love note to 한국

(photo from last yr)

i love her back streets
the way she juts
up and down
rises
falling
with
and/or
without
me

i love her alleyways
her smells
her
vendors
and her
buyers

i love her lines
the way she has been
excavated
dug so deeply into
red line
green line
blue line
go
with caverns still to
explore

i love her exhales
that steam up
from her crevices
crevices
created
by
men
and
women
trying to find her
center

i love
her exclamations
that tremble through the walls

love how shes so tender
so unpredictable
so one day settled
next day wild

love how she pulls and pushes me away
will not let me go
how she is
my beginning
and now my middle
how even so long from her
my body could not forget her

how music falls from her highest places
to her most lonely corners
how
shes the one i could never leave
even when she turned her back

how my blood is of her veins
my body from her limbs

shes my constant joy
my constant geography to discover

i could trace her lines a thousand times
and still only just
begin to know her

raise my fingers to her
swollen
body
bursting in the upper
the place where i am most at calm
in the center of her
chaos

love her ragged edges
how even the ocean cannot conquer her
how other men have tried
but still she has remained
true
to her
chosen

she has not just one
but many

she was made for generations
to be adorned
with their triumphs and their sins

i do not know why it is i love her
she has wronged and betrayed
lied to worse than any lover could
sold me to feed her self-serving flesh
and yet i love her
because she loves me too
calls me by a name forgotten

i love her in the way that lovers cannot stay away
mumbling
"dont know why
just something about
you"

love her in the way
that sleep is torture
and every taste
is to know her

i love her in the way that
i have yet to love a person
love her in the way
that i cannot deny my own heart
when with her

love her in the way that
only those whove loved
can

know

love the city where i was born
love the country from which my dna is traced

love her knowing how crazy she can be

love her because

when mumbling to self

the words repeat

"korea... seoul...
there's just something about
her"