Origami Moonlight: Collected Love Poems of Paul Hina 2009-2012

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Origami Moonlight: Collected Love Poems of Paul Hina 2009-2012 Page 4

by Paul Hina

lips—

  me laid down on her stains of secrets—

  as there are raindrops on the petals

  of her prison

  43

  she is as pretty as posies and

  as potent as poison,

  her curves are like coils of riddles

  made from somewhere mist,

  and her hair is spun like the clues

  airbrushed on the clouds

  but she speaks with the sing-song

  certainty of summer rain,

  and her kiss might kill you if you climb

  into it—head first—

  her heart heaving in your hands

  44

  when she walks, flowers grow

  beneath her feet,

  when she looks at me, waves splash

  at my body,

  and when she smiles, the sun shines

  across my mind,

  her body is the shape of the world

  as it ought to be,

  enveloped by the mud of the source of all

  light and sustenance—

  the softest womb to want to be buried in,

  counting the moons on her thighs as you

  dwindle into the sweetest wash

  of wondrous death

  45

  the water's chatter still speaks

  her name to me,

  and the mist means her kiss is

  near in my memory,

  dancing on the surface

  of the stream,

  waiting for the mind

  to mumble its way

  back to her mouth,

  fingers swimming over her lips,

  her wet skin,

  watching the rain drip off her

  droops of down hair,

  and the dance of the dew that develops

  in the heart never dies,

  only dives deeper

  and out of reach

  46

  her face is so wonderfully clear to me,

  like i've touched it before—ever-so-slightly

  with the soft part of the back of my hand—

  like i've felt the weight of her beautiful head

  leaning into my touch, like i've seen those

  lazy, blue eyes shut with silent imperceptible

  lashes intertwining like furls of fingers and

  watched them open again like a shock of cold

  water had me submerged,

  and her breath, i have smelled its sweetness,

  remember it with the lavish comfort of satin

  rain, and tasted that kiss like spring's first fruit,

  its juices dripping down my chin like the delirium

  in a dream of flying, an ecstasy so enormous that

  it unfolds a paper moon with what feels like the

  hands of a heart from another life, keeps me trapped,

  mesmerized by her origami moonlight

  47

  she is so pretty,

  face etched by the most careful hands

  —better hands than mine—

  and her body is shaped by an artist so

  deliberate that no curve is overlooked

  to forgo perfection,

  and she moves with meaning and music that

  revs to life from her whirligig heart,

  but, when she's absent, my mind is left bending

  lines, drafting faces, meticulously trying to keep

  her melody alive in the world,

  trying to hum along and remember the sway of

  those hips like silver bells ringing shocks and

  buzzes up and down my skin—the same way

  her smile can bend a string of sound around the

  mind, sending a long shiver of her wrapping a

  laugh around the stems of all my future dreams

  48

  the spring days are dwindling,

  petals have dawdled and dangled,

  and you look wilted, waiting for a

  shade to climb into so that the cool

  grass can lick at your sun drenched

  skin,

  and, though the heat frustrates me,

  i want to find you with these spring

  fingers, press flesh into flesh with

  the faintness of flowers,

  and we'll find a tree's canopy together,

  paint its leaves with our fistfuls of

  secrets and pluck a few to dabble

  away all the kisses we'll plant on

  spring's shadows

  49

  she is the measure of all miracles in

  my mind,

  it feels like i've known her for years

  and years, and yet she fades in and

  out of my days in waves of endless

  uncertainties—

  her pretty features, at once blurred,

  become perfectly clear the next minute:

  the way she makes music within me,

  gives rhythm to the world with her beauty

  —those sweet handfuls of hair,

  those journeys of legs stretching into

  these poems like sunsets.

