wb :

sex happens

2011-11-06T08:37:00.010+08:00

freely given -

arm, rest breast knees

interlocking the

inspiration the exp

iration,

the swing of counterweights the

dance of Newton the

turning of celestial

dance of Darwin

- freely received,

freely given -

a nest of fingers strings and syringes

of hair,

velociraptor soles, a hawk's throat

freely given, foreheads for

heads for

sooth for

foot touchs cold brick freely received.

freely given

look at me.

you're

ohhhhhhaffffwwwwwlllllllllrrrrrnnnfmmmmmmmmhhn -

yes

oh.

freely given

an incubus by the name of Maxwell

scoffs 'and human beings are weightless, yes,

and I, falling, am no feather;

falling; a bed of arms,

freely received

If I should die

2011-10-23T01:33:00.002+08:00

If i should die, say this of me:

He was one who looked occasionally

in mirrors,

say in public,

He was small like a flower,

and in private speak nothing.

say,

'here lies the graceful,

and truth beneath eyelids.'

Say 'I will remember'

and 'I will remember'

and pour beneficently sherry

say 'Here are songs,'

and 'here are songs',

sing.

I know no deaf ears,

only that the end is

vibrational

sensational

and they will say 'he was'

and, 'if.'

for have I been cause

to rotate -

hold hands,

and move your feet

Here lies the silent,

after all the time who wouldn't

shut up

Figure/A Visit

2011-09-22T09:56:00.000+08:00

Figure puddles

some head we for warmth/

collect cuddle/

and swarms of butterflies

we ate for lunch/

more than soft/

more than radio

flesh and feather,

black smoke

drips for your eyes/

tips for your tongue

and rungs for your lips/

weather.

I would be so liquid,

lukewarm as to cause

riddles to speed up the spine/

lightning! and the clasp of hands

and the sifting of sand/

we'd walk into suns

call me. nine one seven

yeah, just up the west side,

nice but not too/

how's friday it doesn't end until/

quiet but I hate/

there's all sorts of children and restaurants/

it doesn't end

please,

all I want in silk black

for the window,

to curve the evening's gold/

you.

my guest. sit, friend,

I wish you all the water

and the puddles to bathe your toes in,

I wish you all the weather/

sit, freedom is voice

raised between us

and making us into air/

you and me could be purveyors

of long streets and overcoats/

or just inspecting pavement

with our soles/

or on a river,

punching the air with our conversations/

headway on little brown boats/

sit.

look at the time.

stay if you like/

there is all the night,

and dinner will be ready.

iceberg

2011-09-11T22:13:00.002+08:00

we are all ships passing in the night
sometimes it is smooth sailing and
sometimes it is all for nought.
there are those cruising through life
like a great white and others
going down with amigo icebergs in glory.

and you, my knight, my amore, my
lighthouse, my porthole to the world -
today we slip off the ropes and draw
up the anchors. we return every last
lifeboat, lifejacket and storm provision
we borrowed. the sea-legs return,

the seasickness comes on board.
as you dissappear off the horizon
with your nets and fish caught hook line
and sinker, my rock-climbing facilities,
champagne, hors d'oeveres, chandeliers
vanish as i shrink to

an invisible fishing vessel struggling
with the boom that would keep on hitting
my head. like the story of pi, except the
happy ending; i live off the shark fins
jamming my rudder and the salty sea;
i am no longer in osmotic balance

i'm lucky that i know
how to walk on water

Fire, fire

2011-08-12T23:52:00.001+08:00

Fire, fire, mark my pyre
Deep and brilliant as sapphire
At the edges of the evening
Clad in thorn and wrapped in briar

When the naked night is brooding
A cocoon of cold desire
Out a fire-moth is breaking
Taking wing, the morning's crier

And the serpent sings a beat
In the darkness of the heat
Shadow dance, the soul is shier
Moonlight-shod and starlight-cleat

Rising in the smoke-shot ember
Tell me, are you friend or liar?
Every word that I remember
Followed me from old December

Naked on November's feet
Nursed the wolfess at the teat
Laid in fur, the toil and tire
Thawing on the snowy sheet

Who the slave, and who the sire?
Fang to neck and claw to loin
Sweating, swirling, vies the vier
As the tongues of flame enjoin

Silhouette, the moon's defeat
Wax and wane, the weeks repeat
On the silence of the shire,
Bold as pewter, black as peat

Stands the bear, his stillness sober
In the distance of October
Whereto does your roar aspire?
When you face the white disrober

Snake who whispers, tongue a-quiver
Wolfess howling at the fire
Bear who wades the dreaming river
Bring me from this mortal mire

As the phoenix from the silk
Drank his fill of midnight's milk
Dreaming, dead, the dawning dire
Fire, fire, mark my pyre.

Fresh

2011-08-11T04:26:00.001+08:00

In my dreams

people die
when the fires fly
and when the morning arches overhead
we count the dead

they walk to my table and point at me
accusingly
they stand behind the piles of paper
that the people who walk and waver
leave before me as an offering
"hear me," as though the people say,
"and take the entrails of the world,
and scry into their black lines, curled
into a thousand troubles furled
and stapled;"
"and tell us, oracle, what you forsee,
what omens in the bleached sheets
what omens in the printed sheets
and guide us, sage, the blind, we;"
and still the dead point at me.

In my nightmares I am one of them

looking onwards at eventuality
sighing as a million choices
flows into the echoes
of a million voices
pointing not at he who grasps the print
but behind him, for he is blind

so my end is wrapped in those same sheets
noted, briefly
perhaps griefedly
and when the papers have conferred
then interred

no more to worry of those others
that have passed by
of those that hurt and hounded
and growled and pounded
no more to worry of those that cared
of those with their souls bared
no more to worry

So when I wake, I
am glad that I am only
a butterfly

saint thomas

2011-04-10T13:54:00.002+08:00

we are

inseparable from the morning air

we are

a spray of blood on the pavement

just a switch in the breeze

through broken glass windows and down

the subway (the speeding current runs

beneath our feet,

beneath our feet

the rush and then the wait

the wait and then the speeding rush.

called to the bench, we

sit on the upper boughs, where

the people look like ants and then

we smoke cigarettes and talk about the weather:

close your eyes.

there is nothing but the weather.

we are

nothing but the weather

the hot sounds of wet cars

and the wet sounds of

boots in the long dark puddles

that shine back the bright life of the air-

This is our reckoning of the largeness

the vastness

and the tall air, the morning

So the prayer call. so the bells

so the mosques in fading lunar light

so the ringing, the chiming, the tolling, the ringing,

the call to waking,

a thousand million million pressing

their feet against the carpet

and each one was you, they opened their eyes stickily

eating, eating,

sitting, sitting, swallowing

close your eyes. it is too much of being

to deal with before breakfast cereal.

you hunker down to a spoonful,

you chew,

you realise

that-

it is-

good-

sweet-

full-

close your eyes.

There will be a tomorrow.

repost.

2011-04-10T04:59:00.002+08:00

found this on sixtimesnine today. I'm pretty impressed with Drunk Adam.

1988, the Pixies

Frank Black (or is it Black Francis in this year? I think it's Black Francis) is sweating. So is Kim Deal, who is the most beautiful person ever to grace the electric bass with her presence. She radiates a smile at the audience as she begins to play. 'And this I know...' the smile vanishes. She giggles out the bridge, tightropewalking between exuberance and incoherence. She's wearing a huge raggedy grey smock and black francis has a dark collar of soaked shirt and they're both nodding and singing and spit is flying everwhere.

Freeze the action.

we are at a juncture in history where lovering and santiago and francis and deal weave wide streams of logic around the heads of bewildered college students. They never coalesce. They are playing four different songs. And kim deal is almost crying with the labor of the moment - she is all lips and teeth and the relentless charging of six bass notes with centuries of womanhood

nodding and singing and spit is flying everwhere, and Lovering and Santiago are suddenly there as well, and it is transfigurative. Rock and roll shining on stage, emanating from the unwashed and sweat-soaked underwear.

i miss you

2011-04-09T21:13:00.001+08:00

like an undelivered letter misses
the letterbox, ending up lightyears
away. the way wheelboats used to
hiss down the missisippi river the
way what bills itself as a wishing
well is just the nearest waterhole,
missing the point that critters in
wells don't fulfil destiny very well;
the way a chocolate chip misses its
cookie; popcorn its box. sand at low
tide, a cup without water, a sun
without a horizon,

the way one misses important calls,
buses go off impatiently. i guess
it must be fate, i hate to say this but
a miss is as good as a mile - i might
have to run that thousand after all.

this turn i can't see moons

2011-04-09T21:03:00.001+08:00

the everyday heat
compresses my skin like an
unwanted creep

the buses hives
of people hiding from the rains
of unpoetic lives;

each waterfall
another promise the universe
forgot to keep

spaceships
sleep- docking at the train stations
letting in wet shoes

last night's tricolor HD
dream, newspapers, and maybe
some people, underneath

a ruse. like
chameleons changing skins, the
world turns

differently, i've heard
apparently they found a new zodiac
sign; that must be why

we read the stars wrong

Mayflower

2011-03-25T05:33:00.001+08:00

The funeral occurred on the hundred and sixtieth day. Hordes of people gathered in the large chamber that served us as a dining hall, a meeting hall, a dance hall, and a place for government meetings and children’s games. I say ‘hordes of people’ but the total number was probably less than two hundred – that’s probably the language of the old world coming to front of the brain again, like they said it would, and Miss Jennifer in Culture and Adjustment One had told me, with a frown that I did not understand, that I would have to learn again the meaning of words. I had passed that off as her being ineffable (that was another word that I had learned) at the time, but on the hundred-and-sixtieth day was the first time I began to sense a hint of what she had meant bubbling up in my mind. At any rate it was crowded; although that word hardly meant anything; it was always crowded and you couldn’t spend five minutes without apologizing to somebody for touching their elbow accidentally; although the younger children seemed not to be aware of this nicety.

Some men in grey overalls were standing a little closer to each other than the rest of the crowd. They were Techs. They were large men; muscular and well-fed; they all wore spectacles and carried around them an air of importance which all of the civs deferred to. Yesterday – last cycle - a Tech had come unannounced into the room I had shared with Jacob, marched over to a console without saying a word, and spoken in a language I didn’t understand that seemed to be composed of numbers for about five minutes. Then he left. Such intrusions happened on a regular basis and nobody thought anything of them, because the Techs had the most important job, and if they walked into your room unannounced it meant they had something to fix that was more important than your privacy. Privacy. A word I would have to re-learn the meaning of. Jacob never understood when I tried to explain to him that I wanted to be alone.

Anyway, these Techs were standing in a close circle and saying things like ‘the SLs fluctuated for a few hours but we’ve rerouted the flux capacitors so that’s settled’ and I knew that it was settled, whatever it was. When a booming voice echoed out over the PA, they stopped talking and looked over to the makeshift podium.

“Today we are a broken people. One hundred and fifty two men and women and children were lost to us in the event on one four seven. It was nobody’s fault – one of the calculated risks we took when we embarked on this expedition. But calculations are numbers. The grief we now hold is incalculable for the parents, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, teachers and children than we have all lost.”

N11Daniel said the word ‘all’ slowly and loudly to indicate that the burden of loss was to be borne by all of the shipmates. I suddenly felt heavy, like my bones had become solid uranium, and I wanted to cry. Not because I was sad – the crying of sadness was over for me; I now bore my grief with the calculated dignity of my sixteen years. Nobody was at fault, he had said. I was not at fault, even though Jacob has become a celestial body, orbiting the sun peacefully in the frozen nothingness of space. In my imagination his eyes are always open and he has a smirk on his face, as if he was caught surprised. No, I was not at fault, but something raged and burned in my mind, not whether or not I was to blame, but as if I suddenly had escaped the atmosphere and looked out on a newborn universe, the stars, the nebulae, the vastness. Things were not simple anymore, but horrifyingly, awfully complicated in a way that made my head hurt, and more importantly, they were there, as sure as the stars guided our silent flight to the new world.

