alas graduating to twenty four went without much fanfare.

as a matter of fact, it was my birthday yesterday and i didnt comb my hair

the day you hate yourself
I might love you

When I was younger, used to listen to the Radio some ten years ago, erstwhile to a world that will one day develop into a Web 2.0 culture,

from receiving to retrieval,
from downloading to uploading and downloading,
when music was usually fed instead of hunted for...

I listened to these by Shawn Mullins that still brings me very much back there

Althusser
Marx
Stuart Hall
Barthes
Gramsci
CS Pierce

are we done with you yet

I'm not over you
Can I get back


under?

Bellx 1

City of Darkness - Life In Kowloon City (Girard & Lambot, 1999)

you only need to produce a book like this about a place like that to attach a memory in the brain's heart of a person like me

Jeffrey Campbell

So I live again with you in memories
You live again in my brain's electricity
Turn left, go right, walk ahead, look back and there
you are, and all at once worth nothing but everything

I have a thread
round each wrist
which I know I can unstitch
anytime I wish

Notes on a Suicide, Felix Cheong

And Rubbish for Stanza

And Rubbish for Stanza

Why is it when you speak I neglect
the content of your oration
Instead
I fixate on the quality of your voice that wraps
itself in my head
I explore your accent, counting the syllabus riding on the wave of your tongue
dissecting your words into letters
until it spells my name

Why do I yearn to see your feet
Ten digits hiding in the architecture of your shoes
comforted by black cotton
How can I ask to see you unclothed
I can only ask for you to wear sandals instead

Why do I write this knowing you are the king of prosody and this has no meter
and rubbish
for stanza

A love perrenial

Molko, B. (2000). The Brian Molko interview. Retrieved 0ctober 1, 2010 from http://www.placeboworld.de/artikel/nurtext/engl/fhm102000.html

this is one of life's biggest mystery- where this ever disappeared to

picture update

Schnaps

Artsch and crafsch

there's nothing to be afraid
of


departures

it is more of
after sharing the same space and expired air
hearing the same tictocs and heartbeats that assure
that hearts
and time are in sync,
that leaves everything else prior to that shattered

what is this strange swelling rising up in the throat
that feels
so so so

heavy

and missing is worse than hate
and missing is an emotion worse than
shame or guilt or embarrassment or failure

all these take a back seat when they take a back seat
and these words could simply be one of those things to look back on and think nothing of,
yet this is now
and terrible is the impending missing

To be able to want and have in a heartbeat
and for that to be normal and not a formal luxury
or something to have to hold out forever for

if that is too much to ask for
or if it is possible to ask for at all

I wish I had a You
with your expensive stiff collars in all colours and prints
and a metal spoon
a typhoon in your coffee
and a You who would never leave me

or would leave
only to return to me

and you would smoke with me on lonely afternoons
creating dreams out of smoke
creating dreams

of one who would never leave
except to chase after me

in these clouds of smoke we build the construction you love
scaffolding, bricks,
metal frames
that will hold up

these dreams of a You
hauling back to me

I'm having TWG's french earl grey at the moment. Unlike the permeable membranes of Lipton or other regular teas, TWG's teabags comes in an actual woven sachet.

It reminds me of a sagging, dripping wet hairless scrotum.

Father

There’s a stranger in the hall
He sits and smokes his rolled up cigarettes without
Contemplation.
He holds the remote control,
lifts it to his tired palm as with Prozac he would.
I don’t believe there’s anything worthy of attention on screen,
really,
But he’s riveted and melts into
fictitious characters at most,
football matches and fouls
-impossible are these imaginary television roles.

The stranger has sat in an old wreck for a chair
For far too long;
Tobacco and pheromones staling into cane,
Living and non-living,
Aging and withering,
Letting Technicolor inspire his inert campaign.

I think the stranger would like to talk.
Perhaps once in a while when
he’s got something more significant besides
‘Pass me the coffee’
Or muttering ‘Shit’ after sneezing.

Stranger’s got his pulse affiliated to
failure and depleting existence
chained through his veins.
Life’s annuity never went beyond
the paid cigarettes, and the old cane chair,
and maybe a divorce from that crumb of a marriage.

