Where lines happen.
Indigo pot with Francis,
matcha tea with milk in a jar.
Chickens roaming
don’t know where.
Yes heart, be free
to rise above.
Saturday morning-noonish
breakfast egg
with raisin bread.
Fake fire crackling
in the stereo.
Easy-chair guards the books.
Open the window
just a crack,
summer winds
bring in life.
Nothing to do
but to rest.
Let’s all
take a breath.
And hold…
I’m in love with your nipple,
I’m in love with your socks.
I love you as a whole,
and all the little parts.
When you are packing to leave,
I ask where are we headed?
When you do come back,
I say just this one more time.
I’m yours for life.
I’m yours for life.
And you are mine,
why won’t you accept?
I’m a fool for you,
but you are also a fool.
I offer you my world,
how lovely when you say:
“baby, so do I”.
I see that look in your eyes,
like you are tired of your station in life.
Waiting for the sign with closed eyes,
click after click wasted time.
You think maybe you have something extra,
you fear that there’s something you lack.
Always the one being knocked down,
never can be sure what’s right what’s wrong.
One day you look up it starts to make sense,
walking too long in someone else’s footsteps.
The same map everyone’s buying and selling,
they ain’t heartless they are just as clueless.
See yourself as the one in your own mind,
say no to the wrong things the right ones will align.
It’s not going to be easy the first step or mile,
but what if you are right and what a story to tell.
You tried to hold my hand,
I brushed it away in silence.
I do feel sorry for you,
another leave-me-alone that you grow used to.
I want you to understand,
I get high sometimes.
Just by walking under the stars,
or a touch of a tree in the park.
Such as now I can see the time
slowing down and stretching around.
The night sharpens its edges,
and the sensation overwhelms.
Flying inside the crystal glass,
melting with all that is and will ever be.
I would like to share my experience,
but words are not what they need.
Or should I explain the sensation?
It’s like the soul leaving the shell.
Every step takes me closer
to a myth that I can never ever tell.
Sorry not sorry, I won’t pretend,
you are my dearest and I will abide.
But there are times such as this,
I will need to be alone to be alive.
I wonder if we have another life
when we go to sleep.
Don’t always remember the dream but,
it must be something epic.
Waking up exhausted
have to reorient myself.
Feeling bewildered
have to relearn how to talk.
A different world from yesterday,
yet one and the same.
Have I changed so much?
A night, a galaxy away.
Hello, oxygen!
Wonder where have you been?
I must’ve been kept in a vacuum,
it muffled and grayed.
When the sun is down
and the shapes are blurred,
I invite you to hear the song
in the background all along.
It carries the day away
into a kneaded history,
where all the thoughts are relaxed
and senses run free.
I laid there on the bed listening to the sound of wind brushing the tree leaves. Without glasses on, I looked out to the green and yellow and white, looked like a Manet. I found peace a moment at a time. I wish I can paint, to translate what I feel to something just as hard to define. It passes the time.
Lots of things on my mind. Yet could not find the individual time to fit them into the proper slots. But something is coming up my throat, upon an unknown trigger it makes a gurgle sound somewhere deep and I feel it. I have an idea of what that trigger is, but it does not always work. I play some cello, follow the linear notes as close as I can. Sometimes the sound comes close to what I expect, yet I double-check with this App on my iPhone. I hate this habit, but I want to sound right. I don’t have the gift of accurately gauging the sound, or play by ear. Sometimes I can, most of the times I can’t. Those are the good days, when for one reason of another my body and my senses are my own. I treasure those times. I live for those times.
But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about living, or a way to live. Something cut my finger, I bleed, and I deal with the consequences, is this living? Just dealing with consequences? Or if you don’t have the music-sheet and you don’t know what to play, but life gives you a cello and teaches you the way, and you play just because. Is that living?
We all are signed up for a package deal with either no accompanying fine-prints, or lacking the faculty to read it. Still, still we are here somehow. I think it might be all about love. I’m tired so let’s just say it’s about love. Because I’ve lived without it for the past decade, and it felt like a blur with no highlights. I lived by loathing my awkward non-belongness. Funny it can be such a hipster thing to do these days. It tells me that I’m not the only one. Our hearts are not broken beyond repair, but rather exposed to the elements. There used to be faith and tradition, if not all humane, at least something to cuddle with. But now, now we are on our own. We are free to live, to send away our hearts with no return address.
