Winter lilies and necrophilia. All I’m left with on these ice-sheathed streets. Don’t worry though, it’s symbolic: I don’t go gallivanting with dolled-up corpses wreathed with white petals. Although I do make coffins for fun. There aren't any bodies to put inside. I just make the coffins, a whole lot of them. They collect in my basement so that I either bump into or stub my toe on one when I go down to do my laundry. The clatter of the coffin-clutter. Or animals that hump in the night. Wouldn't it be nice though, to just cuddle forever without expectation? Flesh softly stroking, half hibernating and meandering in dreams? to pick and choose which parts of existence to be awake for, without losing on the time that the not-chosen intervals take up? oh, wouldn't it be nice...

 "Oh, wouldn't it be nice" The Beach Boys' harmoanies thread through my head again & again, knitting needle fierce. I'll try to put on shoes today. Some measure of accomplishment, a new chapter in my autobiography, the one that everyone will forget to read. I'm going to title it Yakkity-Yak and it'll contain blank page after blank page. The binding, however, will be exquisite. But I digress: to the shoes! 

give me morbidity, i'll make it funny for you

i'm wired to be a criminal if you give me the right tools

on my spare time i look at bank floorplans and figure out how to break into things

i only create if it eases the chaos inside

playing my cello in my cell in the prisoners' stripes

singing love to the birds at midnight

i'm your favorite insomniac

the one who whispers in your ear when you sleep

my bloodshot eyes taking in your breathful body

wondering about our bones' tendency to hide

until the day they appear and refuse to go away

persisting in ways our memories will not.

Of course, scientists analyze bones endlessly now extracting dates, chemical composition, even lifestyle (in the Connecticut Natural History museum, they used spines to figure out that early settlers suffered from arthritis brought up by clearing out tree stumps from their farm-fields). Yet what happens to all those thoughts jostling within the neat rows of skulls at the archaeological digs?

 Nothing happens. 앖 어. one day a girl will end up hanging herself

by the hot red wires of her libido, spewing (bloody) innuendo drop by drop

how many years will it take to bleed dry to her irony ivory white bones?

that or the conscience that she's been brought up with will maybe

strangle her spirit for sating those unholy desires, 그 녀 있 다 conflict

come to me, he sings, he wants, he does not want, he wants

dragging her by her favorite collar of lust, while she begs for she knows not what

yet the desire pulses forth

brainbingbonging

until the thrill is lost

but even when it's lost, its memroary still haunts & hurts,

the wound still winding around our muscle-latticed bones,

until she (or he, does it really matter who any more? we are nothing but pain when in pain anyway...)

indulges in licking that wound, tasting its bitter lessons,

scar-phagy

lost like a man in white clothing in the most intense of snowstorms

swirling around like everyman's personal arctic mindwinds

it's not so much that it's cold, as lonely

standing in that neverland and walking towards an unnamed goal

지금 눈이 와요. human interaction is as far away as a memory

rocking back and forth between frostbit fingertips and a frozen over heart

sighing out a breath of carbon dioxide mist, does heaven hear one's soul cry?

suffer-swallowing silence gives me the impression that heaven collects all the soul-cries addressed to its netherly location and places them in a storage-locker located on a surprisingly well-paved back-country road in the vicinity of Lemon Springs, North Carolina. I never found any lemons or any springs in Lemon Springs (kind of like how "Shady Pines  Apartments" by my house is surrounded by maples that let in too much sun), but there is a distinct eerie feeling that osmotes through your bones, a draft that has the distinct feel of soul-cry fallout. It comes on you suddenly: you're zooming along in your automobile, listening to the country music station (which is really just top-40 pop delivered in a cowboy-hat-burdened-twang these days), enjoying how the sun lets out a golden shower (no, not that kind, you sick fuck!) everywhere and then KABLAM! it hits you harder than when your stuffed-zebra named Penny was put in the wood chipper by your brother Mort who was sadistic even at the tender age of 6. Anyway, your eyes spot that road sign LEMON SPRINGS and SHAZAM! the draft rattles your bones and plucks your muscles like an out-of-tune guitar. Suddenly you hear their faded echoes: soul-cries that were never ever heard like mail returned to sender except that the sender never knew they were returned so they just were hanging out in the garbage waiting to be found by those scavengers who like digging through garbage and compiling their best finds in underground magazines like this one journal that was exclusively devoted to tossed-out grad. school applications. So those soul-cry echoes found a brief home in my brain, only to be pushed out of my other ear by the restless wind and taken back to the lonely pine-stands of not-lemony-and-not-so-spring-like Lemon Springs, North Carolina.