I lost my patience with Jacob. I put down Persuasion and let the Victorian English drain out of my mind for a few seconds. ‘Fuck off!’ I shouted at him. He looked shocked and angry at my tone of voice, but obviously did not understand my anachronistic insult. My English teacher, Sarai, always laughed at what words we did and didn’t know. She said that our language would become a model of linguistic solipsism that would be studied for centuries, but we didn’t know what she meant. ‘What?’ he said. I said ‘Leave me the fuck alone or I will disembowel you and space your bloody guts.’

He actually had not been doing much to annoy me. He had slithered over to the bed and asked what I was reading. For the twelfth time – I had been counting today. He was twelve and at that stage of development where he wanted to ingratiate himself with all of his older friends, and me especially, the older sibling. But I had been irritable for a few days since my period had started, and I’d just had had a fight with Sam, who said he didn’t like me dressing up ‘slutty’ around other guys. I didn’t know what the word meant, but when he explained it to me I hit him in the face. I was crabby and on the verge of tears and I deeply wanted to be alone to read Jane Austen who always seemed so calm even when things go to frozen hell in a handbasket full of shit.

‘Privacy, privacy! That’s the only word you know! Stupid! Liz, why do you need to be alone all the time? You must be watching dirty shows and touching yourself and when Miss Sarai finds out she’ll confine you for a month!’ I am bleeding out of my vagina, I thought to myself. ‘You know where you can find some real privacy?’ Jacob pointed to the outer wall. ‘Three point five meters thataway. It’s real quiet. Just jump out of the bloody airlock, that’s the only way you’ll ever be happy.’

Now I was apologetic. I hadn’t meant to lash out at poor Jacob. I sensed, however, that further conversation would not appease anybody, and resolved just to ignore him.

Seeing that further conflict was pointless, he muttered ‘You can bloody well go and fug off to yourself!’ and left the room. He’d probably gone back to N49Peter and N35Sarah’s room in the port quadrant. I dreamed of my 18^th birthday when I would move in with Sam, and began to cry hot tears of frustration. Why couldn’t I just get along with people? Yesterday the girls in PE had teased me mercilessly for not wanting to play netball in the RecRoom. They said I was fat and useless. Actually, I just didn’t want to be around them afterwards – ‘hang out’ as they used to say – and have to make small talk and be annoyed at them talking loudly about whether N32Becca was really pregnant, and whether she’d keep the weight, and how Justin Bieber should’ve stopped making music when he turned 60. I wanted to shout ‘I DON’T CARE!’ and storm off, but wherever I stormed off to would be full of people making other small talk and playing netball and whatever and I wanted to run away and hide and cry in a dark little corner but there were no dark little corners in our brightly-lit spaceship, only the endless deafening presence of people I hated.

I’d flipped in the middle of Adjustment One last cycle, too, when a girl kept asking inane questions to Miss Jennifer about why the Japanese kept killing themselves, isn’t that kind of silly and I’d stood up and knocked over my chair and told her to ‘fuck off’. I don’t think I even knew how to use the phrase properly then. After that I had a long discussion with Miss Jennifer. ‘You know, Liz, words have the power to hurt and to heal. You should be careful about saying things like that.’ And then she got wistful and said that we might all have to learn again the meaning of words.

Thinking about Miss Jennifer, I tramped across the ship to look for Jacob, heading port, then a little fragment of rock less than five metres across ripped through the port quadrant and one hundred and fifty two people died in the freezing vacuum.

There was frost on the blast door in the central hall from the decompression. There were people everywhere and missing people’s names were being read out over the intercom. I wanted to throw up with the fear that Jacob wasn’t coming back to the room. How could I have known? The inexhaustible miscellany of human interactions. One day you tell someone to fuck off and they run off and they don’t come back forever. In the end no grey-suited Tech came and told me that Jacob had been lost. It was a slow, grinding come down and a blur of corridors and my throat was hoarse with shouting his name and by the time ship’s evening came I knew there was no hope, and I cried and cried and cried. The next day ‘N46Jacob’ was on a piece of printed plastic in the central hall.

On day one hundred and ninety nine we set foot on Mars and discovered that there were no dogs and no trees and no clouds and no moon, and there were no malls and no parking lots and there were no cars and no crowds. There was no Jacob. There were so many things I wanted to say to him, that I was sorry even though it wasn’t my fault, that I liked him better than anybody in the world even Sam who was a real fucker sometimes, that I was sorry.

I played netball. I worked in the hydroponics garden and wrote essays about Austen and Shakespeare. I spoke to the girls and held N51Catherine in my arms, watching as she burped and giggled at our smiling faces. Here, where new words were being invented for the green color of the evening sun reflecting off sulfate in the atmosphere, where all of a sudden the beansprouts started growing with two heads, I joined in the circle of planting and growing and reaping the harvest. Things were primitive, you might say, although we had televisions and Internet and a radio broadcast from Earth. Things were not simple; they were harder than ever, and I thought every day about poor Elizabeth Bennet and willful Portia and how they would never have had a place here.

I had a dream in which Jacob came back and stood in front of me and said he forgave me even though it wasn’t my fault that he died. I opened my mouth to say that I was sorry but when I said it the words turned into chunks of uranium and fell to the floor, glowing slightly. What does ‘sorry’ even mean here on the red planet? We left to escape Qaddafi and the world government and the silly politics and we brought our dreams and N32Becca’s baby girl and the words that meant we were free, but sorry doesn’t mean anything. Privacy doesn’t mean anything. ‘Fuck off’ doesn’t mean anything, because when you fuck off you walk off into the red desert, you walk off into space and are never seen again.

So I am not sorry. It wasn’t my fault. Those are old words from an old world that imprison the living in the coffins of the dead. I am sad, though; I am so incurably sad that I will never speak to Jacob again – I threw away the sadness and talked to Miss Jennifer and then I learned it again, only to discover that even on this dead planet it means exactly the same thing.

I Sing of the Father (3rd draft)

2011-03-20T00:07:00.001+08:00

sleepless,

I walked along a cavernous street,

noticing that one side drew me in;

the other was a flood of fluorescent lamps

and scaffolding.

I walked along an avenue that was a crepuscular fantasia

where trees curled toward the shady windowsills

the secret city:

where across the street the pilgrims mumbled their trade

in the glow of lamp-light

I walked two blocks, following the trace of branches

against the skyline. I felt intricate patterns arise

on my tongue and fingertips.

I saw so many doors. The mossy stoops.

each one was a hymn.

the secret city.

the old stories growing in damp corners.

I heard bells on the wind from far away.

these were heralds of the sprouting of the soul.

in my mind:

where the darkness congeals into dialectic,

I had built this city from dark drops of sleep.

Never again

2011-03-09T00:01:00.002+08:00

Never again would he fall in love, he swore to himself quietly over a tankard of ale as the smoke swirled in swaths and the noise crashed and broke over the heads of hunched men. Outside, the cars blared their horns in the lonely light of a corner streetlamp.

The city wept for his tragedy, golden streams of tears from a trillion eyes, trickling into the gaols and gutters of the midnight. It sobbed and gasped for air and tore at its hair, black strands trailing into the rising fires that licked at the clouds.

And then the stars sighed, and went to bed early, and the great eyes in their orbits in the heavens saw, and it was good.

And perhaps it was.

- 6 sentence fiction.

the frozen trees

2011-03-07T02:14:00.001+08:00

they touch the air with fingertips

as lifting a glass lens

gingerly for fear of slipping,

precipitating the quiet end

the snow is gone; now icicles

grace the outstretched limbs

they wear their royal livery

and shimmer slowly in the wind

a car passes by, wondering

at all the winter excess

the frozen trees are still.

Pilate eyes the savior in a wintry dress.

freewrite - the approximate consistency of vomit

2011-03-07T01:57:00.001+08:00

bottles paper and air these are the things that consist the universe these are the things that consist the mind of man. These are the directions of the fleeting and the futile which rob the morning air of its freshness and of its wonder. I am streets and tar and cars. I am bundles of neurons misplaced by a friendly deity who (for some reason) needs them back. I wonder who he is, that great incompetent fucker, who by suggesting that he exists suggests that everything has gone horrifically wrong. Nothing has gone wrong. Everything has gone wrong. The black and white of it is really the grey and green of it, for right and wrong are urine and phlegm in the wilderness of the sane. What a wilderness! What animals! what free and flightsome birds that grace the morning with their sharp downstrokes, rebelling against the earth. I would be a bird but for being in love with the dirt. I would be a worm but for being in love with the air. I would be a tree but for being in love with running. I am, I am, I am! But He is not. Let us pray. Dear Lord, you are a nuisance. We'd be so much better off without your constant insisting that things are wrong in a particular way. They are wrong in all the ways there are to be wrong! But You don't see that. We gave you a chance - several. No, but two thousand years was insufficient to learn you. You are incorrigibly petulant. Therefore, after much regret and consideration, we have resolved to eat you. Goodbye. Oblivion is painless. Hello then, New World, Empty Sky, Cloud, Tree, WindowSill, Computer Screen. Hello then. I am your friend as it was in the beginning now and ever shall be world without end. I am Jesus - and here's the secret - I killed God. That was the Good News - that man is now and forever truly free amen. I do hope you appreciate it and if you would stop loving me for awhile and give your brother a smile I'd be truly obliged to not do something horrific because really I'm dead and why don't you all understand that? Why don't you all understand me? I gave my freedom so much so that I died for my fever, my guardian angel, my hallucination, my abdication, my abduction. I was the last of the mad so that mankind can now be sane. That was my gift! You have squandered it. You have lost it among the papers and bottles. I hope you are happy - but I know you aren't.

this old world

2011-03-03T14:27:00.000+08:00

this old world is thick brown in my veins

this old country is old air in new lungs

this old bed is black with drops of

sleep.

this old mouth is word-bitten and cracked

this old shirt is thin from the wind

this old hand is still from long sharp

pain.

this old wall is terrified by its contents-

this old breath, strong syllables against night-time

this old gaze that tears concrete, willfully and

tired.

this old world is cars and streetlamps

this old road is tar and paint

and long trees in the distance

ringing with old songs

The Memory of Sleep

2011-03-03T14:20:00.002+08:00

Fingertips aching

breath

condenses

on the air warmly

visage.

cracked red dried lips

eyes hanging like boulders

over grey canyons

want-

far

where cold

short air

coils

between our toes

want –

lean,

and breathe

the blue foreign frost

for in warmth,

for in cold

the great parched floor

of stillness,

the lines fidget

curling their brows

clicking joints

Revolve

great circle –

small circle

the weariness

of wakefulness

fairy lights.

2011-02-18T00:01:00.008+08:00

it’s all he knows how to do:
    stringing fairy lights above
    the corpse of their relationship.

he has cut up the images of her,
of them, keeping only the pretty bits –
    the comfortable silences on quiet afternoons;
    the dusty photographs of them smiling,
their faces against the sun.

in his world there is no one else.
nothing but a silent loop of tape
    constantly rewinding, playing
    images of empty roads, of entwined fingers;
happiness, contentment –
    whirring and stopping in the dark.

----------------------------------------------

cross-posted from my writing blog: i just felt like breaking adam's combo. this should bring my total post count up to three! feels good being a contributing member of the community. -ryan

Hudson Stomp

2011-02-16T08:54:00.003+08:00

tramping down to the river side

with our frenzied faces each aglow

we sat down there to watch the tide

each hoping that the tide would show,

each hoping that the tide would know

to join us there to play our game;

hoping each that the tide would show

as the sun set with a yellow flame.

keeping our watches synchronized.

huddling up against the snow -

There it is! one watchman cried

Each hoping that the tide would show,

We huddled toe to toe to toe

but breaking on the bank there came

a swelling from the dark below,

but left the river bank the same.

sighing, disappointed-eyed,

we thought that it was time to go

our shivering faces belied

the sweetness of the weather, though –

we’d each hoped that the tide would show.

we walked back slowly, fighting shame

that crept red up our cheeks and brows

and the sun set with a yellow flame.

