If I picked up a cigarette today
what good would it do trying
to puff my way to tranquility

what good would it do to start crafting an image, start removing the little things
that set me apart for the rest
start hiding taking down the pictures frames which contain goofy photographs of me, real non-**** ****, that don’t turn on even a light switch
in lieu of beautifully shot photographs of
in nice lighting


What good would it do to start when I don’t want to, when I don’t feel like I need to be like them
What good would it do light one up
when I give a flying **** whether I smoke or not
when it’s just another stick and I could just as well pick up a twig and stick it in my mouth

What good would it do being someone I am not

“How beautiful we are “
i carry this sentence tucked in my coastal
in case I forget
how feet and how lungs move the way butterflies flutter in time

I get to listen and be taught by living
masters in my craft
I am amongst the youngest between them
I am there to soak up it
again
I take cement to cloudy city days
and break all expectations places on me
as I create the path no one thought could be carved out


It is not my time yet it is theirs their blooming flowers mine, ours, the world’s to appreciate

but it is indeed my time to learn
to sit in a kindred embrace of the art of life
the divinity that language can point to
it is my time to stir world in my belly

I am scared that I will be disappointed but I am aware and I am trying to face my fear
whether I succeed or not whether I can do it or not is not the bottom line
it is whether I can accept myself, liberate myself enough to try

I just do not want to be
who I am not

I want to sit by the beach over the sand
hear the waves roll in and out and
share this life

share and be valued the same way I deeply value all creatures
be heard the same way I try to hold space for others

be given devotion the same way I devote
Equal give and equal take

a world and safe space to be heard, walked with

Its just that  what ever I wear, who ever I meet does not matter if they truly cannot see or hold space for me
if they cannot let me
be me

Swirl my heart in light and love have me dissolve into them never to accept separation
have their presence shower those I love
give me strength in this lifetime as minuscule as it may be in the span of this universe to be of service
grant ‘s endless devotion so I can care for in this one humanely life for all those I hold dear
so I can offer them beauty even when there is pain in our hearts, keep me rooted
open me so all that is left is body used to it highest potential
who dares to love, fall, rise and feel the extent of what it means to human

I look at the tree and see my lovely leaves
We share life together their bark makes that part of the world and my body makes this part of the physical world. “Oh my leaves :))”  what do you think when I stare at you with such joy in my heart ?

Sometimes I just want to dissolve into now and I want every scary thought or idea that comes as advice as warning to melt away. There is no one way. There is not right way. There is just what is… ever flowing. All possible. Pain and pleasant things nothing hinging on correct or wrong.

I will sit and catch the stones they throw at you.

What does love do now
it opens its palms

I don’t now what it is about the way skin is fragile and tender to the touch
no matter whether young or old that makes smile and love our little boats islands of flesh each so different, each so radiant and full of beauty

What if I am watching myself grow more and more beautiful
inside tulips bursting
what if I am also like one of  the monarch butterflies that migrate each year to my mother’s state in Mexico
what if I, too just emerged from the cocoon

And then I will have no big reasons to live here

my work can be done from any country
and now so can my studies

and when this year is done
perhaps you’ll think I would of left either way
but I would not of
I would of called this place home
because your were here

I have pushed my body passed  it’s limit
wobbled to the pavement swiftly
and appropriately landed on city concrete because by what else would I be cushioned or met by in an eastern metropolis denser than my flat, patchy L.A extending to the sea

I will not pucker up my lips and try to kiss you
I will deliver poetry over your tongue and ask you how it tastes
I will be what I am with my fragrance
eternally unrivaled as is yours, theirs and everyone’s else’s
our uniqueness solidified at birth

I did not find you broken nor off course
I found you whole
in pain perhaps but wholly please never forget that silent prayers follow you that they ooze and hide in the winds breeze never to be spoken
silence is their language

I am Jane loving Austen
Purring with her own happiness in there solidarity home

I am flower moving in the wind
feeling it’s conjures that life is indeed cyclical and you should sway to its wind

I know it was not his fault nor my fault
I know it was trauma bonding
painful inheritance of pasts resurfacing
triggering unconscious cycles

I am not angry
I am in love with my own becoming
and I can see his becoming
and think we chose well

Two different roads
my love on the other fading to nothing
alive only in the forever of yesterday

You sweat through the fury of a blazing love that gave too little and still wanted to call itself love

Today I love the moon and all the dreams in my belly that speak of sweet womanly passion, of sweet burning match sticking life’s wick
of sweet, oh so sweet fervor to be everything I am with out compare
of sweet, sweet, willingness to release myself and continue

Find my hands in the water of the graces that do align

My body is tired by my will it’s so strong
I plow in one direction with all my might  because i am young and I can do that
and I have enough energy
and I am dogged
headstrong
but even with that
the rest of road is not for me to sole clear
it’s in the graces of what things do align

