Chalk lines

Funny how you should ask that question
You asked me that a few days ago
I'm really not the sort you know,
the sort that
tells you I've been doing badly even if I have been
to a singular,
ceremonious question of
"How are you?"

I've been okay
although at the moment,
I'm ready to parcel myself into pieces at the thought of you

The thought
I had always believed,
in the way the religious believe,
could move me into entirety and forever

My writing's been going okay
I've been told though

Restrain yourself,
restrain yourself

when just a few days ago,
you told me I restrain myself too much
and I should just
let go

It's a funny world

I said,
It's a funny world

While one wants me to to put rubberbands on my words
so they don't spill all over the place
in its meaningless, lukewarm vanity

another ponders on the rubberbands around my soul
and its baffling knot around my heart
threatening to submit both entities to expiry if tugged

I'm telling you this

So am I still restrained now, sir

Go on, pull on these bands so you have some answers
on what I look like
sound like write like when I come undone

Not very pretty and mysterious now is it

What did I tell you about the Midas Touch

And what have we here now

This intensity,
this strength
this potential
coined on the terms of others which I never even believe existed

now collapses into pulp through a sieve

into an epitaph of what is now my own

Don't be ridiculous, I'm okay
I have drawn numerous lines for you remember
in chalk no less, for its fleeting quality

Fleeting like you really

So each time you cross it
I can erase that and draw another

further
much much further than the one prior

so you can come back in the manner I always let you

So how can I not be
okay

I'm just tired

so no more lines

no more

time can't hurt you
i can't be bothered to get you alone in this world
you can do it youself,
but make your ends known
to your means and your lovers

I had so badly wanted to say that I was pondering over the skeleton of a Monday

For all broken hearts

Corporal... the best is take one day at a time... Don't think too much... just live slowly... women come and go, Corporal...

It was Meng Ann's voice. I looked at him for a while and studied his face. Meng Ann's mother died when he was five, and his father used to beat hum. That was how he became the leader of his gang. His back was covered with a large dragon that covered his body. There was a snake on his chest, and he wore a Buddha on his neck. He had a scar on his left cheek, and wrinkles round his eyes. He looked 10 years older than his 18 years. His eyes were stone, which saw through everything and sliced them like a razor. He had a sharp perception and kept quiet at all times.

Meng Ann treated me with respect because I respected him. He was the most outstanding soldier in the platoon. His section-mates looked at him in awe. He was fit, a marksman and very hardworking... he knew the jungle like the back of his hands, and once led the whole platoon to company line during training in Thailand. He was also a good runner and performed brilliantly in infantry skills.

In short, he was a better soldier than I was.

Meng Ann never had a family and spent his life in total darkness. The gang were his only friends, yet they fought amongst themselves. The cuts and bruises of his body said it all. It was a body that had seen real gore. Real suffering.

He was far more educated because he knew what it was to be stripped of nothing and to be nothing.

Meng Ann... tell me the truth... why do you respect me?...

We were still on the bus. He threw his cigarette out of the window... and took some time to answer.

Because you're good hearted. Very hard to find...

He answered in dialect and didn't speak anymore...

I was moved. I felt I didn't deserve it. But I knew better than to resist it.

-Excerpt of All Broken Up and Dancing by Kelvin Tan (1992)

Say, I Am You - Rumi

I am dust particles in sunlight.
I am the round sun.

To the bits of dust I say, Stay.
To the sun, Keep moving.

I am morning mist,
and the breathing of evening.
I am wind in the top of a grove,
and surf on the cliff.

Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.

I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.
Silence, thought, and voice.

The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark of stone, a flickering in metal.
Both candle and the moth crazy around it.
Rose, and the nightingale lost in the fragrance.

I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift, and the falling away.

What is, and what isn't.

You who know, Jelaluddin,
You the one in all, say who I am.
Say I am you.

Excerpt of Pooja Nansi's Mind Your Language

Please can I give up my freedom to strangers
who conveniently change the names of our cities to suit their incapacitated tongues:
Bengaluru to Bangalore
Chennai to Madras
Thiruvanandapuram to Trivandrum.

Practical Aim- Cyril Wong

After great pain, what would the body
learn that it does not already know
of relief?

