black and white

look, look closely at this black;
the soul's color in these eyes.
universes contained within;
all pulled tight by gravity;
a singularity of emotions.

look, look closely at this white;
the sun's blinding light
barren of expression;
flared out a million miles;
supernova of emptiness.

2007

blue coat

i was somewhere with dan.

i was excavating or sculpting. it was difficult to tell between the two. there was a large boulder and i had been staring at it for some time. it was granite and rough. i forged some tools; odd looking things like chisels yet with tiny finger like prongs; some had two, some had three or more. i made at least three or four of these tools.

with them, i was revealing a code written in the stone. it was like chipping away at little bits to reveal something like lines of braille. but as the lines continued, they became more like a bas relief seam in the rock. it was like two tectonic plates coming together, pushing together. it reminded me of satellite images of the seam running north south in the atlantic ocean. the middle crease was dark and on either side of the slopes of the seams there was white, like grey hair at the temples of an aging man.

we talked about it, wondered what it meant and then had to pack up.

as we were walking into an airport, there was a woman. curly blonde, medium height wearing a three quarter length blue coat tied at the waist. she kept glancing at me but not turned enough for me to ever see her face.

i glanced at dan, questioning. he shrugged. i figured it was a message of some sort. i just don't know what it means.

nothing new really, my dreamscapes are full of strangers who sometimes take months or years until i meet them in real life. perhaps this is why i make records of the encounters; so i can be sure later i was not imagining things...
--

strange thing later, in waking state...

i had a chat with an old coworker i had not talked to in ages. i had some business related questions to her...

i asked where she was working now? she said, oh! i'm at blue coat.

thing is it didn't really occur to me until i was writing the last lines of the dream journal entry...

nothing surprises me anymore. i still don't know what the dream means but that is the beauty of it, i suppose...

Empty Space

There is an open hand
but the space within between
fingers, palm and wrist
is taken up by the heart
that once lived in a chest.

Feb 2007

contemplations

The breath of his thoughts
are as tangled as his hair;
sculpted and painted visuals
of what lives inside.



Stone ground into a band,
something harder than bone;
lasting longer than flesh;
a reminder of fleeting breaths.

Feb 2007

death of an ibook

alas my poor ibook is getting old. it has been diagnosed with parkinson's disease.

so i'm taking donations for a replacement. :)

Briars

in an abandoned car dealership
a barren parking lot
on the western edge of the empty space

lies a brick planter full of bushes
once ornamental plants
plants that once decorated

are now reverted, wild in the
midst of an urban badland
signs of life try to break

beyond the confines of once
a prison pedestal,
dark purplish spiny tentacles

thorned blackberry vines creeping away
freed from preconceived notions
this morning, on the moist pavement

fallen leaves from the spindly arms
are mounded around vines
like funerary fuel, ready

for ignition, waiting for rain
stubbornly holding on to the moisture
from last night’s rain

the pattern of life across the hard surface
speak defiantly against waste
briars want to pull at me,

peeling bits of skin, making me leave
a little of myself behind for
the unborn souls of a unborn forest

–son dao, january 2005

Pieces

Sending that song;
sending those images;
they were supposed to

put the pieces back together,
but they are like a pile of
monzonite below a daylight moon.

It was to take something more
to make the magic work;
all the images sent were

nothing less than granite crystals
under fragile, baby nails
I was only made for a big flash.

Not this other thing that
might hold me here,
my only signature was a flower.

The emperor's symbol of longevity
the white kiku to bloom and die.
I am just a scribe; with ink stained digits,

a pauper in silk and soot
never meant to see that face
that now lives in my ghost life.

January 2007

iron

there are lines drawn across the night sky
seen only by broken souls and hearts not willing to heal

they are represented by the tiny moles upon my scapula
the broken remnants of where feathers once grew

they hunt me for the hopes of what is lost
they hunt me for a map that might be tattooed

but once my blood has gone to soil
making the the rocky ground go to iron

all humans will ever find is the ore
the thing that gives them tool for mutual suicide

2007

movement

movement, there is movement
below the skin. there is the sensation
of bone straining against muscles,
flesh, a million little strands of life
searching for motion.

