wb :

"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".

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.

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

make sure you
don't burn out

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.

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.

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.”

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.

-~-

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

// 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

What cruel vices poets do inflict
upon the fright, unknowing, youthful world;
upon an early morning interdict
with Language's faint and frivolous curls
a flower I find I can no longer smell
without immediately thinking of a bell
and rhyme's tyranny I patiently bore
until my coffee turned a metaphor

what beauty justifieth this torment?
in time each word must surely lose its power
a symbol of some artist's discontent?
i much rather call a flower a flower

this was written one disgruntled night
by a poet short on sleep and sight.

Each sliver of disguise
that peels away from you
I treasure it contentedly
I nurse it in my eyes

That when you fall apart
and flippantly entombed
You float in faint eternity
Preservèd in my heart.

"What use are hands on a clock?", he said; "You can't hold on to time. It slips away, it crumbles like a weather-beaten rock".
"That's true", I replied and smiled at him, "fingers on time have just the use as stones on the graves, on those who have died".
He laughed and sipped at his tea and stirred it; "Not consolation for those who've kicked it".

I write for you. It has to be
better than feeling like a worm,
while wallowing in increasingly
melting goo. So I shall mow
down any feelings that show, peeking out
like sprouts in brightly
green rows. Spring came early
and uninvited, that is true,
but everything I do, I'll
later rue. However, it's an easy
matter to glue a letter firm and
tight so I won't squirm,
and I'll never remember.

It should comprise things about
the universe and seas, then go
on to curse and wheeze. Perhaps
some metaphors comparing love to
war, or to unidentifiable black fungal moss?
Why, that might help to close some
doors. Not that you really care,
of course, but even if we never
watched the sunsets in a breeze, or
languidly together fed the fish, which
sounds quite boring, and probably
is, shock and horror, I think I'll
gladly? miss? whatever constitutes "all this".

____________________
comments v appreciated, especially if it's too prosaic?
eli

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.

eli

_______________
(extremely unseasonal post. well, i wrote it before cny! and please tell me you guys know what a pack rat is. half the people i showed this to didn't!)

freshly basked, make you toasty
when it's cold, or so I'm
told. These just
look at me quizzically.
No, mustn't act rashly.

Must it be none? Not even
one? The browned and crisp
crowns seem to frown
at my indecision.
Outside the sun winks - almost,
I think - and I say "Nuffink."

eli

On a Monday on a bus
as the road whizzes by
I sometimes wonder to myself
if my soul can fly
at the speed achievable by an internal combustion engine.

adam

Rustle of lips that meet
brushing past
In the streets -
Lovers deeply drunk
of Desire
Step darkly into the night -
it parts for them
like the gentle yielding
of a coy lady's limbs.


Music burns,-
the air grows thick with
stirrings of poetry
and ninety-nine red roses
drip dew incarnadine -


while hearts unfluttered yet repose
on hearths of love
like ice-glazed obsidian,
still unwarmed
by the fickle furnance
of cupid's platitudes.


Sharon

i watched a train depart
and on it was my love
i heard the whistle cut the air
the sound to pierce my heart

the tears were soon all spent
your burden in a chest
and when the station held no soul
my heart held no intent

so go, my love! be free!
i cannot wait for you
for when i check the table, it
intends eternity

It was one of those moments
locked in an instant;
where our faces met, in the
reflection within


solidifying cup of chocolate.
smoke sylphed off the rim,
Leaped exuberant,
Waxed ethereal...


Then condensed-
And thawed.
You supped the dregs and left
me waiting for a different brew
to fill this empty mug.

Sharon

EDIT: I, the dictator of the blog, demand updates. And don't tell me you haven't written anything. Cheng, put up that piece of prose you showed me. Sharon, the stuff you wrote last year. You all have a week!

This is big news: I've changed the blog layout, Yes!

Things to note:
1. The title of the blog has been changed from the rather trying-too-hard-to-be-funny "Writer's Blog! I swear it's a pun!" to the stylishly ambiguous "wb : " in lower case letters, WITH a colon.

2. The blog is now grey, which is the colour of the FUTURE. Yes. In the future, everything is grey.

3. Due to an accident involving a time machine and a small portable hard disk, our old tagboard is gone and has been replaced with the old defunct tagboard on my old blog which was originally taken down because it got spammed with russian porno ads. It is also futuristically grey.