When that fire-truck has raged
past, what do I rediscover about silence
except that I would always miss it?

Do trees mind if it is the same wind
that passes through their heads everyday?

After the mall is completed, must we
remember the field it now inhabits
where we raced each other as children?

If my lover forgets to wake me with a kiss
a second time this week, should I worry?

Does solitude offer strength over time, or
is denial of it the only practical aim?

After the earthquake, would it matter
if no one saw two dogs from different
families approaching each other
without suspicion, then moving apart?

As the workers wash their faces hidden
by helmets that beam back the sun,
should they care about the new building
behind them beyond a fear of it falling?

If my mother cannot see how else to be
happy, is it enough that she may lie
in bed, convinced God watches her sleep?

After deep loss, what does the heart
learn that it has not already understood
about regret?

When all light finally
forsakes a room, do we take the time
to interrogate the dark, and to what end?

Dubai International Airport

Will you feel the same way I did
while I stood in a booth with ten strangers then typing to you

all of us pounding away relentlessly at a keyboard at a terminal
with no seats at all hoping their words,
an update or two will reach somewhere
for someone like you

will you
will you

will you miss me
and what colour is that missing

do they have hazy tinges like aura or are they solid hues of emotions that are clearly defined
has missing me caught up with you yet

the ailment: missing you, has its noose around my neck
tells me you're not around
but it hasn't tightened yet
ah, yes denial is a loose noose

I try to text you something
dog earred I miss yous that has seen better and worse days
or tired three words eight letters up against
thousands of kilometers

I've been smoking alone and with people
but it isn't you,
I've a pack of fags burned away like joss sticks into oblivion without
your presence

that's when I feel your absence all over

I feel something rising up in my throat as I think of you
I wonder if this is how a hot air balloon feels like
To swim in the sky it must first be fired
up to a such a painful temperature

I had a sandwich in case you were wondering if I've eaten
What would I give
for the hope of you stealing me away from this lunch
for your brand of nonmeat diet
stealing me away from it all

this light this water
these words this now
is nothing without you to assign meaning to

I set my coloured finger nails
to reach for you at the rectangle of this black keyboard
hoping you will walk out of this shape
into the contours of you I was so used to holding

I was, I was an embryo

You know I've got my father's spirit;
Silent and moulded into
a mental catastrophe

I'd have children who speak in indifference
in a mind lonelier than my own

You know I've got my mother's fate;
Will be married to a man
who will bend my back lower than his,
until it is parallel to the ground

I'd live from day to day work in and out

Go up
then come down
heavier, with a heart my weight cannot bear
and thoughts damp with febrile contributed by a lysing mind

Give me no moon or investments in shares;
Bury me
in my music and I would like to be undressed

Every orifice cleansed
No more slipknots of innards should live in me
You can
Feed my
viscera to my parents

No one else will ever know the
darkness that plays tragic in my light
and warmth of my home I was,
I was
an embryo.

Nazim Hikmet, 'Autobiography'

I was born in 1902
I never once went back to my birthplace
I don't like to turn back
at three I served as a pasha's grandson in Aleppo
at nineteen as a student at Moscow Communist University
at forty-nine I was back in Moscow as the Tcheka Party's guest
and I've been a poet since I was fourteen
some people know all about plants some about fish
I know separation
some people know the names of the stars by heart
I recite absences
I've slept in prisons and in grand hotels
I've known hunger even a hunger strike and there's almost no food
I haven't tasted
at thirty they wanted to hang me
at forty-eight to give me the Peace Prize
which they did
at thirty-six I covered four square meters of concrete in half a year
at fifty-nine I flew from Prague to Havana in eighteen hours
I never saw Lenin I stood watch at his coffin in '24
in '61 the tomb I visit is his books
they tried to tear me away from my party
it didn't work
nor was I crushed under the falling idols
in '51 I sailed with a young friend into the teeth of death
in '52 I spent four months flat on my back with a broken heart
waiting to die
I was jealous of the women I loved
I didn't envy Charlie Chaplin one bit
I deceived my women
I never talked my friends' backs
I drank but not every day
I earned my bread money honestly what happiness
out of embarrassment for others I lied
I lied so as not to hurt someone else
but I also lied for no reason at all
I've ridden in trains planes and carsmost people don't get the chance
I went to operamost people haven't even heard of the opera
and since '21 I haven't gone to the places most people visit
mosques churches temples synagogues sorcerers
but I've had my coffee grounds read
my writings are published in thirty or forty languages
in my Turkey in my Turkish they're banned
cancer hasn't caught up with me yet
and nothing says it willI'll never be a prime minister or anything like that
and I wouldn't want such a life
nor did I go to war
or burrow in bomb shelters in the bottom of the night
and I never had to take to the road under diving planes
but I fell in love at almost sixty
in short comrades
even if today in Berlin I'm croaking of grief
I can say I've lived like a human being
and who knowshow much longer I'll live
what else will happen to me

