Yitkbel

Yitkbel Nov 2019

I

It seems that there are no more
Unreachable dreams
It happens that in this world
There can be no real peace

When blood and tears still bleed
For those buried under the rubble of war
And unfulfilled needs
How many of us despair in the ennui
Of unexplained emptiness, of gluttony
Of materialism and wants

Mankind must grow with upward gazes
As the sunflower must face the sun
But when our desires are so easily reached
And when the time has become senile, and forgettable
What happens to us ordinary people?
Swept away and obscured by Reality and the gunsmoke?
Then, silenced?

But I,
I must sing
Must sing in the desolation
In the silence
I sing
Forget me if you please,
Mock me if you please
“Chasing meaningless dreams”
“Reality isn’t idealistic like your poetry”


Yet-

Think,
what songs and chants, after a millennium still sing
Think,
what colours and paints, after centuries
Still brightly remains
Think,
Imagine if there are no words and Babylon
Is only recalled in the ruins’ dreams

I must fearlessly sing,
Fearlessly sing,
With every atom of my soul and being
With nothing, like a beggar to the kings,
But my love
Wild and free

Save the world in my paintings
Shine hope from my poetry
When my flesh is buried by the fleeting
When my soul ascends into the everlasting
My thoughts, my songs, will still be echoing
Resonating
Within every heart like me,
Borne
From
A dream

II

Black smoke fills the red battlefield
Gray fogs and clouds banishing all light
All cries and outbursts, quickly dissipating
I still sing, within the solitude, brightly sing

The gargantuan Oak Tree breathing in the desolation
Its crowns are still hidden above the clouds,
Above all beings
Though, most of its leaves, have already left
For that place
We cannot yet be

The sun slowly descends
Bidding farewell to the moon waning
Above the light-polluted plain
Wounded by the over-brightness
Of materials and beings
None can find any guiding stars
The hungry and lost dream of flying
The full and peaceful suffer in ennui

But I,
I must sing
Must sing in the desolation
In the silence
I sing
Forget me if you please,
Mock me if you please
“Chasing meaningless dreams”
“Reality isn’t idealistic like your poetry”

Yet,

I must fearlessly sing,
Fearlessly sing,
With every atom of my soul and being
With nothing, like a beggar to the kings,
But my love
Wild and free

Save the world in my paintings
Shine hope from my poetry
When my flesh is buried by the fleeting
When my soul ascends into the everlasting
My thoughts, my songs, will still be echoing
Resonating
Within every heart like me,
Borne
From a
Dream

III

All beings are occupied with walking
Through the hectic roads
But I am still trembling, climbing
The bough of this abandoned Oak Tree
Way above, the light, real, mirage or delusion?
Resisting my hesitation
I still keep my faith steady and unwavering
Though only the silence loudly sings
With a few leaves of mockery and laughter
Calling me absurd
Calling me silly
I still sing, I still scream
Dazed with my humility

But I,
I must sing
Must sing in the desolation
In the silence
I sing
Forget me if you please,
Mock me if you please
“Chasing meaningless dreams”
“Reality isn’t idealistic like your poetry”
Yet,

I must fearlessly sing,
Fearlessly sing,
With every atom of my soul and being
With nothing, like a beggar to the kings,
But my love
Wild and free

Save the world in my paintings
Shine hope from my poetry
When my flesh is buried by the fleeting
When my soul ascends into the everlasting
My thoughts, my songs, will still be echoing
Resonating
Within every heart like me,
Borne
From a
Dream

IV

Like salmon swimming upstream
Upon this Life’s Strait
Between Nothingness of Being
And the Endlessness of Being
Every woman and man
Rushing towards the same direction
Flight or falling
The end is always the same
Death, and repeats,
The Cycle of Living

The Sea of Every Being, who would stop flowing?
Stones, or vessels, everything standing still, will never remain
Fish and droplets, must also combine with the waters of already been