7 years he still sits there and stares,
Cigarette in hand and brain with cracks.
Trying his hardest to pretend I’m not really there,
even as I walk through the door
through these years
and through television re runs,
wearing his blood like a curse in this life.

Traffic Light II

The traffic light bore an eternity at
the juncture
headlights bled into similar warnings,
the traffic then
is now the never ending articulation of honks
and flashes
colors and exhaust ash in my head

I do not seem to notice the red light you emit
among this peace
Red (danger)
Red (warning)
Red (do not proceed)


By now the green man comes on
and by now my smoke echoes my nasal cavities
floats easily to my blood brain barrier
It is now in the shape of a noose and threatens to strangle
my brain's heart with it

Traffic Light I

Your name explodes as a dramatic exclamation mark
At times,
a sandy whisper
at times
a blinking red man, that teased to turn green

Thomas the Obscure- Maurice Blanchot-

Just as a man who is hanging himself, after kicking the stool which he stood, the final shore, rather than feeling the leap which he is making into the void, feels only the rope which holds him, held to the end, held more than ever, bound as he had never been before to the existence he would like to leave

Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

sometimes, endings have no endings and nights have no mornings.
my dreams are made of air, and my body's made of paper

Transparency Can Be Obtained at the Counter- Jonathan Lim

Transparency Can Be Obtained at the Counter
said the sign
so i stepped up and asked for some
it was easier than i thought.
she didnt even look up-
her heavy perm weighed her down perhaps
her eyes downcast but the lashes stood proud
her fingers fumbled busily through fashion
or possibly food

'How many shits you want?'

No more less than i've had so far,
i thought

But didnt say so-
im not so insolent
and she seemed too tired to care

i thought too long
and missed my turn
she rolled again
'How many transparency you want?'

in another place i would have said

'Just enough to need no secrets
to live in the light
to act in the open
and sleep under the stars
without qualm or wolfworry
sufficient to look through each other's eyes
and see the them inside
and the me them sees
To speak clear
not caring to be heard
but to have spoken
to be like waterglassair
not colored like childmarbles
or tinted rose or syrupy sweet'

but that in another place only
there that day was her
looking like she didnt care less what i thought
perhaps no one had asked her for transparencies in a long while
and they were dusty
filmed in i dont care
coated in god alone knows dont ask me i said already
i dounch know you still so kaypoh why dont
you leave me alone somebody pay you to kachao me is it my life
guailan lah please leave me alone

stop looking i transparent is it?

and she wasnt and didnt want to be
sitting there as opaque as she could make herself
undeniable as a mountain
unhurtable as the sidewalk we splatter
no seeing through her
no thorugh way

the queue was stretching longer
filled with lives shortening

hurry up
were they wanting to buy transparencies too?
wish they luck

'Two shits. Thanks.
Keep the rest for yourself.'

She didnt look up.

- Jonathan Lim, "Transparency Can Be Obtained at the Counter" from Capsule

'If I ever feel better, remind me to spend some good time with you,
You can give me your number,
when it's all over I'd let you know.'
Phoenix, If I Ever Feel Better

imagine there are two or three ways to make you...

Facial Punctuations

I have two commas for eyes that are either
openly inverted or
blinked closed depending on the maturity of emotions
My nose is an exclamation mark
a vertical dash- slides a way down,
abruptly finishing in a tiny stump for nostrils

My mouth is a full stop
I've ceased to speak the words that others believe exist in a plane
other than theirs

A Monday that feels like a Sunday
with Tuesday looming in sight
that I can't grasp at the moment

You see I've a million things to say
Now now now
now

now
now
!

But day after day
night after night and the seconds that follow,
its a nameless, shameless milieu that I can't even find a euphemism for,
for going around in circles, fading back into my black chair
tapping against the black keyboard
thinking that never gets anywhere

I do wonder where do thoughts go to
if there's some sort of heaven where digested thoughts go to,
or maybe there is a hell
or there's some kind of recycling protocol

I do hope one day
we both realise we make up
too many excuses

for our actual inadequacies for how we put us on hold
in such a pathetic manner

The house in Richmond

Even at 6am
The sun is already generous, blaring the lines formed in your skin by nightclothes from slumber into incalescence
The air that whispers through your patio that has doors
is bleak and
You feel like the ceiling fan is on electrical strike
Its supposed zephyr ruffles not the fine hairs on your arm,
nor the glass of dust in narcolepsy

