Quiet despair

the vacuum in my room is unbearable
pregnant with aborted ambitions and all sorts of
empty reasons
the music kicks in, I am sinking

Even the sunlight through the leaves
are blinking,
Away the tears that never stood a chance
to illustrate the heartache

Of a tragedy that never ends
and the hope that always dies
Instead of me.

the Earth has many words

Smoke signals rises from your nostrils
when my eyes are hummingbirds
Flitting from the blossoms of your words
Do I dare say that you
Make me feel?

It makes me want to dance
To the earth's seismic activity
And stretch out into the galaxy

But when I look down,
I see my feet are bound
Like our words, like my heartbeat
I want you to compare my hair with
The night sky
The chilliest kiss of the season is here.

No use crying

I heard a screeching
when you coughed under your breath
you are distracted

your eyes are darting
My mind has split into two
To read your movements

To follow my thoughts
Spilling from my mouth like milk
That won't stop flowing

I am forever
Cleaning up after myself
The milk that I've split

f(Happiness) = Int(Acceleration of existence + (Rate of acceptance)^2)dv

I always thought happiness was not where I am, like a picture someone drew but I was not in it.

Song #2

I don't want to wake up because
I find myself being raped by reality
So I close my eyes and it all becomes
Simply another game to me

Like you, no one ever held my hand
And made me their own

Mr. Elvis Presley comes back from the dead
to play the redundant legend
While Thom Yorke wails tamely about
the angst of living alone

A rockstar's life is designed to be lonely
A rockstar lives only to roam

The pavement my feet can never avoid
Confines me from escaping into the soil
The costume I wear is always evolving,
Reminds me the shame of being unknown

So Jesus darling won't you be the one
To lead me on home.

Death of a seed

There were pieces of me all over the floor where I shattered. There are some of those who helped me pick some up, some who carefully stepped aside to avoid the mess, some who stepped on them on their way out, and others who stood there and rationalized how I could have prevented the fall. I lay there, picking up one splinter at a time, burning with anger and shame as those empty words bubbled over them. My mother and father, this teacher and that friend, this pastor, that other. I saw their outer shells, hollow with treachery and feeble love. I wallowed in bitterness.

Then God came and picked me up, and He told me that everyone will be held accountable for their own lives. He told me to look at Him and forget myself. As I moved towards him, the splinters were absorbed into the earth and a new figure sprouted from within, the very embodiment of true love.

He kissed me three times.

With each kiss, my skin broke open and my mind chimed three times,

'How happy are the seeds that sprout into root!
How happy the root that burgeon into stem!
How happy the stalk that bursts into blossom!'

The light figure walked to those others, the frail bodies standing over where the pieces had been, and He touched them so slightly. They broke open, like an egg, spilling out the sadness and pain that were bubbling into the empty words they had given me. Immediately I bent down to wash it away as if I saw my reflection in it. I stood up; my own heart welled up in compassion for them like fruit in the season of ripening. I forgot my bitterness, and I loved them.

--------------------
My father once told me, "Your happiness in life depends upon whether you see everyone around you as a devil or an angel."

I replied, "No, my happiness depends on whether I can see everyone around me as human or not."

Nowhere

Ohh, the sun fried crisp in honeyyy
Dripping on the refreshing skyyy
The businessman's hair gel is runnyyy
Money is his life is all a lieee

Thoughts made no sense in my head, but the melody was caught in my head like a fly in a spiderweb and the complex mapping of cityscape was enough to keep it reeling. I tried to skip out of the sheer irony of a medieval weather in a metropolitan setting, but the droning hub of pedestrians drowned out my whimsy. Immediately my feet landed on the cracked cement, dragging my head from the clouds. Shake. Walking along, I stepped up to a brisk stroll. But my eyes kept on watching. The city kept unraveling. My feet stepping. My heart drumming.

Night crept up like a yawn, but I was still restless. School was over, summer was before me like suburban sprawl and I still felt the vacancy that papers and exams left in my schedule. I hate that word - 'schedule'. It makes me think of a tall, skyscraping bureau of thousands of little knobbed drawers labeled with dry words. Each of those drawers has receipt-thin papers with procedures written on them in some sort of code. I've never cracked the code. The code is written in Courier New and is spotted with abbreviations. My mom cracks a wooden stick on my open palms. I shudder out of my dreamlike metaphor. Schedule means responsibility means obligation means punishment. I shudder at the word 'punishment'. The city is yawning.

Night makes me think of the blackness of my mother's hair that stained the hair of my sisters and myself. Thick and bundled like massive ink brushes that wait patiently on our shoulders like a writer's burden. They are brushes full of ink that have never stroked paper. We carry them like broken wings, impatient and walking and walking. I wonder, can we write our stories with our feet? Stroking the pavement, my pedestrian canvas, with the voiceless pounding of my unresolved arguments and hopeless thoughts. But the rubber on the soles of my feet erases my memories, rather than preserve them, as I walk down the street to the next chapter.

I still remember a time when I lived with them, I screamed too loudly when a moth escaped the kitchen cabinet and the cans of tomato sauce cascaded onto the stove and exploded. But somehow I was quiet in the sanctuary of my room when my arms were covered in red writing, swollen from pressure. (Why don't you care). At the time, I did not know what cliche meant, nor the fact that thousands of others were displaying symptoms of a birthing world. Had I known, my mocking laughter would have made more sense. My mom was cooking something in the kitchen that smelled fishy and salty, while my toddler sisters wrestled on the kitchen floor. Ha. Ha. Ha. The mirror reflection returns my laughter, jeering with large beady eyes and a jutted jaw that grows bigger and drooling. Its hair grows dry like a walnut tree in the winter and splits into millions of tiny threads that seep out into the corners of the mirror. Amused, I bare my teeth and growl. The reflection fades at once into my old, kneeling self. I'm not afraid of you.

