my foggy friend, my foggy fiend

i was cradled into the world yellowed and healthy
in a foggy, monotonous city where most people only drove through, never into
we only stayed until all the pointed fingers and shouted pleas were finally enough to make my mother come home

maybe the fog followed me like a friend
maybe like a fiend

in all respects, there are no foggy days in San Mateo
foggy mornings, the odd foggy mourning, maybe
the weather is a year-round mild

so, friend:
i am blind, i see no longer like my small handed days
guide me, reassure me that others too
have felt your wispy fingers curl into their eye sockets
that if now you will take my sight
they too, as the years come, will see no more
ignorance
is a bountiful and lovely thing

so fiend:
i am blind, i see no longer
leave me, your hands
have stripped me of color
my mind knows no relief in a rising sun
there is no new day

and yet

haven't you heard that you can cure cataracts
sometimes glasses
sometimes surgery

go on and follow me, follow me

friend, fiend

i'll rid myself of you yet

i will taste sunlight; i will see stars

tomorrow will know a green stare
and i will know its smile

you may be cold
but when you're cradled by a mother
whose arms know your weight
the love's warmth burns through

the scars ache, the chill bites, you wail
the wounds heal, the heart beats on, i'll try

and so,
i'll try to see past you




 

link to one of my favorite poems

"let my body be a godless church, holy for no reason beyond itself"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn0HrhNGnT0

It goes this way

you are dust mote morning

lethargic slow motion 

drippy 

do not stay 

you are one wide night 

Poetry, she says,

Poetry, she says,
poetry is eternity,

let the sound and silence break through the barriers of time,
let the existence of different letters craft their ways into words,
into meaning, into love, into greatness, into poetry,

Poetry is the cereal we eat for breakfast,
the way we promise ourselves we will wake up earlier tomorrow,
Poetry puts the morrow in tomorrow,
puts the life in today,

poetry draws the pathway towards acceptance,
leads towards forgiveness,
is the beacon when we are drowning,
the last bit of oxygen when we feel suffocating,

Poetry is the sweet scent of cinnamon pretzels lingering on the corners of your lips,
so taste it in the warmth of the glowing sun,
Poetry is birthday candles,
castle building in the pillow soft sand,
while watching the ocean and the shoreline kiss,

Poetry is butterflies tingling in your stomach in the arms of your first love,
arcade games, standing under street lights smiling ,

Poetry is wishing for endless tomorrows,
thankful for each today

Poetry, she says,
Poetry is eternity.

This is for the self-proclaimed "ugly" girls

inspired and written in the style of "shake the dust"

This is for the self-proclaimed "ugly" girls,
for the people who spend their nights cleaning airports,
This is for the pizza and ranch sauce crunchers,
for the boys who tremble when talking to girls,
This is for the addicted dads,
for the ones who have belt marks carved into their backs,
this is for the former prom queens,
for the parents who have to work past midnight,
simply to feed their children,
this one's for the girl who I met last sunday,
the one who spends days as a housekeeper,
but dear god she's only sixteen.
This is for the midnight lovers,
for the ones who honeymoon to Paris alone,
this is for the girls who lost their mothers to cancer,
for the broken English speakers,
for the boy who changes the pronouns in his poems,
This is for the ones our country turns against,
for the ones who are stereotyped by their appearance,
This is for the ones who lose at bowling parties,
for the single mother dealing with cps,
This is for the ones who seal their mouths closed,
who hide beneath shame and shattered reflections,


Do not let the heaviness of defeat weigh you down like you are a burden,
do not let the cruelness of your classmates step on you like damaged wallpaper,

Listen to your pulse, it is a reminder that your body is powerful enough to keep fighting,
You have not collapsed yet,
struggle is just a journey to freedom,
you'll trade blisters and a tired climb for a view of the world,

You stay silent in a crowd of people,
you forget the sound of your own voice,

Every time someone asks you your name,
you give it them,

scream it until it echos,
and it will echo,
feel the reverberations of your own sound,
it matches the power of any other,
nothing less than human,
do not forget your own importance,
do not let go of your own existence.