You fumble through your sleeping bag that crackles
but the sonic alacrity tosses nothing to your ears and being
that has now chose deafness over hearing
comatose over awakening

Somehow your sight works just fine and the room
spins into eventual lights and silhouette, shapes and colors
and Pearl who sleeps on the right as the other 5 girls are too on the left,
lined next to each other in sleeping bags
like deceased in body bags in an amusing sorority tragedy comparison

You hear the guys down there stuttering awake from last night's hibernation
In no time you can expect
Karen's tinkering of a metal spoon,
creating a typhoon in her coffee, against the glass mug

Soon you will smell Jasbir's cigarette smoke from your veranda singing its way into your nostrils
and you find yourself wishing for that acquaintance you used to share
just so smashing your way out and smashing his cigarette end
would have been more acceptable in the name of friendship than
morning provocation as an ex-thingy

Now your thoughts are done
Thoughts are the only way to begin a day in the most civilised manner
since half of this town is in ruins and the locals express themselves in something more foreign than Babel

Will You Will I

When done
over

Will I
feel
feel loved
feel
feel rated
disgusted
wasted
don't care
care

How will I proceed from the process
Will we progress
or digress?

Will you
judge
disrespect
change
be
blown away, or turned off
emptied
relieved
Will you love
connect
or run away

lighting up to inundate the silence rising up with the heat of the night

When you descended textually in the cellphone medium that July
you were cold as technology
I was disinterested as its magnetic chips
That was you this was who I am

It was like that Wednesday when we met and you were so polite
As though I might bruise at a singular
infliction of negative adjective
We punctuated the deliberate hesitation
with sips after sips of ice water
and smoke after cigarettes when conversation made no leeway

That night
I told myself this is it and I can't do it twice;
eating vegetarian food for sheer manners
and lighting up to inundate the silence rising up with the heat of the night

Some of my favourite non-English films

You spoke to me and
I talked but I was always thinking of you each time you speak, really
and of that time you had asked,

then you wore loose clothing and always a thin white tshirt
your laced up shoes scuffed down an 8pm phoenix tarmac

It was Tuesday
or Wednesday, one of those times I saw you enough to
not remember you
or think about you

'How old are you?'
'18,' I had said

Thinking of it and writing of it now
Youth then was nothing but dust
a shameless episode of trying to magnify
eventuality
sexuality
personality

Yet all it mastered was
the culmination of nothingness
ignorance everyone saw but yourself

what happens when you grow old too young

When will you learn, when will you ever learn, sometimes even after you have the last say, it might still blow up in your face, when will you learn your own happiness, your own clarity and God isn't in the hands of another man because when he leaves it will all dissolve, alongside you with it

with it
with it all

10 Jan 2010

You're Only Lonely

Dylan Thomas, Before I Knocked

Before I knocked and flesh let enter,
With liquid hands tapped on the womb,
I who was as shapeless as the water
That shaped the Jordan near my home
Was brother to Mnetha's daughter
And sister to the fathering worm.

I who was deaf to spring and summer,
Who knew not sun nor moon by name,
Felt thud beneath my flesh's armour,
As yet was in a molten form
The leaden stars, the rainy hammer
Swung by my father from his dome.

I knew the message of the winter,
The darted hail, the childish snow,
And the wind was my sister suitor;
Wind in me leaped, the hellborn dew;
My veins flowed with the Eastern weather;
Ungotten I knew night and day.

As yet ungotten, I did suffer;
The rack of dreams my lily bones
Did twist into a living cipher,
And flesh was snipped to cross the lines
Of gallow crosses on the liver
And brambles in the wringing brains.

My throat knew thirst before the structure
Of skin and vein around the well
Where words and water make a mixture
Unfailing till the blood runs foul;
My heart knew love, my belly hunger;
I smelt the maggot in my stool.

And time cast forth my mortal creature
To drift or drown upon the seas
Acquainted with the salt adventure
Of tides that never touch the shores.
I who was rich was made the richer
By sipping at the vine of days.