Throughout history,
Prosperity never enjoyed longevity
It doesn’t matter at all,
Whether or not you believe in the
Holy Dream
Everyone wants to leave a mark
Leave a mark on the plain
Where impermanence permanently be
Leave a mark, footsteps
Where the dust of beings and the temporal wind
Will always sweep
It all
Clean

And I stop, downstream
Facing everyone upwards
Leaving
And sing

And I,
I must sing
Must sing in the desolation
In the silence
I sing
Forget me if you please,
Mock me if you please
“Chasing meaningless dreams”
“Reality isn’t idealistic like your poetry”
Yet,

I must fearlessly sing,
Fearlessly sing,
With every atom of my soul and being
With nothing, like a beggar to the kings,
But my love
Wild and free

Save the world in my paintings
Shine hope from my poetry
When my flesh is buried by the fleeting
When my soul ascends into the everlasting
My thoughts, my songs, will still be echoing
Resonating
Within every heart like me,
Borne
From a
Dream

Conclusion:

Row upon row
Hopeless bodies crawl and crouch
Upon the desert of abundance
Chased by the sandstorm
That will soon catch up to us
And sweep over all

But those of us awake
Rush towards the other way
Fearlessly sing
Joyously sing
It doesn’t matter what lies beyond this wave
Darkness or Light
We still sing

In the Desolation, I Must Sing
Original Lyric in Chinese written:
Thursday, October 24, 2019, 8:44 PM
English translation completed on:
Sunday, October 27, 2019, 2:00PM
---
Thanks to Lawrence Hall for proofreading! :)
This is from a few weeks ago; I think my mind and eyes need a little rest. I also should read a little bit more, my reservoir of knowledge is running a little bit low.

Yitkbel Nov 2019

The Perfect Circle of Wise Fool’s Allegories

The Beginning and the End
(Introduction and Conclusion):

The withering maples, the fallen skylark
The plagued leaves, the forsaken bees
Are warning us that we are not only
Losing our depth, but also our earth
The sun, and our ways
When love is great, greater than the sea
We fear it the most, afraid to be lost in the waves

It shall not fade away, the eternity will always stay
Yet, Yet we build our haven with materialistic bricks
To hide away from the fear of losing
And look down upon culture and souls as a foolish faith
Not realizing, all that can be weathered away
Will be weathered away, broken down, to decay
Then, swept away, by the temporal waves

And those that belong in the eternal place
And those that seek for truth within this maze
If they ever find it or are found by it
They will shine, shine under the sun of everlasting rays

If all these endless roads are only for the incomer
To prepare for the end of the road, the end of our ways
Telling them that within this cycle of brevity
The road will end just a few short steps away
Would it be more rational to not arrive, or stay
Surely, we seek truth to find guidance to the pave
And continue our lives
In that painless, lossless
Place


Verse:

When we are still combating evil
With our guns and metals of empathy
Another far more vicious and shapeless foe
Has suddenly and quietly sneaked up behind us
So that on our search for the truth
We are being suffocated by the abundance

It seems like we are being surrounded
By two different but equally hideous enemies
But are we the only innocent ones?
Are we innocent?
The sky is veiled by the autumn shade of change
Perhaps, we couldn’t see clearly who’s who
Behind the mask of foliage
Couldn’t see what is truly happening
To this new age

Pre-Chorus:

The red leaves gently fall
Covering their visages
Till we are deluded by the illusion
A fool with dusty tattered cloaks, scythe in hand
A knight shimmering like gold, staff in command

But what hides behind this nature’s disguise
Which of them is our friend which is the foe
Is one warm in clothes but cold in his soul?
The humble one cherishes his blades for harvesting
The boastful crushes with his plenty, baton of pain

Bridge:

All hungry and thirsty souls
All bodies filled with emptiness
Just want to be filled, filled with whatever will stay
And stay, peaceful without the prospect of abandonment and fading away