To you I offer, edited version

Dear sister, 

You walked into my room telling me about people,
how we can walk down the hallways every day surrounded by people,
how we can feel completely isolated, excluded, lonely,
how people can just turn away.
How there are 7 billion of us on Earth,
each of us selfish,
each of us choosing to stomp on people,
each of us forgetting the human connecting us,
each of us lonely.
You tell me about how people are born to play the victim,
throwing out accusations like words used to fill up the spaces of silence.
You told me how people forget how the silence screams volumes
and the harsh sounds that entraps and entangles offs our mouths curve their way into shattered porcelain.
But dear sister,
you, you craft words into a blanket,
promising me love, promising comfort,
Today I am not lonely, we are not lonely. 

Dear people who shall refuse to smile back at me, 

Today I am thankful for you,
thankful because you made me realize how people create truths.
Truths about someone without knowing anything about them.
2 plus 2 equals 5, or 4, or 6, or 8
but today does it really matter?
Ultimately the most beautiful aspect of human nature is the myriad of truths existing that we ourselves create.
how we all enter life like a blank canvas,
letting the spectrum of different people and cultures and experiences color their stories on it. 

I do not blame you for ignoring me just because other people colored dusk over my name,
I understand how we tend to gravitate towards what is accepted, what allows us to just belong, what makes us a little less lonely. 

Dear everyone I hurt in the past,

I can count the number of times I apologized on one hand.
But today, I am sorry, I am sorry, a million times over,
I broke bones and used them as support for my own heavy ego,
but today I will not allow our friendship collapse, I will carry it on my back. 

Dear friend, 

You are my chess board,
protecting me from becoming trapped by sadness,
Today I am a winner. 

Dear world, 

Are we not all same?
Strip away our names, our face, religion, race, gender, love, hate, the pronoun we use in our love poems,
until we exist only as a looking glass of one another,
we are human,
so naked, so vulnerable, so similar that all we can do is smile,
notice how we share the same laugh,
how our hands curve around each other's like lock and key, like we were created to connect them, created to embrace the wrinkles on each of our fingertips. 

Dear life.

take a glimpse at the person next to you,
take a glimpse into their struggles, their aspirations,
how each person is a separate story, and a good one, composed of complexities, evil, goodness,

but today,
Dear you
stop performing autopsies on chapters you already lost the page number to,
stop wishing for re-dos, reincarnating what you should have said, should have done,
I'll wrote myself into your plot line,
to you I offer a better ending,
one that we all deserve. 

"We forget crowns do nothing for kings but put weight on their heads and a target on their back"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO7VlK7VAgQ

fireworks

I dug out this poem. It is the first one I ever shared.

On June 23 1982, Chinese American Vincent Chin was beaten to death the day before his wedding. 

Dear Vincent, you

they say your skin was painted too dirty to be worth anything, 

they colored you different 

you, they saw your eyes were too slanted to be recognized as human, 

they saw you different, 

And as they ran after you, 

you were not surprised, 

you always knew they were coming, 

So when they got to you, 

when they got to you, 

I watched as they split your head open with a baseball bat, 

as it splat, striked open, 

crackled like fireworks, 

I know how it feels

I've been there too. 

I go there in the lonely nights, 

in the years I dedicated to writing hate about myself, 

In the years, I cursed my name, 

 hated the way it sounded, how I dreaded the silence before teachers attempted to articulate the "Xuan" in "Wenxuan." 

it sounded too foreign,

so I crafted the letters into something more American, hide behind a curtain of assimilation. 

But when you died, 

the sun rose once again after the darkness of nights under the silence of the Chinese exclusion act, 

the Japanese concentration camps

I was there as your spirit danced in the moonlight, 

illuminated, 

the brightness of your skin, 

burned as we colored you hope, 

we colored you magnificent. 

because in 1982, 

your death gave life to the fist ever widespread Asian voice all across America, 

As we all, 

Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean,

all cried out your name. 

Dear Vincent, 

can you see us in all our different colors, 

the fire in our voices lighting up as we elevated towards the sky, 

crackled like fireworks, 

Dear Vincent, 

when they say your eyes are too slanted, 

you tell them about your lover, 

how beauty was in the eyes of whoever could be hold her 

looking at her 

looking at her was just too much for you eyes to endure. 

