Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
JoJo Nguyen Jul 14
I luv strange sirens
lying At pond's bottom
Li many dead knights
cavalier in dance
over della nd valley morte
gas lit by their owned
intellectual noodles

We lie cold like soba or revenge

It will not be televised

the fusion,
Inverted Schmooing
A Mounting Inner Flame
A dance Meeting with Spirits
till the Dawn's early light

the Racing,
fast Noonward
2 dead lines scripted for a James Joyce
Netflix special late night

Like Bugz Vital Transformation
Like The Dances with Maya
Hey Jo. You know. You know.
Yawning in Awakening
like Kate or Kim or Kari or Karen or

2 Chopin's Nocturne
in repeating rhyming

5 patterns
JoJo Nguyen Apr 2014
George.Carlin.stuff
window.shopping.green
jacket.turquoise.dress
­my.our.stuff
close.2.kiss
brief.closeted.mix
somewhere.sapphire.s­hift
somehow.cerulean.drift
wish.holding.past
we.stuff.me
faded.l­eave.memory.
11x3
JoJo Nguyen Dec 2020
Here come we
as perfect a baby

Button nosed
and dimpled cheek
shrieking nights
and babbling morns

A handsome son
A beautiful daughter

Somewhere
Somehow

We become misfits
design by Evolution
or Grace
to take too much risk
with each other

Nose ringed
and potted face
acned ambivalence
and strident justice

We come together
in holy matrimony
to find outsized
reward randomly binds
only a few in rarified
forever

The languid eternity
of a few
short
nasty brutish and sharp
years

We leave her
We leave him
Here stay we
JoJo Nguyen Jan 2023
In solitude unimaginable for social networks--

In confined cells
watched by supermax panopticon--

we ritualize the creation of Creation; we assign primes to segment time;
we bin days with witch to make or to
fake.

Enjoy, my fellow passengers with agency.
JoJo Nguyen Jun 10
Ring and Stone (1+1+1)
Silver and Ruby (5)

Fire and Wind (1!+1+1, maybe unstable)
Kali and ****** (6, unstable)

Power and Noise (2+1+1, unstable)
Charming and Luck  (4, unstable)

Noose and Loose (1+1+1)
**** and **** (3)

Bowel and Bowl (1!+1+1, maybe unstable)
Dreams and Dear (3/4, maybe)

Fruit and Paint (1+1+1)
John and Pink (3)

Emancipation (5)
Purgatorio (5)

Color (2)
Verdant (2)
JoJo Nguyen Apr 2014
Crickets rub their legs together
at night, chirping. To past
time, we two stridulate.

It's just a myth, but we sing
anyways, every night.

A calling song, loud ***
appealing, before a quiet
chirp ends the courting.

Chirp, chirp, chirp,
who the **** is he?
Chirp, chirp, chirp,
make up, or make it up,
let's ****.

A large vein runs down
the wing, serrate teeth
smiling, gnashing out
dry chirps.

Night songs of entangled legs,
or crossed wings? It doesn't
matter, and we hardly notice
the passing night.

The tumultuous song
of a billion chirps doesn't keep
us up alone in bed at nights
anymore.
JoJo Nguyen Jun 2013
Time is curved
spaciously along
pushed strings

Curvature
constrained by
thickness of
stringy ropes

A bang splits
point-like to
cooling forces
beyond spontaneity

Membrane rupture
prevented only by
seeding of
life within bilayers

Weak and Strong
forced together
again by surface
surfactants
JoJo Nguyen Jun 2015
There's hunger
in my belly.
A churning knot
-- not too bad yet.
This was a writing exercise, I learned from somewhere/one. I only did it for about 2 months in 2002.

I'll share it with you as poem-ish "stuff".
JoJo Nguyen Jun 2015
The carpeted floor
squeaks
as I walk on it.

Sound like the croaking
voices
of undead Donald
Ducks.
I modified it from "a dead" to "undead". Lots of zombies on our streams!
JoJo Nguyen Jun 2015
A shelf made of pine artificial looking plywood. It holds all of my research notes and some other stuff.

