Pious deceit of the soul...

Even when alone it malingers...

Buried flowers...

Sunday morning fireplace
Robert Frost, the bible and a cup of tea
Life in a specter with lingering voices
Unfinished puzzle pieces on a vanity
Yearning for things left to wonder
Quilted pieces held together
Time and essence, bound forever
A breath of life for buried flowers wither.

The Birth of a Tragedy...

I was seven years old. Mom raised all of us alone in Korea while dad was in America. We moved in with grandma, a single room make shift shack in a backyard of someone's house.  The dog barked and chased us around his doghouse like uninvited guests. After school, grandma had a bowl of rice with marinated beef jerky waiting. I was her first grandson. Grandma never took to mom.  Mom and grandma argued a lot. We all slept on the floor.  My brother, sister and I in the middle. Mom slept on one end of the room and grandma on the other.  Every night I stared into the silence of the night in its entombed blackness. I was afraid to move. I didn't want one of them in the morning to find me facing the other.

Salted rice balls and the cosmic universe...

My father was 14 years old when the reds started to take over the villages in the north and pilfered the young sons of the land.  Wanting to save her only son, my grandmother filled a sack with salted rice balls and sent my father away to hide in the mountains.  She told him no matter what happened, he had to live.

His two sisters remained behind and after that day, he never saw them again.  He hid for three months in the dense mountains until the salted rice balls ran out and found himself scavenging for food in the abandoned villages.  The reds got wind of these young party infidels and conducted daily sweep patrols through the mountain terrains.

One predawn night break he was awaken by the sound of leaves in distress.  Nature taught him the linguistics of basic survival.  It was the sound of approaching footsteps in military boots and a cacophony of artillery and uniforms rustling rigidly through the heart of darkness .  He instinctively rolled for cover and settled upon an unsuspecting bed of branches.  He quickly gathered himself only to find a set of eyes piercing him from the deepest edge of the night's abyss.

At first sheer terror palpitated uncontrollably through his boyish empty body.  It was followed by a rapid cascade of the heart pulsating through every fiber of his core, turning into a slow rhythmic beat which became a familiar, predictable, and strangely comforting companion.  He found himself inextricably captivated by a divine power of the cosmic force and for a brief fleeting moment, he felt peace.

But that tranquility never had a chance to malinger as he was suddenly pummeled by the crackling sound of a cocked rifle echoing off the mountain’s deepest valley. He felt instantly paralyzed by the eyes that held the pointed rifle.  In that same passing instant, he felt the overwhelming power of his death and all other random deaths wrapped irreverently around that instant.  But also in that same passing instant, he felt the overwhelming power of his life, and all other random lives wrapped irreverently around that instant.

But on that day, that very day he found himself with an empty sack of salted rice balls, everything about him and everything about me and everything about the cosmic universe took a turn when those eyes pointing the rifle turned and walked away.

The Deconstruction of a Man

A delusional  objectivist since NYU days when  first exposed to Whitman, Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand's Howard Roark,  I have been in a lifelong search for my “voice”.  In the process, through every random life experience, through knowledge and wisdom collected and pieced together in a fragile glass menagerie, through the dark alleys with broken bottles strewn, through the façade of maturity, accountability, and even faith, I have become layered thick beyond recognition. I find myself still tittering precariously on the cusp of this tight rope and it seems I have reached a point, a somewhat unprofound and unoriginal point of sheer desperation, forcing me to realize that the only true way I'll ever find this elusive voice is through the deconstruction of the self.