Chorus:

We wish, we pray, we
Won’t be washed away
Be forgotten, perish away
Why climb for the summit
If we must fall to a nameless grace?
Why can’t we just stay unborn?
If we can’t bear life’s lightness or weight?
Perhaps, I’ll never understand my place
But within the pondering and hopelessness
I woke up
And realize that truly:
Only Love transcends time and space
The embrace between two condensed hearts
Of pure longing could exert
The gravity
And gravitational time dilation
Of such self-forgetful density
That would wrap entire fabrics of reality
Around us, immersing us, with brief
Merciful revelations and trials
Of the unfathomable
Eternity

Verse:

The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
Should not have been for us so near and dire
Only a couple of generations, only a couple of decades
We are already lost between unrest and the barren
The wavelength of boom and bust becoming exponentially shorter
So that before a man has fully dug himself out of the mud
He is already returning to ashes and dust

Within the ocean of impermanence and uncertainty
We quickly raise the good lumber
And then just as efficiently push it back down
Till we are more like volcanic rocks
With so many holes floating, to ask to be filled
And when fulfilled, drown as we fill, purposeless
And empty

Pre-Chorus

Hungry or at peace is sometimes the same
We are equally empty and anxious
We aren’t necessarily searching for more
Like Milan Kundera said,
What we can bear the least is
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”

The children joyously rush towards the summit
And pushes down the monolith that crushed them
Without realizing an invisible rope connects all
So that all who wishes to reach the top
Must also fall through and brace the ground

Bridge:

All hungry and thirsty souls
All bodies filled with emptiness
Just want to be filled, filled with whatever will stay
And stay, peaceful without the prospect of abandonment and fading away

Chorus:

We wish, we pray, we
Won’t be washed away
Be forgotten, perish away
Why climb for the summit
If we must fall to a nameless grace?
Why can’t we just stay unborn?
If we can’t bear life’s lightness or weight?
Perhaps, I’ll never understand my place
But within the pondering and hopelessness
I woke up
And realize that truly:
Only Love transcends time and space
The embrace between two condensed hearts
Of pure longing could exert
The gravity
And gravitational time dilation
Of such self-forgetful density
That would wrap entire fabrics of reality
Around us, immersing us, with brief
Merciful revelations and trials
Of the unfathomable
Eternity

The Beginning and the End
(Introduction and Conclusion):

The withering maples, the fallen skylark
The plagued leaves, the forsaken bees
Are warning us that we are not only
Losing our depth, but also our earth
The sun, and our ways
When love is great, greater than the sea
We fear it the most, afraid to be lost in the waves

It shall not fade away, the eternity will always stay
Yet, Yet we build our haven with materialistic bricks
To hide away from the fear of losing
And look down upon culture and souls as a foolish faith
Not realizing, all that can be weathered away
Will be weathered away, broken down, to decay
Then, swept away, by the temporal waves

And those that belong in the eternal place
And those that seek for truth within this maze
If they ever find it or are found by it
They will shine, shine under the sun of everlasting rays

If all these endless roads are only for the incomer
To prepare for the end of the road, the end of our ways
Telling them that within this cycle of brevity
The road will end just a few short steps away
Would it be more rational to not arrive, or stay
Surely, we seek truth to find guidance to the pave
And continue our lives
In that painless, lossless
Place

The Perfect Circle of Wise Fool’s Allegories
For all hungry and thirsty soul searching for eternity.

By: Yitkbel Yue Xing ****

Translated from original Chinese Lyric that was originally translated and adapted from my English poem: “Terror of Good, Emptiness of Plenty”
Original date of Chinese version: November 3, 2019 18:55
Date of New English translation: November 5, 2019 15:04

#wise #fool #wisdom #allegory #lyric #translation

Yitkbel Nov 2019

The Torus of Reason and Faith

In my copy of J. M. Cohen's translation of Michel de Montaigne's Essays
Cohen wrote in the introduction: "Montaigne accepted a double truth; the sphere of faith and the sphere of reason were to him entirely separate."

