Thoughts on Longing

Even now, I see sunflowers and miss you.
At night, the view of the San Francisco skyline
makes me realize how far I am from you.

Now that you are gone
what is beautiful is made more so, achingly so,
and thus becomes laughable.

~ 2/3/08

Mailbox

I see your writing on the envelope.
It is raining outside.
The envelope I slip under my shirt
as I run indoors.

The blue of your name is runny,
like puddles in a field
just before the spring.

I imagine your tongue licking the flap,
your lips made moist again
by virtue of the rain.

Many thousands of miles away
I miss you.
I kiss the flap,
open it tenderly,

and devour the words inside.

Circles

There is a ring around the moon,
a silver haze. This means rain, I say
as you bring your gaze to me.

Light swirls endlessly in your eyes.
There is no hope for me at all
if not even the moon can escape
the lure of your irises,

the depth of your pupils.

Later,
I kiss your nipples
and trace the circles
of your areolas
with my tongue.

My flesh aches
and something more than flesh
swells within me.

I want to give you life.

The rain falls around me.
Circadas sing then fall silent,
sing and fall silent
as the world does circles
in the darkness.

San Francisco

Over there, the pier jutting over gray.
Your eyes were sometimes that color.

Salt fog, wind sea, sun clouds
surround me. There are children
in the distance somewhere laughing.

They are so young.
When they see the sea
they see the sea,

nothing more to the glimmer of light
swallowed by the water,
no copper spun in setting clouds,

no hair like strands of copper,
no skin that tastes like the fog.

The beach is for children and lovers.

There might be God in the waves crashing.
There might be you in the sands,
eventually.

Beyond the pier,
sea lions watch
the buoys flashing in the night.

17.12.07

Selecting a Reader

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.


from Sure Signs
by Ted Kooser

TWO HAIKU ATTACHED BY PETIOLE

Glittering golden
pages on the poplar tree
turning in the breeze.

-

Then and now one falls
floating, folding through the sky:
a story's end in Autumn.


~ 11/18/05


I wrote this at the Free Speech Movement Cafe. Writing a 12-15 page research paper on rape as a form of violence is heavy stuff--going outside on the terrace and looking at the poplar on the edge of Memorial Glade did wonders for clearing my mind.

Second Lesson

[ Continued ]

2) Let the moment fill you and run its course.

Perhaps it is not we who live through moments: perhaps the moments live through us. That being said, we should allow each moment to live as fully as we would like ourselves to live. This ties in nicely with the charge that we experience our emotions fully.

After the break-up, I felt I should repress myself and bottle up emotions. Sure, I allowed myself to bitch and moan about S. to my friends, but I could not bring myself to realistically tell her about what I was going through. I did send e-mails that vacillated between love and hate, and wrote LiveJournal entries that bordered on insane, but I did not know which path to take: noise or silence, anger or sadness, sadness or acceptance...

I realized, even then, that this was a moment I had to experience fully. It would take its course, and being young I did not know how exactly to navigate that course but only knew that I would go down it somehow. And, according to Tuesdays, it would be a matter of saying "this is confusion following a serious break-up" and detaching myself from it--but only after accepting its validity, its own claim to life, as an individual and wonderful moment.

And... after recognizing a specific feeling as pride, I am able to detach myself from it. It is then--hopefully--easier to forgive.

But I will surely relapse. Feel sorry for myself, be lonely, feel hurt, be nostalgic. But I know that I will experience these things, and I will be able to rise above them--when their moments have lived.

Introduction and First Lesson

[ Early Morning, 3 August 2005 ]

This portion of the letter was written on my flight back from Korea.

To No One in Particular,

I write this letter address purely for no one other than myself. To capture the moment, I am on board Asiana Flight 202 out of Inchon [Inchon Int'l Airport in South Korea] to LAX [Los Angeles Int'l Airport]. There are roughly two-and-a-half hours left in the flight: I watched "Triple X II," finished The Piano Teacher, and read Tuesdays with Morrie. Instead of bibimbap, I ate beef of some sort on the plane. My last meal in Korea was rolls at Raw in Apgujeong, Rodeo section, with Hung-ah [a diminuitive form of "older brother" I call my older brother] and Paul. Yesterday I had Australian lamb chops at the Paris Grill in the Seoul Hyatt.

It's to the topics addressed in Tuesdays with Morrie I give my attention, because they mirror to a close extent the thoughts I've had and realizations I've come to this summer.

1) Life could end at any moment.

And for this reason, the grudges we bear, the stubbornness with which we hold our narrow points-of-view, the shows of pride, the notions of "balance of power" between individuals--if I were to die suddenly, what would be left except regrets and bad memories? I like to say that I am not one to hold back what I feel. Then why not reveal what I truly feel and what I want others to think I feel?

The causes of [the stewardess just gave me a fresh, hot cup of coffee--what a wonderful woman!] this revelation are: eating dinner with some relatives, and thinking about my time with S. Once, I posed the question that if a beautiful car-ride ended with a horrible accident, if it was still beautiful despite that end or horrible because of it. B, whom I queried, replied that it depended on what type of person I was.

What a lucky man I was/am to have experienced such a wonderful relationship with a wonderful woman! And what lessons I hope to have learnt...!

I think that I will use this blogger to chronicle thoughts in letters that I wrote but never sent: some of these letters I write for people but never get around to finishing or sending them. Others I write for no one in particular.

Also, I will update this page with poems and literary stuff. I don't know--this blogger is somewhat superfluous, what with my LiveJournal account (www.livejournal.com/users/joondawg) but whatever.