Welcome! On this page, made primarily to practice my HTML coding skills, you'll find every poem included in the original poetry book I put together on Canva and finished in July 2025 - plus relevant (but brief) commentary! Of course, this catalogue does not capture the fullness of the Poetry I experience, which can only be attained by perusing an actual copy.
What kind of new poem are you?
What kind of decision, incarnate,
Stretched over molten core?
How is it you heap lilies into bread,
Breath into tightropes,
Foxes into water?
So bold is your rule, your play,
Sticking your fingers into that eternal glow
And licking it up, making turrets out of time.
I realize I love you as I could anyone,
And as you fly and smile, so could anyone;
For we are all poetry,
Each of us a parcel of thought
Balanced over a chasm,
En rhythm,
Blithering like a bullet
Toward the sun.
***
Dance is an undervalued art form in my opinion. At least, I never see dance considered and discussed to the same length as music, books, and movies, not on its own terms, though it often accompanies mainstream music. In "For the Dancer" I wished to give the art form some tribute for its own sake. This poem was specifically inspired by the Vietnamese street dancer MT Pop, a periennial fascination of mine, whom I've written about here.
Stepped out, leaned back, you opened your arms
Inviting all the sun.
I smiled at the sight of your upraised grin
Like something had been won,
Like I’d sensed a soft tang in a fruit;
Just right, but unforeseen.
Or, seeing a painting, found some blue
Mixed carefully in the green.
Spread out, you basked, extended your arms
As if welcoming an embrace,
Head tilted so you couldn’t see my grin,
Oblivious smile on your face.
***
I call this poem "Ekphrastic" because it accompanies a photo, though it is not so much an ekphrastic—inspired by the photo itself—as it is inspired by the same event occurring in the photo. I keep the photo and its context private, out of pure sentimentality, and to maintain the obliviousness.
A sparkling crust of heaven’d been abandoned on the ground—
I only stumbled on it long beyond when it was found.
The birds with routine thoroughness had pecked it heavily—
There were ants there, and grass grew up till it was hard to see.
***
This could very well be considered an Emily Dickinson tribute, though I'm not sure if I meant that intentionally. I can only hope and dream that it is a fitting imitation of her style, in not only the use of dashes, but the metaphorically explored spiritual content.
One day,
A girl looked out her window and realized
The meaning of what she hadn’t noticed before—
Of blood’s faint tang,
Of the clicking clock on the wall,
Of spring roots churning the soil,
Of water penetrating the Earth,
Of distant cities belighting themselves with people,
Of farmland whispering its secrets to the wind,
Of rosy smiles or mumbled scowls in quiet homes.
She realized the breadth and length of all her limbs
And the breadth and length of her mother’s womb,
Her father’s back and his strong hands,
She realized the circumference of her eyes
As if she held them in her palm.
So she went outside and she yelled
To the yellow flowers and the fir tree
Mammoth against the sky
Don’t, don’t let me die,
Even if I went to death in flames
Like a doomed maple leaf,
Even if my blood gave life to the ground,
Sinking into it and watering it,
Don’t, don’t let me die.
***
This is one of my best poems, I think. The formula was a clear vision from the start that took multiple drafts to reach. Some images came from my own backyard, others from children's picture books, those forgotten teachers of the essential elements forming the world. It is one of my few free verse poems where I feel that the rhythm is satisfactory.
A cookie is all it takes
To make me and you.
A drawing, too—
A cat smiling back
From your sketchbook
Or mine. And a story—
Sudden love, youthful glory—
Heroes, queens, and crooks.
Whatever we find to make
Makes one of two.
A comment was all it took
To turn “she” to “you”—
Over a purple pew,
A gleeful look—
Shared Thursday homework days,
A poem read,
Letters under the bed,
Swings and sunrays.
Some mac and cheese to cook,
A thumping tune.
Chores, gifts, and wild dreams
Stitch me to you.
A shed cleaned through—
Life’s mystery—
A still-unused plant pot,
A child to watch—
E’er interspersed in gleams.
Chasing light, budding out like trees,
Are I and you.
***
The world needs more platonic love poetry. I took a stab at it. This was written for my very dear friend and fellow poet Almond Gordon.