This autobiography was written
in east Berlin on 11 September 1961

Blinded by Fury

You read in books about how someone is 'blinded by fury'. It's true in many ways- the heat of anger swallows you up like a giant leap of flame, and it phagocytes logic and love, and all you see before you is a dangerously incensed leviathan egging on the liquidation of a hateful being

Bus Days

i hint about The Bus Days,
but you can only say,
'Yea, if you want to, we'd take the bus again...
one of these days.'
But you dont understand.

the girl who
was happier with you in the bus,
i think you left her on the bus
that drove to Destruction.

For Malvin II

She decided to stand outside

'Don't take your clothes off,'
she reminded,

caught in that moment of 23,
stinging of holy Dettol
and surgeoncy of self inflicted pain

You were on your chair
my focal point of sight
was on your focal point of sight of something;
Unravelling magic in your phalanges

but in my flight of fancy
there's more magic your fingers can do than what your occupation calls for

"Can I help you?' you said

You can't recall me from that day
I guess you have girls who pierce their sternums everyday

There are many tools you use that I do too
and they are just as many ways to revel in mystery company;
you can have yours but this is mine

My mind wants to read yours
My skin fancies your needle in me

And as I vanished into your chair, watching you snap
your gloves on,

I have my gutted heart trying to talk
But my lips are not

'It's beautiful, its healing... beautifully,'
you said of two holes in my puncture chest

a lifeless metal thing
but not me

I may be half dead
but still living and breathing

You put the surface bar into a tiny Ziplock
like a secret between us now removed

'Souvenir,' you called it,
your smile rotting in the sourness of a voice

'Now why do you look so sad?' you asked

My piercing played in reverse,
but your questions were the same

I would have you screw
unscrew me,
put my skin in plastic

But I could never talk to you

Jaunty Esmirada holds
Filtered sunlight through the genteel
Windows

In its posh Grange Avenue address,
With ‘Esmirada Prefers Visa’ signs that
litter
The lower skylines,

And the promise of return for
Better weathers and renewed hope.

Everyone's got their beautiful Christmas trees and all jingly jangly stuff hung up

The church choir's ringing
and all dressed up to the nines, twelves and twenty fives

I sit here and appreciate the life you killed
and in my heart is a hole from the promise you broke

t'is season is full of loneliness and the void of everything is ageless

Hot southern sun never yields
to soft, beautiful snow

I wish someone like you would know
how much i'd like to throw
X'mas out of the window.

chronicling sadness

January: Happy New Year
I have never felt this tired
or this relieved
of seeing blood dripping all over the table for the nth time

December: Merry Christmas
Feel like I'm sinking down to die by myself
feel like a million pounds sinking in the Atlantic ocean
before disintegrating into nothing but part of the oceanic habitat

September: two months to 23
Sadness bleeds into every air molecule that I inhale and exhale
And I still possess the curiousity to wonder if
I will ever be alright

And if this is this how my years will be spent
waiting for the ounce of a second
taken into wastage of a passing and my thoughts out on this page,
with no one to read or understand

June: Happy birthday, my dear sister
In this life
everyone has kindly lent me a helping hand
to meander along this trecherous disease melting febrile in my head

March: the first quarter
In my alternate reality, I justify this fuckedness by telling people
they dont know me,
they dont bear this shame nor
wear these chains.