eyes close slowly,
silently like a flurry of snowflakes
touching on water.
inside, behind the veil of eyelids,
behind the rosy glow of thin flesh,

lurks a universe of feelings,
an untamed expanse of geography
that no one has dared explored.
quietly, the synthesized fatigue
seeps into his tendons,

make movement seem like a dream.
making motion seem drunken,
lilting, like a still jellyfish
in a slow whirling ocean,
like the emotion given to him

in his ambiguity.
they float in his head,
flow through his tissues and
liquor him into a soft sexual lingering,
lasting rancor stripped of sharp edges.

they feel like her face,
that strange and familiar longing face
seducing him with eyes of a mythical cat.
the lean long body moving through heated air
like a trout in an almost freezing stream,

climbing upward against gravity
without even a stray wave of effort.
motion, movement, emotion,
he knows he has been invaded.
invaded by the wiles of her beauty,

her intellect, her skin,
a skin that cannot be evaded or avoided.
he tries for stillness, he tries for non motion.
the surface of his existence is momentary,
perhaps even coming close to still but

beneath there is Scylla and Charybdis.
beneath there is another domain
parallel to the flesh,
beneath there is another universe
side by side to earthly pain.

she has laid herself there,
in the multitudes of slivers,
into his molecules.
she touches herself and he feels pleasure.
she bites her lips and he bleeds on the inside,

tasting the salt, tasting the blood,
savors the taste of a kill.
hers, his, theirs,
the shared lust of a vampiric appetite.
the shared pain of a thousand lives
pulsing through the borrowed cells

of a thousand more.
closes his eyes again,
time moves behind cold lids.
time moves like water under ice,
the chill and the warmth indistinguishable.

the pulse of one's heart indistinguishable
from the many lives that have died to feed the one.
the many marriages between time and death,
the many marriages between loss and possession.
now the ice is closing in,

the surface of water turning to glass
like something so solid that was
just in the last moment fluid.
now the cold has seeped so far inside,
winter has reached the seed of lust.

winter has taken his corpus.
and she makes him sleep
for a thousand years with
the lasting, lingering, longing,
lovely taste of her sex in his heart.

beyond this featherless and flightless existence

He sat there staring. Staring into the little emptiness, the dark space that was between the illumination of the torch floor lamp and the little desk light. There was a little haven in spaces not covered by familiar rays.

The space called to him. The empty-full space spoke to him as if they had known each other for all their existence and perhaps longer. Whatever language it was made sense yet the words couldn't work in translation.

The emotions that got turned on inside, like a hundred fire hydrants, threatened to flood him, flood the room, flood his existence and travel back into time. It called for something drastic, something so familiar but vague at the same time.

He sat and moved his eyes, shifted his narrow vision among the items scattered across the desk: the fountain pen, its worn barrel, the quills and papers, the knife and pencil, empty cups of cold green tea. They all spoke something, told a story. His muscles understand though his mind could not or would not. His instincts were awakened yet his upbringing resisted.

There is the partially open window. There is the beckoning noise of the New York traffic, the Park Avenue cacophony. it is the rasping and howl of the after dinner rush of taxis heading uptown after post meal drinks. It is the distance and the cold it holds asking for his attention. In a shuffle and shove, he is on the table and little items are scattered all over the floor. A pot of ink is spilled, its scarlet stain grows upon the wooden floor like a foreboding omen, a poetic foreshadow.

Light comes up from below. Noises turn into a strange strata of chords, like Stravinsky's riot in the Paris Opera. Looking out he sees not anything man made but a murder of crows in orbit. It all seems to make sense. He looks at the growing pool of brick red ink spreading across the maple, onto the pale sheepskin, looking like a murder scene.

There is a last caw from beyond the glass, from beyond this featherless and flightless existence. The journey is brief in time but long in experience. The journey is not a plummet but a commitment. A marriage to something that had been secret all his years, all his moments. And in the time it takes to sprout a feather the people below find a pile of clothes, pair of shoes and shiny trinkets of an repressed life.

– sd, 2007

sharpening

This afternoon I noticed my senses acutely
for they are need of sharpening.

I realize the words of my loved ones
have been at me for so long,

they are like frail nails scratching at granite.
They aren't getting any sharper;

meaning has been lost in litany;
intent has been lost in ritual.

I cry small talk is not our culture
but Confucius sticks his ugly face up,

so I will have to also sharpen my knives
dismember his fear and hatred;

throw their remnants in a pyre
that has been waiting for three thousand years.

2007

Killing Me

You are killing me with images of yourself.
You make me want to write poems
that will allure you to me.