Maybe the purpose of this burden
Was to find the balance.
Maybe the meaning of this love
Was that we learned to dance.
Maybe the time as a stranger was wasted
Only if I let it be,
Only if I turned my head
From the eyes that looked at me.
Maybe each moment was a chance
To find, to forget, to revise this parlance.
***
A reflection on what might seem like lost or wasted time. Maybe each moment is a chance to renew the previous one. Maybe every moment was worth it even when it felt like we were losing ground.
There is no boundary, never, even to truth—
Strict limits corral wrong, but real goods
Swell up and up, upheld, into themselves.
There is only magnification in true love—
A spread of numbered stars, fresh blood from dust—
There is only a vastness deep, like where seas run,
Yet fruiting, leafing, lands unneeding sun.
There is no possible limit on God’s wealth,
Whether glistering, dark, or green, or vague, unfelt,
There is never not a majesty to hail,
Or buckets drawn up taut from heaven’s well.
It is only words
That are only ever lonely,
Still unable to swell in scale.
***
Truth is most easily thought of as a limiting thing. Not every statement can be true. Only an exclusive number are. That is the nature of truth. And yet if true things are the only real things, they are the only things with any substance... Words, meanwhile, even as they are the purveyors of this truth, often fail to live up to it.
You are all. Just you,
A burning cloud.
Grasses tower, stars all fall askew,
But even in my tired dreams,
You are you.
Rulers tire and lose all of their power,
Yet not you.
In the corner of the night,
You run—
Through a space too small for running.
I am stunned.
In the warmest pocket of the night,
I wait, trusting in your
Endless, steady gait.
But then I run.
Over town and under swallowed sun,
Hopeless in regards to you,
I run.
But what is this? Sun swells,
Destroying city streets and freezing cloud.
I am wandering, shy, from torrid hell,
To be subsumed in Your embrace, to melt,
To cease to run,
And run with only You.
There is no night, there is
None, only You.
***
It's one thing to write with rhyme and meter, another to write free verse, and yet another thing to let yourself tumble along according to your brain's intuition, pursuing a rhyme purely when it feels right, letting my rhythm skitter and slide. I hope that in this poem I was able to capture some of the motion, the stops and starts, the awkward pauses compared to moments of continuity, that characterize these mortal lives of ours, consisting of so much running and seeking, wondering and watching, waiting for God.
What if we lived in a world
With no fluttering dawn,
No plains tight-cloaked with green,
No mountain’s arm?
What if we had no home
With rock and tree,
Through days that crumble orange,
By fast streams?
What if we spun through a space
With no stepless stars
No breaths between words,
No exhaling skies?
What if we dwelt by no sea
With clash of blue,
With tongues of cloud that dart
On tanned-skin sands?
What if we’d lost the sun
So long ago,
And walked with chilled limbs,
Blinking—wincing—staring—
With dead eyes?
***
A dystopian imagining and an exercise in evocative imagery.
Composed of lines from English translations of the songs “Somebody” and “Lemon” by Loco & Hwasa, and “Gondry” by Hyukoh.
Am I frozen up?
I forget when I see you.
I want to take off the name tag
I've been hiding, to give it to you.
Whether it's bitter or sweet?
Fast forward.
It's so warm here.
Let's sit with our legs crossed and just be still—
Still staying the same,
Still staying the same,
Sitting on the sunshine.
Past and present.
Is it dawn over there?
Over the cloud, let's go far away.
We are trying to melt the frozen old days
Aim at the night sky and shoot
and burn?
You have to try it.
I don't wanna waste my time.
My heart might jump into the sky soon.
We want a shooting star.
How many times do I have to fall down?
Don't stand there like a fool.
I'm still at the same place.
You should fly and walk
You should get covered with the dust that doesn't come off.
Over there at the bottom is our nest.
Is the current silence an opportunity or will I lean on it?
Should I sit still or should I go out?
Let's go see it again.
I can't think straight.
Whether it's bitter or sweet, you have to try it.
Does life mean to make a loss?
It doesn't work out the way you want it, anyway.
...
Sunshine is over me.
She gets over me.
I keep on.
Whether it's bitter or sweet, you have to try it...