January: Happy New Year
Another one of those silent unrelentless nights
Me and the eloquence of music to fill up this internal silence

This how I will spend my nights filtering into the mornings:
In front of my computer screen,
submitting my thoughts to expressional tangibility,
brain cells lysing

my soul
evaporating into static radiating from the LCD

From 2006- guessing I should change "MySpace" to "Facebook"

‘Finding ‘lost friends’ was a fun game- People wanted to connect. Of course, connecting is not enough and it was bound not to last, but it was fun.’
- Danah Boyd, from ‘Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad?’

This social life has to be nurtured
But personal interaction
can be negotiated these days;

Smint laced breath
practiced smiles
are deemed passé
Along
with a nervous heart committing suicide
another neighboring anatomy.

Just choose from 8-], =.=, or <3
to assume a sentience we
might not really associate with

Emotions can now drip from phalanges
working against cold plastic keys
Hoping

To create a cosmic nexus
between an identity or a possibility
who makes
his home
From air and wires
Behind LCD.

Expiration:
An announcement; I will grow old
People too,
will turn cold
aging in their graves, growing older
once again.

Expiration happens
Elusive and slow

but dashes past you upon realisaton
like a hunted criminal

I wish I knew about expiration
of all my First Times before it ended

Now Im disintegrating

ex-
piring


Pride
A lion in my paper skeleton
To keep from venerating towards the angry scissors

Shaded the same as honor,
this pride,
is proud like a red ribbon forked on both sides
razor tooth inside

Should have learned about pride before
Time cemented into permanence

Should have calculated pride
before I missed you for good,
because I thought I was right,
and you thought so too.

Love
Nothing special is that of sacrifice
The Son would be dying for 6,446,131,400 (July 2005 est)
So how hopeful can I be of you?

Love survives in memories as black tonal values
but when remembered,
it glazes over in brilliance of technicolor.

Now
I survive on hallucination of pigments;

No one told me passing the test of
yesterday's serial let down
would be this difficult


Regrets
If you have none, how do you exist to live by
an expiration without realization
an uncalled situation for too much pride
a love the same way, misunderstood?

Hibernating on regrets
rotation never occurs on the same axis

Regret if you must,
Just dont tell anyone.

my absence is flawless

I thought you might miss me wherever you would go
And that missing me was unconditional

I want to stand next to you
With my breath heavy on your neck
Alive and burning up with warmth

And I want you to yearn for my hand
which is unreachable for your heart
To close the gap in it

I want you to miss me when I am gone
Even more so when I am here

But when you indulge in a company foreign from mine
I fade back as a cushion on a couch
where the prints and fabric are the same
Safe
And boring

A cushion’s print blend its presence into absence
And my absence
Is flawless.

your comfort zone
yes the same one you guard
guards you with its bars

The Prostitute- John Mateer

The woman is sitting in the doorway half in the sun.
Her face is hidden. She’s talking to someone out of sight.
Her legs crossed like fat fingers.
Even from here I can see her shins are bruised
and the white high-heels scuffed and dirty.
Though she beckons passers-by they hardly glance at her.

Then she stands up, steps into the humid street.
Her eyes clench against the bright.
Under her black vest her limp, shrunken breasts.
She spots me in the bar across the street and beckons,
insistently beckons me like a long forgotten friend.

you know you want to
so why are you not doing it

is it for the same reasons
why i am not

Dead End Job-Jeremy Messersmith

Trying hard to stay awake
Over time without a break
I'll catch the night bus home
You wont have to sleep alone
I'll wear this crisp white shirt for you
I'll work this dead end job for you

My guitar is out in the shed
But I will stumble into bed
Time breaks these hands
Two kids, one minivan
I bought that diamond ring for you
I'd buy anything for you

From the dark side of the street
I hung around to watch him leave
I watched him kiss your neck
So soft and violent
But I wont say a word to you
I would lose my pride for you
I'd lose everything for you

if i could be who you wanted... all the time

im getting old, time to snap out of this melancholia but i can never seem to

"In another time in life, I probably would have hung out with you, told you to stop smoking and give you a Cornetto for everyday you stayed off."

- Mark Alvisse

I heard of a man
who says words so beautifully
that if he only speaks their name
women give themselves to him.