Find something to belong. I can feel it in my heart, it’s aching for something within or without. It’s bothering me. It tells me to look, to see. But am I ready? Can anyone truly be ready? I find peace wherever I can find it. I see it in your eyes that you are on the same journey. Keep your head high now. I have seen God. It tells you more as you are ready for it. Don’t be afraid of offending it. You can not. Finding it and keeping it is the task.
Keeping it is the task. It is hard. It is but a feeling, a feeling that life is designed to interrupt. You can not get back to it whenever you wish. Even though when you have it, you can’t imagine living without it. Your heart is full, then it wanes again. Not enough, passed its peak, looking for more. What is the condition for one’s love? Can you be still and keep it, or will it be tired of you first?
I have seen animals who are starving to death but still with this pride in their eyes. Like they know something that I don’t. Like they are living above these concepts of self-pity and pointless dreams because they live it every single minute. What can I do? Am I ready? How should I live?
Hush now, it’s coming.
My mother told me
she never wanted a girl.
My father left for U.S.
when I was twelve-years-old.
He later told me:
if I was a boy
he’d never have left.
I loved my daddy the best.
I didn’t know
how to take that.
I still don’t know
how to take that.
The burden of
being seen
as less
by your own mom and dad.
Take whatever
I can get
thinking that
I don’t deserve.
Numb myself to
face the world,
all too aware of
the cracks in the armor.
Fake the confidence
tell me I’m good enough.
Prepare for the worst
is the way I grew up.
Can it be so long
since I felt safe and sound?
I’d rather be lost
forgetting where I’m from.
Looking to the stars
for signs of hope and wisdom.
Searched everywhere
have to go back within.
Don’t want to apologize.
Thank you for giving me life.
Time to take the leap,
want to see the other side.
I wish I can write whenever I want to write. As it is, far too often the inspiration comes, then I put my mind up to the task only to find… I have a dud. Whether it’s the wrong thing to start with or most of the times, like right now, the energy is just not there. I can conjure up the sentiment, the spark just barely lit but alas there’s no oxygen to make it a fire. Half-finished pieces are impossible to finish. The feeling just isn’t there anymore. So I start another one. It doesn’t really matter though, does it? I’m only talking about the same ol’ thing. Guess I’m just searching for the right way to say it.
Sentences that are show stoppers, I have some in my mind when I started writing this one, but they seem not appropriate now. Something along the line of “when the flow comes, it just jumps right over the cliff.” It made sense then, probably just something to bait myself into continuing the conversation with myself. Also if it is a waterfall, shouldn’t there be rainbows and pretty mists? Maybe it will work better in a poem? I like poems. They are like waterfalls with pretty rhythms instead of rivers or lakes that are too restrictive.
My mind wanders. It tells me to shut down But I can’t go to sleep yet. I am shutting down, this is part of the procedure. This may not make sense, but “you only succeed when you are no longer afraid of failure”. I guess that’s what I want to say. And I hugged a tree today. I’m not surprised at the aching in my heart anymore as I was doing it, transmitting my feelings over to this gentle giant who is more connected than I can ever be. I touched its branch, I brushed its spring leaves. It whispers about love in the wind. I trust it more than anything I’ve known. It’s my home. To be fair, I don’t normally hug a tree, I don’t need to.
I don’t know how to tell a story. I tried to sketch a telltale story about Rev and Qi. I tried to compile the world this little girl Ming lived in which may or may not have ever existed. But I don’t know how to continue. What’s the next plot? What if I get the characters mixed up? What if I’m no longer welcomed in their skins? What if I become bored by their stories before they ever come to life?
Arg… can’t think anymore. It has become too frequent, this mental grating. I want to do things, I start to do things, only to find out that I won’t be finishing them. No! I will finish this story..
I usually write with headphones on to isolate the noises. Silence helps me think, or not to think. This voice in my head is what writes. It tells me to say hi. Just kidding. But it’s not always there. You have to have certain mental energy level to keep the flow going, otherwise, it just flows right over a cliff… haha. There. And there’s no rainbows and pretty shorelines, only darkness and dampness. Something like exhaustion.
