
ㅁ The hummingbirds make a hum, a whirring, a red flashing, a black thrum, here they come.
Caveat: Poem #1734 “Beyond the window”
Caveat: Poem #1733 “Dream imitates life imitates…”
ㅁ Dream: full of frustrating anxiety, a teacher's nightmare, you went to the staff room for some last-minute copies for a pop-quiz you were giving, but lo, the copier malfunctioned!
Caveat: Poem #1732 “An abrogation of solar formality”
ㅁ The sky returned to its gray: more normal, more informal. The sun's way makes for a bright, rigid day.
Caveat: Poem #1731 “Stupid pun”
Caveat: Poem #1730 “Look what I’ve found”
ㅁ The raven walked - danced - along the edge, perhaps its talons felt the rust of the sun-cooked trailer's rim. Glancing down, it saw white: a discarded tub made of plastic. It hopped down and pecked. Squawked.
Caveat: Poem #1729 “And”
ㅁ Un-Rhymed Sonnet. A rotated rose is nothing more than Some reconsidered kiss, intractable; Love creeps like cats, like lawn-mowers across The green summery suburbs of my heartbeat, Who tug mercifully passive, all alone To evoke the blood of reptiles beneath The scattered rocks of over-civilized spirit To drain into the corners of my room. Lovelost. Your face as if beyond recall, Memoriam: As if black / cupric seas Did separate two serpent-blue-green isles. Lovelost. Lost love which clings to my conscience While I wait like zoo-monkeys in a cage A hop and step distant from my desire. And Rhymed Sonnet. What's lost? I may die tomorrow-matins While metamorphic metaphors fly blind Through the lonesome corridors of my mind To leap 'gainst these fearsome, scaley satins Which clothe a cowering lust. Somehow your smile Can drag old bears from under winter oaks To shed carelessly their black hair cloaks On the floor: rests a love note all the while Discarded by love-green-romantic fool; With the ruby guts of a lizard-king Spattered on my innards by silver knife, Parabolic precursor to blood-pool, Inward-facing stone, little pebble-thing. The fool must be fool; I must try at life. And prose-poem. Dream: A rose is your cliché – an expression of horizontal love that's no love at all but just like some simple multicolored leaf – pretty but irrelevant to the soul which is more like some dead leaf. A rotated rose is the essence of cut summer grass – moribund like the subjunctive, lovelost. Trees throw leaves down in angry disgust, "you're too beautiful, and look: winter comes!" I want you more than any silly rose because, somewhat as the cupric seas of mythic green, you trace magic on the retina; a residue fluttering downward from your eyes like rusting spring leaves – caught in a late winter drizzling. I guess it's more your face, traceries of sea-foam on the somber, pensive rocks, which danse irreverent of the genius of mother earth. Which, of course, evokes further souls, more, more, than silly, shy, mine. Suppose it's best you ignore this, as an angel properly should, but remember to dream at night about the saintless ocean, glycerine panic, and that muddy path along leaf-strewn, yellow-pink, cavernous cliffs – your name has become my most sacred prayer, and I don't even know you. Calm the injunction now, the heartfelt fool, under post-priori cobalt skies, romancing a ghost within his own imagined kingdom. But you're real, aren't you? Paragraph. Nevermind. Néanmoins. Maybe it's just that you're Parisian in spirit: kind-of-inconclusive. But even dark satan brightens when you blink. Your smile brings only bleeding, ecstatic lesions of joy; romantics turn away and laugh, but only at myself. So what's funnier, this poem or this man-boy? A nasty wasp of something cupid hath stung me. Unsting me or not; ice cream at the beach in July and now the leaves fly, now thinking thoughts about you – because now I've seen more in the wine-blue waves than just cold Aphrodite. And. If in some further time removed, fate could act as sea waves to wash, for one brief mote of singular time, your lips nigh mine, I would fall within that mote as someone from a bridge towards…
– a pair of sonnets and an accompanying prose-poem, written originally in November, 1984, and posted on that date but now also added to these daily poems.
Caveat: Poem #1728 “The survivalist’s manifesto”
ㅁ Never consider the reasons for things. Don't even think on the hummingbirds' wings. Doubt all the logic the wide world presents. Let's all go back to sharp stones and skin tents.
Caveat: Poem #1727 “Nectar”
Caveat: Poem #1726 “It might be right”
Caveat: Poem #1725 “I scared it away”
Caveat: Poem #1724 “The unseeing gaze”
Caveat: Poem #1723 “Unmoving”
Caveat: Poem #1722 “Thirty-fourth stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon thought about stories and songs, struggled to figure out what was her own. Only the ending seemed clear in the least, all was a blur beyond that, she was sure.
Caveat: Poem #1721 “Thirty-third stanza”
ㅁ Kiamon looked at the rocks and the stones scattered about on the slope by the road. Pointlessness dwelt in her frustrated mind: what could she do but attempt to survive?
Caveat: Poem #1720 “Reconstituting the self”
Caveat: Poem #1719 “Cool trick”
Caveat: Poem #1718 “Star, no cloud”
Caveat: Poem #1717 “Bowlegged Toyota”
ㅁ The pothole attacked! Some guy's truck's front axle broke. So now: stranded truck.
Caveat: Poem #1716 “A stealthy snowflake disguised as mere water”
Caveat: Poem #1715 “Intended consequences”
Caveat: Poem #1714 “Mouse meets mousetrap”
Caveat: Poem #1713 “Michelle’s visit”
Caveat: Poem #1712 “Rocks at low tide”
Caveat: Poem #1711 “April snow”
ㅁ The wires line the road. They convey fragments of thought. Snow coats the outside.
Caveat: Poem #1710 “A few words on the view”
Caveat: Poem #1709 “Us”
ㅁ Those social creatures discuss their dreamings, exchange meanings, raise a fuss... but it's all superfluous.