The Koreans don't have tastebuds for sour or bitter tastes. Not literally, but I mean, you'd be hard pressed to find foods here with those flavors in them. Just a cultural preference, I guess, just like how they like their women young, feisty and beautiful (read, made up, skinny and fashionable, but still opinionated) but the oldest man in any setting is still at the top of their hierarchy. Forgive me for being tired of bowing though accept your ways I do. Forgive me for being so different to a nation that wants to be more powerful by being allied with all the waygooks (foreigners) that they want more so to ignore because they're so afraid of them. Tiny, Asian looking, but with a tribrid mind that barely anyone can understand, I stand before you to teach English, completely self conscious of my identity much more so than before. Almost accidentally, I put myself through different trials and suffering, and in this way, somehow I grow. The Buddhists would say that I've always been this way, nothing has changed, it's just that I'm removing everything that I've associated with myself before that aren't really there, like dark clouds parting to reveal a clear blue sky. Getting to the core of the soul, so to speak. Hurts, mind you. But it's a loosening, relaxing hurt, different from the trapped kind of hurt I would bear if I were to somehow resist everything and try to stay the same.

  Although staying the same has its dangerous allure:

A barbed-wire stasis,

 an absolute zero of time,

     moments molassesed till they're still,

 clocks reduced to tacky sculptures,

   votive memorials to Chronos

            the present instantly fossilized,

               ready for inspection

               by some rapt alien race

          that'll install us in trendily-lit museum displays,

      marvelling at the tangled connections of it all,

            the myriad threads that refuse to release us,

the connections we can't see

   because each moment instantly melts into another one

 always...

When people say everything is connected, they don't generally mean that everything is having sex in this giant orgy of everything. And yet that's what I think of now. Word sex, avatar sex, blood sex, throw in a little chain and ball bondage, and or tie him up S&M. And time? When did each human being decide - because I do believe that we each decide - to borrow time from the universe, only to return it with our actions using this time that we have to exist? Human beings might not be a bag of chemicals and tiny electrical synapses, but I sure do fight myself a heck of a lot everyday. Golly me, hold on, my blood is rebelling again.

my blood,

  that radioactive lava,

whispurring in my ears,

      a mephistopheles-river

    that lures and lulls,

 making me forget

        the void

     nothingizing the everyday

into purely zen like transcendental measures

            too peaceful for human existence

We humans define "what is happening" through conflict and melodrama. There are no stories in which there is no conflict, because we think of that as 'plot'. While the American way is to be consistently and dreamily searching for something or someone better, the more Korean way is to accept what is the now, the present, and work with what has been given. Change is something uneasy and unexpected that they don't usually want. Upgrades, yes, but not new inventions. For instance, right now, I would love battery operated socks that heat themselves. Get my blood warmer, not with anger, not with lust, but keep me going with a specific lens of perception that render these experiences interesting, these inner-resting events, these peace-swarming lullabying happenings that register in our mem-ore-ries.

My mem-roar-y fractures

into an earthquivering shard archive:

my oxygenerating breath

as I study resentomology,

the feel of quickly-torn catheters

in cold, empty cathedrals,

miasmatic machines

moleculing our being

destroy

and create

each and every one of a Shiva

in our own minds, gods

wielding the elements

in eternal quests for meaning

and that elusive thing we call

"happiness"

how do you define having it all?

Would you even want it all?

Brain-bloated with all those dopamine-dollops,

pleasure-waves washing over you,

with fascysting insistence,

gorged with excesspools,

no hunger hurling you

into the next moment.

You stagnate

into a rotting statue,

a worm-holed

monument.

a log for the worms to crawl through, to make homes of, for some random animal to lift, and make a meal of these mealworms. The lion, the pig and the sloth begin singing "Hakuna Matata! It's a problem FREE philoSOPHY!!! Hakuna Matata!" lickity lick oh so delish, splickity splat, oh why did you do that? bang bangaboom, you hold my dear doom, oh golly, my blood is rebelling, oh golly, you got me, you got me ...

I woke up.

Within

a dream

within

a dream.

Then the dream

forgot it's own dream

& I evapourattled

into a nothing

so nothing

it had a texture:

the silence

of silence,

the mute epics

of unsentient stones,

the taste

of never experiencing

taste