  these are the meanings, the reasons the

  world makes sense when she speaks,

  or when she appears to move—a dusty

  apparition, breathing and then dying

  with the immeasurable rhythms of

  a wind so familiar

  50

  the shock of her hair skittering

  across my face is where the core

  of all kisses finds its beating heart,

  where fingers are bloodstained with

  simple, beautiful love,

  and every touch is a shiver that bends

  bodies into shards of something deeper

  than sex—

  a pool more chaotic than passion,

  a girl more meaningful than questions

  or answers,

  more necessary than art or science,

  the embodiment of truth's tendrils,

  winding around every lovely, loopy

  imperfection

  51

  the blooms of spring's first

  breath has given way to the

  suffocating heat and weeds

  of summer stagnation,

  and i have stifled the misery

  long enough to whisper her name,

  hide it in my pocket, breathe it in

  on days of stifle and sweat,

  and i'll want for flowers but will

  settle for the faintest ghosts of the

  flirts of a gesture, the thin veil of

  a touch, the tiniest taste of a distant

  kiss stolen in spring's once sensuous

  strings of rain

  52

  you are a pleasure of poetry that still

  plays in that great pause before the

  summer smacks all the spring's sweetness

  from the stirrings in the heart

  and only the stars can send me back to

  you on those sweaty nights, the swelters

  of the sky stealing the memories of your

  mouth until the starlight presses its pretty

  lips onto mine, projecting movies of you

  onto the moon in my mind, your blue light

  lying on me like a long ago lullaby, where

  love was a song, and you were only a heartbeat

  of lazy light away

  53

  you are a lily,

  long and

  wondrous white

  and you hang

  in repose,

  petals ready to fall

  into the puddle

  of a kiss

  54

  i don't understand what it is about you

  that hooks me so deep,

  has me hung up,

  always,

  dangling over a fall—

&n
bsp; a plunge felt in the gut,

  the one that feeds the butterflies

  —a descent that spins the mind with

  memories of your voice

  saying my name,

  tasting your beautiful noise on my lips,

  knowing your ageless face

  will forever be

  etched on the screen of my sleep

  in this sea of dreams

  55

  your hair dangles lazily over

  your pretty face, elegant and

  perfectly framing its symmetry

  with something resembling

  sunshine—warm from the serendipity

  of the feeling that i've seen you before,

  known you in the loveliest of ways,

  and the dress you're wearing flows

  over your body like waves of water

  were massaging the skin beneath its

  skirt,

  and your legs are long and tan and

  your ankles are tiny and tumultuously

  beautiful when they sway your foot to

  and fro like a thought were spinning

  your mind around, making me dizzily

  drunk on the perfume you've left in the

  room just by being so perfectly a woman

  56

  you are a darkness muse,

  a shadow across cool, blue water,

  a dizzy dream made dizzier by the

  flutter of your long, black lashes—

  like butterflies opening your mouth

  for a yawn—

  and you breathe poems into me,

  resuscitate songs, long and quiet

  ones that cause dead flowers of time's past

  to bloom around the sunlight reflected

  off your hair, sending sunbursts off

  memory's photographs, concealing the

  fade of your face from my hungry hands,

  but i search for you in the sands of the

  darkest night's desert with the hope that

  water wobbles atop this teetering

  dream of wanted words

  57

  i've been looking skyward for you,

  watching the shapes and curves of

  clouds, measuring the wisps of white

  fluff with bending fingers, trying to

  manipulate the heavens from ground's

  stingy perch,

  and i breathe your name into these cottony

  daydreams like some loopy sky writer,

  and you are so beautiful on a backdrop of