I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither
A ghost nor man, but mortal ghost.
And I was struck down by death's feather.
I was a mortal to the last
Long breath that carried to my father
The message of his dying christ.

You who bow down at cross and altar,
Remember me and pity Him
Who took my flesh and bone for armour
And doublecrossed my mother's womb.

All we have to signify our living is the rhythm
we call the heart
which isn't an accurate sign of being alive
at all

It's wearing, marriages just is looking at them disintegrating all over the place knowing it is too late to turn back
too old to start over because it is what you've known the last twenty years no matter what others say
a marriage is a bad investment
it makes you believe in the prospects and profits the satisfaction that exist in the faces
of your children who are some times grateful
but mostly not
some times you wonder what happened to the happiness in loving your children
your first child, thinking you can never love anyone more than you ever can
Now you are a parent
watching them
never knowing whatever they are thinking of
and of yourself
a marriage is a bad investment
so if you think you want to get married
look at the fractured picture of your own parents and the equally fractured picture of the child that is yourself
and how you will never fracture that of your own

Losing you to geography

"Are you scared?" you had teased
"No, don't be stupid," but I lied
"Would you have been scared if I said I was?"

I clutched at then seat belt

And I smiled while you drove
Three times we missed the exit
The train would have served me better
But it was you and me
you and a car

You will fly when you have once drove

but I will remember how you curled your phalanges around the wheel then

But you will not remember how my phalanges look like typing these now

You will not remember how my fingers will look like
when they have been finally conditioned to hold a cigarette stick

when they have been diseased by arthritis at 80

when they have once understood the curls of your hair in them

Your Famous Facebook Friends and Beauty Creams

You walk out of the shower, skin polka dotted red from the hot water
Its always been this way even as a child
It was always about the hot water, the hotter the better
Funny how something this nondescript exists now as a
realisation to even write about

You lather yourself in creams
that promise to fade and whiten previous assaults of epidermis, they even promise to defy
quartz and clockwork
You know it is never about the properties or about its research done in Parisian laboratories
by Parisian researchers to justify its cost
It is only about the promise of the beauty you hope to attain
and beauty
can only be hoped for and not promised in a bottle/jar/tube

While awaiting the potions to assimilate into your skin
you log onto Facebook drifting through names of
people known as 'Friends' on the left side of your profile
You click to view all, marveling in your own predictions of how you were damn sure then,
of
Annie being happy earning nine hundred bucks a month after CPF as a clerk with a boyfriend pigmented in motifs on his mod-ride,
and how true it is now

You click to view all, surprised at how many famous people you have as friends
even though your contact is limited to the awkward hello at the shows you attend when you finally feel
more intelligent, creative and productive enough to show up
Others speak of these names in breathless awe and you want to say
Oh, he's my Facebook friend, but your heart taps your tongue to ask
excuse me but is he really a friend?
You decide against it and keep quiet
all the while knowing you haven't deleted these Friends yet because it makes you look better
but
at the same time
feel ashamed at your own superficiality of it all

Finally
You decide your Famous Facebook Friends (FFF) and beauty creams are the same
It all culminates in some wish for eventual potential
Of being as big as your FFF
Of being porcelain beautiful

You cannot love a man who hits you
they say
You cannot stay with a man who hits you
Apparently it drains your self esteem through a sieve of punches

Yet is esteem the final dented can in this warped production
I would hardly think so
I'm too busy fighting my own frenzy
what kind of feminist am I
to tolerate this on the same bed with the four peach walls that hold us in
what kind of sadist does that make me
to know I will forever
want the man I cannot have and he will want me the same way
too

I've said this before
They had me when I didn't have them

You cannot be with a man that hits you
They say and I agree

But life lives in the anger within a fist
It knows enough to hate
It hates enough to inspire
It inspires enough to love

You can't be with a man that hits you
They say and I agree
But it doesn't mean you can't love him
and it doesn't mean he doesn't love you

Strings and Lines

Those short short lines per stanza are supposed to be contemporary, perhaps
reflect insouciance or so
But we all know by now they only serve to be Bukowskiesque just like the many others
have imitated or so
Nothing wrong with writing longer lines
They don't discredit you any lesser
like how going to an art school makes you any more of an artist
or how cultivating an accent institutes your belonging
Nothing wrong with writing longer lines so keep dragging your sentence longer
as you would with your life as metres of yarn you would wind around the man you love to make him stay
until you run out of strings or he runs further than
the length you have
or until you strangle each other with it

I suppose suicide makes no sense to people who have never contemplated the secret strength, concealed mania and pompousness of sadness. And to be fair, I hanker after my own fame and pursue my desires the same way, rooting on one emotion that makes me feel real even if it does make me feel like shit.