If I am dumb beside your body
while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips.
it is because I hear a man climb the stairs
and clear his throat outside our door.

From Let Us Compare Mythologies by Leonard Cohen

Since you have enough grace to admit it
Then I shall too, though we shelter ourselves under the umbrella of pride
to admit why or how or when or what
makes the attraction

There are certain rules that you have to follow for it to be certain like all things in life
01:44:41pm
29-07-2009

Interesting so what do you want out of me
12:46:40am
29-07-2009

Youre adorable
12:31:32am
29-07-2009

Thought you were just hitting on me :P
12:22:06AM
29-07-2009

Oh come on why do you think im constantly mocking you
12:16:31am
29-07-2009

Ahuh seriously
12:13:22am
29-07-2009

Why me though
12:03:13am
29-07-2009

Im not mocking you youre replying like youre falling asleep or drunk
11:43:15pm
28-07-2009

by me question mark
11:40:18pm
28-07-2009

Ahuh are you alright
11:37:43pm
28-07-2009

Well you cant deny I had a part in making you sleep yesterday
11:26:35pm
28-07-2009

You know ignoring me wont help in denouncing my amazing ability to bore you to sleep
11:06:49pm
28-07-2009

Awww are you upset
10:58:06pm
28-07-2009

Okay then good dog
10:52:00pm
28-07-2009

Piggy flu what to do they didnt call it bee flu
05:19:10pm
28-07-2009

Cant I blame the store for having an obscene amount of bigger sized stuff when the population is shrinking
04:55:43pm
28-07-2009

I highly doubt your ability in meowing my piggy flu away
04:23:12pm
28-07-2009

Well depends currently piggy flu is coming back piggy flu
04:10:36pm
28-07-2009

Its bloddy hot today
03:24:36pm
28-07-2009

youre a hard one to please huh
02:49:03pm
28-07-2009

cant to think of it its a great weather for a nap
02:33:57pm
28-07-2009

Please your early slumber had everything to do with me dont denounce my ability at boring people to sleep
02:19:52pm
28-07-2009

You know im quite the paranoid prick yet
11:52:33pm
27-07-2009

Im talking about myself dear and how I bore people
11:38:25pm
27-07-2009

Boredomness
11:36:47pm
27-07-2009

Probably with my severe boredom
11:36:11pm
27-07-2009

Well i know i have the potential for putting most individuals to sleep
11:30:16pm
27-07-2009

Ever tried melationin
11:18:25pm
27-07-2009

Youre not going to sleep are you
11:11:20pm
27-07-2009

You shouldnt stay up too late you have work early no
11:04:22pm
27-07-2009

Eh you wanted to send it to my add in vienna question mark
10:36:54pm
27-07-2009

My address here in singapore
10:15:36pm
27-07-2009

No others just amused are you expecting something else
09:58:18pm
27-07-2009

Hmmm interesting im more amused at how you are taking to my behaviour
09:33:09pm
27-07-2009

And how is this considered one sidedness
08:44:46pm
27-07-2009

Anytime you want
06:59:00pm
27-07-2009

Good after that statement now i really will be taking forever to come up with a reply
03:50:53
27-07-2009

Still awake
03:45:20am
26-07-2009

Biography

"How are you?" I asked
The volume of books spoke louder than my own
His pause was printed on every page of collection on that level

"Fine," he said to the spine of an errant book

I looked at him
knowing in his eyes I will find a man who only looks forward
and not at
bookmarks of his past, like how I stood there as one

wondering which page of his biography I belonged to

The heart this morning feels like the egg shells of a nursery rhyme character that cannot be put together again. Sometimes, you wonder why God gave you a heart that could remember so well, and a mind to dissect things over and over so carefully. These two anatomy don't quite belong together. It has brought you nothing but an impetus to sink in further than you already have.

In every woman's closet is the skeleton of a someone whose bones and memories will not rot

and even after decomposition,

refuse to intergrate and blend into the present

The Box Man knows that loneliness chosen loses its sting and claims no victims. He declares what we all know in the secret passages of our own nights, that although we long for perfect harmony, communion, and blending with another soul, this is a solo voyage.

