This is an old one, wrote this while waiting for my next class, that was more than a decade ago:

Love is not red
But jet-black
Like the inside of a moaning cello;
Dark but warm,
Secluded and safe,
Secure but trembling on
Two everlasting notes
Sliding through an endless thrill.

Love is not red but ultramarine,
An ocean of immeasurable strength,
Pacific,
At times blustery,
Deep, mysterious,
And beautiful.

Love is silver-gray
Like the color of the sound
Of a clock's second hand
Chipping its way through eternity

Love is verdant,
A forest,
Lush,
vast, Wild,
Enchanting.

Love is cosmic latte,
the color of all light in the universe,
boundless,
timeless.

Love is not red
But yellow,
Not the coward,
But the bold yellow streak
Of early morning sunlight
That slants through the window
And invades the bed
Where the anatomy of bliss
Sprawls naked.

Do you know that musicians and non-musicians differ in how they listen to music?  If you are not a musician you probably do not know that there's a difference in how you listen to music from how a musician takes in music. Non-musicians tend to listen to a piece of music as one particular whole, like looking at a painting and seeing the whole painting. Musicians do not listen to music that way; musicians tend to hear every instrument playing in a musical piece as an individual, with its own movement, and see how these individual movements create patterns that if viewed from afar create a big picture. It's like looking at a painting and seeing every brush stroke, every daub of color on the canvas and how all of these form the whole painting. 

I can still remember how I used to listen to music as a non-musician. When i was a child I listened to music and saw it as one whole set of emotions moving as one. But after I learned to play a musical instrument, and after I gained experience playing in a band, I lost the ability to listen to music like the way I used to listen to it as a child. Now, every time I listen to music I could not avoid hearing the bass guitar, or one particular instrument, and seeing it "swim" or "surf" the sea of movements that are created by the other instruments. I could also shift the focus from one instrument to the other, the instrument that is in focus will become the one , in my view, to be surfing or floating in the sea of other sounds that the other instruments in the background are making together. 

Even if there is an instrument doing the solo I can still choose to make it part of the background if I choose to focus to another instrument. This is what I do every time I listen to music. I wish I could learn how to go back to listening to music like back when I was a non-musician, I want to see the kind of emotions that that kind of listening would bring to me now that I am older.


everyone is lonely,
lonely for attention,
lonely for recognition,
hungry for praise,
wanting to be seen as the better one,
the better off,
wanting to be envied,
everyone's wearing a mask
to hide
the fucked up kid inside
who enjoys dancing to the music
of this meat parade.







(This is another poem I wrote in my head one sleepless night)

suddenly i wake up from a dream,
and realize that i've been talking in my sleep,
the words are scattered on the floor of your heart,
some are splattered on its walls,
but more are still dangling
from the tip of the tongue of my mind,
waiting to be uttered,
like arrows ready and trembling on their drawn bows.

but i know that they'd just fall
heavy on my toes,
like hammers

(I wrote this poem last month, this just came to me late one night)

a smile is plastered on your lips,
but a frown is leaking out of your eyes
like a tired soul
melting
under the heat of this cold night.
are you with me,
or are you somewhere else?
we both know the answer
and it seems that we are tired,
the room is filling up
with empty space,
and we're exchanging empty stares
like two goldfish
looking at each other
from afar
while slowly drowing
in each other's fish bowl

(I wrote this poem as a filler for a student magazine I moderated a long time ago. This poem was inspired by the what-ifs that I and my wife used to talk about.)

There once was a cowboy
who was tired of riding the blind horse of time,
tired of wearing not a cowboy's crumpled hat
but a failed knight's broken helmet and heavy armor mangled by dents.

One starry night he was blown by the wily wind of destiny
to the room of a princess;
a princess distressed by her sleeplessness,
a sleeplessness caused by a pea of desire buried deep under her mattress,
a desire to horse around
like a cow girl chasing fiery sunsets,
sunsets that wet the corners of her soul's mind's eye.

And they talked 'till the birth of dawn,
and on to dusk,
about sunsets and horses that never were part of them,
but were in them,
and of how life should be written in free verse
and not with the chains of versification and metrical form.

And they wanted to talk some more,
but he has to be on the road before the mad swirl
of the meeting of the then and the now
sweep the two of them away
to a time and a place that never was and never will be,
for the cowboy was a cowboy and the princess was a princess,
and a cowboy has to be on the road,
forever riding the blind horse of time.
and the road was not where a princess should be,
but it could be,
if the princess would just let it be.

But the princess was a princess, and the cowboy was a cowboy,
and the cowboy had to go,
for it was late in the afternoon and the wind was singing a dirge to the dying sun.

So while the late seagulls forage the shore, he bid her goodbye.

And on the road the cowboy rode again that blind horse,
slowly out of her sight,
as the last of the sun bled on her sky,
just moments away before the hand of time
started hanging stars on their firmament,
in memory of the beautiful should-have-beens
that the two of them did not allow to live.


 

K2 Modify 2007 | Use it. But don't abuse it.