Modified.2015.06.19

An artificial
plywood
shelf looking of pine

Holds my research
notes
and some other Stuff
The structure is arbitrary, but poetry demands you be self-consistent in whatever structure you choose!  (5x2x5)
JoJo Nguyen Jun 2015
Two tracks of fluorescent lights. I can't see where they meet in infinity. There are remnants of bugs from the summer.

modified 2015.06.22

Fluorescent light
hang
above. Twin tracks

that cannot meet
in
infinity

where bug remnants
dry
from last summer.
I think I was leaning back in my lab chair and staring at the ceiling. Graduate school were such happy times!
JoJo Nguyen Feb 2013
We dance on Kali's sword,
watching memories fade
away in real-time.
Dance, fool, dance.
Arms looped in arm,
we circle, chanting, holding
on to each other
as the world is cleaved,
and shaped into...
What?
Rebirth?
Redemption?
Or just plain old something new.

A chaotic whites
at least not stained red
this time too much.
We small band
looping, preserving,
what we think best
for Vishnu to fill up
the next green sprouts
with purple majesty.
RIP.
JoJo Nguyen Jun 2015
A Dancing fever
spreads across
Deutschland from
ancient Roman City
Aachen

to far away
Madagascar where
proto-people
live, waking to morning
whooping calls
and fading habitat.

We can still find
preserved Lemurs
in Duke hospitals
and open zoo
for robust ring-tailed,
or dark cells
for the nocturnals.

Would they dance
too with us, in mass
hysteria,
irrational exuberance,
and ergot
poisoning if
only later converting
to a Science
belief-system new?
Interlacing my streams.
JoJo Nguyen Feb 2013
They link together,
number and days,
strings of value
punctuated with semicolon winks;
(and consonant curved smiles.)
A grand unifying theory
hanging Baubles, Bangles
and bright shiny Beads.
The impulse Force of changing
momentous Month bending
light years in frequency of days,
mega-Hertz too compressed
up longitudinal mornings
and down transverse evenings
of negative pressure silence.

>intercorrelate.sync.JPC.+.FB
JoJo Nguyen Jan 2015
moving always gather dust,
swirling plumes
stuck in tiny granules of sweat,
and tears. secreting pores
cl0gged with detritus
of past life stirred
in passage to a short
sharp future.

a shocking c0llection
of earth, keratin, and
electron sheen on me,
confusing
or submerging
or subverting
0r diverting,
obfuscating or
simply schmooing
in a l0osely trailing
tendril connecting fragment,
piece, & sticky speck.

i join more fl0aters
hidden off in forgotten
co0l corners of history.
JoJo Nguyen Oct 2017
We treat others like dirt

A lot of dirt makes a Mountain
and when the Mountain moves
the Earth shakes

A Mountain does not quake
at being treated like dirt

Dried **** burns
A mountain of fertilizer
explodes with a spark

We treat others like dirt
We treat others like manure
We mix ourselves together

And plant our seeds
on this excrement Pile
hoping our next
generation Children
will come
On a new cloud layer

Zephyrs lacing leaves
Brooks babbling over roots
Precocious progenitors
come to rejuvenate
humanity's Mountain
JoJo Nguyen Mar 2013
I need to go.
I am displacing
here.

Displaced Wednesday,
time to fast, not
for my health, not
for moral justice, not
to slow consumption, only
from dawn to dinner, a
lackluster way not
to restore dopamine, not
to suppress apetite
in some lateral, percussive
hypothalamus injury.
I fast in sync only
with voices and volume, doing
in mind emptiness.
JoJo Nguyen Jan 2020
There are rules and protocols;
movements and routines.
Not quite episodic and semantic.
Nondeclared transition and rituals.
Rounded manners distinct
from infinate loop
and routed inner biplane
hemmed to a sight line,
spiraling death down.
Earth or Spitfire flare dare?
Grounded embrace forever comes.
I move, postponing
and extending.
The declared break is now.
Airflow ripples,
and eyes tear.
Straining shear forces
reducing reasoned response
to instinctual joysticks.
Old, new, modified,
learned, sticky
quirks of friends.
Lost love, lingering,
switching *****,
adjusting yaw, pushing yoke,
subtle procedural affectations
stolen, infused in
to fly, bank, and escape.
JoJo Nguyen Oct 2018
(I came into a Stagg Street bathroom.)