If I were to describe my own double truth, of reason and faith,
I think my sphere of faith is surely placed within the sphere of reason.

Like a torus of Reason and Faith:
Though I can rationally navigate my way to reach the membrane of my faith
What is truly hidden within is still ever beyond reason.

Perhaps through this relentless search of truth, and the piercing gravity of love,
I can one day breach and reach
The nucleus of this ring or Circle
That is Perfectly spaceless
And
Timeless

The Torus of Reason and Faith
By: Yue Xing Yitkbel ****
November 5, 2019 2:09 PM

#torus #reason #faith #montaigne

Yitkbel Nov 2019

Merciful Trials of Eternity

At the core of our ever-hungry souls
We only really needed one thing:
To be filled with something.

Hopefully more permanently,
But nothing of materialism, or even rationalism
Last more than
A mirage of permanency
Even the century tree of sunset dunes
Eventually sets as whispering dust into the sand
And even the wisest man fades away
Into the senile body whose soul
Has already bid farewell
To this temporary land

I sought and sought
And only found that
The Word is true
Only Love transcends time and space
The embrace between two condensed hearts
Of pure longing could exert
The gravity
And gravitational time dilation
Of such self-forgetful density
That would wrap entire fabrics of reality
Around us, immersing us, with brief
Merciful revelations and trials
Of the unfathomable
Eternity

Conclusion of:
Terror of Good, Emptiness of Plenty
By: Yitkbel Yue Xing ****
First Draft Completed: October 29, 2019 5:36PM
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/3384509/terror-of-good-emptiness-of-plenty/

#eternity

Yitkbel Nov 2019

Century is the New Millennium

Introduction:

If I, with my childlike mind, thus
Interpret Hawking’s analogy here
Of the Universum Infinitus
Not as a fringeless sphere
But as he described, like the surface
Of our beloved planet Earth

Then, the only place
That is beyond time and space
That is with-out time and space
Must be hidden within
Forever, within
Eternity’s grace

What would we see,
If we left Plato’s cave
Into the Perfect Circle
As if through the looking glass
See all of life and existence
For what it was
Without our restricting frame of
Reference:
Our Consciousness
Fear and awareness of change
And loss
Without fear of the light,
Because we were shielded
By the shadows on the walls
For too long?

I

Through the perfectly lucid concave
I saw every String and every way
I saw the river of time, the ring of time
Unified
I saw it ebbs and flows, without death
And seemingly, forever alive

Humanity, consciousness, swim freely
But each soul stay in place, yet as
The river itself moves, and changes,
No one ever ceases to move

As St.Augustine deducted:
Time is the awareness of change
Something must come from
The Future
And
It will unstoppably pass into
The Past

The Present
Is almost nonexistent
Ever within one indivisible
Moment
Thus,
Time is meaningless to God
Time only exists for us
For it is what is gained
And what is immediately lost
TIME doesn’t exist for the eternal

II

Over time, I noticed something This River Time on the other sideSeems to be changing over nightIts flow becoming slower and slowerYetIts waves becoming wider and widerTill less steps is necessary To be able to cross over time

We measure time by change
But even change is quickly
Changing
Becoming more and more often
More and more senile and forgetful

Is TIME ageing? Dying?
Is the river of time becoming
More and more viscous
As the sentiments build-up
Becoming more and more
Like milk or even honey?