Dear Vincent, 

Im sorry they stripped you from love, 

Im sorry I didnt speak up earlier, 

when I was there.

1.

This is the 2nd poem I wrote a few months ago. It was written the day after a Gunn high school student, Cameron Lee, killed himself by jumping in front of a train and inspired by a senior at Aragon's facebook status and profile picture about his death. It is inspired by the style of Sierra Demulder. As a community, we should support each other in school, and if you see someone sitting alone, just say hi because it is easy for people to feel lonely under the pressure of competition and expectations. It is easy to hurt others, to be hostile, to forget about someone's feelings, to isolate others as inferior. But school is already a stressful environment, do not make it worse for others. Be kind. Nobody is ever alone. I know we can all relate to sadness.

1 AM,
you find yourself laying on the train tracks under the silence of the night. you count to ten.

Remind one month,
you learn about gas chambers in your history class,
about oxygen in biology,
But your teachers are pilling up the work load,
your parents are already planning your future,
as you stay up each night just to get through the next day,
you know what it feels like to be suffocating.

Fast forward one week,
your home is not a homefront,
much more the opposite,
but the ongoing battle against time and firing school bells,
has got you chained by the density of each test grade,
flooding your lungs with the heaviness of defeat,
burying you with lost hopes,
you are still fighting to keep our chin above the water,
but you are sinking,
struggling to breathe,
grasping onto the last bit of oxygen as if you were trapped in a gas chamber,
you are drowning.

Fast forward 1 week,
you ask your mother about God,
ask her where people who die really go to,
is there a such thing as hell,

Fast forward one week,
this place is hell.

Fast forward 1 day,
you remember the guy in your biology class,
they say he's in a better place now,
you understand what that really means.

Fast forward 12 hours,
you leave your house before your next alarm clock,
climb over the fence along west charleston and east meadow drive,
have you gravitate towards the brightness of the head lights that illuminates in the night,
like a beacon, a lighthouse, promising hope
an escape out of the darkness,
you can see it now,
closer and closer,
leading you back to shore

1 AM,
you find yourself laying on the train tracks under the silence of the night,
humming your favorite llulaby, the one your mother used to sing to you before she put you to sleep, you can finally finally sleep,
you rest your tired eyes,
you count.
10.
9.
8.
7.
6.
5.
4.
3.
2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY8ynr2cSTs

I always go back to this poem, it perfectly exemplifies the rawness of poetry, the breathless silence words evoke, and how we feel inspired in the end, without knowledge of why, of how. The art of spoken word poetry captivates me, not only because of its manipulation of words crafted into metaphors and rhymes, but also its ability to reveal the struggles and aspirations within one that allows others to grasp a glimpse into one’s life. With words, each person carries a story, and it is a good one.

discover a world of poets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsp_3uz__zs&list=PLupalylLGWv-IOvl3F9WrFGgPQYpVEzJJ

One of my favorite poems ever written by Ted Baker

Paper People

I like people.

I like some paper people.

They’d be purple paper people.

Maybe pop up purple paper people.

Proper pop up purple paper people.

‘How do you prop up pop up purple paper people?’

I hear you cry. Well I…

I’d probably prop up proper pop up purple paper people

with a proper pop up purple people paperclip,

but I’d pre-prepare appropriate adhesives as alternatives,

a cheeky pack of blu tack just in case the paper slipped.

I could build a pop up metropolis.

but i wouldn’t wanna deal with all the paper people politics.

paper politicians with their paper-thin policies,

broken promises without appropriate apologies.

there’d be a little paper me, and a little paper you,

and we’d watch paper TV and it would all be paper view.

we’d watch the poppy paper rappers rap about their paper package

or watch paper people carriers get stuck in paper traffic on the A4.

There’d be a paper princess Kate but we’d all stare at paper Pippa,

and then we’d all live in fear of killer Jack the paper ripper.

cause the paper propaganda propagates the peoples prejudices,

papers printing pictures of the photogenic terrorists.