4. Because my school taught me Creationism instead of HTML, i have been unable to correct the fact that the name of the poster is no longer displayed on entries. You will have to label your posts manually by typing your name at the bottom.

5. THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT. We now have an atom feed, which is hyperlinked under the moniker 'Feed' at the top of the page.

6. We now have a logo on the right which I hacked together in 5 minutes using mspaint.

adam

scritch of computer
conversational
much harder than we thought, a poem
much harder than a rock
tinkle of keys
like the stones on the bed of a brook
burbling in some childhood scene.
breath issuing from a nostril
he's had a childhood illness and only breathes through the left one
an exigence of air like frustration or exertion as he roots
through his tattered soul for fragments of beauty, only finding
the click of fingernails and the roar of a generator.

movement of a chair. underneath his weight the world shifts
infinitesimally
the world moves infinitesimally the floor tiles an immeasurably tiny distance away from his feet
suddenly the walls are strange.
suddenly the air is different from this infinitesimal movement
above the world his weight shifts
movement of a chair.

crickets. The idea is almost laughable. he closes his eyes and imagines them
perched on a gaggle of rocks outside the ground floor window
some demonic creator's plot device
he knows he should laugh but he trembles 'chirrup'
with the crickets.
the bustle of a fan cools his back
gives him air for a sigh
there is no home in the night-time only the creeping dread that with each tick of an old clock the universe shifts an infinitesimally small distance away from him

but elsewhere in the vast emptiness the air aches with the silence


adam

On the road
90 kilometres on kerosene
slow it down, we're only eighteen for now

On the road
is a bright blue sky
the future's a bright blue firefly
losing the urge to keep my hair down

On the road
we'll drive your dreams
into a drunken ditch
and lie back stargazing and throwing up

On the road
we'll have had enough
we'll drive back home and pack our stuff.


adam

"a meeting of minds" is not so apt
to describe the pothole-ridden road of love
more like a smashing together of pies
and seeing if they stick together
and taste just as good mashed up

memories are not so much holding hands
sitting together on a bench in the park
but the sound of ground gladly receiving
the shit of birds, splattering, splat splat
and jumping up, screaming, wiping fervently
hasty apologies to no one in particular,
uncomfortably fidgeting on the way home

not the footprints left in the sand
but getting cut by broken glass
on pristine beaches, feet as marble, streaked
across the sole with a dash of tabasco sauce
and the desperate rush to hospital
to do a test for aids
just in case, its better to know, you see

but when i think of you
(i don't even need to hold your hand)
all this shit is fine by me

is just a way of saying that
the number of fingers on your hands is something that I sincerely miss
four is a great way to have a family
four is just the number of countable ways I could've said 'I love you'

3

is the number of holes in the front of your face
I guess I'd say that I miss each one
Three is the number of sunsets I actually enjoyed
After three it started to get
a little overdone.

2

Is how we count your eyes
they are almost too large, and slightly fruit-shaped
Two is when we take stock of the number of people
it takes to hold hands
Two is the number of minutes I could rest my head on your shoulder
without cramp

1

Is what we say for romance
as if a person could possibly have two hearts
One is the number of times I will let myself look back
Once more and I'll break your legs.


adam

on a night such as this -
how are you? good day,
what is the time?
may I? you may

let's go for a walk
i'll take up a ride
on a bicycle!
we could walk or we'll fly

to the moon don't be silly
i want you right here
it's enough that you're over
it's too much that you're near

let's give up (let's not)
i think of too much
i think of too little
maybe we've lost touch

with what we wanted to say
took too long in the thinking
the moment is now
the poem is inking

slowly but surely
(let's just take our time)
there's only one moment
and that is now, we've done it, it's over, we've made our
rhyme

it's too late it is gone
the moment has flown
what did it look like?
could we have known?

or just grasped like a straw
it didn't exist
it was in illusion;
moments are mist.


adam

he built a castle of roses
and watched it sway in the breeze;
the moonlight would wash
over petals and leaves

on the midnighter's table
next to an empty glass
then he sighed with the wind,
slumped over a letter

like all the works of man
toppled in the end
by nary more than a breath
and a wave of the hand

first a little
in the mornings when you wake up
and discover that the spawnlings of worries
have taken up residence and bred in your sheets
and your sleepy mouth sour with the filmy milk of what ifs and should haves

afternoons are terrible. the sway of a leaf
becomes in one terrible instant the sway of jeans on a hot school day
or the shadow - the silhouette of a smile
a breeze is the memory of a past kiss.