-----------------------------------------

a ballade i had to do for my class. I know it's missing the 4-line envoi at the end, but

1) i ran out of rhymes

2) i don't really know any princes

and 3) stop oppressing my art with your rules

College Morning

2011-02-13T02:41:00.003+08:00

college morning college coffee

college hangover

and there's the umbaqanqa on the speakers,

beats pushed like a street vendor

hawking coke and hash,

and there's a torrential sadness,

'as if I didn't know my own bed.'

my friends are asleep and entangled.

I put my legs up against the wall,

wishing them conjoined dreams and

conjoined happiness, looking out,

at the rain

Then I start to pick up the pieces

of last night. I rearrange covers

and blankets, then shirts and drunken

kisses, hands held irresponsibly and

shirts and socks.

candy wrappers. orange juice -

I find a headache beneath a pillow

have you considered prophylaxis, sir?

take two for toothaches and hangovers

four for guilt and six for misadventure.

dustbin.

bottles and sheets.

So the morning starts to roll downhill

I file the night between the anthology of Renaissance music

and the book of essays, hoping it'll be mistaken

for study. That's a lie -

I lie back, watching the rain again

as snores are lost within the drums

as they reach the shutters,

mingling with the traffic and the morning.

Every college student knows

that last night was the end of days;

that this morning is a hazy afterlife.

There is nothing more to life than chasing down every temporary high

2011-01-17T12:44:00.001+08:00

For a unbeliever,

life is a rush from peak to peak

backpacking up the steps and slopes

then a wild toboggan ride through the valleys and up some ways

I beg you not to think that that's so sad

as you daughters of the faith are wont to do

one climbs and falls

(one climbs, at any rate)

and, ascending to each peak one isn't concerned with

breathlessness and aching legs

but the sun reflecting off the lakes and the trees.

it will pass, as you say.

after the last ascent I will ride alone into the valley of death,

that cold and windy place -

but There is nothing more to life than chasing down every temporary high,

I am happy to say.

I get stronger with each ascent,

and looking out from the hilltops I know that the sun is rising

and say to myself 'It is good.'

adam

I haven't been writing but the backlog is enormous

2011-01-12T04:23:00.000+08:00

solitude is a sin

that owes itself to lofty thoughts

that only tempts the certain sorts

who don't care what state they're in.

loneliness is criminal

thus: stay away from books and things

and intellectual mutterings

for they can be quite subliminal

look out your windows

the people on the street don't care

if you whiste, shout or stare

and company is always found indoors

the bottom of a bottle reflects a friend

and I am he and you are he

and we are all together and we are all free

at the bottom of a bottle in the end.

adam

Several poems I wrote on trains, planes and buses

2011-01-11T11:05:00.004+08:00

in reverse chronological order

1. On the Train to Chicago

It is painful not to move, though here we

are motionless like it's the grand prize

sitting and waiting to die on a grand

strip of sticky metal

like flies

I want to die and float above the wreckage

swaying, humming a song by joni mitchell

Flying free with the birds and the souls of the joyous.

It is painful not to move, though here

I sit motionless - thought is a mistress

and though her whip is sweet,

her pleasure is no freedom

I would rather be dead and free than be happy and die -

but I am trapped on a strip of sticky flesh, waiting like a fly

the sun is at our back - we are heading

the first sortie against the traffic

and it occurs to me that we are full of Things

songs and quotes and the girl who got off at southbend

who had great tits

and there's so much it's a wonder we don't explode when we die

showing scores of dour-black-crying people with Chelsea Mornings and red-sweatered

girls with pert breasts

but no such thing happens.

My heart cries out the bondage of this train,

full of things full of things,

ready to explode like a frag grenade full of ressentiment

I would rather swim than float

I would rather run a race than win it

and when my heart beats against my ribcage it is oblivious

to age or tiredness

it fills my fingers with blood so much it's a wonder I don't explode

and fill the inside of this train with the sticky remains of bondage.

2. needles are broken in my universe

the playing has stopped and not for

want of trying the pops have fizzled

and the booms have faded and the

jaded remainder is bones and things

it swings, it does, in a ghastly

parabola, fastly staring, daring you to move, a corpse on a wind-up spring

Dainty daily flies are the prize of

decay, let's go away let's go away to

the clouds and have our dance

and perchance meet again on some sunny day.

Let's go away, and meet again on some sunny day.

I am found naked and broken by words unspring from their casing, facing the wind

and the rain-baked brick flooring. I am moored to vocabulary! It is constabulary in its oppression! Feed me the birds and I live for a day.

Apollo apollo - follow me in the

trails of the swallows across the sky.

Follow me and fold the hours into pretty shapes, affixed in floral scapes across

a meadow. Follow through the choral

fugue of clouds, break with me into unifying

splendour across the firmament, a giver of

givers.

O sun! O king! Oh wild and terrorous thing.

Sift and decipher me.

O source! First cause of harmony! I will join in

the multitudes and if I not be a root I shall be a third

O finality of the heavens! You have given the

world a ceiling. I will make it a floor.

3. In Chinese class the teachers said

remember your roots

I did; they are dusty and hunger for moisture.

They said, honour your parents

I have; I am the son of Aristotle

they said, honour your neighbour

I have; he sleeps by the durian tree

oblivious to my footsteps.

What's the matter with the weather?

2010-12-13T13:46:00.001+08:00

it's raining and

the shutter sounds

fall down the street amid the glare

of sirens, horns and things;

the streetlight brings a shine to

eyes turned toward the corners

and away from all the shady stoops

where hooded people sit and mutter

things about the weather. What's the matter?

It's cold and damp and Barney's got the fleas again

oh darn, the rain and the wet and the bother

what's the matter with the weather?

Were it so dark that you lost your footing

soon you would be down there rooting

losing your fingers one by one

and the street would end as you go,

a cigarette end burning out in the snow.

You know, I lost one there.

Down on the corner of Mercer and something

don't you think that in this bloody cold it's

a blessing, a real blessing

to drift off into blood-soaked primeval night visions

of huskies and things

I wonder why the winter brings

this crazy feeling,

oh that crazy feeling.

Kathy I said

I'm cold and I'm aching and I don't know why

wear a fucking jacket, you stupid dipshit

four thirty pee em, diary.

two hundred miles it's mid afternoon and the sun is dark.

we huddle with our dogs in the never-ending blizzard

Morale is good. We are running out of food - might have to

kill a polar bear or two,

sometime next week. but I think we'll be alright,

I think we'll be alright.

adam

pancakes

2010-11-15T16:14:00.005+08:00

as far as possible
should be made on a sunshiny day
be careful of them.
they're sweet, but burn easily.
tend to get jammed
and land the maker
in all sorts of sticky
situations with bees, especially
if you involve honey

but the best thing is
that they can be flipped
without ripping the fabric
of anything. also
they are the anti-thesis
of undulating
so you don't need to
run up hills
to go blackberry picking.

don't go bananas
making them; no need
to batter yourself
if you don't get
the proportions right.
it's rare to get
the sunny
side up first time
around

territorial/ down to earth

2010-11-15T16:02:00.004+08:00

you sat there like an unmoveable brick
wall; you who used to be
such a brick

this decision is final and concrete. No
amount of termite infestation
can crumble it.

the gardeners seem intent on weeding out
deep-rooted fate; decomposing leaves,
thorns in spades

but they leave the strawberry memories;
the seeing red, capped with green.
so amongst the refuse,

i keep the turf wars, entangled vines, and
ungerminated seeds. after the rain,
surely someone

will need this place to plant stalks
again

College Dance

2010-10-31T00:48:00.001+08:00

stand close, or else you cannot hear each other

talk loudly and say the most impressive things you've done

leave your number, and what you do when you're alone

if she turns away, then try another;

only sitting down will get you any further.

dance with as many people as you can

boys if you're a girl and girls if you're a boy

although this is by no means compulsory

make as many friends as you have fingers on your hand;

close your fist and forget them if you can

if he (or she, i forget) smiles and says your name

remember please that it might go nowhere

but shelve the book of hope in there

for later; keep it dark and play your games

if she or he perchance forgets your name

smile and look into her eyes

or at her nose if eye contact is unsupportable

or if her proximity makes you uncomfortable

make do with holding hands or otherwise

try not to look into her eyes.

and if the book of hope shall fall

don't panic; there will be another song

another winter dance, before long;

There will be dancing after all

if the book of hope shall fall.

adam

Suns

2010-06-29T11:06:00.001+08:00

sunday night must be a disappointment.

all faces. i want to say that nothing will satisfy me

like glowing on a dark night like that

like all the suns in the universe were burning inside my skin

and putting tingly sensations through my fingertips

but are they enough, these embers

like cigarette ends, that glow once and then expire?

or will they too sink and dissolve in the muddy puddle that is Life

No (I proclaim)

they are the charred ends of endeavour

although it's better to be pockmarked with

the craters of cigarette burns than to be

protected by Venus's cloudy atmos

that combusts these little flames before they become scars on the soul

I am tired. MY light is almost out,

damp, damp, damp! Like a used handkerchief

or a bath-towel. I want nothing more than rest and my Final Evaporation.

but I want to say

as an ember falling on a sunday night

that I wish there were more suns

adam

sour grapes

2010-06-16T19:51:00.001+08:00

all plants grow up. unlike
human beings. be they tomatoes,
grapes, or plums, water them
for peace, or the shoots will
anarchy. even so

it sucks to be a plant. you can't
run from invaders, or dance
can't sing in the rain,
zap leeches or jump.
foxes have a tendancy

towards jealousy. but at least
they can eat grapes and
comment on them negatively
all the fruit can do is
telepathy
sourness so they'll flee

The Pet Dory

2010-05-29T18:18:00.001+08:00

Another day, another story.
She tilts her head at her pet dory-
"What happens now, my drop of glory?

What bubbles in your damp history?"
It gulped. She frowned; "You blasted Tory-
another day, another story,

Your fishy life is old and hoary-
And when your time finds Purgatory,
What happens then, my drop of glory?"

It turned its back, the Monsignore,
And took of kelp its inventory.
Another day, another story;

She went to bed and woke up sorry-
Her fish had died, consumed with worry.
That happened to her drop of glory;

She plunged on downward, twenty-storey,
And ended on the concrete, gory.
Another day, another story-
Thus happened then, her drop of glory.

-~-

Surprisingly existentialist, given the silly mood I was in when I wrote this.

Seine Sunset

2010-05-17T09:55:00.000+08:00

Don't turn from the hues in the sky-
Let its darkly purpling iridescence
compose
into a liquid glow
that distracts your eye

From ricochets of lovers' feet,
clock-work crescendos down the boulevard.

You will catch their mingling melodies
of rose wine? candle light? dinners
along the Champs Elysees
As they sweep past you,
and slot themselves places
methodically,
guided by the bored hand
of some somnolent Cupid.

But wait until the light has cleared-
Tune into turgid indigo skyscape
Then slowly stroll away
solitary
from the vacuumed vestige
of the melting sun.

writing call: a short story project

2010-05-14T00:54:00.004+08:00

Hey guys, Ryan here. I know I haven't actually been writing here, but I wanted to give you guys a little heads up about a new project of mine before I start send out e-mails.

A friend and I (Matthew Reuben, for those who know him) are working on a new collection of local writing. It's going to be fresh, exciting, and it's going to be published in print (read: on paper, in an actual book). We're looking for sponsorship from NAC and everything, so it's pretty exciting.

Of course, first we need pieces, and that's where you come in. I'm sure all of us here have stories floating around in our heads waiting to be pinned unto paper. Well, this is your chance.

Guidelines:

Submissions must not exceed 5000 words in length.
We're looking for prose writing - short fiction, essays or extracts from forthcoming works. Poetry will not be accepted.
There is no theme. All we ask for is your best work.
Authors must be Singaporean or Singaporean PRs. The reason for this is that NAC only sponsors Singaporean works.
Submissions should not contain any racist, overly sexual, or subversive themes. This is, again, due to NAC's policies.
The piece must be "new" in the sense that it is "unpublished in print form" - this makes life much easier in terms of rights.
Submissions can be in any reasonable digital format. Preferably ms word or .txt files. In anticipation of scanned submissions - .jpg files don't count as "reasonable" formats.
Please note that we are unable to return any material received.
Deadline is 31ST AUGUST 2010. All submissions and enquiries should be sent to new.singapore.writing@gmail.com.

