Allocating Geography

Your apartment did not just harbor enough

for eating and sleeping, your pencil lines

wired around each other into sketches

and your paint shattered into pointillism.



Guests derelict in your apartment

because you lived with your art the same way

it lived in you. You could never bring yourself to have them witness

how your demons possessed the canvas.

*

Your back is turned to me

I watch as you sturdy yourself to tweak the key into the lock.

I am now your shadow when once you were mine,

a severe figure watching me measure paint and turpentine

crossbreeding viridian, ultramarine and titanium for imagined pain

dressing the canvas until it was desolate of white.



In this suitcase of books, manuscripts and clothing,

are my teenaged perceptions of you, a decoupage

from the mid part of the last decade.



Your tongue reeking with acid to rival my recklessness

in discounting Mathematics in exacting

distance and proportion,

matching linseed oil to paint with feelings instead of ratio.



In those years I came to be illegal

and flawed. The latent recklessness

as you predicted then, emerging now as a decision

to move in with you,

I reminded as I measured your apartment, prior to me,

subtracted of friends and lovers.

*

As milk clouded your coffee, you refused

without apology the pasta I cooked. You spoke of aging

and if there were any time to fortify better eating habits,

it would be now. Dessert appeared

in the form of voluptuous silence, and I ate it.

That night, there were no pedagogical, paternalistic approaches

to reconcile me with you and the art.

No longer each other’s shadows,

I neglected you allocating geography in your canvas

while you ignored the newly transplanted Bukowski

speaking volumes from your shelf.

as I exit

A flame
dances like a ballerina
She
either
collapses along with the wind's game
or tiptoes in the scanty air

A flame
fuses with my fag in the most righteous marriage,
delivering
a spiral misty crawl upwards

The air freshener responds with a hiss
Its medicinal fragrance,
trying to assume an identity of industrial strength sweetness
that exists not

I sit on my throne
reading the paper dissolving with chronology
the nicotine evaporating into toxic inhalant

and the seconds
of my life for sale in the cubicle of plastic yellow
that holds me in

It's an asylum for me; this

So I flick into the clear pool beneath me
with careful consideration
A prick of fire
would be an unconvenient jolt back to
the corporate world that imitates gallows

As I stand up and watch the last grain of ash
take a graceful tumble down the bow
expiring in a tired sizzle,
I know I'd do the same in time to come

watching the remains of my soul

embers of any life
amble behind me as I exit
the lavatory

never know pain
never know life

been a while

I used to think the more tragic the better

The truth is when I think of the early 90s
Your face comes up with a vengeance like it was yesterday

I Am Not

"I can't stand them with their ugly inch-thick eye liner, fake lashes and straight hair. But don't worry, you're not one them."

"If you're not, what are you?"

I was told, I was not,

I have not the grace of ruler for hair,

nor the fervently desired ivory length of skin.

I do not have hairless legs and arms.

I was told, I cannot be. I am defeated by

my utensil that garners food but not tradition,

the insolence to pit logic against prescribed philosophical values,

my dreams in a language so flat and terrifying to my ancestors.

I was told, I would never attract,

the industrious, the filial,

the responsible, the thrifty.

I was told, because I am not,

the harder I should try to be.

To please my father’s mother, to match my cousins,

hopefully find a generous man, a forgiving mother-in-law,

to not mind

what I do not have.

I was told, it does not matter who I am,

But what I am.

I have landscape for eyes and sun for skin,

but plenty of the vowel “I” in my name.

I was told, I am everything.

I inherit various countries

from opinions. I work the domestics. I have a Bachelor’s degree.

Cheap brown kohl imitates eyebrows.

I am lazy. I am a flirt.

This is why I do not look,

this is why I am not,

for others cannot bear for me to be.

I may live on until
I long for this time
In which I am so unhappy,
And remember it fondly

- Fujiwara no Kiyosuke

your correspondance with me

serves to deny me

Heart

Soul

Land

Mount Agung

Bukit Penisula- Uluwatu

Dirty Duck Diner- Ubud

Bebek Bengil Restaurant
(Dirty Duck Dinner)
Telp. 62-361- 975 489
Padang Tegal - Ubud