There're only two-- the shared one in the hall and in a master bedroom.
Our shared lid was down, and spotted with a yellow accident realized.

(I sopped up the mess, and dropped spilled Toilette Paper into flushing water.)

Why is there a Vietnamese renter sitting in the bathtub?
Was he trying to crap in the tub?
We talked and he said the toilet was stuffed, but it wasn't.

Ta Ree's bathroom looks out onto the pool.

(I shut the bathroom door and locked it with that weird turning lock, and looked at the pool, another inside room.)

(I see a slender hand.)

We adjusted our dreaming angle, and it turned into a young Ta Ree.
She had on a remote face, already detached from us.
Under slumber's possible tendrils, a small smile appeared on her face, connecting my Inside with our outside.

(I laughed; She was still with us.)
JoJo Nguyen Jul 6
Idk

I don't know witch side I'm on
I can't tell my left from right or
my right from wrong
Us 3 say I'm a fool, say I'm nothing
but like a Canta loop
in our Birdland
You are there

Ik

5 minutes ago
JoJo Nguyen May 2016
A blond girl walks in front
and I fall in love
not with how she jgiggles
(that comes later walking home)
because she doesn't
in her neat two short
French braids,
petite flat black shoes
and a rolled up, no
it can't be no one reads
printed media anymore
but it's there, in her purse
as she walks fast
fading into the future
I can't catch up with even if
she doesn't turn left or right
while I'm a centrist so our future
diverges splits into
parallel universes identical
except our minor chord variation
in the Music
JoJo Nguyen Nov 2015
It's a valley carved by moving water
It's a face wrinkled by time's current
It's a hike across the valley's face
It's a trek in through our granite life
It's a shout into the cool mountain air
It's a spike tracing our cloudy memory
It's a familiar echo bounced  
It's a family reverberation gone
The mountain has moved
The river is still
JoJo Nguyen Feb 2013
EDEKA is a small grocery market here in Germany, and it's usually stuck between other shops. It’s like that where I go. Tucked inside a mini-shopping center, across the street from a Penny Markt there it hides. Before you enter, a flower shop to your left waves and tries to distract. I hardly ever give it notice, until today I had one of those flashback moments like an old hippie hearing a cool LSD trip laughing past him. I was busy thinking about work, and what food I needed to buy when the flowers flashed and a dormant trace flickered. And just for a nanosecond, I thought "wouldn't it be nice to get her some flowers today." Blue-violet iris came and went with the skip of one heart beat. It was easy to keep walking past into the EDEKA.
JoJo Nguyen Oct 2023
Single egg
To be single and free
Singular egg
To be the only source
Insular egg
Sourced from Aliens
Insipient egg
Foolishly taken
Sapient egg
To be graciously given
Sentient egg
To be in a blue cocoon
JoJo Nguyen May 2022
An singular, insular egg--

A poultry product trafficking from ancillary islands.

Why does Black Velvet weep in Buffalo?

Two Johnsons joined by  bitter worms, quantum entanglements

fed to little crows, caged birds howling cold and broken.
JoJo Nguyen Jun 2016
Soldiers fall in line
To sacrifice life
In cause least relish
mustering love
for moral purist
JoJo Nguyen Jun 2015
<quote>
...
Your body is a garbage can.
Your body is white, why

let others touch it, why
not. Why

my body so
tentative, do I
...
</quote>
Another white dead guy talking...
Search for "Enough" by Robert Creeley to read the full poem.
JoJo Nguyen Mar 2013
There is one distance or diameter through the center. There is only one D. Cir equals two pir or just pid, big D with e's pie-eating smile. If you look at e'm askant you can see how the i's drop out in a furtive way to leave only cr/p.

E wears cr/p as a badge of honor on e's tee. It's how e chooses to identify with the infinite Volume. Pir or pid, both are too circumspect. D quantifies directly, but really E's just two r or r as a diminutive D half step down.

As a minor E didn't fly. Twice promoted now, D is much happier as a major, three quarters of a Volare. E gets to fly three quarter skies with three roots dug deep, deep down twice into the sunken earth, a visceral connection to a Cantare.
JoJo Nguyen Jul 2013
Eskimos have a Gazillion
words for snow. We have
teraflop words for coffee.