And that's it. The reason why we're not accepting poetry is that the local literature scene is already full of poetry. We want to do something different, something fresh. I'm sure all of you have it in you to write some sort of prose. And even if you aren't selected for publication, writing something you feel is good enough to be published is something in itself to be proud of.

Email me at ranathalion@gmail.com if you have any questions. I look forward to reading your submissions :)

P.S. In case you've been wondering what I've been up to, I've been working on a one-story-a-day project here. Drop by and tell me what you think.

history

2010-05-13T01:58:00.001+08:00

is not yesterday's
orange julius and caesar
salad. it might be the cold gulf
or this post-war depression

it is the absence
of cats basking in sunshine; the
lack of umbrellas on a very
rainy day. it is the unseen

puddles that ruined the best
pair of jeans you owned; natural
disasters, storms and water-bombs.
don't bother cleaning up;

life is just another infectious
disease; you climb great walls
and soldier on. tomorrow may not
see you over the moon, but

you might see some stars soon.

ode to a balloon

2010-05-13T01:38:00.001+08:00

you're full of hot air;
flying high above
many parties,
above oceans
of hair

just be careful of
the mountain-peaks
of the rigs of ships
of the passing
of weeks

remember to check
the weather, mate
for when pressure
increases, or there's
too much

on one's plate
one tends to deflate

mallards

2010-05-11T19:20:00.006+08:00

greenly glisten in the sunlight;
boldbeaks wing-tucked, beadeyes sleep-struck.
like beached scallops in the seabright
are these senseless, careless ditchducks.

they snooze from dawn till afternoon
and still, their languid sleepwakes’s late.
more endless dreamdoze follows soon;
these birds shall grace my dinner plate!

Last Lines

2010-05-11T09:16:00.005+08:00

Based on Malory's Morte Arthur. I wanted to have a go at the Anglo Saxon style, heavy on alliteration and compound words. Blogger didn't allow spacing hence the cut-&-paste. Click to enlarge.

on a cold day

2010-04-21T20:59:00.000+08:00

spring came again
with rain in your hair;
tulipped bedsheets on chairs
drying in the sun. without
the life-support of heaters,
the freezer froze over.
little snowmen live now
amongst the fish and the
fowl. they have carrots
for noses; snowfights by
the dim rim of the
kitchen light, cheered
on by birthday cakes
and leftover mold.
i open the door,
but no sign of life
just plastic wrapped
hunks of meat
and their rapidly approaching
expiry dates.

zebra

2010-04-20T21:00:00.001+08:00

i woke up to a world
in black and white;
knew exactly what
to do. the only shade
in between was chocolate
so i had some of that too.
i could catch words
before they flew out
lighted up like fireflies
stop phrases from
whizzing down waterslides.
i could do anything;
eat fire, change the
seasons, or bring on
the ice age - still the
zebras would always elude me.

The Trick

2010-04-17T01:21:00.001+08:00

and then there's the trick

a ping-pong ball in your hand,

balance yourself on the other, legs pointed

upward. You may wish to practice against a wall

first, to expedite balance

take it up with you, you've held it:

now let it go, and bounce to the floor. Smile.

You have now achieved distance from sadness.

adam

2010-03-21T20:59:00.003+08:00

as we walked through the jardins des tulleries
spying on lovers kissing, trying to imagine
streetlights and moon as fountains and sun
and children sailing paper boats -

i did not think of the oily fool
twisting things like spaghetti round his fork
and spoon. i did not think of the many-hued
statues filling up the museum behind us

stuck in eternal bliss, or famous paintings
i completely missed; only amazed at the
dinner of internal organs playing their
strange symphony to accompany beliefs

i'd never allowed myself to believe in, fitting
perfectly into the hollows
of the gardens, the morose shapes of trees, the
flowers we can't see because it's the wrong season.

To Alcohol

2010-03-14T02:08:00.001+08:00

To Alcohol!- the cause of, and solution
To all my tears and laughter on this night,
To all life's problems, and their resolutions!

You ask, my friend, what caused my grim submission
To whims of fate?- Why only my delight
Is Alcohol? Well. The cause of, and solution

To young boys' woes is purposeful distraction,
And that was she! Oh, such a pretty sight
To end life's problems! So my resolutions

Were broken, and I drank intoxication,
I gasped her scent, I called her name at night
O'er alcohol, the cause of, and solution-

Aflame, it came, enraged- our dissolution,
And where she stood, just wind, and winter night,
And one life's problems, and no resolutions.

So drink with me! O, drink to this rambunction!
No better time to glory in our plight!-
To Alcohol! that cause, that fierce solution
To all life's problems, and their resolutions!

O Sun!- A ballade dedicated.

2010-02-27T14:57:00.001+08:00

O Sun! What wakes your eye each day anew
And turns it over every sleeping stone,
Each lake, each tree, each blade of grass you grew?
What calls you to your fief when winds have flown,
When shadows cross your barony have blown?
What greatnesses your gaze had turned to scry?
What sights might waver your immortal eye?

O Sun! Within your luminous purview,
Out of the clay our shivering limbs have grown;
Those very hands wrought boats from fallen yew,
And where they fell, the seeds of cities sown;
Slaves to your seasons, yet your light disown,
And beauty artificed, as though we shy
What sights might waver your immortal eye!

O Sun! In fear, your symmetry we drew,
But pride our breasts had swelled, and none bemoan
Your blinded back, as all our sins accrue-
The starved and sick upon the altar groan,
While in their palaces, the rest atone;
O judge, accomplice, jury! As we cry-
What sights might waver your immortal eye?

O Sun! Your servants, we, have stared at you,
And seen a haughty king upon his throne!-
And we, conspiring of your power, drew
The fire and the sword you bore alone,
Usurped your crown, your reins!- O, had we known
The vastness that you stared, we would not vie
What sights might waver your immortal eye.

train wreck

2010-02-16T23:50:00.001+08:00

the laptop hums strangely
like a warm disaster
should've known then
that you would
hurtle off-key
once the playlist
shuffles track

in case of insomnia

2010-02-16T23:48:00.001+08:00

count ships. it won't
be easy, for they like
to pass unnoticed
in the night

but they're better
than their woolly-headed,
monosyllabic
counterparts

what is the name

2010-01-22T21:39:00.000+08:00

what is the name of the rose?

something sad and something still

motionless until the day it dies

and then fodder for the flies.

what is the name of the sun?

a bonfire slowly burning out

the last refuge of virgin light

and then gone in the night.

what is the name of the city?

shadows and light in etched patterns

it is bright with the morning's breath

it is a dance and a death.

what is my name?

I am a coffin, wide but not so long

filled with empires and desires

and sealed with a song

adam

octopi

2009-12-10T19:03:00.002+08:00

there are many ways
you could do this

reach out a tentacle
suckered with doubts

release pools of
dark-inked missives

school yourself not
to be so clownfish

clam up and refuse
to shell out anything

or decide it's
too fishy and give up

before you finish
counting

the waves in which
you love him

the stairwells

2009-12-10T19:02:00.001+08:00

invisible launchpad
to mars; mornings ascending
with the dark skies.
this isn't rocket science,
they commonly teach.
which would've been better;
space-suits, or fire-proof
pinafores? for

gatherings under the
fluorescent lights; final
checks; what's your take-off
strategy? spacing out,
sitting down suddenly, i miss a few
good-luck hugs. but
they forgive me
and my starry nights

what on earth were we
thinking about, taking those
flights? Probably trying
for pegasus not icarus;
going towards winter
not the eternal summer of the
sun. And as we farewell through
static radio waves, floating we
lose all sense of gravity

The Man Who Photographed Nothing

2009-12-09T21:40:00.001+08:00

A quiet, unassuming man, he had no family- that he would speak to me of, at least- no job, for his retirement was a cosy one, no vices that might barter a year of breath for a night of brazenness, not even a hobby peculiar to men built as him- for he was built right between the jolly, redfaced heftiness of a woodcutter, the wiry, bearded strength of a fisherman, or the stately, supple grace of a watchmaker; as he opened the door that morning, he greeted me with a pensive smile, and took my hand with his own, as wrinkled as the book-spines on his shelf, and callused as the logs that made the walls of his cottage in the mountains.

The only luxury he truly seemed to need, I noticed as I entered, was the camera perched snugly atop the sturdiest shelf nailed into wood perhaps older than either of us, surrounded by ancient books and illegible papers, yellowed as the eyes that read them, strewn across the table, and a tea set which he looked at with that indescribable melange of contrition and nostalgia; and as we had tea, he slowly turned his thoughts to laughter, and our first meeting filled many a mountaintop minute with the heartiness of two with much between them yet, inexplicably, more to share.

Then up on last of the rays of the sun climbed the night, and the sky darkened, and the fire now gave us tea, warmth, and light; and I rose, and smiled, but he smiled and said to me- "no, lassie, let me show you something now- my life's work, if you will", and then the door opened- but it was he who was outside, and I was left a- amazed, perhaps- adrift, now that I think of it- but then again, retrospect never made things clearer.

And so it was that on the first night of our meeting, he took my hand again and brought me to the top of his cottage, and the ancient camera, his singular pride, joy, and love, sat upon a tripod on the roof; then he motioned to the city that lay below us, massive and corpulent, red and radiant in its bloatedness, and he sighed and took pictures of the sky, the stars, and the hills; and though he tried his best, the lights of the city always found their glare into the corners of the lens, like- like some mere tourist gazing the camera, oblivious to the wonders that lay behind them, the light glinting of their teeth like it were some trophy of theirs.

"Behold the works of Man, as many as they are terrible", he said to me, and I could only nod mutely as he sighed once more, and started to take down the tripod; but as he fastened the last leg, there rose a terrible silence in the air, tenuous and tenebrous, and suddenly the light of a million homes went out as surely as the fire below his stove; and all of a sudden, the only lights in the sky were a million patters and a waning moon, and the only gleam that the world returned shone off the burnished silver of his camera.

In that moment, his eyes widened as a child's, and he laughed, and cried, and forgot about me, and in the glorious darkness he worked with the fervor of a man who had seen that he had spent the first three years of his life babbling and wetting himself, and that he very well might spend the last three years the same way; the tripod went up, and then the camera, and in those few minutes, a lifetime's dream came true as he photographed the night in all its unsullied glory, the glory of a million stars, the blackness of the sky, and the shadows of the hills upon a sea that whispered on the breeze; and when he had taken the last picture, he merely smiled, recalled that I was there, and took my hand another time- and he said, "please have them developed for me", and coughed his last laugh into the coldness of a night that was the closest he ever felt to warmth.

-~-
Flash fiction in 6 sentences. Inspired by the view from the mountains at Nagasaki.

in the middle of the night

2009-12-05T20:02:00.000+08:00

the constellations of desk-lights
milky way wrappers,
fallen comets,
multiply like
efficient mathematicians
biologists who
have just discovered the secret
to life.
if you were looking
for evidence of the big bang
it is right here
underneath some bars
of galaxy and inertia
too.
tomorrow's asteroid
comes nearer
like the swimmers in
the slow lane
kicking up water
fuelled by chocolate
trying to fit into
orion's belt.

blueberrying

2009-12-05T20:00:00.001+08:00

i need to learn
loneliness
picking blueberries
amidst the Isle of
Langerhans;
digesting

them as i go along.
above are cloud-boats,
menancing like
thundergods.
should i make oars
of prickly, dark-

staining bunches
or wait
til the blues
have been
absorbed into the
lapping waves
like friendly rocks

The history of a million years of our world

2009-12-05T00:03:00.004+08:00

He had told her to wake him in a thousand years or when it was safe, whichever was later, as he closed his eyes and laid on the white sheets on a steel bed in a cocoon of black; perhaps her aural sensor malfunctioned in that instant, or her processing core misinterpreted his intentions, for when he next opened his eyes, it would have been a million years.