A rapidly snarling dog jerks me from contemplation in front of my apartment. Anger immediately flares up within me towards the owner. I tell it, 'I know how you feel'. Cooing to the dog like it was a puppy, I dig into my bag to find the leftover pizza and begin to feed it. His growl softens to a questioning whimper, scarfing ravenously while occasionally snarling at me through his mistrusting and longing eyes. I see humanity in his eyes. I see myself in his eyes. Millions of splintered bodies, ravaged, neglected, hopeless faces are staring out in his tiny pupils that seem simultaneously overjoyed with the cold and dry scrap of food that it is consuming.

Kim's Post-urbanist take on Progress

Repetition is ignited by the unresolved. It manifests in insanity. When we are not in motion, we start to repeat the action, thought, emotion until it is satisfied with a collision that propels us forward. We submit to any force that will extrapolate our value to give us something in return, and we mistaken it for the right collision. Thus vicious cycles of exploitation, obsessive compulsive, abused turned abuser, molested turned molestor, and shortcomings are passed down from teacher to student, parent to child, state to citizen. We mimic others who appear to progress confidently, because they seemed to have received the collision and been resolved of something we have left gaping open.They seem to be moving from their previous status to another, one we assume to be better, because modernity is the 'mark' we aim for. When we receive collision in the wrong direction, we progress towards it the way a flower will grow towards fluorescent light in a dark room, perpetually in a state of want and need because we are stuck. We have not received a collision towards truth, but based on the movement alone we assume we have and "settle for it", and the level of life at which we last received contact repeats. Confidence is the acceleration of identity. Identity is the mass. Love is the true force. (Force equals mass times acceleration). God is the only source of true, eternal love. Jesus Christ is the only way to the true, living God. Christ is the Bare Life, the one whose death has no consequences (for he had overcome it), who stands outside human law and divine law as established by the Sovereign, "He who decides on the state of exception", who is made to suspend the law, yet keeper of the law, declaring that there is nothing outside the law, a figure of slavery and the state of exception which by becoming a rule grants the Good life (Agamben). Confidence is a desirable movement, for stagnancy represents failure, which deserves condemnation. It is the vehicle for progress, but if we get our confidence from the wrong source, we progress in the wrong direction. While existence is multidimensional, life is a bidirectional status. Thus if we do not progress towards life, we progress towards death.

from the dead

Two days under the sun, and I thought
the air was beginning to smell like bee spit
And the clouds were somehow
Lactating

I feel so raw, I thought under the sun,
so flawed. those were
My fishermen days

When men hung Jesus on a wooden frame
On a whitewashed wall
Whose gaze is fixed on a corner, eyes
Bleary

Oily Saint Mary, Moses!
Jerichos, echoes, my voice in a tomb.
How fleeting is life
How hungry the womb, I am
Numb, numb, numb.

One day, the Son of God appeared
His hair is white as wool, eyes of
Fire

And called out my name.

Today

Let Today be
Where I am, where I stand
In relation to eternity

Life is really One
day long
From wake to sleep
To right the wrong
From weak to strong, my soul

To keep
To hear Your Voice
And never let our hearts to harden
Or forget as in the rebellion

For we have yet
To rise and set, the call
For One day
You called Today.

Perfect in weakness

Symptoms of Post-traumatic
Reiterate in spastic motions, caught caught
Stuck
In a Caricature of myself. self
Nose, Trunk (Puncture, punch)
Punk, get out of my head!

Said the Artist's ghost from the dead
Get out of your mind.
Said the Shrink sh shSHhhhhh
(Everyone is watching) Shut your face.
Eyes, mouth is watering, brow

Everyone is faltering, now

Cheek, bones, rising in place
Contort tort torting (don't you frown)
Broke Broke

Broken and contrite basket case
Heart is sore and spirit poor
I am, finally

And, and, and
Finally and Complete(ly) before
You.

Land of ice

fold your heart

and fly my hair waves

of breaking continents of sound

breaking tunnels of echoing

glass

the melting mountains sing to me

wanting to swallow me

slice me, silently

rising with the fog, dripping

sweet sirens, soothing

bare, mellow. salmon, sorrow.

you sigh alone

you know if i’m at home

you sighed so silent

oh alone

you saw me fall down

like snow.

Lullaby of the South

I shattered the cradle at the crack of dawn

Crawled out to view the lake

Momma won’t come back, she’s long gone

With an empty bottle and a bellyache

Sleep, my brown baby, succumb to the beat

The moonlit drumming, the hopes of the villagers

Are as dusty as their bare feet

The silhouette of banana stalks

Stamps the bleeding weeping sky, the heat

Plucks beads of sweat from your cheeks

But I

Will remember to shatter the violence

That swallows your dreams in the night

Will scatter these seeds in the silence

That will burgeon into

Hush, sweet baby, this lush Branch

That will fight your fight

That will comfort you in the night.

World and I

Generations are enslaved by the prince of this age
Gaping wounds that are paved with a subtle rage.
I read this era like a tragic novel
I read chaos, grief and despair on every page.
Voices of an invisible chorus shrill to the chagrin
Each note stumbles over the last like an unpardoned sin
I hear their tears echo through a shell
I hear their bitterness swell and laughter wear thin
Like these garments of flesh, and its desires within.
I ask myself, where does life end and death begin?