I stumble dazed and confused
Drifting and floating off
My body on this earth
But my spirit elsewhere
Thoughts swirling in my head
It’s all so clear
Yet oh so jumbled
Confusing
And scarily vast
Like staring into the depths of the abyss
That’s either a place full of blackness and fear,
Or a place of rainbow lights with its excitement and dreams and creativity
And boundless love

Everything is important
Nothing is important
Unless we make it so
Choose it so.
Life is experience
About learning the lessons
About enjoying the ride
Love?
Fear?
The choice is yours
And yours alone to make

I was born robbed of my maternal language,
That crucial bundle of Heart’s pillars
and ribs.

The one that makes you forget
What even words or images are
worth for,
The one that shaped what sense I hold,
And the one who built me
from mere ashes
When I couldn’t even have my eyes
for God, before the first of times.

I’ve searched through more than a dozen
of them so far,
those which humans throw and throw,
force, upon me,
and each time one comes
when the victory seems at last
only for me to find
I have nothing else in my hand
than the smell of footsteps long gone
in the sand and dirt.
Though a half of my plucked out
ribs remain,
which is Poetry that ever wants me,
tongue carries,
that which cannot be
undermined nor explained,
I limp, maimed, without my own tongue
to claim.

And from that search my love though
for the language made its birth.
Possibly the yearning turned into arousal
of wonder catching, affection lapping.

I went back to the Language,
a veritable person I make of it,
I gave it the right of a name,
characteristics
And I am all those questions
directed towards it.

By the script of E.J. Koh’s letters of mother,

How to express in Korean, English,
or any other language
how we miss one dearly
or how the distance shapes itself?

How does language create us
and makes us become
what we are truly deep inside?

How does it decompose us
at our lowest and the highest,
of the state and one’s expressing?

Especially when the Word, at times,
though so futile unreliable,
is the only thing we have left,
like Dreams?

And if you ask me now,
with so much tongue inheritance
already making my stance in “To Be”,
which mortal speech the most beautiful is?
You can’t. for how can I choose?
French, the violet whisper?
Spanish, flaming blades in Llorona’s tears?
English, a parting ship in eloquent observance?
Italian, a cigarette night in a local conversation in lush green?
I cannot. For, what choice?
You could also ask me which of the stars
I love the most: I can’t say.
Each is so similar to other yet not,
though the brightest might not
be the dearest,
the middle one might not be the further one and the intimate arousal for all
that abstract and ungraspable
makes your feelings so confused
and beautifully mad
as if you had polyamory
with many persons at once,
couldn’t get rid of any of them,
choose only one,
yet each one of them has something
the other does not.

Every exchange of a language in mind
is that of our person,
even more of Poetry
I derive myself from in feelings & images,
an exchange of puzzles, schemes,
as if going through a ballroom
full of diversely dancing people
and once you have to step through them dancing waltz to pass
and then dancing tango.

The fall of the Babel was the moment
when that maternality of Speech
shattered into alien yet same
breaths, sacrifices, work of hands
and transit,
and ended up so rich
yet so lacking in its “magna carta”

So, if it all ends always as the same,
If it always leaves heart ripped,
If I can have it all yet none I want,
If it’s the same mortal thing
in codes shrouded...

If in this realm, the story ends
and starts alas,
tell me:

What choice of speak
do you even think
I still have?

You step out into the world and its tendrils seek to entwine.
It takes away my hopes and all the dreams I once held as mine.

You are faced with expectations and choices so not of your own.
You come to think it not so bad when life is both empty and alone.

It becomes just easier to forget about hope and any form of dream.
Responsible to self and away from expectations endless scream.

You close the world outside behind your safeties solid door.
And give up on love and dream like clothes discarded on the floor.

You accept a life of little value and so too the feel it will never end.
All for reassurance outside consequence wont reach in to offend.

I write of being sad and lonely in many of the poems that I write.
But I am conscious, it is I who cast love and hope out into the night.

The tiger languidly paces its enclosure
Its genetic memory of the hunt intact.
A movement catches its eye and its heart quickens.
The instinct to hunt, catch and eat
- to savor the delicious, warm meat and thick,
salty blood - stirs with intuition's reflex.
It freezes, licks its lips and crouches,
alert to possible prey.

Where are your rights, oh modern American?
With your family eating popcorn - behind glass.
Surely you are lessened by protection
and insulted by cool safety.
Climb the fence, ignore liberal warnings
and the alarmed cries of lesser men.
Stare down the now crouching cat
- ears back and cautiously approaching
in bent, alert stalk.
Claim your right to be free!!
Taste pure freedom.

Someday I’ll have a desk, with a scenic view
In nature, where modernity I can eschew.
I’ll write stories, some might even be true;
And I’ll be free, do always what I choose to:
Escape this wretched trap that benefits the few,
Finally be content, not always so blue.
If this sounds appealing, I hope you find it too.