All too quickly passed the first fourteen years, but while the people had long since forgotten the old days of hunting and warring, their governments had not; and so it went that while children played in pristine virtual-reality beaches and their parents enjoyed every conceivable pleasure in the synsation chambers, their leaders rose and fell like the tides of a time when the moon still possessed most of its mass, and their factories sowed the seeds of things only he would come to know of, and only for an instant.

As his shell hummed and whispered, forgotten in the basement of a home ruined by time, his family's rusted bones adorning the stainless pipes, the day arrived where man, blind with pleasure and deaf with ignorance, chose his future for himself, and picked the road paved with thorns leading to perdition; in the wake of the first bombardments, nobody was left standing who remembered who fired first, and as man strode the lands of his dominion and left the smell of regret lingering in the wake of victory, the pride of Mankind was torn as the hair from the few who survived as they beat their chests and wailed in torment.

Then it came that countless years later, as a village was digging for a well in the desert wastes of what remained of Southeast Asia, they struck a coat of ebony that even their strongest warrior could not break though he shattered his prized stone axe, and the medicine woman declared it the Devil and unbuddhist, but the elders called it a relic sent by the gods Elohim and Vishnu, and the tribe venerated the sarcophagus as readily as they held in awe the bones of their ancestors; and as they searched the world and grew stronger, they found more of the sacred relics, and they founded the first of the last civilizations of Man in the wake of what few remembered as the Flood.

One day, in the heat of winter, an archaeologist wiped the sweat off his forehead and adjusted his lead suit, and shouted for his assistants to come, and, awestruck, mouths agape, hearts pounding with sheer incomprehensibility, they beheld the zenith of all the works of Man, and they worshipped it, and they brought it to the Sister City at the other end of the world, declaring it a prize as worthy as the Cocoon of the Maker; the last elder knew what it was, and shouted and coughed his blood up in the comfort of his hospital bed, but the doctor simply shook his head and gave him an injection to put him to his last fitful sleep, and drove his nurses in his car to witness the unveiling of the priceless artifact with markings only two men alive knew how to read, both of whom were asleep, and both of whom never would witness the awakening of the relic whose title its makers bestowed upon it was World-Killer.

And then in the rain of dust and echoes he woke, and he kissed the vacuum, and it took him into its embrace; and that was the end of things for the race of men.

-~-

Flash fiction in 6 sentences, idea stolen from ZH.

Construction Site

2009-11-01T07:04:00.002+08:00

I was walking down the road
and didn't hear a sound
til I passed a construction site -
jackhammer going in the middle of the night

I didn't think it much
to tell the truth I couldn't
but i left with the feeling that
i'd seen something I shouldn't.

It was not the noise that moved me
though I felt that unearthly sound
but my heart did jump sideways
when it came to me through the ground

Hide away! Hide away!
it seemed to say
the dust is flying in the middle of the night
hiding in the ashes of a construction site.

I don't know what it was I felt
or indeed what it meant
it was not the dream of things to come
or worries hiding in the cement

I'd moved too far away to hear
by the time I reached home
but I couldn't sleep for that jackhammer
just wouldn't leave me alone

How lonely you must be!
A sound without a sight!
left in the dark by no-one
Jackhammer going in the middle of the night

How lonely you must be!
A sound without a sight!
left in the dark by no-one
in the ashes of a construction site.

It came to me but years from then-
I left my life behind that day
and though I cannot recall how or when -
that unearthly noise will always stay.

cake

2009-10-28T04:57:00.000+08:00

this will be
a piece of cake
i guarantee

some eggs
in your face,
lots of buttering-up

i will be
sugar-sweet;
jam compliments

into every
other sentence.
add spice

to your life?
as it heats up
in the oven

i realise i've
forgotten if
i put in a leavening agent

2009-10-25T20:58:00.002+08:00

"God help me now", he murmured in his sleep;
The roiling sheets, they swelled and crested high
As livid shades within the mirror's scry
And smoky lines upon his skin to creep;
The pattered rain, the ghost of morning's night,
The darkness fidgets, tremors in its heart
Which echo rustlings of the nether art
That brought to knees the Highest Lord of sight.
Unwilling to behold, enwrapped in haze,
The time forgot, the passing just as fleet-
Equations, vectors, furrows on his brow,
He dreamt of sun unbridled in its blaze,
He traced infinites on the careless sheets
And murmured in his sleep, "God help me now".

Consumption

2009-10-18T04:14:00.001+08:00

You told me once
you would hand me your heart,
lay it on a platter-
(for daws to peck at) but
all you gave me was a
silvered shape of stone-cold
steel.

You eyed me curiously
as I cupped that metal mass;
wincing as each beat
(surreptitiously systolic)
bit into my skin,
fettering your heart
with ribbons

of blood.
you lifted my hand
and pressed it to my chest,
(red-ribbed, battering mess
of lived lies
and dying promises);
it tears through flesh
and leaves me staring
at where my heart
once was-

But for all my
pouring passions,
hue incarnadine,
your heartless heart is
insensate,
no more flesh than
mine.

You smiled at my new heart,
now yours, consumed,
satiated, satisfied;
your heart bleeds in me
but I am
impervious to thee.

ode to baking

2009-10-16T18:39:00.000+08:00

the rise and fall
of flour; spilt milk
in a quarter of an hour

make sure you
don't burn out

Bird

2009-10-16T11:21:00.000+08:00

you were pale

and you were sad

and unfortunately

so whirling, gazing out onto the horizon

you were,

smiling at tomorrow

and the guy next to you

that you forgot how it was

to feel the earth between your toes

it was lost forever in that instant of hair

and eyes going horizontal and merging

becoming one streak of delight.

I knew you then

as one bird knows another

how you longed in your heart to fly

and give up what the earth demands

and silently, in the solace of dawn,

tiptoe away from the roots of the tree

and into the morning sky

this is not an onion

2009-10-12T06:12:00.004+08:00

but as it peels apart
the sink fills up

with hot soup,
though i see no fire.

fine accompaniment for the cold
shoulder of lamb

should i grill it, or
is it just small

fry? gingerly seasoned;
fingers burnt -

this is not just a stupid
root (purple in the face,

stubborn layers) so
why does it make me cry

into my hands

____________________
note: is just basically collection of lame puns, i blame this on all the cooking i've been doing reccently haha. do let me know if it's too obscure, have had to explain it to everyone i've showed it to thus far.

Coffee Shop

2009-09-29T22:12:00.001+08:00

haven't seen a paycheck in a thousand years

you text 'is dinner on' oh no i guess it is

but I don't want to face the horror

of opening my wallet and finding...receipts.

saturday and i've borrowed as much as I can

dinner's not looking good but I've got a smile on

a sad sort of facade for a kind of slow-dawning horror

I call in slightly sheepish tones

Afraid to seem cheap

but I do need somewhere to sleep that isn't a void deck

So i'll meet you at the coffee shop

dinner is at six o'clock

and it may not be an 'atas' place

but I won't have to sell my home just to see your face.

It's not that you aren't important

but love should be more than dollars and cents

especially if you've more of the latter

anyway I can't afford cheap gestures right now -

flowers i'm sad to say are

out of the question.

anyway money can't buy you love.

and I'll meet you at the coffee shop

breakfast is at six o'clock

and if tomorrow morning I get to spend fifteen minutes with you

then it's fine if it isn't air conditioned.

Sunflower

2009-07-30T11:47:00.002+08:00

It's a night and day affair
and both ways it's the same
for two weeks now we're playing
this nameless, ancient game

and now you're eating at my mind
like a two week mold
left out in the cold to grow
and I hope that I return in kind
or i'll be growing old
left out when the cold wind blows

and I feel it in my stomach
every time you call my phone
and I feel it in my liver
saying I don't want to be alone

but loneliness is all it is
like a sunflower by the hour
grows toward the sun
my love grows like a weed
and lower my standards grow
the longer since it's begun.

So dance for me, sunflower girl
and I will shine for you
high love is lost on such as us
but i'll love you til' the morning dew.

mad morning

2009-07-25T17:15:00.000+08:00

the mad morning gave me pause

to think about clouds and the colour of your eyes

and now I am caught up

in the colour of mists and sunrise

it seems that we'll part in the dark

outside the radius of some lamp-shade

and rise again in the morning to the drizzle's enfilade.

Oh grizzled shade of sleep! To what do I owe this joy?

i have debts to pay to the morning dew

Oh holy darkness deep! My spirit do employ

and make the ancient promises anew.

Visit me! in brain-stems dance

the dance of blood and bones

visit upon me! in endorphins

in afternoon jogs

and tea and scones.

so hence with fervour we awake

and of our birthright's bondage do partake.

Warm Welcome

2009-07-11T14:55:00.001+08:00

A step out of arrival
and a foreign English’s eclecticness explodes in my face
like the spray of confetti at
a party of middle-aged women in pink tights.
This morning’s babble should please me more
but I now deem it unhappy variant—
though telling of home,
familiarity smacks like the mismatched attire of
a hawker whose tone demands patronage
to justify her lost sleep.

This is my country.
Open arms decked high with
consumer commerciality,
her once warm embrace now
exudes indifferent materiality as the cold
adorning charm she loops around my neck;
I hesitate
(but as the crowd presses closer,
and the scent of physicality
engulfs me in a swirl of designer perfume)
I join them, and let the mob
sweep me towards the
shopping districts.
In the background, music blares
from a store window and they chant,

“Welcome home.”

Last Thoughts

2009-07-06T01:36:00.005+08:00

Let this be the last summation
of our moments snatched
in between movements of crowds—
Wide-eyed interludes,
the low cascading of your voice
and your accidental touch
sends undercurrents through my skin.

Now, you sidestep me with your gaze—
there is time for one last laugh and you are buoyed
away by the tide of faces;
Like pebbles, they wash unspoken hope
from the sands of my heart

but leave your memory
accreted on its plains.
Day breaks on the horizon,
and you have forgotten
what I must forget.

Ballade, again, for our generation

2009-06-18T12:28:00.003+08:00

-~-

Do forgive the triple kill, it is rather sudden.

-~-

They go to see a play of hopes and fears;
Expecting blood and death and tragedy,
They want to break their hearts and shed their tears.
But though the theatre still stands on the lee,
It shows no tragedy nor comedy-
The stage is spartan, and there is one light,
And figures in a symphony of white.

At first, accountants gave their wary leers,
But soon it proved to be a hit-to-be
And cleared up all they still had in arrear.
The older patrons muttered, left it be,
But newer ones were all amused to see
Avant-garde things, and took some strange delight
At figures in a symphony of white.

And though nobody understands, they fear
For some strange reason, trembling eerily
To watch those faceless forms in pale appear
And then dissolve, some others turn to flee,
While more yet rise and cavort endlessly;
Nobody thought to ask of the playwright
Why figures in a symphony of white-

And he alone is certain, he is clear:
It is a joke too plain for eyes to see,
It is a play for audiences to steer;
The subject, Man! The actors, you and me!
The time is now, the plot is life! And we
Are they! But no-one yet has guessed it right:
Who figures in that symphony of white?

Villanelle for our tragedy

2009-06-18T12:28:00.001+08:00

A number, blinking in the pale of white
Alerted him to see what he had sought-
A star amongst a million in the night;

With joy, he stood and danced, two left, one right,
And designated it- three-four-three-ought-
A number blinking. In the pale of white

Of sixty hertz and forty watts of light,
He dialled his girlfriend on the phone he bought,
A star amongst a million in the night,

Told her the news, then sat back down and sighed.
And then- a shiver- words in throat he caught-
A number, blinking in the pale of white,

He googled up his age and weight and height,
And he was there- all numbers in the plot-
A star amongst a million. In the night

Sat he, repulsed, revolted at the sight,
Stood, trembling, sure that he was what he thought-
A number blinking in the pale of white,
A star amongst a million in the night.

Terzanelle for our generation

2009-06-18T12:24:00.000+08:00

The sun is first, and then the city roars
To men who lose their sins, their souls, their say
It is a heart that never shuts its doors.