Wikipedia it!
But don't get distracted
by the Tales.

Recounted stories of empires
held together by zeitgeist brand,
a belief, a set of ritual,
buying in bulk, a role of thumb,
opposable heuristics.

They've clustered history
in bunches like expanding
matter, as if it matters
who was king or Augustus.

Empires & civilization
held colloidal by the quirks
of geology and brand
feeding food-forward
with ritualistic sacrifice
in Megazillion iterations.

From Fertile crescent to Nile
Valley silicon, when we bind
ourselves to brand,
and move in belief,
secure in synchronized stability,
then comes the rubric cubes
miraculously built high
upon slave backs, holding
pyramidal server tombs.
JoJo Nguyen Apr 2014
Perhaps it's a coda of sort
and not a quota
on a 'list to do'
or in any way quotidian.

Let's revisit words
like old friends,
with faces now wrinkled
almost forgotten,
vaguely remembered,
loosely associated
with a mood,
maybe a tone,
or was it subject matter,
form and content?

Playing with a Tempest
teetering silently
on a quiet Sunday
afternoon.

BUT it's only Wednesday!
JoJo Nguyen Apr 20
Good morning peeps peeping
M T & O are at Disneyland
You & I are creeps creeping

The house is quiet
Do you like Portugal. The Man?
It's a "Ghost Town" in duet

"Cheer up Charlie Brown
The end is near (Yeah)"
😁 A frown upside down

"All that you wanted, but you wanted to wait
I got a feeling it's already too late"

It's all right here in the being
"Yo, alright, I'm coming"
Random song that you liked, and randomly Charlie Brown shows up in the lyrics! Did you know this Charlie? Whatever. I chose, non-randomly to make it into a signal. Your welcome Charlie Brown.😜
JoJo Nguyen Jul 2015
Eyes without e
or she or he
or perhaps a genderless
E
beckons
because without
e
we mingle, chat
and must lifely confess
eYes without e
whispers a desperate
Yes
Just playing visual with words. I noticed that the word "eyes" without the "e" gives us the word "yes"! Is it a visual rhyme?!
JoJo Nguyen Feb 2013
What an odd duck.
Reading his mead is like
drowning in sweet
annoyance. His criticism,
self-westernizing
reference to Greek
heroes; I know but don't care
as much as my sister,
My look-a-like; Die Zwilinge.
Who am I to question the genius.
A genius of his craft,
but blind in sanity.
Who am I to question us,
Deaf to the genius
of our own Muse-ick.

It is just us three:
#, Brel and me.
Trois Faisans,
# 6 ft under self,
Master Brel sings
still of Les Bourgeois,
and me toolin around
still JoJo.
JoJo Nguyen Feb 2013
There's no health benefits
to fasting: still.
Your body responds
in some paleo-way;
calcium leaks from bones
to balance lost ones
escaping during the ***.
Always this homeostasis
while peeing. A setpoint.

There are those who fast
because that is what's left
to them, a prisoner in cell,
on the street, sitting in cubicles
feeling rightness with the same
wrong skin as e's fellow mate.

E does the daily pet cheats
too, until e's tired of it all,
until e wishes that there WAS
a great fallen Leader
to blame, or a giant green Tank
to stand against rice's grain
while holding defiant plastic
shopping bags.

