Your art will let you down

Where was it last year I was at... Yes, di Arsenale... I suspect I was by myself on my day off. After the maze of exhibitions, I ended up at the washroom.

Behind the door of the cubicle I was in, I took a second to contemplate the vandalism on it. None of those street techniques, fancy art scribbles. They were short scripts, an assortment of handwriting: cursive, bold, tentative, tiny. I wondered about the life of all the women behind the souvenir of their presence.

Some had political content. A few in Italian, which I didn't understand. Mostly about art.

Art saved me.

Art ruined my life.

Art fuck shit.

I was thinking along the lines of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart when I took out my pen and etched the following

Your art will let you down.

And today? Don't think I've ever had a day where I felt it any more accurately than I ever had.

Magritte's This is Not a Pipe.

Magritte's point: This is not a pipe, this is a picture of a pipe. Can you stuff it? It is just a representation. If it was written "This is a Pipe", it would be a lie.

This would make a wonderful tattoo. We are hardly who or what people think we are. What they see, is merely a re-presentation.

gravity always wins

Migrants

Under the discerning sun,
we have assigned you great heights,
the labyrinth of scaffolding your career ladder
we wouldn’t imagine climbing.
When the idea of death, or worse,
the half death of paralysis
you have seen other brothers fallen into
seem too much, you lay
another brick with mathematical precision
a few thousand times,
its mechanical repetition to pace fear.

Still you advance
in numbers, increasing by the years
pawning land and adjourning family
until success, which is at best, equivocal.
But a promise is a promise,
the dhobis and rickshaw coolies made good in history,
a blueprint of possibilities.

We make proud
announcements of zero accidents and teach
that your safety comes first,
then the firm’s bankrupting risk penalty.
On bamboo poles you balance
danger with the love of who awaits back home.

In a shelter, I spoke to one of you whose
courage galvanizes, a lesson primed
in hardship.
Later you correct bravery with desperation,
they are not interchangeable.
Nevertheless you are
faithful for the third time.
A femur fracture and a back injury later could not
nail you home too long
before you are straightened,
walking back to something slightly lesser
than a dream.

I am gathering

courage

in the gauze of smoke,

the company of music,

its words and tune only popular.

What matters now

is its next mechanical

palpitation,

predictable and safe enough

to assume a heart

beat that you

failed me.

I am gathering

strength

in the number of men I collect.

They will

have me back all the same, not knowing

I am on my knees,

attraction and attention their hand

outs,

to keep me going.

I am gathering

you

categorized in nominal:

injury,

year,

incident,

framed in the mental gallery,

for reminder

to not surrender

to another collection of you.

Holding back

is hardly

one

of the easiest thing

to carry

The three faces of Pieta

Michaelangelo's Pieta

The unintended Pieta. Samuel Aranda's picture won world press photo of the year 2011.

Contemporary Pieta. I took this picture in Venice last year. The Giardini... or was it in Arsenale... South Korea's pavilion by Lee Yongbaek.

good times, old times

and finally...

how the stems look like

Sometimes, I feel like some parts of my life never happened. Like the fact that I studied science for three years... progressing from a level to another, each class more mystifying than the one before, until the names of the classes were clean forgotten in the difficulty of it, leaving me with the memory of its suffix -ology.

I can easily dismiss the beauty of the places I've lived in, been to. The people I've met- Ana and her poetry she tried so hard to translate, Manuela and her contemplative laughter, Monica's Japanese worthy mannerisms... I can hold on to these imagery of them, but there is no depth, love or loss.

I woke up from a dream about my old housemate last night. I think about her from time to time, modeled a poem after her... but I don't miss her- as lovely as she was, and I suspect, will always be. I saw her being my housemate as a fact I accepted with open arms and mind, out of pragmatism above anything else.

I don't really know how to attach myself to anything.

just so fine

http://www.myspace.com/music/player?sid=21205416&ac=now

Because You Say So

1.
Brittle, I need only another
word from you to break me.
Then comes your dire anguish
to cement my veins with glucose
and lipids to turgidity.
Clean forgotten are
your words to conform
weight to shadow
as you question what
I am doing to myself.


2.
You are criticising my choice
in men once more,
so Type V on the Fitzpatrick,
my date’s swarthiness repels you.
I am made to repent again.
Gratitude and filial piety,
to know shame,
until you become bitter
with love,
Chinese
like ourselves.
Still you stand uncorrected and proud,
stereotypes rightfully assured.

3.
You are nailed to tradition,
its roots deeper with time,
deeper than mine
so I will be the perfect weight,
I will act Chinese and that is
beautiful
because you are correct,
because you say so.

Imagining your own funeral

Chassis and Skin

I see now the men I
never want to see again,
collective in disbelief.
They inhabit a homogenous expression
similar to mine when they left.

On red plastic chairs, they sit
along my timeline,
fiddling with flat top mineral water,
assorted sweets and
talk about me.

One says my restlessness scared him.
Another disagrees; his departure was from my need to own.
The last one who speaks, my first adult love,
only says
we grew out.

Of guilt or its pointlessness,
they agree, they were good men and I,
decent enough.

My best friend, never able
to look the part for mourning
arrives, the lips her signature red.
She whispers me her valediction
borrowed from Bukowski.

My parents are sentenced by embarrassment.
They measure reality with denial and
days on, they faithfully call on me
to awaken.

Before the furnace, I do, vacating
chassis and skin,
my favourite dress.
I am defunct of everything tellurian,
memories: the scalloped lines of my backbone,
quartered sunlight through the window.
My air-con rhythmic at 4am with
the brittle accent at the turn of each page.
Submitting myself, I am lighter
and lighter, now decimating
into the brightest light.

The best anti-Valentine's Day Valentine's Day card

Credit: http://henrytheworst.tumblr.com/tagged/Charles-Bukowski

Tiger Girl

‘86 ( 山 )

Either out
of duty or preference,
my mother wants a
son,
not another daughter
and born
in the year of the tiger.

She worries about
the mismatch,
girl and tiger:
restless and deadly,
overwhelming
my father’s rooster.

Time to time, she
blames
the literomancer.
I am
as untamed
as it is,
yet called
a tigress on the loose,
descending
ascending ascending
the mountain in
my name.

I have no
duty to refute
my mother’s belief.

She already sees
my appetite
to escape,
to hunt
for sustenance outside of family,
ungrateful and carnivorous
like a tiger.