There has been great assurance to creatives- seek treatment, inspiration will not dwindle with the aid of pharmaceuticals.

Perhaps at this moment, I can write this confidently, as I am less incline to kill myself (but just read those times when I have begged begged begged God to take me) at this moment, that I have absolutely nothing, no words no poetry, without pain.

It's all the environment, it's all in the heart, the mind, words that I have endured years of torment that come out eventually, that has people telling me, Joey I can relate to you, I know what you mean when you want to die, because I want to die too.

When I look back at my own work, I equate genius with pain. I romanticise my pain into poetry and prose that will otherwise never see the light of the day.

The same goes with starvation, the willpower associated with it. It's strength, and I have never felt this much control and will with anorexia. It's pure will and nothing else, and even I beautify eating disorders into a character trait. Yes you can die, yes yes you still feel beautiful and empowered. This supposed determination could be an illness itself... and you can only see it if you're in it.

I could go on about the eventual vitriolic consequences of smoking, but dear dear dear God, moments and people in my life so defined have all been punctuated by the brand of cigarette I had been imbibing, complementing the exact emotion with each exhalation of the erotic swirl of smoke.

And then there's men. I've lost track of the men standing behind each stanza, each suicide wish, and each manic episode. Most men and the experiences I have written about are beautiful characters and subplots stylised by my very own words and emotions. No I am not saying they have been exaggerated, they are facts, things did happen the way it did in real time, but I romanticise them so much, especially the bad things that happen that make them come alive in here, in words.

If I could show off the men I have seen and have been seeing, the realization is such that they are ordinary people, they do not dress fashionably but decently, they are not chiseled like models but rather girlfriends will approve of, artists but not struggling, not rocket scientists or heirs but with good enough a job or adequate trust funds, not from the royal family but respectable ones.

Yet, romanticising these men is not only about the subject but the other elements weaved into it- their assinine ways, their adorable mannerisms, and association. Association (of emotions and other subject matters) weave them ultimately into either the obsolete romantic or the absolute asshole.

Last Card

You weren't lonely last night
You weren't lonely the day before
You haven't cried in a week, really,
and haven't drank in the same amount of time

It could be because you've bought a plane ticket
to somewhere even if you never get anywhere

This ticket, it's a farce no
You might as well admit now
It's all bullshit
you not being lonely
Inside of you,
loneliness echos from cell to skin to being
It bounces off each other
Accumulating
before exploding into words as this
you are a lonely soul
empty and hallow like a whore's cavity

Your ex lover, the one who repulses you
the way you repel him
The one who told you frankly how sick you make him
has disappeared
Once again or for good you find it hard to judge now
In a week you might crawl back to
his peach flavoured room heavy with poverty and leftover sex
In a week you might be smug
you haven't crawled back
yet

The ticket isn't really a ticket

you call it your last resort
to which your best friend corrected you have a choice
and you would come back eventually, and that
is

the last card

you loved crazy incongruent lines such as
superior toothbrush
and others i now cannot remember
even your email address was modeled after
what exited a cow's oral and anal orifice
a moo, methane
moothane now
and how life isn't Chrispy anymore when
you told me how he killed himself

i would pull you back to those days
where we were too young to have been worn out
i miss those lazy days
we'd meet once every school term was over
meaning we met only four times a year perhaps a bit more when you served out
your two and a half years

how i had a uti when i first met you and couldnt stop
popping out of the ladies every twenty minutes
i wasnt garry
i wasnt daniel to you
but we're close enough to hurt

even after three years of absence and im not trying now am i

how did you dissipate as a friend into a stranger

moving away
getting married


must have wore you out along the way
because you are now a husband
you will go on to be a father
a grandfather
an uncle
and i have faded back into a stranger

without even having realised when