evenings - quiet roads now ring with longing
no more solitude but emptiness
long shadows - a quiet play only for your audience
the puppets secretly laugh at the living

it hurts but then the next foot falls
and your shadow lags behind a step
and, tarrying,
hurries to catch up


adam

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

every saturday he sits in his corner
and smiles.

then he takes out his little keychain,
and twiddles his fingers about the bones
rayed out like so many cold cold ribs.

he walks to the door, the glowing black door
and he puts the key into the lock
twists it
twists it, hears the click

and now he is happy
locked in.

Labels: poetry

there you sit at the computer,
staring, staring,
staring,
staring.

the screen is bright enough,
does it reflect you, man?
a timer ticks away, bottom-right, right, beside
beside that number that shows how many megabytes
how much more memory that silicontraption has,
more memory?- you could always buy more
more for the precious pile of metal
the shiny heatsinks
the shiny chips
as you looked into those memory chips
did they reflect you, man?

or were they too bright, were they too bright?
were they too bright? too much light?
you could always lower the gamma
lower, yes, lower, a touch of a key
a flick of a switch, yes, lower the light,

the sound too loud perhaps? then turn it,
turn it down, turn it lower,
make it deathly silent. it is easy, is it not?

do you hear yourself in the silence, man?
do you hear?
do you hear breathing, do you hear?
do you hear beating, do you hear?
do you hear hearts and stomachs,
beats and growls over whirrs and whines?
can you hear yourself in that silence?

can you hear yourself over whirrs and whines,
that whirring noise of the many fans
those fans that fan the heart,
fan the heart of your computer?
will they ever burst in to fire, does it, does it
does it feel the heat that it makes itself?
does it feel, man? does it feel?
tell me, does it feel the cold of the room,
that cold that preserves its bones,
that cold you made to preserve its nerves,
even that cold that freezes your flesh?
can you feel it, man? can you feel it?
too cold, and a switch; too cold;
the air-conditioning goes down, down, lower,
and it is warmer, it is warmer for a while.

but you are afraid.
the heat, yes, the heat, will build,
build, build, build, until those chips fry,
fry, fry themselves in their own lard.
are you afraid of that, man?
are you afraid of that?

are you afraid of that, man?
are you afraid?

are you afraid of that?
go out of the room,
go out of the room,
go out of the room

out of the room
the room,
out of the room
and into the sunlight which you cannot,
cannot cannot adjust,
that sunlight, yellow light to strange eyes,
accustomed as you are to flickering white.
go into the sunlight, the sunlight,
and into uncomfortable, uncomfortable warmth
embrace the warmth,
the warmth that warms as much as it wants,
the warmth that you cannot adjust.
you were not born here,
you were not born to die here.
go out into the noise of the world, man,
go out into the noise of plate and pan
jackhammer car jogger ice-cream van
go out, go out, go out and then
go out again i know you will return here, man

go out go out, return here no more,
go out, you will return but
go out.

go out where you cannot control your destiny, man.
you are no god
you are no god
you were not meant to be god
you were not meant to be god
you were not meant to be god

you are not a god, you are not
you are not
you are not a god of order

you are a slave of chaos
a slave of chaos
slave of chaos
of chaos
chaos

go out, go out, where you are a slave
to sounds that you must hear,
light you must see,
warmth you must feel, oh man,
go out and feel the warmth that misses you.

you are no god on olympus, you cannot live in storms
you are no god, you are no god,
go out into the world that you missed,
go out into the world,
that you missed,
that misses you still, man.
go out into the world and live,
live like a man.

go out, go out. feel, see, hear.
feel, see, hear.
you have not felt anything but freeze.
you have not seen anything but glare.
you have not heard anything but whirr.
go out, man.

are you afraid, man? are you afraid?
are you afraid of chaos, chaos,
chaos that you cannot control, man?
go out, man.
go out,
go out where you cannot stare into it any longer.

does it reflect you?
does it reflect you, man?
does it reflect you?
can you look into it as a mirror,
can you look into it as a puddle,
can you look into it?
can it show you your face, man?
can it show you you?
this screen does not show you,
it does not show your life,
it does not show your life,
it does not show you.

you are no god, it lies to you.
you are no god, it lies. it lies.
it lies, it lies. it is perfect,
it is perfect,
it is perfect,

it is perfect.

it was built to be perfect,
know that, man. know that.
it was built, and built it was
for a purpose, built by men.
it was built for one purpose.
it was built to be perfect.
it is perfect.
it is perfect.

it is perfect.
it never forgets,
never forgetting,
it never forgets.
and so it lies.

go out, man.
you were made to forget.

