-They say the
mother in my world has no pulse.
They say the God I talk about is not the God people fear.
They say the subject of race is no exception.
They say, I have difficulty with the surfaces,
the echoes, the sudden, the no longer there.
They say the shape of the crown on
my head is only a narcosis of motherlessness.
How does the poem begin? Hmm.
I'm no storyteller, only troubled.
I'm not sad nor inventive, nor magnetic.
I am forgettable man and forgettable woman.
I think a poem
begins when I start looking for a poem.
As soon as I want the poem I just look and I mine for it
everywhere.
And I know that it just comes.
It just I almost trust and believe that it will come
from doing that. And it always does.
It's never let me down.
In some ways, I feel like being a poet
also means being able to go back and forward in time
freely and freeze
moments and frames that you've seen before
and really analyze them to understand them again.
The poor wind returns from the mountains,
passes through the door and lights up around the fire.
It wishes it were smaller to be held.
It wishes it were heavier to stay when it pleases.
When I became a poet, I was able to
rewrite my own history,
and that changed me on a psychological level.
It allowed me to heal.
These are my mother's letters, and the first one
dates back to 2005.
When I was 14, my father
got a job offer from South Korea,
and so my mother and my father moved
to Seoul in South Korea then,
and they ended up staying there for nine years.
And I stayed behind.
I found myself getting into a lot of trouble
and I did whatever I could to harm myself.
So that was a lot of a lot of drinking, a lot of drugs.
Things like bulimia and things like partying
and then being malnourished and not taking care of myself.
By then, I had
long since kind
of let go of the idea of them ever coming back.
But during that time,
my mom would write me letters every single week.
These are where the teardrops are, their tears
from my younger self translating old letters,
what by my own tears, was startling.
What I found was love, you know,
immense amounts of love
that she had for me that I believed was not there.
The wind is alone in every measure of aloneness.
The wind is something to be left behind.
A poem can access a person's psyche.
It accesses their soul.
It lends to challenging the self
to think of compassion on a new level.
They say, I will never have enough to lose.
There is no judge nor critic, nor author, nor poet.
That is my friend.
Now is not the time to be timid or shy.
Poets now have to collaborate
and see themselves
beyond the scope of poetry to say, I'm
not only a poet, I'm a historian.
I am a time mechanic.
There is no death like the death of expectations
after I dare to rear up and ripple language.
Very few things in life give you the opportunity
to support and feed your soul.
And poetry is one of those things.
They say, I write from a common sensibility.
I see that no one can admire more than poetry.
They have tried to find something human in me.
And it's no wonder that
so many people across the world, in times
where they feel the most alone or they feel the most pain.
They turn to poetry.
Poetry will always be something to turn to.