  blue—and blue so effortlessly finds beautiful

  on you—that i may never look to the heights

  without thinking of the daylight in your face,

  or devising ways to carry it with me at night,

  when dreams are dark and lonely and your

  blue is hovering above sleep's sweet lucidity

  58

  you are a lazy flower, lying still,

  waiting for the steamy summer

  breezes to pluck your lavender

  heart with its yellow smears of fingers

  and

  a kiss of blue lands on your lips

  to moisten your pouty petals as

  they drip one by one into the lush

  morning green of july's brutal truths

  and

  the rain's weary whisper of hands caress

  the reds, browns, and pinks of you, clings

  to your gossamer meaning with wonders

  of spring eyes—soft and tenderly held

  with youngest grasps of wet fingers

  59

  she whistles sounds of softly birdsong

  in my ears, rocks me gently from sleep,

  wipes the drowsy dew from my morning

  eyes, and shakes me from the web of

  tired, tangled dreams

  and when she kisses me softly across the

  mouth, she shuffles the night away, and

  pulls me deep into her sunshine,

  and the day is new and bright, and promise

  decorates the room like some undiscovered

  color,

  and i touch it—this color that radiates

  from her skin—and it makes the softest, most

  beautiful sound of bells breathing whimsical

  secret worlds into my ears

  60

  when she laughs,

  she sends a wave through me,

  an innocent roll of thunder

  that stirs something warm in the belly,

  and nostalgia rises up

  and electrifies old shivers,

  and a light comes on in the mind

  with a ding and a jump,

  and i remember what it was like

  to hold naked hope in my heart,

  how tantalizing uncertainty was

  when i was young

  and the future was full

  of the flowers of mystery,

  splendidly stained by the shadows

  of springs to come,

  awash in the summers where

  somewhere

  a girl shines to remind me

  61

  my head is sore for wanting,

  reaching for muses

  among the clouds,

  and the hazy sky

  gives the world visions

  of angels that spiral away

  into wisps of stuttering stars,

  and the poems i hoped i'd find

  are lost in the mucky trails

  of the moon

  and travel across my eyes

  like fireflies

  or some memory

  of her dancing

  through the mist

  on some rainy spring day—

  her shape as hard to trace

  as the horizon

  when the moon is a lonely sliver

  of white

  and the stars are stained

  by someone else's kiss

  62

  her hair falls over the fronts of her shoulders

  in chestnut waves, and her breasts peek

  out like natural parts of the landscape—a

  lovely place to spend some time—traveling

  with fingers, twisting those softest wisps,

  tangling her tresses with playful hands,

  kissing the flesh of the breasts as i wipe away

  the air of her hair, bury all the noise beneath

  her body and live in her lines, those clumsy

  curves that make such a perfectly unclumsy

  flower, and listen to her breath, hear her

  speak in psalms—the music of life's deepest

  meaning, meandering near a kiss, listening

  to the ripple of the sweet streams of her

  throat, the thrushes that rest on her lazy

  limbs, blooms shot across her bough

  63

  her pink umbrella plays pretty music

  under the rain,

  the pitter plop of rain's wet feet gives

  rhythm to her already graceful walk,

  and she might as well be singing,

  dancing beneath the grayest of skies,

  giving light to the gloom that gloms

  away the rest of the landscape,

  a white light that shines like a star

  waiting to fall, a bright shot across

  the world for wishes and wayward

  wings—the light where flight begins,

  gives breath to the birds—

  and hopestreams run everywhere,

  waiting for the echo rings of her pinkest

  rain to fly further, touch a deeper gray

  into light

  64

  when she curls into a smile,

  she pours promises from her pinkest pouts