-~-

a.n.: this is what many hours of system shock 2, a good hot shower, and an overdriving mind make.

Labels: poetry

different when we get back, the product of
breathing the air on opposite sides of a continent
mountains between us,

miles of wire between us
so that we can share the electricity of our existence
but the touch is lost
its insulating quality that keeps us from being reduced to electrons in a pipe

oxidation is loss. we'll be
spirits lost on a wire
we'll drift between packets and protocols
we'll dissociate our feelings
immune to grief, we smile our
electronic smiles.

II.

we'll be
afraid at the last juncture
before the point of divergence; taking our trajectories
to different coloured skies

the last brush of
fingernails palm sweat
evaporating on my forearm

tomorrow it will dry
memories are anhydrous
but tears are not.

III.

we'll be
waiting for the crossroads
not divergent yet; our footsteps still
in rhythm with the drummer
that is our sycopated
heart-beats but yet -
touches cold we fear the coda

IV.

we are
silent, sitting on a bench
no pain yet - but our eyes glow
like the stars we are,
we are, we are, we are.

Labels: poetry

on the porcelain tiles
tending to the bougainvillas
i'm inside making flowers into necklaces
later she tells me they're pretty; she wears one around her neck
and gives me a little laugh

she's outside pulling weeds
i'm inside with the herbicide of youth
angry at the walls;
my tears are to her
garden shears

like rain to butterflies
(where do they hide until the showers have passed?)

she's outside watching television
in her old wheel-chair
I am inside
dreaming of airplanes and skies

I am outside dressed in drabs and grey
walking around the wooden box
I bend as if to confide
but now she's fast asleep, inside.

Labels: poetry

you and I have no chemistry. Henceforth
we are dissociated, I my own
entity. I cannot comprehend
your spontaneous flares;
insoluble mysteries; variable states,
golden dust motes floating
precipitously -- the facts stand as this:

when I count the ways I know thee,
the technicalities fail me.

Labels: poetry

He stood and waited as he tried to imagine what it would sound like if the train passed by him without stopping. it was a faint humming in his head that grew as sudden as a bolt of lightning, then faded just as quickly into a low moan, leaving behind empty air and a trinity of rails.

Perhaps he had been waiting for too long; when he waited, he thought, and when he thought, he thought of such things. in the distance, he heard a thud-thudding, accompanied by a light shuffle of shoe on tile. he had found a seat long ago, all of them empty anyway. everyone had boarded the previous train in their hurry. though the trains ran in a loop, and the last one was not due for a few more hours at least, the station was empty nonetheless.

Then more people started to fill the platform. first it was one, then they came in two by two, all manner of men and women. so many people flooded the floor- almost threatening to break past the line meekly painted into the tiled floor, and overflow onto the rails. ever they came with no end, all manner of brilliantly boring people. some in riches, some in rags; most oblivious, a manner of metal mated to their ears. there were those in clean suits and tie, immaculate hair on white shirts; there were those whose white had grown yellow with age, but who still fumbled to tuck their shirts in and keep a crease in their pantlegs; there were those who carried great bags, bent over, with no care for the stained patches adorning their clothes. all of them jostled and scrummed, sounded and laughed. so many. he had not thought there had been so many to live. the sensory confluence reminded him once of a movie he watched of a slow-motion magnified frog's leg twitching upon the application of galvanic force. like so many cells they twitched, hemmed in on all sides by fellows; then there was a great flash, and they lunged!- they flailed in one direction, moving scarcely a nailsbreadth each but drawing the entire leg with their concerted power.

Then two of them caught his eye. they were surely together, his arm about her waist. whispering sweet nothings into each other's ears. perhaps he recognized them, and there is nothing like recognizance to bring recognizance. perhaps they were the same couple yesterday, but then she was in a shorter skirt and his hair gasped at the ceiling, frozen in picassoesque spires. or perhaps he knew them from two days ago; then she carried a red red rose newly sprung, and he had a smile more sincere than the sound their feet now made when they stumbled, giggling, across the floor. now he was in a great suit, coat hanging on the other arm, and she smiled coyly in a pretty blouse and lipstick.