They can all see my blind spots
and I would not hide them

everything must be looked at
and all brought to light

all old pattern examined
and what remains must be what I choose
to nourish and uphold

all parts
splinters
and gentle flowers
All in the light

no need to hide
they are all worthy of being seen

both no obstacle simple what is

I dreamt of a full room, something important was happening in your life, an opportunity or something you worked for
some sort of celebration
I was there just to say hello

All thought patterns need to be out in the light. If it makes me uncomfortable I dig in even more, see the thought patterns and give them a name

I talk to folks whose job is helping others navigate life and identify unhealthy ways of thinking and acting
from monasteries in the mountains to therapist over zoom
the classroom extends to the even the people around me
there is a teacher everywhere

much growth is in progress

All the frogs leap
all the walls feel like today
all words are near approximations
to what you can only point at

It is gone like the river
everything including I change
sand through my hands
gone

no grasping of resisting anything
or we resist life
and when we resist we suffer

Who knows what tomorrow’s flowers will be like

Paradise is in my apartment
It can be found over my small work desk
Or on my soft  blue duvet cover

I can be seen in the scooped white bathroom sink
or piercing on the back of a ray of light
that has made its way through my window

Paradise is in the way I love even the smallest fruit fly over my narrow kitchen counter

And when I close the door it follows me down the street to the convenience store, around the corner to the subway station,
down the street to a small mom and pops restaurant

When they look at old photographs of you
,you will tell of them of all the crazy stories and all the mistakes you made as you grew.
how your chest expanded and your heart pressed against your ribs inflating like a ballon on certain years, wishing to become airborne and to lift you along with it towards the sky

you will tell them of all the unfortunate situations that lead to all the food in your fridge rotting and all your sadness eating up your appreciate
and how you turned inwardly and perched like a bird over the ledge that you decided was not to jump off but a clear vantage point from which to see peace all around and from which to oversee the land
and make out what direction you were now going to head down

The grounded planes begin to take off
and friends begin to spread far beyond the sprawls of L.A county
some to school, others on tour, quite a few to start off somewhere new
my brother among them
on his way to Denver
and me sorting through thousands of poems most of them never quite right
and drawing scene from my everyday life
flying inwardly and heading toward my own destination
gathering the annotated white papers containing poesy off the floor
picking out the ones that will make it into my first book baby

Life is today
so I wore it like loose blue dress down the streets of Apgujeong on my way to work

The world just seemed so beautiful that I drove into it head first, without hesitation and without need of pulling back.
I jumped off the big board and it’s altitude did not matter because  I just ached to see and to know for myself this world. It has always seemed so marvelous to me this little body and this unknown earth under my feet, that even when I have felt one of my perceptions of it collapse over me –I have felt inclined to photograph it’s dilapidated roof, walls, windows and all the false starts that I dram of when I dove.

It’s just I love this plot of being, as if it were a field stretched over centimeters of flesh, which is my skin. And I love how we are all kin. And I do not care what someone thinks of me. I care how my feet feel against the grass, if I can forgive and love them just as myself. If can kiss again this world with the same vibrancy. I care that I never put this love of life down, that I take it, take it all, all of it as it is.

she brings them out coffee when they come to buy meals at her mom and pop’s restaurant
without charge
that’s just the way she is my loving M

she tells me it’s so cold
and that those folks need to stay warm
And I think of the times that I walked to her home as an adolescent because it was too cold for me to stay in front of the school and wait for my dad

Everything became it
and it became me
and toggled between matter and gi

I want to write about the way the stars swallowed with matter the emptiness
and how the moons began to orbit the planets and how the planets became
silent floating dreamers
witnessing a red giant’s combustion
the ardent way a life burns bright in the midst of such a universe as our
all inevitably traveling towards extinguishment

It is today I want to write about all the possible impossibles that brought me here
I sitting on an orbiting rock
my chest rising and falling with bones just below flesh and arteries pumping rivers of red blood through me

When people give their hearts to poetry, to music, to dance, to art–
to the arts
do they know they are giving themselves back to life
do they know that there is no separation

“I am__” does not matter. You are life

Hi little star we made many mistakes
tumbled to the mercy of old habits
found at the very tips of our being
touched deep wells of sorrow

little star there is nothing I want more
than to make sure your path gets better
and that from here on I am better, too

we did really roll down the hill and into the lake, but moving in water is starting to feel refreshing

we made many errors but that is what takes me from pain to humbleness  to continual humbleness  to refreshing humbleness to liberating encompassing humbleness

I am cataloging the thoughts that pull me into a whirlwind of incompassionate self-talk
observing them
carefully watching them in hopes of not repeating old patterns
in hopes of breaking away
in hopes of being more conscious of the way I live
and the way I want to spend this life
my little notebook and I held together by my hope writing down each painful thought we wish we did not have to admit to