They make their beds, their minds, and make their way,
And bones of steel, and veins of putrid tar
To men who lose their sins, their souls, their say;

All that is left are memories afar,
And fantasies. Where steel and concrete grows,
And bones of steel, and veins of putrid tar,

Inside their rooms, a moment of repose
To dream of things that lie beyond the walls,
And fantasies where steel and concrete grows,

Then night descends; the gate, majestic, falls
For them to leave. It is impossible
To dream of things that lie beyond the walls.

They wake again, in lights immiscible-
The sun is first, and then the city roars;
For them to leave, it is impossible:
It is a heart that never shuts its doors.

underwater

2009-05-29T04:18:00.006+08:00

i write yet again of the sea
which tosses up iridescent flying
things - not the obvious, dull-eyed
fishes, but lace-frothed waves,
obscuring the lonely, evasive eels,
the ones you need to look
hard to see.

the sand chafes the glass sculpture
the tide makes in every moment,
spinning up tiny, miniature fauna,
shaping all possible types of sea-pebbles
to pick for your pockets, pretending
a shark or unnamed underwater animal

had sniffed it, played with it as it
grew up, hid behind it when the
slamming of the shores seemed like
thunder from above, when the gulls
seemed to be crying their fates
when hooks came searching for them
and they could not slip away like the eels

2009-05-29T04:16:00.001+08:00

the poem
touches a nerve like last night
we tossed our hearts, strands of hair,
washing powder, tupperwares
onto the grand scale, weighing up our worths

the words wave over me like a sea of lights
woofing, pawing, wanting to play
they reach right into the center
where nothing but deflated
balloons stay

they paint life with added shimmer-
the forest-colored litter receptacles,
smoky bars with no patrons, even once-
white gates no-one has sat on; darted
a glance at; grown roses on for years

now. and the poem subsumes the beetles
of our fears, absorbs the sillinesses
of the imaginary face-offs, tussles
between grasshoppers, earthworms and children.

Ice Age

2009-05-29T04:08:00.002+08:00

Now, thoughts of you are like
mythical rainbows and
chamber pots of gold.
They float up unannounced
like goblets of oil from
dirty dishes in the sink's nose.

If I but told you, all the
global warming in the world,
all the coffee cups and scones
couldn't stop the inevitable
ice age and stupid sniffling
I'll explain as a really bad cold.
___________________________
wrote this ages ago, can't remember if i showed anyone though! clearing up my possessions, thought i'd better keep this in a relatively un-loseable place heh.

Please

2009-05-02T00:08:00.001+08:00

woke up at 7.30;

knew the day would do me in

woke up at 10.30

and I had lost everything

and please, please, I say -

have mercy on this brand new day

In Bethlehem I saw the star

was slowly on the rise

and I knew the time had finally come

for this old world to die

and please, please, I say -

have mercy on this brand new day

I was walking down the road

and I saw the setting sun

and those crosses on the hill

and I knew the deed was done

and I heard the thunder speaking

and the mountains did shake

and I heard the voice of God

bid the rivers to awake

and please, please, I say -

have mercy on this brand new day

I walked a street of mist and sound

and wondered what's ahead

a ghost appeared and whispered to me

'everything is dead'

I woke up in the morning

and was weary of my sin

woke up at 7.30; I knew the day would do me in.

-adam

The touch of a hand on the heart of a blind man in the shadow of a linden tree

2009-03-30T10:50:00.003+08:00

The touch of a hand on a screen of a lily in the water at daybreak; that is the sound that rings through his mind, and his heart is thumping out all the horrors his eyes cannot forget, loins desperately remembering the ribaldries of the evening before in sudden burning recollection, and the time is not right, the day is dark, the clouds strike with the fever of a maddened God upon the tree that stands outside his porch, splitting it in twain and setting the ground alight with the embers of a nighttime's folly, birthing ash and dust that blows away in the wind, across the lake, scattered motes of consciences and memories lingering, as though kept aloft by nothing more than starlight in the everlasting midnight of a sunless world where skeletons rock on their porches and bones rattle in their cots.

Full post:
http://whythecynic.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!EBCF08A01A145542!1198.entry

Ash Wednesday

2009-03-01T01:31:00.001+08:00

Last year - dithering on the doorstep
of a forgotten, unfriendly church, in an
unfamiliar, un-navigatable city, cool
dark dusty pews and golden high ceilings,
tracing the reliefs with my sketchy belief-

This year, climbing mountains to find
flowers, I clear spaces where it hurts.
Orange-juice like light spills from the
spring windows of this chapel, dying hair
straw-color, percolating into happy singing

Coats and scarves hug the backs of chairs;
the songs from these who grew up in winters
and snow are the same old ones from my all-
round Easters at home. I carry the cross the
long trek to the silent room with its unwashed

laundry, five flights of stairs with the year's
guilt; why didn't I go into that gilted place,
why didn't I chafe at inertly training back
just to be safe, now, I pray I am forgiven
for my haste and wrath will never find me again.

Punctuation, 01: The Crying God

2009-02-17T23:16:00.000+08:00

01: The Crying God

It was a punctuation in a neverending stream of self-pity, strong enough to shake him from his weeping and bring him back to the afterglow of fluorescence on padded walls of white. His eyes focused for a moment, picking out the anomaly amongst trillions of pairs of tender feet, and with the practiced, swiftest movement of a finger the camera swung around, turning its monstrous, monocular visage towards the third layer, a million-and-seventeen rows and eight thousand columns in.

He saw it, then, crying in its cot, struggling against the twelve tubes that pierced its skin ever so delicately, feeding it, monitoring it, sensing every part of its body and knowing it better than it would ever know itself; it was awake, feebly twisting, shaking, thrashing like a whale stabbed with a hundred harpoons. Beneath it, the pristine white of the sheets had already turned an ominous crimson; the temperature sensor read thirty eight celsius, pulse rate was a hundred fifty, and the multitudinous antibiotics and antihistamines and analgesics did little to soothe the suffering of the tiny, four-limbed form that splayed and flailed about, dying, so gently dying.

So he, with his practiced, experienced hand, flew his fingers over twelve points on the holographic screen that represented the twelve tubes that connected the baby to his machine; twelve switches on a half-invisible blue, interrupted by a round orange globe that scrolled his single eye across the domain that was his to maintain. In the dark room, in his soft black chair moulded to fit his back perfectly, beneath empty lightbulb sockets which threw no more light than dead masters threw bones to their dogs, surrounded by a complete circle of nothing but projected light and screens, he contemplated and executed fate with ten fingers on twelve switches, fingertips dipped millimetres into the optical sensors that registered his every move, and then he threw himself back in his chair and forced himself to watch.

As fast as light could carry his will to the steel arms of his unblinking eye, the tubes retracted unashamedly, and there was a pause as the baby's heart rested between its beats, and then the blood started flowing out of veins punctured even before it left its mother's womb, draining a heart already scanned and classified before it beat its first systolic; and then another pair of arms came up, over the cot, pierced its skin where the neck joined the head and drew out a core of metal, and it choked and bled and the sheets were the deepest red of rose.

Meanwhile, the rest slept, peaceful, unaware, unwitting, unwilling to bear witness, unable to comprehend the manic resplendence of emotions that coursed through their watcher's mind, their own neurons barely able to keep up with the demands of their hearts, lungs, stomachs; and they slept, hearing but unlistening, squirming in oblivion, even as their caretaker held his hand over the orange scrollball steady, gazing on the bleeding and sacrifice of one of their kin.

As quickly as it began, it was over; it fell into its death, silent and trepidant, twitching in anticipation, pale with anxiety, in a red pool of its own anger and confusion; and the cot's bottom opened, a caressing maw of metal leading to the organic recycler, and the shrouds fell in, wrapping, tumbling, covering, like the hell-argent of an angel falling, falling, falling; then the fissure closed as swiftly as it opened, the arms returned to their positions by the side of the belly of the beast, and the unblinking eye shuddered for an intangible moment, fleeter than a gust of midnight through a treeless forest, and with the hiss of an angry serpent a cloud of poison cleansed the cradle, erasing, wiping, restoring.

He sat back in his chair that so impeccably fit the shape of his back, his soft black chair, underneath a light that illuminated nothing, in a darkness that hid nothing, before an infinite screen that taught nothing. Right hand over the orange globe, he clenched it, willed, and closed his fingers; and from the endless depths of the processory another infant, suckling on its finger, acquiescingly attached to twelve tubes that sampled its blood and tasted its breath, arrived and took its place in the cot that had only so short before been the home of another. It smiled and gurgled, and turned onto its side, where the pair of connections to its spinal cord did not get in the way of its comfortable sleep. There was a hesitance, a tensing and a nanosecond frown, and a new sample was drawn, analyzed, and the results shown to the machine's master.

And over the screen, the semi-transparent holographic projection that showed trillions of green dots and one red dot, the punctation resumed normal operation, turning green; a window popped up, proudly declaring that the sample values were within normal limits; and the eye turned back to its sleepless observation, attached to an arm with forty elbows that retracted and folded and kept its vigil over its domain.

The last echoes of the anomaly beep faded from recent memory, the eye-arm returned to its base position, and the screen was once again a perfect blanket of green; and he saw that it was good, and he cried.

the truth is,

2009-01-14T01:46:00.002+08:00

i miss feeling
like i've eaten a whole lemon
i miss
the hole in my bagel,
the inside-out california rolls,
clothes that refuse to dry;
riding rollercoasters
though i'm afraid of heights.

i miss missing you.
but not you - oh no - i look
forward to that as i would
visiting unfriendly relatives
in a deep dark wood.

and as you slip past
like an iced drink,
i take the next
merry-go-round
into the wind

Childhood

2008-12-31T15:17:00.000+08:00

A rhythm calls me to the west

and calls me to get up and dressed

silently I rise and say

'Good morning to the new born day.'

-----------------------------------

say hello to saintly snows

and halos made of leafy blows

that blizzard by your garden front

and blush your childhood as you grow

say hello to first time winds

that scandalise your soft eyelids

and leave you with the reddish glow

and brush your childhood as you grow

say hello to brisk sunshine

that tans you like the sharpest wine

you're sharp now where you once were slow -

and crush your childhood as you grow.

-----------------------------------

sing of whirling teenage days

and dancing wildish dervish ways

Oh! seasons will not trouble you

Oh! sing no more of your childhood.

fresh and hungry in the night

you spoil for bloody love and fight

your pack will split the loot and lays

Oh, sing of whirling teenage days

On your own you catch the breeze

that blows by like Jehovah sneeze

but stand strong like the finest tree

Oh sing of wildish teenage ways

Oh, sing of whirling teenage days

-----------------------------------

adulthood has not caught you well

thirty has not found you swell

stationary you are sad

but say not that adulthood's bad

you pay the rent and mop the floor

and long once more for metaphors

and shining star-streaked bloody nights

and passion under cool moonlight

but say not that adulthood's bad

thirty five has found you sad

but childhood's given as a gift

and memory is never thrift.

Sonnet 57: closeness

2008-12-21T21:41:00.003+08:00

as close as sun is to the midnightsky,
as near to moon as comets on the roads
and with a flick, a halogen explodes
and then, together, in our seats we fly
or rather, flew. for soon we must alight
and wrap our shoes upon abrasive tar
and walk together long and lone afar
upon a path that is but falsely bright
or will you stop as suddenly as hearts
when crashed into a wall of solid steel
my hand about your neck, a pulse to feel,
a key inside your engine, nothing starts,
and ambulances bring you off. I cry,
head raised; I walk beneath the midnight sky.

Upgrade

2008-11-29T00:58:00.002+08:00

He found offence with his right hand,

And so he had it off, replaced with shining steel,

Leaving behind the aches and pains he used to feel,

Replaced with crafted love, made in Japan.

Then some months later, when his knees gave out,

He thought a moment, gave up with a shout,

Lopped them off, and everything below,

The newly grafted pistons certainly not just for show

For instead of just watching the grandchildren playing

He could now join them in the sandpit, laughing,

His X-ray vision always looking out for danger,

And metal limbs protecting them from injuries

So he was naturally taken by surprise

When screaming mothers dragged their crying children away

(Crying more because they never won at Hide and Seek)

So he retreated to his home, defeated and meek,

Took out a pair of kidneys, a liver, a spleen,

A heart, and fifty percent of brain,

Replaced his veins with carbon nanotubes

And cartilage with artificial lubes.