  of lips,

  when she bends both hands a
round my arm,

  she holds my hope in the heaps of those hands,

  digs into my deepest dreams when the weight

  of her sweetest thoughts meets my shoulder,

  and late at night—in the mute, milky moonlight—

  i watch her breathe poems from that lake of skin

  that flows from where her chest meets her throat,

  and she is my every poem, every verbal palpitation

  marks future pages,

  and it is the light from her whole heavenly body that

  gives me illusions of kisses and disheveled hair,

  the dizziness of tomorrow dances where hips

  dip and swirl into night's water,

  and someday—caught in the gloaming's fingers—

  when we're gray with tired—white with weary—

  we will still be slow together, still diving into

  dreams,

  dancing with the kisses that toss our hair

  and swirl our hips—

  she'll curl smiles,

  and i'll catch the breath of her poems

  65

  she hones the hinges of her hips, knows

  when they shift and swing, breathes

  confidence on the bell that each sway

  rings in the minds of men,

  and she smiles to see them stop and

  turn her way, a glimmer bounces in

  her eye, and she swings her pretty

  head, swiveling the neck so subtlely

  that her hair traipses—with the tiniest

  tips of its fingers—across her back and

  shoulders,

  and she laughs to think that the same

  shiver she feels also shakes up and down

  the spines of the boys she has been softly

  speaking to by barely beating her wings

  66

  she is a gray pool in my brain's water,

  caught in the electricity that buzzes blue

  in dreams,

  she kisses my sleep with portraits

  of her body—porcelain and silk stretched

  around her softest frame—

  and she rests near the stream of time,

  caught in the subtle, yet strong currents of

  our enduring love,

  her long fingers holding tight to the hot

  stones of my heart,

  a smile stretched across the hope on her

  mouth,

  her hair a slowly mudslide that reaches

  for the brook of our memories,

  babbling,

  babbling

  67

  you are a pink stroke of paint, a pale

  dot of flesh on the landscape of my

  night's sleep,

  a color that moves and breathes and

  makes promises from old secrets,

  wakes up long ago whispers that blow

  as frequent as the winds that make

  waves across the long, lazy strands

  of greenery that surround you,

  and the watercolor blues smeared above

  you lean whiter to gray, teetering,

  always, on the threat of raining you away,

  your hands and your hair,

  your words and your lips,

  all could vanish like somewhere sand,

  startled stardust, a twinkle trampled

  by time,

  a promise pushed aside by new paints,

  pouring pouring pouring

  68

  she is the rhythm of my heart,

  the red that breathes in my blood,

  the substance that pokes my reverie,

  the truth that tears me down and lifts

  me up.

  she is the stunning start of the seasons,

  the first shuddering startle when the

  rain purrs to a pour.

  she is the sun of enlightenment when

  i am wobbly and weak with the weight

  of worry.

  and she is the reason i work—

  the push of pen to words and

  words to poems—

  when i'm lucky enough

  to catch her whimsy

  in the cups of my clumsy hands.

  69

  i can no longer trace the curves of

  her body with my fingers, can't imagine

  the height she carries on those long,

  lost legs of hers, i can't remember the

  shush of her whisper, or the sound of

  her voice,

  i've lost the secret sound of her fingers

  folding into mine, and her lips are ghosts

  that fade—like each kiss—right through

  the holes in my memory,

  and it all slips away into somewhere water,

  a pool so deep that, if i jump, i'll never return,

  only sink into the loops of memoryland, never

  emerging, will be stillborn and breathless inside

  these brief glimpses of her song, a fan dance

  of light through the open ocean

 