***
For commentary, read here (and for better layout; some aspects of the form I have not figured out how to replicate in HTML).
The darkness of the deep I cannot stand,
The wisdom before time, truth’s settled brand,
I cannot store in my poor mortal breast.
In some small scope of knowledge I must rest.
Yet sure I know, Truth lives, although so old—
It blazes through the dark and through the cold—
As man so feebly tries to warm himself,
Its light exposes him, and offers health.
It reaches into hearts like briny floods
And builds new corals there, new shining buds;
It does the work of men who level forests,
But in a shorter span, with better morals.
Inexorably it does rule and move.
Truth, being truth, will ever its worth prove.
***
This is I suppose a companion sonnet to "Unbound;" at least, they are linked in my mind, as musing upon the transcendentals.
Sun and sand in water dance.
I feel happy. So do you.
Talk is easy, charms advance,
Eased out by the rushing blue.
As we trudge o’er yielding sands,
Our voices match the chickens’ coo.
Sun and sand in water dance.
I feel happy. So do you.
I did not expect such friends,
With such laughter, sharp and true.
Now I see each shining chance
Brought us under this blue.
Sun and sand in water dance.
I feel happy. So do you.
***
This is a rondel reflecting upon an enjoyable choir trip where growing friendships were established, somewhat unexpectedly. I do not usually expect to enjoy myself at social activities and so there is always a sort of magic when they do turn out very well with people I don't yet know well. Hawaii is a particularly good place for bringing about this magic...
Being with you can feel like
I’m going into your house and spreading sand—
seeing sand on my shoes and trying to rub it off,
stopping to grate my feet on the carpet, creating flurries of sand,
watching crests of sand form themselves on your rug
and regiments of sand encrust your floorboards,
sand heading out into corners, sand making forays under the sofa,
where months upon heaped months will trickle by
until you can get the floor bare and clean again.
And I stand
wishing I’d remembered to scrub off the sand,
and wondering when it all will be over—
wanting to leave and maybe never come back,
because of all this sand.
***
I wrote this for class when we were assigned a "confessional" poem. The truth I struggle to confess is something that probably doesn't matter to anyone but me. It's no sin, just the constant, bewildering frustration of feeling I don't always know how to communicate, and sometimes speaking, even on ordinary topics with ordinary, pleasant people, makes me feel like an alien. In the end I always feel like I'm letting someone down.
Ah, now we have come to it,
Having passed through an early morning
And a long gray day to get to it—
The sea.
The sea, so immediate,
Closer than a photo I’d press my nose against,
Yet huge.
Sitting here on these vales of sand,
I realize that truly,
Every shore is the center of the world.
Those unplumbable swaths
Of only salt and light
Are the real plenteous populace of Earth.
Those battles under waves
Of squid and whales
Are the real wars.
Colors as seen through water
Are real colors.
These thoughts don’t make any sense,
No more than a beached turtle
Or a dog drowned in a waterfall,
But it doesn’t matter.
The sea subsumes it all.
The sea knows what I mean.
***
The sea! What more is there to say about it? Its descriptors, the reflections it inspires, are as endless as its own great breadth. I am always saddened by the foretelling in Revelation that in the new earth there will be no sea. I hope it is only figurative.
To walk to the edge of a cliff without fear,
To look down and see light on the water clear,
Pure light without boundary, dipped into blue,
Light wheeling and healing when splashed by the dew;
Such deeds are too great,
Such light too divine,
To filter the film of my factual mind.
To sit in the garden, to home with the birds,
To tell of a flower with a kiss and no words,
A pink smitten rose or a ripe tulip bud,
A buttercup gleaming in glade gray and hushed;
Such habits excel
All ambition of mine,
Being far beyond my empty logical mind.
To smile through the darkness at your smiling face,
To mirror your motions, to give to your grace,
To meet your sweet eyes with the same energy,
To greet you with loving, and friendship retrieve;
Such chance comes not to
Anyone of my kind,
Imprisoned by an intellectual mind.
***
I am not sure what inspired this poem. I relate to it only occasionally. It is perhaps an exploration of, what would be the consequences if I did (or could) retreat completely into that hyper-logical, fixatingly intellectual part of my mind?