Or perhaps they were all different couples. clinging on together in their happiness perhaps, and both men and women flickered glances thence, perchance gently jealous.

Then he heard the announcer on the sound system. a breeze blew past his ears, whirling with the static-garbled words.

"For your own safety, please stand behind the yellow line. thank you for your co-operation."

The thud-shuffling continued even as the rumble of a steel behemoth waxed in the distance. as though a lion sensing prey, the thudding hastened for a few moments, then it resumed its old pace. perhaps that was the tail of the lion; the rest of its muscles coiled in anticipation, the muffled roar stifling itself, and countless cells readied to spring. then the train- he dreamt then, so vivid, that it had stopped to graze or perhaps drink from a water-hole- the lion sprung! then its lifeblood poured out onto the tiled floor, and hundreds of people walked through the doors, as many as in, and the doors closed, and the train was off.

That was not his train.

The shuffling in the distance finally reached his ears. a sickly old man, bent over crutches, hobbled over and took the seat next to him. no word passed between the two. the old man had a beard, perhaps, and might have once enjoyed the dubious honour of having hair. teeth were perhaps only a faint memory now, but certainly the love of walking had stayed with the old man, past the loss of one leg beneath the knee; crutch held erect beside him like some fantastical scythe, watching the people as surely as himself.

And then it was silent again. there would be a short lull. he knew more people would come and the station would be crowded again. as sure as from nostradamus' lips, they arrived, filling the painted floor and leaning on all the pillars. some watched the rails playfully, most stood to themselves. then a few strains caught his ear. someone- a boy, young, was singing some russian song, music filling his countenance even though his ears were not stopped up with rubber. the words reminded steinbeck of the time he was back in moscow, working as a doctor then. in the stifling heat, in the press of a thousand souls upon a lonely one, he yet managed to feel the solitude in the cold russian winter, and the warmth of a drop of the miracle liquid, the lifeblood of the proud rus. strange, how a young boy's uncertain notes could evoke his memory of a hundred men delivering their anthem; and strange, how he could think of vodka in the middle of summer.

And he was happy. music in his blood, joy was in his face. no need had he for gels upon his hair, nor neither suit nor pants nor pinstriped hat. like some rogue atom vibrating at absolute zero, or the last rose of summer, refusing to go, he stood out; pricking those who came near him, yet drawing just as many to be hurt. all about him smothered the blacks and whites of business garb, the grumbling noise of music faked too loud. perhaps again the spring would bloom in red, but not ere winter struck the lone rose dead.

And then they heard it, like so many flies catching the scent of carrion in the air. the same voice- the same sound, exactly as it had been for so many years, so many trains-

"For your own safety, please stand behind the yellow line. thank you for your co-operation."

And then there was the rumbling again, like the great hunger of a greedy emperor. this time, the train came at the other side, disgorged its vile, squirming load- like a bloated roman patriarch, taken till his stomach's protest at the table, gone to throw up a viscous bile, then shovelling just as much into his gaping maw again. as much went out as went in, an infinity of peoples chewed on and spat out in some grotesque orgy. in the middle- lost in the noise- the faint words hung on the air, trepid, then were lost to the toothless metal maws, tens of them along the steel snake like some homeric monster, snarling at the masses that yet pushed themselves into its jaws.

He shuddered. the jaws snapped shut, forcing rubber lips together. the song was lost, its notes still playing in his head, and there was a glimpse of the boy's smile- did he look into his eyes?- and it was gone.

Again it was solitude alone with solitude. the old man beside him turned to face him, and ventured a question.

"You've missed both trains. aren't you taking any one of them?"

There was only the uncertain reply:

"No. these- none of these is my train."

Labels: prose

The idea that the landscape of Mars is red is a commonly-held myth. Photos from the first martian probes in the 1990s showed a panorama of red but those were really colour-enhanced - for scientific purposes, for sensation, who can say? Having discovered another uninhabitable grey rock in space would not guarantee NASA's budget - after all, we already had the moon and as far as the average voter was concerned, that was enough. In reality, the martian landscape is almost uniformly grey, punctuated by canyons, but these are grey canyons studded with grey rocks on ancient grey riverbeds. From space, the planet looks red because of iron oxide in the atmosphere. From the ground, the sky is grey, but the ever-present iron oxide dust looms nevertheless.