  70

  she is an approaching storm,

  the sweet rumble in the distance,

  the crack that creaks across the sky

  like some great ship on choppy water,

  she is the curve of a cloud,

  the wet in the rain,

  the electricity in the lightning,

  she is the devil in the details—

  the girl that grows greater gardens

  while i dream of distant lands,

  touches the nighttime whispers until

  the wind wakes me with its shocking caress,

  a passionate kiss across the terra firma

  of my mind

  71

  her round, Botticelli face was painted by

  the softest fingers of renaissance angels,

  stretching their wings to touch her ceramic

  cheek, to feel the blood rush through a live

  wire of moving art,

  her paint was dried by the hand of the

  miraculous cosmos, planting stars in

  her eyes, swirling the dark muck of

  the infinite unknowables that shape her

  body for curiosity's attention, to spark

  all of beauty's new inventions, where

  dark matter meets the sweetest curl of

  light

  72

  she is the how and the why,

  the reason of my heart,

  the rhythm of my song,

  the method that trails travel in my mind,

  and these paths

  lead me to her pretty peonies,

  everywhere popping with whispers

  and side-long glances,

  petals tiptoeing across my skin,

  shining secrets like a light for my pen

  73

  her beauty bends credulity when she

  wakes in my dreams, tipping the moon

  with the weight of her whimsy,

  and her laugh…

  her laugh is like a thousand once darkened

  stars have come to life in an instant,

  and each bright light is a shiver i'll spend

  my daylight hours chasing to translate,

  but you can't make meaning from the

  easy perfections of her song, let alone

  make music from the miracle of her simple

  smile, but each failing is a fathom worth

  its weight in sleep's oceans

  74

  your legs are exposed

  so high up your thigh

  that they shine like Shangri-La—

  reflect art on the artless—

  and your long hair

  dances over your shoulders,

  down your back,

  waiting in the stun of someone's stare

  to shock the so
und of the heart

  with love songs and sleep breaths,

  to dreaming of better detours

  through the words

  that lie in your hands,

  and the tales that are translated

  through those fingertips of hair

  that tickle the naked skin of your shoulders

  float on layers of whispering poems

  that bounce between your naked knees

  75

  i dream of falling down the muddy

  waterfalls of the hair that so raggedly

  hangs beside your face,

  the color and the curls reduce my

  mouth to mumbles,

  but instead of lying my hand across

  your softest slope of shoulder and leaning

  into breathe the air of the earth that slips

  by your ear,

  my mind becomes an open aperture of

  memory,

  and my pen leaks light everywhere with

  little poetries, where your mudslides make

  mischief in this muse starved mind

  76

  her body is painted by the pastel

  garden on her dress, a drip of a

  dream pressed wet against her body,

  and the petals slowly peel off the

  skin to peer into her sky blue eyes

  and push the scent of all her flowers

  around the room,

  and i have always wanted to see,

  maybe touch, the sunshine she—

  this singular girl of summer—hides

  in her hair, to hear the earth beneath

  her ache and grow—roots into tendrils,

  tendrils into veins, veins into the skin

  of softest spring breathing exhales of

  her sweetest colors covering, momentarily,

  all the world's darknesses

  77

  her soft, round face radiates the kind of

  youth you see in renaissance paintings—

  something angelic and glowing, white

  with the slightest pinks of life coloring

  the flesh—and you just know she tastes

  like honey and milk, and that her skin

  lies like silk across her body,

  and she is full of the softest snow that

  winter aches to recreate, and the clouds

  constantly try to reinvent her with their

  intricate chemistry, but their fingers,

  the hands of the slightest blue atmosphere,

  just can't create such soft ceramics as her

  snowy arches and curves

  78

  it's true you're plain,

  your clothes aren't flashy,

  and your hair is lazily

  tied behind your head,

  your face shows little effort,

  but your skin is as soft as your features,

  and underneath those sloppy clothes

  are curves and beautifully lines—

  softly bending toward ecstasy

  and when you let that lazy hair down

  and shake it out for me,

  there is a stutter in the light

  that casts a shadow

  on all the world but you

  79

  i thought i heard you call my name,

  out of sleep, from the depths, where

  the mind confuses memory for meaning,

  and it startled my heart with the rapidity

  of a revving thing

  and my body purred and was moved like

  light through an electrical current, and a

  rush of goodness ran over my skin

  and the world, my world, met me through

  the gauze of no more sleep, and i was

  dreamless, dying for your water, clutching

  for more meaning in the lightning beneath

  the veil

  80

  her eyes are startles of starry

  skies, and when i fall through

  those skies, i sink into plumes of

  clouds swarmed with white lights—

  bright with bliss—

  and those lights are the glimmering

  kind, the kind that shake and swim

  on the surface of the dreams that

  stream from memories made opaque

  by the rain,

  and dripping stars conjure mischief

  sculptures on the screen of these celluloid

  rivers, and i count every light, every jagged

  kiss of ours, and they're as clear as the sound

  the heart makes when i hear you call my name,

  feel your eyes like fingers of rain on my skin

  81

  she'll always be a dancer in my mind,

  spinning poems from her pretty tendrils

  of pirouettes, pliés and tiptoes, peeling,

  always, new fruits for me to try and taste

  she paints moonbeams on the canvas of

  my remembers—where art stands, eternally,

  near the thrill of forgets—with the soft strikes

  of her satin slippers,

  and she presses—on-pointe, arms stretching

  elegantly to calm the clouds—startles

  of flesh that stain my quiet moments with

  the dizzy lights of daffodils and daydreams

  82

  does she know that her thighs hold a 

  thicket that flows to heavenly places, 

  where smears of wild flowers grow and 

  smell so sweet that my teeth ache at the 

  sight of their saccharine stained colors? 