There’d be a little paper me, and a little paper you,

but in a pop up population people’s problems pop up too.

there’d be a pompous paper parliament who remained out of touch,

and who ignored the peoples protests about all the paper cuts,

then the peaceful paper protests would get blown to paper pieces,

by the confetti cannons manned by pre-emptive police.

and there’s still be paper money, so there’d still be paper greed,

and the paper piggy bankers pocketing more than they need.

purchasing the potpourri to pepper their paper properties,

while others live in poverty and ain’t acknowledged properly,

a proper poor economy where so many are proper poor,

but while their needs are ignored the money goes to big wars,

funding origami armies building paper planes

while we remain imprisoned by our own paper chains,

and the greater shame, is that we always seem to stay the same,

what changes is who’s in power choosing how to lay the blame,

they’re naming names, forgetting these are names of people,

cause in the end it all comes down to people.

I like people. cause even when the situation’s dire,

it is only ever people who are able to inspire,

and on paper – it’s hard to see how we all cope,

but in the bottom of pandora’s box there’s still hope,

and i still hope cause i believe in people.

People like my Grandparents. who every single day since i was born have taken time out of their morning to pray for me.

that’s 7433 days straight of someone checking i’m okay and that’s amazing.

people like my aunt who puts on plays for prisoners.

people who are capable of genuine forgiveness.

people who go out of their way to make your life better and expect nothing in return.

people have potential to be powerful.

and just because the people in power tend to pretend to be different, we don’t all need to succumb to the system.

a paper population is no different.

there’s be a little paper me and a little paper you,

and we could watch paper TV and it would all be paper view,

and in a pop up population peoples problems pop up too

but even if the whole world fell apart then we’d still make it through

because we’re people.

But I am a broken pen.
Can I really save someone. 

in the lonley hour, original

I spent the last hour thinking and so I wrote this. maybe if anyone ever got to really know me, they would understand me, but they can't. 

Dear sister, 

You walked into my room telling me about people, how you walked down the hallways everyday feeling completely isolated and excluded and lonely, and people just turned away. How there are 7 billion of us on Earth, each of us selfish , each of us choosing to stomp of people, each of us forgetting the human connecting us, each of us lonley. You tell me about how people are born to play the victim, throwing out accusations like words used to fill up the spaces of silence. You told me how people forget how the silence screams volumes and the harsh sounds that entraps and entangles offs our mouths curve their way into swords. I used to do that. Dear sister, but you you craft words into a blanket, promising me love and comfort, I am not lonely, we are not lonely. 

Dear people who talked about me, 

Today I am thankful for you, thankful because you made me realize how people create truths. Truths about someone without knowing anything about them. 2 plus 2 equals 5, or 4, or 6, but today does it really matter? Ultimately the most beautiful aspect of human nature is the myriad of truths existing that we create ourselves. how we all enter life with a blank paper, letting the spectrum of different people and cultures and experiences color their stories on it. 

I do not blame you for ignoring me just because other people colored dusk over my name, I understand how we tend to gravitate towards what is accepted, what allows us to just belong, what makes us a little less lonely. 

Dear everyone I hurt, 

I can count the number of times I apologized on one hand. But today, I am sorry, i am sorry a million times over, I broke your bones and used them as support for my own heavy ego, but today I will not allow our friendship to collapse, I will carry it on my back for however long it takes. 

Dear friend, 

You are my chess board. protecting me from becoming trapped by judgement and hatred, leading me to a way out of sadness. Today I feel like a winner. 

Dear world, 

Are we not all same. Strip away our names, our face, religion, race, gender, love, hate, until we exist only as a looking glass of one another, so naked so similar that all we can do is smile, notice how we share the same laugh, how our hands curve around each other's like lock and key, like we were created to connect them, created to embrace the wrinkles on each of your finger tips. 

Dear life, 

take a glimpse at the person next to you, take a glimpse into their struggles, their aspirations, how each person is a separate story, and a good one, composed of complexities, evil, goodness, but today lets become a part of each other's plot line, choosing to write ourselves into the happy endings.