III

Century is the new millennium!
If we measure the river of time
By section or meters of changes
Then, surely we can see that
As the flow of the denser and denser
Bodies of water slow down
Quicker and quicker
What used to be a thousand waves,
Or a thousand years
Is now a hundred waves
Or a hundred years:

If each fixed section or meter
Is marked by a great shift
Paradigm shift or
Great Change
Then
It is clear that the younger time
Used to take shorter, quicker,
Steps
And as it grows and ages
His steps become steady and slowerBut each stride becoming longer
Thus travels faster
Till only in about a hundred paces
Would he encounter another
Lamppost,
As opposed to Olden Day’s
Every thousand paces

Conclusion:

Time is Consciousness
Or Awareness of change
For if nothing dies, arrives,
Then the constant present
Is forever a place without time

What if the speed of change changes
What happens when change
Seems to be coming quicker
And quicker?

Is change coming towards us
Or are we flowing towards change

Is time ageing?
Is our conscious awareness of
Change
Moving in greater and greater
Strides?
Moving from thousands of years
To hundreds
To decades
To months, weeks,
Days?

Would such a frequency
Exhaust time itself to death?

And grants us our search
For eternity
Not for us to live unbelievably
To age beyond Adam’s 930
But for us, within a hundred years,
A decade, year, month, day,
Hours, seconds
Experience all possible changes
Till we lose it all,
Till no more changes could occur
And
Forever stills the Status Quo.

We are experiencing it now,
Quicker and quicker
From a thousand years old
To a hundred years old
From centuries of greatness
To fifteen minutes of fame
To weeks of love
And endless separation
Till we exhaust it all
Ran all the way
To end up in the
Land of Waste

Or find a way
Beyond the cave
Into the unfathomable
Perfect Circle
Beyond loss, beyond change

Either way,
We will end up in a place
Beyond Time and Space

https://hellopoetry.com/poem/3387038/a-platos-perfect-circle/
A very muddied but curious stream of consciousness formed from different strands of what I recently read (Science for the Layman books), and my naive thought experiments sparked by whatever it is that I encounter.
---
Century is the New Millennium
By: Yue Xing Yitkbel ****
November 4, 2019 18:47

#death #of #time #metaphysics

Yitkbel Nov 2019

A Plato's Perfect Circle!

The road from Nothingness of Being to Existence of Being back to Nothingness of Being is logically unsound and inefficient. A straight path of redundancy, from a permanent nothing back to itself needs no meaningless detour of a temporary path where nothing is brought back.

The road from Nothingness of Being to Existence of Being forward to Endlessness of Being is a much more rational way of travelling. As an unavoidable path between two places that must be traveled to the end to reach the new land from the old is a much less pointless method and surely vital.

Or better yet, perhaps not a strait between two oceans of emptiness and fullness, but a ring! Endlessly living, through and through. From the everlasting and continue to the never-ending.

A Plato's perfect circle!

A Plato's Perfect Circle!
By: Yitkbel Yue Xing ****
November 3, 2019 18:55 PM - 20:32 PM

#philosophy #circle #of #life #perfect #epiphany

Yitkbel Nov 2019

Terror of Good, Emptiness of Plenty

I

When we are still combating the problem of evil
With our vicious guns and metals of empathy
An invisible enemy much more clever and stealthy
Has been sneaking behind us
Suffocating us with the suddenly plenty
On this battlefield of seeking

We seem to be caught in between
Two grotesque foes, but are we really?
The gloomy autumn sky is covered with change
Perhaps we judged too early, unclearly-
The red leaves fallen with grace of leisure
Have obscured their countenance, and we see
Only a tattered fool holding a scythe of nothing
And a soldier looming with righteous perfection
Yet, perhaps behind their foliage masks
The fool has his brow raised with love and longing
Cherishing his tool for harvesting
While the soldier with his bullets ever ready
Smirks with an air of violence
Perhaps we have failed to distinguish
The unwanted, cleverly disguised humble friend
From the well dressed yet poisoned with greed, foe

II

Where I come from we used to send
The youth not to the land of plenty and above us
But to help the poor, those who after hard work
On the land, lie beneath a clear sky full of stars
Unwounded by the pale light polluting the cities
With nothing but the vast dome of possibility
The moon and specks lighting up nothing
But a heart full of hopes, love, and dream