The first half of our lives is spent stubbornly denying it. As children we acquire language to make our selves understood and soon learn from the blank stares in response to our babblings that even these, our saviors, our parents, are strangers. in adolescence when we replay earlier dramas with peers in the place of parents, we begin the quest for the best friend, that person who will receive all thoughts as if they were her own. Later we assert that true love will find the way. True love finds many ways, but no escape from exile. The shores are littered with us, Annas and Ophelias, Emmas, and Juliets, all outcasts from the dream of perfect understanding. We might as well draw the night around us and find solace there and a friend in our own voice.

One could do worse than be a collector of boxes.

-Barbara Lazear Ascher

In my head
I've awoken up with the impression you left on my sheets
In my head
You've left my glasses by the sink
stained with the print of your lips
In my head
Your cigarette ends are pinched and pitched
for my plastic bin

Loneliness is leukemia for happiness

'And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?
Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.'

T.S. Eliot, excerpt of The Waste Land

For Malvin

The air feels sterile
this I can tell;
the autoclave machine, the alcohol swaps,
latex gloves dusting residue in the web of your fingers,
assaulting the olfactory senses with leftover rubber bitterness

I could stray away
Or I could stay.

‘You can come on in now,’ you said.

I climbed onto your bed for nails;
as I breathed in your palatial lies of my bare breasts on your gloved
hands,

your eyes now iced into a gaze of intense attention
as I lay floored on your surgical divan
with nothing to do but
breath in a silent tattoo parlor business eloquence

The fluorescent lights on your ceiling
are beginning to resemble nebula on a
blinding carousel to me

‘Don’t move. I'm coming,’ you said

It’s hard to think of ravaged wedding dresses
and my languid lethargy of depression,
when you stand your hardy palm atop my nipples
a few centimeters
away above my ragged heart
banging against,
almost out of my ribcage

I wanted to laugh at the sexual innuendo of your instruction,
nearly forgetting about a broken relationship
with an equally broken man
when you announced you were done

You pitched your needle for your biohazard bin
and stood back in satisfaction

You told me it's pellucid beauty,
but it’s bod-mod lexica I’d never understand
because
I was already half worried
of what you’d think of my faux stomach operation
and stripes of blood I wear proudly similar to a general’s.

‘What happened?’ you asked.

I put my shirt back on and you might have struggled to put
sight else where.

You have beautiful hair,
pictures on your skin,
and earlobes stretched to the size of perfection with empty globes

As I stood there
sucking this first memory I have of you through my teeth like a fellatio,
I refused to speak

I paid you a hundred dollars and
went home

Stranger

I
A novelty is always embraced
That is why I like you passing by
With you, there is no insipid air nor common recognition I've acknowledged for years before

II
For the love of a stranger,
this must be good

I do not know of your habits that may instigate annoyance from me
We are not privileged to know that of each other yet

III
Do you mind how sometimes we are alone,
but we're never alone all the time?
We all wear warring wounds of the ex-es once fought
They walk around as ghosts in crypresses for us

IV
3am radiates sleep from you a certain calm
Curtains drawn over your eyes and my heart
I am just not too sure if I even know you

For T (from 2007)

The walls in the background shadowed a sadness I saw not, but heard and felt- right through an advancement of mechanical technology in the piece of wire we call the phone line. These days, we do not even need wires or cords anymore. I've heard you whined and wailed. It had previously blemished my mood with your endless need for attention. I've also heard you lament in your typical glorious campy traits-

Just that I've never heard you cry. This time your histrionics did not wear me down, it built me up a want to build my own Great Wall around you, a fortress that lasts beyond backdoor abrasion or emotional lacerations.

each time you cross the line
i will erase it and draw one for you

this time
further than the old one

i let you do this
dissect me into a million pieces
shatter me into pointillism
i let you tell me
how i can be the way you want me
i let you know that is going to be okay
i let you

speak of my intensity
and of my fire I never knew existed and
which i will later let you put out

i let you slip through the door
that remains unlocked, and open
to wolves and vultures

so you can come back anytime you feel like it

i let you scrutinise my intelligence
my works
my age

so you can come back when i am beautiful enough

i let you do all that








because
i can never
do that to you

Almost a decade and still so relevant