It was dark on mars. That was how it always had been, the shroud of night almost perpetually drawn over the red planet not by the presence of clouds (she had none) but by sheer virtue of distance.

Above the spaceport the sky was a deep grey. It was night-time. The daytime came and went with whimsy but each cycle brought no more than a tinge of brightness to the otherwise twilight surroundings. Six billion miles was a long way for the warmth which sustained green earth to travel.

It was also one hell of a long way for a spacecraft to travel.

That day, the spaceport was crowded.


Mother held my hand as we thronged with the crowd; pulled and pushed, seeping our way like rivulets of water between the cracks of parched earth towards the wire fence. I felt myself being pulled upwards by her muscular arms. Mother hoisted me to a perch on her shoulder so I could get a good view of the spacecraft: at seven, i was tall but most of the rugged colonists were taller: it was water day, there was to be a spacecraft (we didn't know what it was to look like), and it would come like rain from interstellar space to our dry little hole in the middle of our desolate solar system.

The first we heard was not the rush of the sonic boom or the parting of the sea of reddish clouds like a crack in some divine firmament to let in the first rays of a new sun, shedding brilliant light on the small pack of cold colonists and filling their eyes with a spiritual fire. Standing there I could fathom a small wet throng wading through the river Jordan; a crack in the sky; a deep voice of command.

The first we heard was not the torrential pour of combustion engines flaring in gigantuan struggle against the pull of the planet, lowering the silver spacecraft first by metres, then by feet, then by inches. When the ramp was extended, a man in a half-spacesuit stood at the doorway framed by a halo of brilliant, cutting but that is an image for later. Before there was light there was sound...

...and the sound was the word. A baby crying. It was little cousin Zechariah, nobody could hear anything of the spacecraft let alone see through the dusty haze, it was night-time, it was Mars, it was the spaceport; and he had had a brief premonition, the sort only available to the very very young, of the grief that is our birthright.

Labels: prose

i wandered in alaska,
feeling pretty bored
when all a sudden to my left
there darted quick a fnord.
perhaps i was mistaken-
but sure that i was not,
i called my huskies to awaken,
and the fnord i sought.
fnord
all over the seas i ranged,
in search of th'elusive fnord
but scarcely a trace i gauged
of that invisible god.
it left me a broken man,
now weary of life itself
but still the desire ran
to see the fnord myself.
fnord
so over sea and mountain like i roamed,
though neither brought me sign of what i sought.
in time, the winter rains to me were brought,
the seas they froze and fresh in spring they foamed;
the leaves turned brown, were trodden into rust,
and gave the barren trunks their greens anew,
while eggs cracked open, hatchlings aged and flew,
and even stones were worn down into dust.
fnord
but ask me if i ever saw the fnord-
i never did, tho' everything i saw,
and all the songs of nature i did hear.
no man will ever know that work of god;
it is his oldest grave unspoken law:
that man before the fnord shall only fear.
fnord
not plucked from out the flow'rs or trees,
not panned from out the lakes and seas;
the fnord is nothing man can seize.
fnord
it is like a ghost in the evening air,
it is like the whisper of sweet despair,
fainter than gossamer, finer than hair.
fnord
but it is in every work that man has wrought.
in every statue, worked in every ingot,
in every word, each punctuation dot.
fnord
it is in every breath of city breeze,
in every stark cold white fluorescent glare
upon the baby cradled in his cot.
fnord
make no mistake, the fnord is there.
beware.
fnord
although you might not know of what i speak,
it is still early; wisdom's child is meek.
although i know it is in vain to seek,
you, dear, might find what i have longed to see,
in everything surrounding you and me;
but, pray, if you should ever see the fnord,
know that that knowledge is most dearly bought.