Why so exhausted? I don’t know. I gave the tree my stories and it just stood there and took it. It can do nothing else, so it does not waste any energy to. But we are free agents of this same amount of life, and we get to choose: to spend it wisely or poorly. I’m more like hosing it in every direction like you’d imagine a tree-turned-person would. Like there’s no tomorrow. What’s this? It looks interesting. Can I have more of that? Speeding towards that on the way there. Eat, fresh, pray, repeat. We are all but vampires who are zapping for life wherever we can find it, steal it, bury it. Is this why we are here?
A life is a life, in my opinion, no matter the form. I feel the connection with my chickens when I look them in the eyes. They are evaluating me and finding me lacking but trustworthy and that has to be enough. I wonder if I can communicate with them or human beings as well as I can communicate with a tree. I doubt it. Maybe it’s a trust issue. After all, if the tree finds a way to betray you, you always know where to find it. You know about its simple and powerful ways and they will never change. Chickens die, people change. Whenever I look them in the eyes, I see doubts and needs which are too similar to my own.
I’m a coward. I want to preserve the simplicity by not diving deeply into things I know I will lose, hence the sentence “you only succeed when you are no longer afraid of failure” all the way the heck above, out of place, way back when I didn’t know where to put it, or why the heck it’s there in the first place. Ah! Maybe that’s the secret: maybe it’s not about telling a story, maybe it’s just saying anything, as long as it’s a byway of reaching something real. You don’t have to know what it is yet, you just have to know it’s there. And trust, that there’s always something, like that weird-ass tree, who will do the listening.
Sorry about the choppy beginning, Tree, it gets better. I promise.
The bugs come after mid-night, when I inquire my brain’s potentiality for sleep. The more the knocking though, the echo pronounces that no one’s home, yet the feel of the anxiety has beckoned forth the hidden tentacles, and they come crawling out, as if being awakened. Hesitatingly they weight in on the fringes of thin lines of thoughts as if to protrude into the quietness of the void and being born right then and there for the first time. Or they are to be expected, to languidly arrive at their destination and all at once, make a single strike. I can write about them.
My cello has been feeling me, I can not hide my fatigue and absent-mindedness from the strings nor the bow. My fingers’ touches zoom in-and-out of my sensory’s palate which I try to grasp and hold on to but they just slip away. Where do I mind wonder? I don’t know. I can’t recall. And that scares me. I want to be able to be present and tag along, especially when a balance is involved.
I’ve been thinking too much. Writing things down before going to bed because they seem to just shaking loose the day’s confines, but they are not fully formed. They seem to me drunk, over-worked dancers sway a little, to the night, toasting to the coming calm. Or maybe they are newly awakened, preparing for their own journeys. I wish I can go with them. I wish I can remember afterwards.
Been trying to find relief from a question asked: “do you wish you do not exist?” What kinda question is that? Upon closer inspection, it’s probably the right question if there’s that. I should be sad, but there’s no reason to be sad once I truly contemplate the question and my answer to it. So I tried to be happy for one day, and That did make me sad. It was exhausting and cheapening somehow. All my happiness (I find I do have some) has been drained from trying to be happy. So I decide that some questions are quite the waste of energy. Luckily I have energy to waste.
Ah, the poem comes on which is… not that good, bed-side pieces…
Midnight channeling,
putting a few things to bed.
“Would you rather not exist?”
The answer hang like a thread.Haven’t I been here before?
How should I say it again?
In the distance a tree falls
not for this ink and pen.But you asked the question
with that challenging undertone.
Can I tell you something,
a truth you have not known.We all walk a very thin line
better not to look down.
I’ve been at a place
there’s no skeleton to be found.This thing that carries us
turns selves into strangers,
and homes into
frat-houses with mortgages.So put on them stupid smile,
drown in happiness for Lolz.
It’s not cheating if you lose
just don’t forget your blues.But it’s not enough, damn it!
Can’t look away from my own eyes.
That someone you have to live with
who’s still searching for paradise.
Good night.
hotsurf_ 