So when he next appeared in public, to the shock

Of all who half-expected him to flash his cock

Instead he simply grinned and brightly gleaned

And vocalized, "I come to you in peace",

They tried their best not to treat him like a disease.

But centuries later, when all repugnance did cease,

He thought to himself and sighed out loud again,

Half-missing the missing ache and the phantom pain

Looking at silicone skin through plastic polymer eyeballs,

Thinking about his pair of life-like simulation balls,

He kind of missed the feeling of having grandchildren

And thought about what it might have been like to have them

Mourn him at his funeral.

42

2008-11-02T21:35:00.003+08:00

this is it
this is the answer to everything
reverse slowly
when parallel parking

look over
your shoulder, checking for glow-worms
before making a u-turn.
you must

glance at the
rear-view mirror, foot like a hover-
craft whirring
over the brakes.

lest from your
blindspot comes out
like flying fish from the sea,
raging instructors

who won't
let you pass. Alternatively, wake
from the frothy
bottle-green dreams

drunk upon
speeding the highways in smuggled
cars and yesterday's hours,
measuring

reason by the
dashboard's meter. Nothing could
be sweeter, not
even the eventual

funk,
needing to extricate yourself
from the wreckage
of fairy-dust.
____________________________
ps: sorry for the use of 42, nearly sacrilege i know. pls tell me if this is mad or vaguely normal, thanks!

Sonnet 56: The dreams of dying men

2008-10-30T18:51:00.000+08:00

Are written in the ink of night, and penned
With fervor on a sheet of parlour-white,
Blazed on the signs where gentlemen alight
And hold umbrellas, gazing on the sand
Fresh-turned, and splashed with wet sobriety,
The wording blotted by the feet of girls
And boys, all sombre, shuffling feet in swirls,
All watching the manic variety
Of frantic thoughts evaporating, quick
As silver, solvent in the evening light,
To leave a blank upon the endless reams
Of soil that covers him, his walking stick,
That hides his hat and, evermore polite,
So gently smothers what remains of dreams.

Sonnet 55

2008-10-24T01:32:00.000+08:00

I built a flower, deep and red as rose,
As lucid as the dreams of dying men
As careless as the soil on which it grows
And sinful as the dolours of its stem,
Convinced by love that hearts are evergreen;
But they are dandelions, light and wan,
That break in flakes upon a winter wind,
And flutter, faint, their nectar bled to ice,
Each petal with a shadow's linger twinned,
Unfurled upon the ground, the peddlar's price
For holding on as love yet draws its close,
So stay your sobs and wipe your gleaming eyes.
For though you would entrap the summer's rose,
Your feet will tread it in the winter snows.

-~-

Because I love writing these best.

God in a bottle

2008-10-22T22:11:00.000+08:00

eight millilitres of water in a bowl,
to be overturned on the fourth of each month
and the drops spilled on the earth

slowly drying in the asphyxiating
throb of vines across a neverending field,
baking in the sun like bloated purple pies

watching as skeletons of cows drag their skin
on stilts across a plain of bones,
and the sun a grin of yellow death

that with its sadness brings the snows,
and with its madness rakes the wind
across a road that bears a single man

afraid of wolves that pant with every step,
who shudders in his sleep of nightmares,
and chokes on sand

there is a better place for him
that is a hundred journeys further on
so on the fourth of every month

he kicks the skull and spills the sins
that have accrued in eyeless sockets
and spatter on the earth like tears.

the kissings.

2008-09-28T17:58:00.001+08:00

Today there will be an unprecedented spate of kissings across the island:

6.43 am - The home of Ang Teck Mun and Wong Swee Lian, Bedok. Teck Mun will awaken to the sound of rain against the concrete of his three-room flat. He will stare into the darkness of his room, then roll over in bed to kiss Swee Lian, his wife of seventeen years. Then he will drag himself out of bed and head to the toilet to wash up.

10.37 am - Rooftop, Hougang Secondary School. Foo Yuan Kai, Secondary Four student, will lead his classmate Jade Chan here under the pretext of showing her the view. The morning rain will have lightened to a drizzle. When the door closes, Yuan Kai will move closer to Jade, so close he can feel her girlish breath on his face. He will hesitate. In that moment, Jade will close the final centimetre and place her closed lips upon his slightly parted lips. It will be the first kiss for both of them.

2.02 pm - Nanyang Primary School. Tay Jun Liang, economics undergraduate, will sit outside the school compound and wait for Rachel Chua, part-time relief teacher, to end her class. When - out of the corner of his eye - he sees her walking out of the school gate, he will time his standing up from the chair to coincide precisely with the moment his girlfriend wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him on the cheek. He will have missed her.

4.16 pm - Maternity ward, Mount Elizabeth Hospital. Daniel Soh, sales executive, will cradle his newborn daughter in his arms and kiss her several times above the lids of her bright, staring eyes. His shirt will be crumpled and he will not have showered for several days. But as he watches her tiny fist clench around his finger, he will believe that today will be the start of a better time.

11.11 pm - Palawan Beach, Sentosa. Ng Sue-Lin will break up with her boyfriend of three years, Jason Yeo. As the dark waves pound into the soft sand, she will stand on tiptoe and, with trembling lips, kiss him on the corner of his drawn mouth. Jason won't react. He will blink straight ahead. After she leaves, he will fling a deck chair into the sea, then hold his head in his hands and cry.

Best Of

2008-09-27T00:18:00.005+08:00

Just to remind us of the importance of standards (of beauty, wit, language, grammar and whatsoever thing things) I've looked through the archives, picked what i thought were the best (even the gratuitous one I wrote myself, heh) and collected them in this post for all of us to marvel at. We will improve! Because most of my output for the last couple of years was crap, I'm afraid to say and rather disappointed to note. We will improve!

by Eli:

Chinese New Year
is the time to shed your old skins
like a snake. Pack rats
should not be cowed
by the mountains of memories
crammed in boxes, but be ruthless
as the tiger. Out with the old!
And tomorrow, as the rooster crows,
you can pig out on cakes and civilities
til you're hoarse. Pineapple tarts and
rabbit sweets are particularly good for this.
Just don't behave like a bull
in a china shop when goaded; only children
get to monkey around. Your thrice-removed
cousin's cat stretches,
yawning like a minature dragon.
Even it is dog-tired.

the stadium at night
seems to be preparing
for something
involving the universe

little satellites round
the bends, thoughts weighted
down by apples in a bag with

homework and long bus rides
- spurting from their shoes
the remnants of rain

by Derrick:

Sonnet 43
Deliverance is still an age away.
You know it when the skies are tinted gray,
The hue of seas that burst in ragged spray
Upon a night which parts in shreds and rags
For pins and pricks of light, the morning's dregs.
This is the night that births another day,
That spawns the brood of men which everyday
Are, drowsy, dragged from concrete cliffs and crags
To stir machines of painted metal slags,
Each sputter, chokes on smoke, another gags;
Scarce older than the trees, but looking hags,
Parading puppets dressed in tattered flags-
If these are children of the earth, I say
Deliverance is still an age away.

by ryan D:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2568843/1/

by Me (heh)

IN 3046
I ran into a minstrel
on the red road outside town
he was singing for his supper
and he looked a little down -

"these are the last days
'fore time comes to an end
and we have spent our centuries
to break and then to mend

our pity, our art, our built-up things
our craftsmen lifetimes-wise
but the world will end tomorrow;
so now we improvise!"

adam

Today

2008-09-07T02:01:00.000+08:00

A song I wrote. Ask me if you'd like to hear the melody.

today
an arrow in the sky
today
an arrow in the sky
today
a train is going by
back on the track
my eyes are going backwards hey hey

today
a raindrop falling down
today
your face might form a frown
a crater in the sand
tomorrow will be damp

and if the streams are flowing from the rain
then the hilltops will not know water again
and if the valleys' mud sinks to your knees
then the hilltops know a desert's breeze

and if a child is born awake
a pianist will her keys forsake
and if the child is born asleep
a pianist will her keyboard keep.

-adam

Sonnet 51

2008-08-29T04:00:00.002+08:00

Too many men have wrote of statues brought
To knees by time and wind and desert sand,
Great avatars of kings and countries grand
So reaped and fallen, leveled from their haught,
And thought it symbolized the end of Man
In watching spires crash unto the ground
The rhythmic crash, of falling empires' sound
A tolling of the bells for lord and land-

It starts much smaller. Those same eyes will know
The weakened legs, the ever-trembling finger,
And crooked back, and joints no more the stronger.
Minute a tragedy, a scornful show,
To watch his ending, in the sun to shiver,
And know that broken stone will last the longer.

-~-

Because at three forty-five in the morning I was a little pissed at Ozymandias.

Clinically Yours

2008-08-10T23:43:00.000+08:00

2. contraindication

We go together like absinthe and God
A pair of misfits outcast by this world
Our paths a cube of ice in whiskey, swirled,
To drop into the heart, and lay forgot,

Until an age ago, when we did part.
Not many things could help me with my drink.
I teetered at the bar, to tempt the brink,
So many days, so many nights. I start;

Perhaps tonight has been too much.
But heck; some more, for letting such
A trivial score conquer my sense
Is not quite fitting with my plans.

So much for soberness. The lights are blurred,
My movements slower, and my speaking slurred,
It is a miracle I walk outside
And then receive a car into my hide.

A miracle, I heard the medic roar,
The nagging pain of needles in my arm
(Though nothing much could cause me much more harm)
And flashing lights and sirens' blares galore

But when he tried to start my heart, the doctor said,
"Just let him die. There isn't much we'll do for him."
I wondered why they left my broken body dead.
The air is colder, sound is duller, lights are dim-

I think I'm dying. Just as well tonight.
If drink did nothing for my awful plight,
There's medicine none that might relieve my blight.
I don't know much, but least this much I know-
They surely couldn't stitch a broken soul.

the carcass of oblivion

2008-07-28T20:41:00.002+08:00

I walked a road, beneath a boulevard of trees that gaped and arched like the ribs of some monstrous whale that had swallowed me but was empty inside, ravaged by time and hunger and pestilence that it had to swallow something as small, pathetic, insignificant as myself to stave off its mortal pangs. As though its flesh was already half-eaten away, the sun poked its rays between the branches, stabbing spears of some great fisherman with a shield of shining gold that blinded the Medusa to take her head; so I walked down, its throat impaled by the terrible splendour of a vengeful god.

I walked that road alone, as though there was nobody else to walk with; the oldest monster of old, the last leviathan, its beached corpse sucked every breath with labour, swept every morsel into its mouth despairingly as its gargantuan bulk thrashed, twitched to keep warm, even as the rays of the sun warmed its carrion-to-be. I strolled beneath its hide, left my footprints on the flesh of that which wrecked ships, broke nations, wrought devastation on Earth so complete the ancients named it and feared its name.

So pathetic now!- but I walked the road, paved in pools of blackened blood, clotted and hardened in a profusion of pebbles, and stared as the sky sprung another salvo at the Earth, the two locked in a mortal grip like titans wrestling. At the dusk of day, even Atlas falters and Hercules wavers; I let the two rest in their writhing embrace, and brought my feet ahead of each other, intent on finding the end of that throbbing maw, the bowels of the great creature that even I called home now and walked the alleys of in search of something I only had a vague picture of.

That vague picture I held in my hand, a map or painting or torn shred of canvas on which the directions to salvation could be found. Perchance perdition, but the road I walked led me onwards, and there was nowhere else to go; so much for a map. Still its presence in my hands reassured me, as though the path I walked down, lined with the specks of shadows sprayed from the rays that spilled across the ground, was Destiny, was Fate, was the straight and narrow way that I should never stray from lest I lose my soul in damnation.

