walking through a darkened temple, a jagged hole perfectly aligns; the kinked white-light washing inward becomes a shimmering flame, topping a stone pillar, becoming a faux candle in my shimmering mind
Flameless Flame [Free Verse]
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Tag Archives: Vers Libre
Discovery Distance [Free Verse]
Mountains are best viewed at a distance, despite humanity's "closer is better" bias. Up close, one is invariably in a cloud, looking at an undifferentiated mass of gray-white: ice -- granite -- snow -- fog. One may climb a mountain to see other mountains in the distance, but standing eye-to-rock with a mountain offers little spectacle & grandeur. Massive things can be too close to see. I wonder whether I'm also better viewed from a distance. Not everything is. Consider the opposite mistake: People say things such as, "My Great White Whale is out there." But Great White Whales are always found looking inward -- not out in the distance.
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Pause Bloat [Free Verse]
A pause hangs in the air like poison gas. It threatens to devour more moments: good moments, sacred moments, moments that could've been something. It envelops all, encasing minds in psychic concrete, entombing thoughts so hushly that not even the thinker can hear them. Through the ear-ringing hours, nothing is said & nothing is heard -- not a word or a scream or unsolicited fashion advice -- nothing but the high tone that slits through silence.
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Tributary [Free Verse]
Your river is a tributary. My river is a tributary, merging & flowing to a sea. I feel your molecules, floating past my own, intermingling & in some way tingling: a jangled excitation. And, [at the sea] we will be, together & [at the sea] we will be together. I no longer worry that I'm a river with no name -- an anonymous tributary -- because every sea has many names.
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The Naked Dream [Free Verse]
There is a dream in which one is naked. But no one is looking at you,... yet And that is so much worse; the anticipation of being gawked at is more disconcerting than being gawked at. And, yet, one can't bring oneself to shout, attracting onlookers, so as to end the misery of anticipation. One can only sit with one's naked expectations -- wading in anxiety.
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Bardo Mind [Free Verse]
lost in a disembodied Bardo state fantastical happenings mainlined into consciousness with a side of swirling phantasm and all the angry demons and all the faceless gods churn around the periphery
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Ma-Ai: The Ideal Interval [Free Verse]
there is a ma-ai -- an ideal interval -- the perfect gap in space & time & space-time there's a ma-ai: between setup and punchline & between punchline and laugh between inhalation & exhalation between listening & speaking between receiving & countering between swinging & hitting too rushed and momentum is smothered to slow and momentum dissipates there is a ma-ai for all things that move.
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BOOK REVIEW: The Wet Hex by Sun Yung Shin
The Wet Hex by Sun Yung ShinMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Amazon.in Page
Out: June 14, 2022
This is a varied collection of poems. It includes sparse free verse poems as well as prose-style poems. There are a number of stream-of-consciousness poems that read like surreal free writing, but there’s also a narrative poem and a number of clean prose-like poems.
The poet is of Korean ethnicity, and her heritage and the experience of being a transplanted individual both feature prominently in her poems. (Though Greek Mythology is also about as common as Korea Folklore in the poems.] The poems also display a fascination with words and as well as with violence.
The poems are divided into five sections. Section three is unique in that includes the collection’s longest poem, a narrative poem, which is presented with some simple, geometric artworks.
I enjoyed reading this collection, it employs clever language and interesting approaches to verse, both among the more cryptic, freeform entries and the neater, more “business-like” poems.
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Tractor [Free Verse]
the tractor idles in the end-row, chugging and sputtering, with a rattling exhaust flap soon the tractor lurches into straight-line locomotion, chugging down the row, carving out furrows, peeling soft, black soil aside the cut worm does not forgive, but neither does it know what hit it -- some thunderous storm, monotonously rolling nearer - becoming more all-pervading - until it starts to fade, but by then the worm is halved everything becomes something else: worm aerates soil and then becomes food for the tugging bird
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The War Mangled [Free Verse]
I heard the dead children, their voices lilting on the wind. The war-torn twice born came crawling in under the wire, bloody and shell-shocked, but among the living, but the rest floated away: their words becoming both milder & more raucous, never fully drowned out by bombs or crossfire chaos.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 