When even violence
has been taken away:
still. We believe in peaceful
God and fast, fast or set ourselves on fire
because the concrete doesn't burn.
JoJo Nguyen Oct 2015
the leaves are changing colors fast!
just two days ago, they were green on the inside,
fringed with yellow, gold and crimson edges.
today the jaundice seeps in bunches and bushels,
reaching in along the veins and branches
into the capitulating green core.
tips of exposed twigs reveal
falling, failing tribal leaves
in the autumn cool air.
skeletons of Halloween start to stick
their bony hands into the even darkness.
JoJo Nguyen Mar 2016
You tell me it's not time to make a change,
just relax and take it easy. I'm still not young
And it's not my fault. But in a way it is,
And I know I have to go.
How can I try to explain when all
the words turn away, and
sigh in sadness that it's all the same
Same old story.
Look at me, and what do you see
Neither Father nor Son.
remembering 2012, which had a song by Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam, but now it's 2016 and my father is gone 10 months.
JoJo Nguyen Jun 2015
You gotta remember
that we're just
upright primates
full of fear,
pounding chest,
full of joy,
vicious in survival.
Small band of the Hand
clumping together,
increasingly clustering,
like fractal adolescence.
Fighting and *******;
Cuban Missile Crisis,
and Free Love Sixties.
Proof that solutions
for small Hand & Bobono
don't fit sullen temperament
of precious preteen.
JoJo Nguyen Jun 2015
In a film,
In laced past,
Our shared memory
whispered
that if you build it
they will come.
And so he built it.
And so we build it.
A real field
where the ghosts
come to play.
I'm here
training my ghost.
He might not be good
or even Shoe-less.
Maybe, maybe in
a fast forward moment
a young Costner,
with love of the game,
will see my ghost
long after
and play a day
catching ball.
JoJo Nguyen Jun 2013
The Rain falls warm.
It's humid and the shirt
sticks to my *******.
How much has fallen
into my collective bucket
during the pass hour
Of heavy monsoon rain?

I gulp chunks
to replace water
in this futile work cycle.
Adiabatic landscaping
in a stifling heat,
within some complex
feed-forward loop.

The cigarette burns
beneath a protective dome,
my cupped hand.
Particulates drift away into
the hazy mist, embedding
itself in breath,
and choking congested,
fluid-filled lungs.

I watch a tiny display
showing small spiking memes
feeding forward to what?
Will it be an apocalyptic
firing storm  or a recognition
gestalt, inhibitory spikes
triggering attenuation.

I drink again the rain.
Can I supervise Win-Lose
games? Am I learning
some wrong algorithm
while drunk on heavy water,
in Futile cycles?

With my open hand
I take Virgil's lead
into our Gradient descent,
urging him on, afraid
our alpha steps are too
small, and the time too
short. There is a constant
fear of being trapped
in some eternal,
local minimal.
JoJo Nguyen Feb 7
Furious Flowers
Flowers mal
sick in
bunches & bouquet

Flower Power
razed from fields
sustained by tech
living in vase
on a table
with synthtic
sap and stale
water

Her scent
drifts across our bustling
city, city of concrete
drifts down another Los River
full of Angels

She reads dead Latin
Canta vernacular
half remembers
some Lost Inferno
where even concrete
burns, burns like Sylvan fields
forgotten Green
in her bob
JoJo Nguyen Dec 2013
My friend's mother is from Belarus. Recently, she got on a plane to visit him in DC, and sat next to another Belarus woman who had never flown before. After several hours flying, they hit turbulence. The plane dropped and tumbled in pockets of dead air. The woman turned to my friend's Mom and asked,
"Have you prayed?"
"Yes" was the reply.
She nodded and then continued her stare at the vast Atlantic Ocean out the window below. After a few moments, she turned and asked,
"Do you know how to swim?"
My friend's Mom replied,
"Yes... but I'm not sure in which direction"
JoJo Nguyen Dec 2015
Does our family speak to us on cold winter's night?
Even if there's no creek to crackle,
no stiff spines, no furry trees,
nothing but a Van Gogh room
in Somerville
and digital clocks ticking.

Does our family still speak?
Chattering away,
Background processes,
Garbled noise, garbage without
wisdom because we've lost the sophistication
to crack ancient encryption.

We hear the history,
and mimic vocalization like a song bird,
dolphin or elephant
each with converging neural circuits.

Members living the same stream?

It's easier to hack the data line,
when we've trained on same sets:
a missing wife,
black and white photos,
and a grandfather clock.
I was inspired by a poem!

Matthew Brennan @TWA:  "Nights Our House Comes to Life".//http://writersalmanac.org/episodes/20151216/
JoJo Nguyen Jul 2015
Money doesn't grow from
poems
or sprout forth from
jazz
trumpet, sax, nor
bass
line chord and
key
progressing flatly from
B
to some more curvaceous
tonic.