When the gods give you a road, walk it!- there is nothing else you can do, when the bars of your cage are the ribs of a nameless beast that yet flails its final breaths, shaking the world with the tremors, the inhumanity of its suffering, each quiver of agony rocking your path as a bolt from heaven splits the air and roars of its power. Each step I take is at the mercy of my maddened master, which might crush me in the labyrinthine folds of its gullet with the slightest sneeze. Stalwart I stride, but travellers as myself already know that any moment we might find ourselves less a breath and a heartbeat.

I am a traveller, and my journeying never ceases. Even on a road as straight as this, wrought by the same divinities that built our frail flesh from mud and air, there is a wanderlust in my heart that drives it onwards. May it be the patterns that the sun throws on the ground, or the shapes the leaves form in the whimpering wheezes of the grand entity that wrapped its jaws about me, there is always something different to see, something else that lingers at the edge of remembering, then bids me goodbye in the blink of a half-woken eye.

The shoes I wear are old, but scarce as old as the monster of the sea that gasps on land like a drowning man, scarce as old as even my own race, who were infants huddled around campfires when the oceanic behemoths had watched countless mountains rise and fall. Now the last of their kind lies with the last of mine, and we are two waltzers to the strains of some melody that ears cannot hear, notes that eyes cannot read, and instruments even the devil cannot hope to play. We are harmonics on the same frequency, the same flesh in different form, our hearts beating on the same accord.

I am a creature of the universe, that journeys down the throat of fearsome time who in his age lies dying on the shore. So long ago he counted all the grains, each one a day that he would live to see; now he has counted each and every one, and found the last beneath my feet, which walk and step their path because a merciless deliverer of judgement: fate, demands the souls of time and man alike.

-~-

In the tradition of posting once a month to keep the ol' blog on life-support.

Waking

2008-06-27T02:46:00.002+08:00

// A sonnet cycle

An evening lost to strangers on the street
Who peddle hours, sell illegally
Exchanging for your soul, another minute-

You cannot come near them as carelessly
As I have done. They linger in the light,
And hawk their wares where one might triumphantly

Declare his victory over certain night
When all around, the hands of watches tick
Without a sound, so as to be polite.

And as I roared, the candle burned its wick,
The day dissolved to dusk yet incomplete
To leave a few lit windows, stark and stoic;

I checked the time, the sky, and found defeat,
An evening lost to strangers on the street.

-~-

It is the night, a shimmer in the night,
A glint of silver dream, a fetid finger
To graze my nape, the morning's old malinger
That stood my hair, that toss'd me left and right
Beneath my blanket, safe I thought I slept
But cold is flagrant, oh so gently burning,
And in my sleep, I never knew the turning
As cold and clamour carelessly they crept

I bed with Winter and a herd of nightmares,
Upon her needles, midst their maddened neighs,
The verve of phantoms clutching at my nerves
For when my eyelids flutter, into nowheres
The ghosts of morning fade by ancient ways
Into my past, a fate they scarce deserve.

-~-

My night is lit by clinic fluorescence
All through the hours, till the sun again
Dares peek through grey-wooled curtains, takes his rein
And rides his chariot o'er the senescence
Of worlds that rot in ignominous black,
The mould of time, held back by desperate men-
Like trembling scratchings of an inkless pen,
They wreak upon this earth with soul alack

For dreams are stronger, fiercer than the wan
Of pallid noon, the god of feeble yearns.
I slumber in its glory, torn apart
By night and dark, for day is powerless when
The fire in the sky no longer burns
As bright as that which lights my mortal heart.

-~-

I shiver. It is morning, and my sun
Breaks bleakly over rippling sheets. I sneeze,
Disturbing asymmetricalities,
And then their silk-dune shadows merge to one.
It is a time when I should be resigned,
But somehow, something tugs me to my bed,
That bows my black-capped, great, and mighty head
And swallows sunrays gingerly consigned
To fetch me from the maw of somnolence.
The shadow tendrils flit as light as air,
As tentative as morning's breath on glass;
Those heavy hands to hold my reverence
Have clutched it close and signed their sigils where
The brightest light will never dare trespass.

Sonnet 44

2008-06-14T20:30:00.000+08:00

O God, thou who art mildly terrible,
You awe me with your stubbly clouds, which shave
And spatter their despondence on the pave
That shrugs the water off, immiscible.
You strike fear in the hearts of kids and mice,
O mighty one! who rocks the air at night
By knocking on the panes with drizzles slight,
The flaccid drops, o through the air they slice
To kiss the ground yet trampled by my feet
And sog up the foundations of my city
That through the years, it falls to apathy
Returning to the earth, a khaki sheet-
The slate of Gods that work their drops by drops
And watch the world until its turning stops.

-~-

since we don't seem to be posting muchly

Sonnet 43

2008-06-02T19:45:00.002+08:00

Deliverance is still an age away.
You know it when the skies are tinted gray,
The hue of seas that burst in ragged spray
Upon a night which parts in shreds and rags
For pins and pricks of light, the morning's dregs.
This is the night that births another day,
That spawns the brood of men which everyday
Are, drowsy, dragged from concrete cliffs and crags
To stir machines of painted metal slags,
Each sputter, chokes on smoke, another gags;
Scarce older than the trees, but looking hags,
Parading puppets dressed in tattered flags-
If these are children of the earth, I say
Deliverance is still an age away.

-~-

This one was written in an epic burst of inspiration. I call it a sonnet because it's written in iambic pentameter, has 14 lines, and has seven or less rhymes. Heck, if Robert Frost could write terza rima sonnets I don't see why I can't play around a little. But eh, enough ranting.

Thrombosis

2008-05-19T00:12:00.003+08:00

You are like a needle shot into my vein
puncturing its wall
drawing out the gall
in a splendrous insertion of pain

Then you pulled out, and the wound bleeding, scarred,
and my blood thickened, clotted
widening, blackening, blotted
and stopped the throb of my heart.

Nightwalk

2008-05-13T01:58:00.002+08:00

Moonbeams gloss over cobbled streets
Washing them aglow.
A glass sea,
Deep as granite
Passes underfoot as you
Run into me.

love is natural imagery

2008-05-11T00:49:00.002+08:00

i love it when we sit beneath the sky
and look up at it.
it reminds me that the sky is upwards, as it usually is.
and i am thinking "it's really blue" when you give me a kiss
which surprises me. i wonder why
i don't mind the taste of your spit

which reminds me. our love flows
just like the river in the spring, beside
the spot of grass beneath the tree in the meadow where we sat.
the world around us is rather green and flat,
but i write it again anyway as though nobody knows.
just like our relationship. nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

whoops, now you know why i'm fidgeting
even as i put my arm about your shoulders.
the warm caress of soil upon my arm
is starting to irritate me, damp and was that a worm?-
and the way you hold on to me, gripping, tightening,
like you want to ignite our last smoulders

into a blaze, the last of summer's sun.
ha-ha, no way.
didn't we get bored of this a long long while ago?
no reason i can think of to keep up this show.
you know we've had our fun
and you've had the lion's share of the say

the whispers, rages, weeps and roars of love.
i've been content to listen.
somehow though you never seem to stay angry for too long
and eventually it's all ha-ha and fun and song
but i'd swear to god above
all the while i'm chewing my nails in vexation.

so while you nuzzle, i look up. in fact, i stare,
at sky and river, trees and meadows green.
eyes closed, you hold me close. perhaps too close for comfort.
and you have that indescribably fascinating smile. like a pervert.
i wonder what sort fruit our love will bear?
- haps children, or strychnine.

exultation

2008-05-10T17:38:00.002+08:00

all your fantasies and their gallant steeds
they streak across the sky, in their wake Apollo's chariot drowning
uncaring about the moon in their sky frowning

while down below, upon the blooming weeds
a rooster crows and goes to sleep

there can be no rest while the night is deep-
stop your ears, and the carnival will dance
close your eyes, and their music finds their way into your trance
purples, greens, and pinks, upon a star-studded black
and the silent crescent who turns her haughty back

never remembered by their deeds
(only in the dark does your tritium glow)
and when you walk in the sun, nothing will you know

nothing will you remember of the dancing in the sky
the meteors' frantic waltz before they blaze and die
with shimmering aurora, her iridescent gown ablaze
you will wave your hair along with the grasses
(still in your left hand, three fingers clutching your glasses)
and through half-curled lips gently tongue your praise
and in the morning when you rub your eyes

tell me- when a dreamer wakes- does he laugh or cry?

Adrift

2008-05-06T22:46:00.000+08:00

I open my eyes every morning
to see my world in a different perspective.
I’m parallel to it.
The old taste of last night’s vacillating reverie lingers,
Gently treading on not quite awakened taste buds.

I get up.
A bit dizzy from the altitude of everlastingness;
life is buzzing beneath me.
the noncongruent stories of yesterday,
and the day before and the day after
whir through my mind,
almost as if played on film.

to fill up a three second gap
in conversation
Someone asks
“what have you been doing?”
sounding the whips of syntax.
I am stuffing the tireless altitudes of the created space
– the void
With eloquence.

the sinewy efforts at sincerity
– can't you feel it gliding round you?
mutating, yielding the effort-filled phrases of speak to air,
compounding, saccharinely opening the sheerest
the trellised tiny purposes, parables,
this marketplace
of tightening truths
and balmy drops of joy

19th September

2008-05-05T06:42:00.001+08:00

These blue chords plunging deep to twang a melody of resonating power
This luscious melancholy voice crying a note of penetrating assurance
That randy rhythm moving my eyes to gaze upon the thought of our aching memories
Hope to find my look plunges deep
Hope to find my lips cry a note
Hope to find my touch will sooth the ache
Lend me your heart, I'll give it back whole if it takes my blood
Lavish me your solace, I'll keep it secure if it costs me my own
Grant me a moment with your thoughts, alone to cherish
Hope to find my look plunges deep
Hope to find my lips cry a note
Hope to find my touch will soothe the ache
When I speak with him my toes hush to listen, in silence enthralled
When I stop and catch a sudden scent, my pores soak in prostrate delight
It's bound to be shimmering of hues, Michaelangelo reaching down to paint our sky
It's bound to be murky of thunder, Van Goh splashing the clouds with rusty rain
It's bound to be surreal as fiction, Rousseau sketching what was only dreams
When I touch his body again on that 19th of September I hope to find only him

A Ball

2008-05-02T07:12:00.002+08:00

I. mellifluous

Sweetly or smoothly
cascading dapples of
midnight blues &
lemon chiffons.
coralshades striate
antiquewhites.
a dash! of ivory,
a whisper! of bisque,
a hint! of chartreuse,
humming murmurs
flowing; melodious

II. ostentatious

showy; pretentious;
trying to etch a
presence, an
existence; but only
to leave behind
a hushed tone of
caricaturizedimitations.
blurs of intense jazz
drone in the
humdrum;
within depths of
ambivalence, yet
played seemingly
to attract attention

III. pastiche

a piece of music
confused&blurred
by paraphernalia,
stained with traces
of paranoia.
in the quiet tone
of pathos, I
envision that
you are just
another undistinguished
daub on my hued
psychedelic palette,
made up of borrowed
bits and pieces.

adam, thought you might like to know, this poem had nothing to do with you. i was feeling vicious at that time. lols. love ya anyhow. haha.

a moment to remember

2008-05-02T07:05:00.000+08:00

If happiness comes with forgetting,
grey matter is a small price to pay.

Alexithymia

2008-05-02T06:42:00.001+08:00

The Inability to describe
Whitewashed hopes in denial.
In denial of love
too afraid to risk all in a folly's embrace
too impure to hide the truth
Putting sugar-strained smiles on display
But only in gibe
too powdery to see the pink vibrance of life beneath
too thin to taste the sentimental yearning
Of a heart without a soul
adrift and separate by the madness
The madness ingrown
too many times before
too many times before
too many times before
oh! the discombobulate
emotions in a verbal manner

Till We Have Faces

2008-05-02T06:13:00.000+08:00

bodies entwined in smoke and dancing
writhing desperately –
clinging.

dusted visages, titian sanguine lips
painting smudges
on collars and
burnished cheeks

careless whispers of love and desire
hearts twisted, tangled
and reason has stolen
fancy’s painted wings

the phantom shapes that haunt
sweet reveries of
lives,
seemingly on filmstrips