Labels: poetry

floor flower

papers
files flung or simply left
through neglect or a deliberate act of violence
bag open - blue whale sifting the air for the detritus of dust
eating through the shiftless cobwebs of disused time
or a mouth open in frozen, dead wonder
the ruins of Pompeii.

adam

Labels: poetry

for you (who caused my heart's erosion)

I. harlequinade
farcical clownery or
love? as our painted lips
(cherryred, dustymauve)
and the shaded world
sparkling under
my left eyelid
with stripes of
peach&rose&goldenrod
were threatening
to brush (or possibly collide)
at this instant
a (fairlysmall)
dollop of coldcream time
hearts twisted, tangled
hung
for sale on a yellow ribbon
caught up in
a lovers' flashy
display of
buffoonery

II. chaparral
a dense thicket of shrubs
where we tumbled&played
as children
and lopsided grins
cracked our faces evenly in half
as the sunlight dappled
your earlobes and chin
and we were
hippomenes&atalanta
orpheus&euridice
perseus&andromeda
as our lips were stained
with the purpling
fruit of berrybushes
and small trees

III. alcazar
a spanish palace or fortress
where you draped
silk&moonlight
across my curving limbs
and took my hand
(chilly for want
of your dust-caked touch)
and led me,
a princess (made of icy stars)
to a prison
dangling crazily
between earth and sky,
suspended (tucked-away)
in a twisted, blackstone tower
originally built by the moors

IV. sachet
a small packet of
ashy snow is my heart,
but
maybe you can
find the last glimmering
gemstone hidden
(buried&sifting)
in that wasteland?
i don't know how
it was fooled
so
(tenderly&mercilessly)
by your dancing pupils,
your laugh
sweetly aromatic as
perfumed powder

V. panorama
an unbroken view
into your graying eyes
where i cannot believe
what i saw:
a world shadowed with
silver mist
that shrouded and distorted
entire lumpish continents
and roiled over
the palsied sea
punctuated by blueblack bubbles
where tenthousand(maybemore)
emptyfaced people
had been placed
(in meticulous crisscrossing lines)
crowding the yellow tinged glass
of an entire surrounding area

VI. creosol
a colorless
look was all you threw my way
(but it missed)
and shattered crookedly
on the bristling fence
behind my two shoulderblades
and only slightly glancing them,
enough to sear a questionshape
into the whitewhite skin
a trail of hurt which
dripped and disappeared into
the air
remained&hovered
(but thanks for asking)
when you pressed scarred palms
to hollow cheeks
you left pinkbruised marks
glistening like
oily liquid

VII. iridescent
producing a display
of something like
hope (champagnecolored)
dancing at your temples
little glassy shards
of canned light
and i think it was a goodbye
half-sunk into your parted lips
and as we touched
(fingertips, like curling palm fronds)
into
a haphazard explosion
of lustrous, rainbowlike colors



side note: words in italics: meaning of the words in bold

Labels: poetry

Fairy tales

Once upon a time
Seems so long ago
No more weary knights
No more fire breathing foes

Chivalry and folklore's gone
The prince's kiss turned to dust
The jeweled sword no longer shines
The treasure chest is locked with rust

The mermaid's tail swims no more
The fairy's wings are ripped apart
And yet these things come back alive
In a read book and a child's heart.



Onions

straight line on the screen
perpendicular to my fingers crossed
i hold my breath. in it goes.
steady.
my heart races. hook me up to one of those
and the line will jump up and down
like fresh onions on a skillet.
he can't taste onions anymore. i cry.

Labels: poetry

double bill.

Hug

hovering on each other's edges
there is a precipice of indecision
in the split second of eye contact
a buzz (is it electrical, or some force of the soul?)

there is a rush; and the moment
vibrates
between the could be
or maybe should not then there is no hope

when it's over we wonder if it really happened;
was it some sort of insanity
(but we feel the lingering warmth down our sides)




Leaves

no telling when the wind will blow
its coming or its leaving
except the sound of moving leaves
a silence's gentle sieving

between the bars of quiet
with luck a footstep may trawl
a passing car makes angry air
on an evening's sultry drawl.

my breath intrudes;
Silence is the friend of feet
voices give way to headlights
and the sound of a darkened street.

adam

Labels: poetry

a long time since
or: delayed onset of hyperallergy

sometime around twelve in the afternoon, at the height of the heat, a man collapsed deep in the dark heart of a giganteous dome; the dome that protected his kin from ravaged and revengeful nature. his passing made no noise; caused no stir; and soon an ambulance picked his body up, its automated medical system still whirring. the coroners- his fellow students- found no poison, no drug, no killer save the man himself. exposed to open nature once, so many years ago as a child, he had become addicted to her wild and sullied beauty; today he died of it.

Labels: drabble, prose