My Momma told me
shop
around for a wonderful
life
and I look and heard
choirs
singing common Gospel
words

Giving more than taking like
free
service that ask for only
donations
in return for daily
bread

So we say best wishes to all
who can conjure
cash
from our daily
*******

Cuz it's never produced a single
cash
record playing on college
radio
but if I listen
freely
I think I hear our Fruitcake
music!
JoJo Nguyen Jan 2014
Two paths diverged,
and I, wood in hand
made it my own
with tended shrubs,
arranged pebbles,
and wild pelt
for game.

Twas a good road
until a harpie
came to roost.

"Such a beautiful Way--
let's woo and trick  
more trekking feet
to feed our hungry
family" she says.

Now there's a Free way
turning my Ki, driving
me solo somewhere
with no family, friends
or even a fornicating Fable.
JoJo Nguyen Jul 2015
<quote>
Do I ******* or hate you?
...
<quote />
So direct!
Read the rest of this short poem at poetryfoundation dot org
JoJo Nguyen Aug 2023
No war here
no famine
nor pestilence
And yet and yet

Heard poets last light
Shedding hearts
At the center-- Los Angeles
where the D line smells but
the A line is fresh clean but
not going to Harlem

We go to Lil Tokyo
new instead
Like a Lil Boy
Or like how a Fat Man
empties a plate

Like skin regenerating
in a dish instead
of scarring
like melanin'd flesh

A new skein
An Avatar
With white voice
And black bodies
Got to listen to some poets night - DTLA
Bridgette Bianca
Conney Williams
Nailah Porter
David Judah 1
Shonda Buchanan

They inspired.
This poem.
JoJo Nguyen Feb 17
But past distant times
She filters happy

I'm Bumble time
look for me
Again
look for us
Again
look for unfiltered
Time again

Drones at the Edge
of our Tomorrow
All our needs Killed

Live run dare

Set the butterflies in formation
Habituated motion
Irimi
there is only Irimi

Love dare repeat
Thanks for reading parts of my soul organized for aesthetic appeal. It doesn't sell well. It never does.
JoJo Nguyen Feb 2013
should.doing.done.did.gone.
should.giving.gave.got.let.
should.lo­oking.looked.saw.left.
should.taking.taken.took.listen.
should.te­ach.taught.trauma.drama

يجب. به. القيام به. فعلت. ذهب.
يجب. العطاء. أعطى. حصلت. السماح.
يجب. يبحث. بدا. رأى. غادر.
يجب. أخذ. اتخاذها. استغرق. الاستماع.
يجب. تدريس. تدريسها. الصدمة. دراما

Should I? Must I?
A tender gave, gotten and allowed to leave,
looking left, sawing to the remains
caught?

Should I? Must I?
Take this catch, crooked took listening,
learning, a dramatic shock taught?

هل علي أن؟ لا بد لي؟
وقدم العطاء، وحصلت على ويسمح له بمغادرة،
وتبحث اليسار، نشر على رفات
القبض؟

هل علي أن؟ لا بد لي؟
خذ هذا الصيد، ملتوية أخذت الاستماع،
التعلم، علمت صدمة درامية؟
If you speak  Arabic, please give me your  own  version/interpretation in Arabic!
JoJo Nguyen Jan 2017
My heart is gravity
My heart pumps Pb

Our weak ventricles murmer
Our bloodlines muddle

All is as it should be
With a strong sad smile

A short wink hooded
Our precocious Facebook children

With mutant gifts crinkling
Brow concentrating in deep

Play practicing trying catching
Pokemon policy phrases

Riffs to redeem siblings lost
Down Kentucky mine shafts

Yet tribal rite remembers
How blacken heart recapitulates

In our habitual memory
We abdicate poetry
We abhor progress
We abjure peace
JoJo Nguyen Jan 2021
In dreams I've met
never remembering her
face but knowing I'm in

love I ask if she
made the omelette well if she
did I'm gonna eat it turning
to give her
a kiss

In long dream
worlds we build our
memories of places in

people old novel and
new well if we always come
back to a middle space linking
me and she it's
our house

people and places linked instances
of class and coordinates
(x,y,z,t, and our
shared d dream
point)

My love I've met
many times at (t and d) never
remembering her

face but knowing I'm in
love I ask why she
cooks in my dream she
turns to leave me
a wake
Next page