World Poetry Youth Team Member Kimberly Tsan!

Kimberly

World Poetry welcomes another member of our talented youth team Kimberly Tsan! To listen to Kimberly’s interview on the radio with a greeting and a poem in Chinese: CLICK HERE! The  featured e-poem is from Michael Kwaku Kesse Somuah, Ghana.

 If you want to become a member of the World Poetry Youth Team, contact Ariadne Sawyer at: ariadnes@uniserve.com. We also wish to welcome a new  World Poetry youth member originally from Nepal, Pasang Dawa Lama Sherpa.

“Kimberly is a third year university student at UBC, who, upon finishing her first semester as a nerdy English literature major, hungrily begs for more. Throughout her excruciating (but fruitful) post-secondary education, she gradually decides that she shall be (drum roll) a writer with a very specific voice. Someone who writes for the sole purpose of examining and exposing our world as it is, someone who has interesting thoughts to share. But having that said, most of the time, she’s just herself—writing about her incessant school life and spending the remaining minutes philosophizing, whining and/or eating. At the moment, she pursues a future that will involve the following: 1.) Creative and artistic expression. 2.) Writing. 3.) Charity and non-profit work. 4.) Relentless gummy bear chewing (she’s been a helpless addict for years.) 

Most likely, though, she’ll probably end up in a place with incredible people who are capable of tolerating her random goofy fits. If you have time, please check out her blog at http://kimtsan.wordpress.com–you shall be generously rewarded with Kim’s sparkly eyes of gratitude.” 

The World Poetry Youth Team will be reading at: HOLD ON TO YOUR TOUGUE!, Celebration for International Mother Language day on Saturday February 18, 2012 between 12pm-5pm.  Exhibition Hall at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre located at 181 Roundhouse Mews, Vancouver, BC. Free. All welcome!

Don’t Fight the System

You heart recognizes it before your mind does. Over
the years it has decoded the language of your soul, deconstructed
the patterns of your behaviour and systemized your
various reactions and thoughts. In order to ensure survival
it strategizes your emotions and efficiently segregates
your truest feelings so you react appropriately the
things that it considers too good to be true or
things that will certainly do you more harm than good.

Its calculations are nearly always exact, immutable
and indispensible and just as your heart masters
the mechanics of your internal chaos, you
indulge yourself in its loyal service and you feel safe
wrapped in this dependence, this self-deception. With
continuous practice, your faithful servant tackles the difficult
maths of life, what you call, bad shit that always
happen to good people.

Like any intellectual being, that little piece of beating
flesh inside of your chest gradually comes
to its own wistful conclusion: to simplify
the equations and formulas and to reduce the
constant complication of its computation—it begins to
defragment its hard-drive, erasing the unnecessary files,
memories of joy, of love and of hope. Those things
are not needed. What good have they done so far?
According to its calculation, humans need only
one thing to survive, and that is fear.

So it teaches you to be afraid,
To live in fear, to become fear itself.
Only then, can you be fully and truly
protected from pain, from unfulfilled wishes,
from one job to the next, from one lover to another,
from the shards of your broken relationships,
from the dawnless sleeps, the nightmares that
do not end, the devil that is life. 

Kimberly Tsan (c)