We went surfing as a team of five
out into the water helping each other know when to catch a wave

we floated over the waves
and we fell often,
I fell often
always just 3 feet from the shore
everyone kept trying
and we cheered for each other each time one of us rode a wave

and every-time the waves were too strong that it knocked one of them over like rag doll
I saw their head emerge again from the water their arms reach for their boards
we failed together many times
but still we stuck together
in their bruises a similar purple to the one in mine

A tinta de meu coração fica púrpura como el suéter de mi avó paterna
me aquece
me envolve
me traz calma

It is good to travel alone, to venture into my being
no people to distract me
no vision of tomorrow to blind me
nothing but
me
and everything I neglected to feel together in one room

my body naked in the morning rising
to shower, rinse and pat dry
my headscarf over my wet hair
the peeling of an orange
the boiling water inside the kettle
my willingness to face the day

I send photographs to my mother
she calls me her butterfly, her bird
her brave girl
on a wall of my old room she
had painted “fly “

and I think back to being five years old holding onto her leg
scared of letting go on the first day of preschool
anxious to swim in the ocean for the first time
shaking at the thought of rock climbing

I thinking back to her smiling
telling me to go and be free
this her greatest gift in this world bundled in words of encouragement often too harsh
she used to get mad, that at first I would not take it
but I know I treasure it
her toughness, her zest, the courage it takes a mother to open her palms

my nakedness to feel, the nabi flying
                    my obsequió is
meu vida pra ser quem sou

I know that I don’t know
and that whatever I am is big enough to hold all brokeness and large enough to absorb all sorrow
it is all encompassing
living in the rocks and in the leaves swaying on the branches of the trees

I know that I do not need to know

le dije que ya no muero
que algo en mi despertó

que siento la vida surgir desde mi costado
un punto definido y la totalidad de la inmensidad
a la misma vez uniéndose
enlazados en la misma cosa

mi ser está en este mundo
mi cuerpo sobre esta cama
pero yo no me habita la habitación

es que desperté del infierno y desperté del paraíso
desperté
es que desperté un mañana profunda, una mañana clara, una mañana sin ninguna ilusion desperté de un gran sueño
dónde todo estaba dividió ahora
todo es

The doors’ music plays from the speaker at a pub near namsan tower and friends point at me “L.A woman” and we laugh.

when I first listened to this song I was 13
i guess I am a woman and I am from L.A

Are you modern poetry and am I translating you
can I run my fingers ever so slowly until I remember you so well
that from your skin I can craft an alphabet
are you
life so exquisite and voluptuous
that I cannot get away from you without wanting to write you ****** free verse or an ode to your blades of grass
a sonnet to your beloved sea so pristine when it glistens
that instantly I fall back in love

what about it does not make me weak at the knees? You just keep surprising me.

How is it life that I came to you ?How did I get this lucky?

What is birth and death as I hold them ? Are you really in between them ?
or have you always been there ?

they told me People who  buy books are older
they have money to spend on them
they have been around the mill
saw some wooden wheel of some sort turn and “know” they are “suppose” to know
But when I see them I wonder what kind of knowing they have settled for

Is it this knowing that build stairs and curates nature so that you walk down the same stairs
why
why must nature must be called wild
and why is
our wildness to be left out on the curve to wither like a patch of grass that no one dares water
why if nature’s accomplishes all in its timely manner would wild be chaotic
if nature accomplished all with grace
look at your hands
look into your eyes of your loved one is it a feral field of darkness, desolate and riveting blood,
has all hope and beauty been lost
why do you hold in disdain nature and call it “wild”

It was added to me this sweet scent of summer that accompanies random days when the thought  of your smile makes me smile and cry simultaneously
reverence for life means
to hold in your arms the painful and soft

resignation that smells of a stagnant room fills and so does love and so does sorrow as does loss as does self respect as does truth

How do you bridge the divide ?
how many times do you try?
endlessly

what if the other person stops trying ?
how many more times do you hold out your hand ?
do you hold out a hand ?

Do you hold your own hand? Do you go so deep that duality both heaven and hell are traps. One an illusion just a tad better than the other but still an illusion

How many circles do you run in your mind before you realize life does not obey minds
that you are not of your mind
you are not the shovel you use to toil
not the earth on which you labor
that you are beyond the mind and beyond the physicality while at the same time one singular spot of material on earth

Duality is the kind old lady who gave you directions turn left and then right and then transcend me and you will get there

I soften into life
while I sit over a large cushion
reaching my left hand deep into my chest
pulling  out the heavy ball of yarn that has been sitting there
I gaze upon on it, at first I want to recoil in sorrow, but I keep holding it and decide I must start to knit
knit it into something like sweater that can be of use when the next winter comes
that can be gifted to someone else
that can expand into kindness

that is what I want to do with this
that is what I want to do with my life