Now we climb and climb
Till the new sprouts are already at the peak
Or they are struggling under the shadow
Of the giant trees
Unable to find higher climes
Or
Unable to break free from this lack of oxygen
Of the giant canopy of already achieved greatness

III

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Was not supposed to be experienced by us
In a couple of generations, in a couple of decades

And the speed of the waves of boom and bust
Of our stability and the longevity of great things
Is only getting faster and faster
In this ocean of constant rise and falling
In this new age
We lift up the logs above us so quickly
And then let them drown so rapidly
We are more like volcanic rocks
With so many holes floating, to ask to be filled
And when fulfilled, drown as we fill, purposeless
And empty

IV

Youth in both poverty and idleness craves for unrest
But those on top should never be opposed with
Proud antagonism
With cries of illusive victory the restless rush towards
The king who tied himself to the top rung of
The wheel fortunae
Who is yet unaware where his inertia leads
Till his destined demise as it turns
To lift up the newly rich
And the new enemy
The vicious cycle of wanting to be above all
When the unwanted truth is glad humility

V

The oak trees stable at its roots, undefeated
Sends us in leaves and birds chirping
A warning to heed that we are losing our depth
In our growth and rooting
For we have rarely seen the valley empty
Yet with all the space to fill with everything
And now live and dream on a slopeless plain
Some with it all and unable to hold anything
Some struggling to breathe under the shades
We are all waning, waning
For our fingers had never dug through the earth of life
With the desperation of the fear of being swarmed
By the dark clouds of timely locusts
Yet,
These wizened words are being scoffed
For being too connected to the past

Are we proposing to cut off the rope
Connecting us to the very beginning
Just so we could get faster to the end
To the depth of this pit
Where no traveler would truly return
Without the past guiding
And we will fall again and again
Ever repeating

VI

I was filled with guilt and despair
That while people are still with next to nothing
With no luxury and sometimes not even family
That when others try to bring them necessities
I can sit in cozy idleness writing poetry
Yet filled with nothing but shame and the empty
In a world less and less occupied with reading
Why I must be a poet sole and wholehearted

And when the missionaries
Send the doves through the screen
Asking for awareness and money
To support these bodies with nothing
I was suddenly filled with hopeless shame and pain
For only one thought echoed from the words said to me
"They have very little material things, yet they seem to be really happy"
And that was the way it used to be
That the suffered and now living with peace
Seems to recall with loving longing
With great sorrow and gladness, I ask you
Is it really monstrous to say they are in a better place than we
They have the most important things
Love, hopes, and dreams
And the nothing waiting to and could be
Filled with anything
While our shaded and sheltered youth
While we hold our cups full
Filled with useless glamorous materials of our own
Or
Constantly poured out for others to keep
Wailing for something more
And lasting

Conclusion:

At the core of our ever-hungry souls
We only really needed one thing:
To be filled with something.

Hopefully more permanently,
But nothing of materialism, or even rationalism
Last more than
A mirage of permanency
Even the century tree of sunset dunes
Eventually sets as whispering dust into the sand
And even the wisest man fades away
Into the senile body whose soul
Has already bid farewell
To this temporary land

I sought and sought
And only found that
The Word is true
Only Love transcends time and space
The embrace between two condensed hearts
Of pure longing could exert
The gravity
And gravitational time dilation
Of such self-forgetful density
That would wrap entire fabrics of reality
Around us, immersing us, with brief
Merciful revelations and trials
Of the unfathomable
Eternity.

Terror of Good, Emptiness of Plenty
By: Yitkbel Yue Xing ****
First Draft Completed: October 29, 2019 5:36PM
---
A mix of existential crisis, fundamental theology, rock music, and whatever little Taoism that's in my mind and blood.

Thanks to Lawrence Hall for proofreading! :)

#existentialism #existential #crisis #essai #philosophy