  and yet the sound of the thicket, moving, 

  murmuring into the great yellow divide— 

  where the divine hides its mysteries—that 

  sound is enough to drink from in dream,

  but truly drinking would be too real, would

  make all other dreams wither away, all her

  gardens' sugar would dissolve on the tongue,

  and all the flowers, all her colors, would run

  down her thighs like a shadow of kisses

  fading into sleep

  83

  she is a precarious flower on those long

  stems of legs, winding and unwinding

  tendrils of nervous thought around her

  thin wire frame,

  and she breathtakingly bends her lines

  around my mind, planting seeds, dropping

  trails of petals back to her smooth, white

  fronds of palms waiting to collapse, petal

  by anxious petal, finger by fretting finger,

  around my lazy lines, lyrics trembling for

  the shapes she makes into songs

  84

  her hair's a beautiful mess tossed aside 

  for shoulder-draping, crawling over her ears

  to whisper seashores, to murmur the secrets 

  of spring's flowers, 

  the delicate cirrus of each slithery strand holds 

  all her past touches, feeds glimmers of every spark 

  that's ever run up her back, every shiver of every

  kiss, 

  and my fingers comb through every miracle, catch

  all the magic as i run over those muddy falls in a 

  whimsical frenzy that drops petals like magnolia

  snow

  85

  april's slightest spring sun

  sends whispers of you,

  memories coming unglued

  from winter's night,

  and i hold tight,

  grasping every faded memory

  with fists

  firmly clasped together,

  like i were holding onto

  your last gasp of air,

  squeezing your final whisper,

  softly choking the end of a wish

&nbs
p; 86

  she's lovely and long, 

  a pink drink from head to toe, 

  languidly lounging

  like some reclining venus

  to make Manet blush

  87

  those waves of your amber rain of hair wash

  out the clarity of days, sends me to uncertain

  skies where clouds climb the bluest walls of

  kisses, reaching,

  reaching for the mystery of your darkest eyes,

  waiting to touch your nighttime waters, to taste

  the rush of your starry fingers in my mouth,

  feeling for infinity, planting it on my heart with

  a burst of Indra's net, sending endless shimmers

  across my soul, exploding like dust across this

  clutter of cosmos, climbing over endless

  convulsions of joy and pure, white, lovely

  laughter

  88

  her streams of curves

  cracked open my sleep last night,

  making maps from memory,

  flowing from one end of my mind

  to the other,

  her sweet blue-gray water

  stirred old sensations,

  and i stole a drink of a kiss

  from her mouth

  for love remembering, touch feeling,

  and i stole the sound of her smile

  from a swirl of liquid laughter

  rushing over the rocks,

  and rolled with it

  toward the falls—so deep

 

  and the rain will never stop,

  will fall and fall,

  descend slowly, softly, eventually,

  into snow

  89

  she is the wisps of fog that hide the treetops,

  she is the rain, waiting near the water—too

  small to fall—curving elegantly over tides

  of sky,

  and when the morning breeze blows a wish over

  her fingers, the leaves tremble for a touch

  and the sun licks every limb up and down

  until her memory is washed across the water,

  and this new day's skin waits for her wind, wants

  to curl up under the weight and wobble of her

  rain, waiting for rainbows to meander toward

  moonbeams,

  and i'll make a wish as the moonlight mesmerizes

  the surface of a puddle, wait for the morning, and

  watch the wisps of her fog stretch out her fingers

  to the tips of the trees as tickles of teardrops fall

  effortlessly into

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