Have no fear of having nothing
Defined by one’s attributes or one’s possessions?
Have no fear of having nothing.
While one grows by extensions,
one does not augment by attachments.
Have no attachments, have no fears.
An onion is composed of many layers.
A tree is made up of branches.
Many rivers flow into the sea.
A man is the total of his influences.
This is by nature, have no worries.
The universe is composed of myriads of things.
A grain of sand can get you started.
Life is composed of things that die.
Death will finally complete the design.
This is natural progression, have no regrets.
Having everything will give you no standing room.
Therefore, have no fear of having nothing.
Koon Woon
May 17, 2025
I Wish We Could Find Comfort in This
Last night and nightly now I am on a train,
running through graveyards hidden inside cities.
The only thing when I frightfully was awakened,
a thin door to you my neighbor was between us.
I cannot ask you to think of graveyards too.
People seldom lift the rug to see if the floor is solid.
I cannot look beneath your face, and I cannot
look away from it.
Sad songs love there sleeping, time arrests it,
and when freed, time has also taken flight.
I do not mean to disturb your rest,
which like an apple has closed its eyes,
I describe you in all the languages in my body,
and then you slip like a child out of her clothes.
The description is all I have now,
to apply to particular and generic things.
The day that I hated you, and the next day
that you hated me back,
decays slower than radioactive carbon,
in all life’s forms.
My simple mind keeps walking
into the same river twice.
When senses return, my bed does not
vibrate like a train berth in Peru.
No, it is at a most sedentary point,
even as land wraps itself around it.
Graveyards in cities are isolated lots,
easily overlooked when you wake,
groom and zoom past.
It does this so mercilessly quiet.
The curtains of nearby buildings are closed.
Postulate then that therein no minds can exis
An Act of Betrayal
Dearest Grandma, seeing you as if you are here
in the American cyberspace with me.
You spent thirty-three years in the monastery of your
Buddha heart, distinguishing true from false, and so you know
I am for the moment sincere. As the lotus pond was full of goldfish, waterlilies, and lotus roots, and as the water was murky, and as the day was long in our Nan-on village. Grandmother, I caught dragonflies in the stillness of the village yard. I gathered snails from the banks of the village pond. The morning glories greeted me as I walked by the graveyard, as if promising those dear to us would live again.
And you, Grandma, live now in my conscious, with the colors of blooming chrysanthemums, with the whisper of bee wisps, and with the feel of silk in hot summer. Grandma, you are there when I close my eyes. In the inner space of these decades, closure was smooth skin, and all the garden petals you rubbed abounded.
You taught me to see the richness of the heart, not the patches on clothing. You taught me the reciprocity of the hen, as she give me eggs for broken corn. You taught me that heaven does not rain all day, so that it is better to stop when having spoken.
Yet, I am to betray you, without my even understanding how.
“The Snow Man”
One must have a bottle of Gallo in this cold alley
And to shake the cops and other winos
And be on the look-out for some sucker to roll
It has been a long while since my abode
Was taken from me not because of ice or lice
But because of the drive for condos
That in this high rise reaching town
Where all the Californ Dreaming has lost ground
To the sound of broken bottles
Which is the brittle psyche of fife
Which leads the rats from places bare
To places that don’t any longer sustain life
For the dweller of the alley, who is on dope,
And nothing, I mean nothing, beats a quick fix,
Nothing that is pure nor is impure.
Koon Woon
2015
Sometimes the Window is International
Beer can on rooftop, restaurant garbage bins,
sexy woman on billboard
with petrodollar veins,
whilst the homeless dig deep into Gaza
for scraps; desert storms imminent.
Inside my room is a goldfish, facing the bent
differential of glass bowl and world,
but I can reach for a lichee fruit in the South China monsoon,
and kiss my wife as she stands on the riverbank of the Pearl.
Here great comforts are sought and they never arrive.
Instead, pitch battles are fought,
just to own these rooms.
Wake up, friends, let us open our hearts instead.
Koon Woon
October 22, 2023
4545 42nd AVE SW #211
Seattle, WA 98116
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