On the ridges of the world,
You must look beyond your own two feet.
You must look at life.
To speak the words
That will move people,
You must look within their hearts
And at the fabric of the world.
To see with keenness enough
To draw a great map,
Requires pushing your eyes open
And letting the light fuse into them.
To reach your final ecstasy
You will pull your heart carefully apart
With two hands until it crumbles,
And only your hands are left.
To build your heart’s hearth, table of bounty,
Safe for travelers to slump on,
You must climb the highest peaks
And throw soul-shreds into the wind
Until they go so far
You can only see the sky.
***
Another poem inspired by MT Pop!... specifically an interview in which he talked about the importance of drawing inspiration from sources outside one's own art. I tried to take this even farther, into the idea of sacrifice as necessary for life... "unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies..." Etc.
I am longing
For that long blue space,
That splash of emptiness, breath,
In which to move.
That balancing,
Forgetfulness of death.
What makes a poem good?
I never knew—
I just use it trying to catch that blue.
I’m an old man, musty but vivacious,
Waiting for my ride out of the station.
What makes an action good?
I wish I knew—
Is there right and wrong, within the blue?
Right and wrong,
To stir my silent heart?
Yes—perhaps—it’s all part of the art.
I have this weakness:
I would think I’m cool,
If only I could bring that taste of blue,
Wrap up in it, and spread it all around,
Fashion it from feeling into sound,
Make you taste it, smell it, good and sound.
As long as I’m like this, can there be blue?
Red and orange are all I’ve got for you,
Not that silent freedom of the dusk,
Not that closeness, not that honey’s rust,
Not that unity of shadow, sky.
I fear the blue will always pass me by.
***
Now this is an especially tricky one. It is difficult to pin down exactly what I mean by that elusive term, "blue," and I encourage people to put their various interpretations on it. But if I were to try to put it into prose... the feeling I call "blue" is a feeling of freedom and serenity. It is an example, subset, or an offshoot, of a larger, more complex atmosphere I often crave, one of in-betweenness and quietness... it is because of this feeling that I crave liminal spaces and I enjoy music that flirts between the melancholy and the euphoric. It is a feeling of no strong emotion, simply being and wondering, and that is why I ponder, "is there right and wrong, within the blue?" Because such a state seems so completely neutral. It is a world where right and wrong are not even relevant. It is not perfect, but there is no expectation of it being so. Nor is there any expectation that it will last forever, although I might wish it.
I almost didn’t recognize you today—
Almost didn’t feel you there—
In the slow, working day,
In the endless noon of the day,
In the music I listen to on the drive,
In the sun jostling the pedestrians downtown,
Glowing trees, pavement with closed eyes.
But you were there
As surely as you were not,
Your face a filter over everything,
At every turn a crevice where you
Are not, but ought to be.
Most people have their “friends outside of school”—
Their special friends,
Secret sunshine lamps,
To embellish time with,
The in-between parts of days.
Mine, mine are just far away.
But I have them still—
Their shadows—
Strewn all over my dashboard.
***
Certain friends never really leave even when they move away. Part of their soul is stuck to yours and it flutters around in the wind sometimes to the point that you can see it. Across time and space this remains.
I sit here alone on the brink of time,
My futures stretched out in untidy lines,
All silent, not speaking to me, though I knew
Long ago that futures rarely do.
I am not the possession of the train’s whistle proud,
Whose set destinations are certain and loud,
But I’m a man sailing a pink cloudy sea,
Surrounded by wonders uncertain to me.
I wish I were Snufkin, jaunting abroad
With only my coat and my hat and a rod,
And music to play, and assurance of home
That though far, resides under the same silv’ry dome.
But as it is, I have a mission mapped out,
Though I cannot find the map’s whereabouts.
And when I get up, I’ll begin, and go on,
And see if the clouds are the clouds of dawn.
***
A poem for the end of senior year. Snufkin, if you didn't know, is a character from the Moomins franchise, who is known for his lack of possessions and love of adventure; he leaves the safety of Moominvalley every year for his grand explorations. Unfortunately I cannot be a free spirit like him. I have goods to my name I must steward, and a duty I must seek out and do.