You make me want to know
more about the beating heart
beneath your pulsing flesh,

the undulations of the skin on your breasts.
There is the gentle movement
like the blur of the pale moon in the night

and I want to watch it. I wonder about
the scent of your skin when you are asleep.
There is the rustling of the sheets as you turn,

they leave a trace of a muse,
melodies still lingering.
There is a stray forgotten hair

on the pillow next to you.
There are a thousand tales
caught in the five inch

strand of gold, silver and amber.
They stay forever out of focus
because your heart has too many colors.

They stay out of focus because
you know I'm not yet blind.
If I ever meet you

I shall have to be blindfolded,
I will discover the hollow above your eyes
and the gentle shape of your jaw

where it rises to meet your ear.
I will find jewels in the place
where earrings go to war

to have a place above your smile.

Tonight if I don't find you in my dreams I will die.
Tonight if I go as such I will have not a single regret.

2007

There's a coyote outside my window

Coyote

There's a coyote outside my window
in my dreams. She howls all night
at the midnight moon blue and creamy.

She sings and stutters
with a flamenco heartbeat
and warns me of the wiles
of beautiful women.

At dawn she lays at the foot of my bed
waiting for me to wake,
looking at my face with wishful, longing eyes.

and then they pass by like a sparrow

the sparrow

there is that in between space again;
another, it is something you are so acutely aware
of and at the same time feels like
it is the relative you have never met
at a funeral
so you aren't quite sure how to act.

it moves, the scene that is;
it moves and in the motion;
in the blurs;
you see faces that don't quite make sense to you.

it is as if they were relatives
or could have been relatives.
it is in the way they look at you;
so intent.

and then they pass by like a sparrow
looking for that little seed stuck in the rail tracks
that she can't get freed...

then it comes.
then it comes like a gentle,
seducing surge of a wave;
not quite a wave,
not quite the surge of a large swell,
but it feels like something that materialized
and grew and grew
and got bigger
and then became your skin.

it suddenly became your thin little membrane
between you and the rest of the world.
and that space suddenly became something different.
it was not a space anymore

it became the emotion that keeps you breathing.

(2007)

in spite of all the dreaming

Anaphora

Each day with so much ceremony
begins, with birds, with bells,
with whistles from a factory;
such white-gold skies our eyes
first open on, such brilliant walls
that for a moment we wonder
"Where is the music coming from, the energy?
The day was meant for what ineffable creature
we must have missed?" Oh promptly he
appears and takes his earthly nature
instantly, instantly falls
victim of long intrigue,
assuming memory and mortal
mortal fatigue.

More slowly falling into sight
and showering into stippled faces,
darkening, condensing all his light;
in spite of all the dreaming
squandered upon him with that look,
suffers our uses and abuses,
sinks through the drift of bodies,
sinks through the drift of vlasses
to evening to the beggar in the park
who, weary, without lamp or book
prepares stupendous studies:
the fiery event
of every day in endless
endless assent.

Elizabeth Bishop

because i could not find sleep

because i could not find sleep
after talking to you, a glancing of
words that might be thought conversation

i rose to make tea eggs
in the silence
of the southern night

and it made me think of a hike we took
that summer day, the time we walked up
that mountain ridge,

warmed by the sun

my skin remembers how its surface
was cooled when we descended into
the path along the creek,

breathing in
the changed smell of the air
as we passed among redwoods that thrived

in that most unlikely place
we entered a valley of coolness
surrounded by golden,

baked hills strewn with oaks

we could not have known
then as we know now
that we had found

the nature of our path but as yet unaware

(2003)

strange nights

last night's dream was so strange.

it started in a room or place where i was manipulating a machine that looked like a asymmetrical monitor that had a lever on the right side. it looked like the style of design from the 50's and 60's, kind of retro.

i was looking at the screen as if i was driving some kind of vehicle remotely. then the dream changed and i was in the actual vehicle as if transported. i follow through this maze of corridors and tunnels and navigated through streets. one street name was larch. i don't remember the other streets now.

i woke up and went back the same dream a number of times. i was in a studio or apartment staying four young women. i didn't recognize any of them but it was odd because they were all asian. the apartment was elegant but did have any walls between personal areas. the separate rooms for individual closets and bathrooms. i had the sense we were all getting dressed and going out for the night. it seemed like it was supposed to be los angeles except it was too pretty. there was gorgeous architecture and there was too much neon and clean. perhaps tokyo? we were going out for sushi and the food was exquisite. tasty and beautiful.

because one of the women could not flag a cab, we had to take the same kind of tube but there were not cars. we just flew down the tubes at breakneck speed. i didn't know the way so i had to keep up with the women. i remember on the way back from the restaurant i took a different route slightly cause one of the women said it was other way and it was because we didn't have to navigate down a deep narrow chute.

i woke slightly and went back into the dream and returned to the apartment but once inside it had changed into a house on a river. there were some friends and family there. the house layout sort of reminded a house i lived in when i was 8-10 years old. i was in a back bedroom and there was a stray cat that came in the house. no pets are allowed so i chased the cat. when i picked it up it was an animate thing but made of burlap and as i gripped it little black things the size of watermelon seeds started to leak out everywhere over the carpet. i was in a panic because i put the cat out and it got back in again.

Thresholds

Clean, 1.1.07

New Year's day. Blue sky morning, it seems like any other cold January day really if you look outside the window. Its threshold into another calendar year is invisible. It is most real inside our minds. I was browsing through cirkusprinsesse's blog and saw her recap of 2006 and it made me start thinking about similar things. It was a mixed bag of surprises, fleeting moments of joy, dark abysses of despair along with an ever present sense of humor that twists itself into many different shapes in order to accommodate laughter into each and every situation so that I could go to pieces but not fall completely apart.

So what happened:

- I found myself alive and still living
- I reconnected with some family and severed connections with others that are family
- I learned that contentment and sadness aren't mutually exclusive and can exist in the same time and space together
- I reconnected with some long lost friends who are dear to my heart and found purpose in the friendships
- I accepted that I am in fact an artist to the very core of my being and to be otherwise is to destroy my integrity
- I learned that I can be extremely self destructive in order to preserve my integrity and that it can be preserved in healthier ways
- I realized that I am here mostly for others and not always myself
- I realized that some of the people I cherish the most are the farthest away from me geographically
- I realized that human connections are impervious to the vagaries of time and space
- I learned you can be very close with someone and learn to love them even when they are thousands of miles away and you may have never or ever meet them in person
- I learned that sometimes people you barely know can give you more comfort than your own flesh and blood. It is bittersweet
- I rediscovered that I can indeed paint though I am not sure where some of the ability comes from
- I discovered that some things I want to convey have to be done with words, images and silence in mixed combinations
- I found that I can live with very little
- I am finally officially divorced after five years of legal limbo
- I am a proud new uncle (again) to a beautiful little niece named Kim-Anh (she is in Paris, can't wait to meet her)
- One of my poems got published
- I found that in the blackest of depression one can find beauty and perhaps that itself is reason enough to persevere and continue
- I learned a lot about the inner turmoils of depression from a dead poet (Sylvia Plath) and found that she helps me cope from another place
- I accepted and learned to be more comfortable accusations of treason in order to be faithful to myself
- I embraced the idea that the only certainty in life is that uncertainty exists so I try to live with that in each and every moment of consciousness

I am sure this list could go on forever but I think this is the gist...

Happy Birthday Papa

Happy Birthday Papa

New Year's day is 13 hours away.
I think of all those who have birthdays on that day
though you neither saw 1967 nor the age of 21.

I wondered often what the sky was like on the day;
on the evening you complained of the headache.
I imagine an indigo tinted grey sky ceiling
covering the streets littered with ochre leaves.

New Year's day is 12 hours and 45 minutes away.
I think of the January 1st that you missed;
I always imagined that it snowed on that cold day.

Three continents and 40 years later close to New Year's day,
my mind and memory still goes back to the once gone date
and the shape of my heart still carries the form
of a flame that must have been the furnace of your soul.

– Son Dao
(December 31, 2006)

My father would have turned 60 on January 1st 2007

Crossings

For Zsuzsanna

Crossings

He stares at the reflection in the still water
and understands why the trapped fox chewed off its paw.
The sun lies low in the western sky bathed in vermillion.

She sits alone in a crowded café like a pillar of salt
and understands why the caged bird plucks its feathers bare.
The background music plays out the soundtrack of her life.

Vast geography and time between faces that have never met
sometimes cross hues and vibrate identical frequencies,
connected by either an old sage's strings and red silk ribbons;
or the light, wave and particles of a quantum universe.

(December 31, 2006)