and in the dark mouth of the mountain she stands
trembling, freed.
her parents’ slow-spinning cries a distant orbit.
yes.
better this than a dusty stillness; those unblinking Plutonian eyes.
better this: to be wilfully plucked and devoured whole,
each night touched by the dark; a shadow face,
every morning a mortal ache, stirring with want.
Q
Too much heart and too little words,
thoughts that run for days and days
on end. a steady hand on chest to quiet the clamor
of something hollow battling its way through my lungs.
I don’t see faces my age anymore.
There weren’t many to begin with – but this time, it’s not a hyperbole. Everywhere I go, they have been reduced to the haunting silhouette of a crest and a nose, focused on their screens.
Those screens. They form a broken sea of blue-green all around me. Little markers of red and white bob in chilling synchrony.
For awhile I cared enough to be desperate: I sought to be seen. Let me be your Togepi, I screamed in my head, catch me the way you would Mew! But in this psychological gym battle, Pixels won. By far.
I’ve grown resigned to this life. I wander among the wrinkled and ludite, the past 30s. I take in the sky and the grass and the concrete as a strange on-behalf-of apology to nature. Overcompensating.
And then one day it happened.
Weaving through the mass of crest-nose-screen (I must be the most adroit human around, no one knew how to make way anymore), my gaze travelled from tarmac to grass to –
holy fuckeroni – human. eye. contact. Eyes that held as much desire as I knew was reflected in mine. Was this it? Have I finally found someone who gets it too?
In a dreamlike haze he made his way towards me, his face so visible it felt vaguely, embarrassingly, naked. And those hands, those blessedly empty hands. No flickering blue-green screen, no bobbing Pokeballs.
Now he was just a few feet from me, his eyes fixed and pleading. They were so captivating, I missed the first half of his appeal:
” – switch batteries, please! My phone die liao but got Onyx nearby!”
That summer all he wanted was for it to not be the worst one yet.
He drinks six cans of stale tea in one afternoon and finds hedonistic joy in not leaving his desktop, even though he is free to. Today’s thought of the day was a variation of all the other days as far as he can remember: am i the only one whose mind offers nothing but grief?
He cannot imagine another as human as him but without the demons; and concludes that no one else is human.
for anyone who had food become a demon in their mind, xo
To stand mid-aisle at the grocer’s,
shelves unraveling in sensual
chrome; to have this cookie pressed in
the flex of my palm, insisting,
crying a bald infant’s need to
be fed. It reminds me that I
am mad and have become numbers –
each pound and rib immaculate,
quietly approaching zero. If
this self could still be mine, hold me
up at the cashier, razor thin
blade against bone, and have me choose:
body or your life?
body or my life.
(or, the crudeness of measurement)
Subatom flicker
– ing through a haze of probability
into the lick of my open palm,
finding you was mere plot: latitude against longitude
on an imaginary plane.
To keep you safe I swallow you whole. Warm for days,
you burn into nights. I measure skid marks
to chase your spin and speed
but logic has lost count. A second is a braid
that unspools into hours held
by thumb on throat to your pulse now mine.
The neighbour upstairs thinks I am possessed.
The letterbox creaks for release.
Inside me a glyph spreads like virus, foreign
and incurable.
It is the thought you I want most. Its lines
sharp and scalpel clean, breathing cool
words from my tattered paperbacks. I fold
in neat angles; a colt with origami legs quiet
on my palm.
The you now are impossible shapes in a dream
of water. Rushing, rising, ebb and slow-
shifting haze of hues I cannot name. Leave me
blinking in a curling tide. Fill each crest with hope
and a hologram you; Its sea-foam laughter
streaming through my cellophane hands. Awake,
I would unfold you and read your edges like braille.
Piece written for SingPoWriMo a few months back, give a picture prompt:
–
no bells would toll for him. somewhere
the hasty half-ring of boy on bike.
we negotiate a world after: the ghost
sting of diesel missed only by student,
late, catching the tail end of -ajulah
singapura. home, the daily stray rolls
a haughty eye at barren bowl.
in headier years his biro scratched
itself dry: sir. english is no good, beg pardon. thank you for racial harmony, chinese now take my taxi.
at rallies, his lungs rattle
with alien words; joins a skyward
sea of fists.
now,
a film of dust on knuckles.
a face as single flip book page.
a child’s shriek quailed by mother,
“肮脏，不要看”
<e-nd>
it was over text
sans serif black and
white, sealing away
our polychrome days.
i cried once
to the shower head,
put on silent,
set as private.
like is more than blue thumbs;
more than a fluorescent square floating
in the sea of ink flooding your room
each night. your hands formless and untouched,
speaking to no one.
A girl who has not written for twenty years picks up her pen and writes her first word in two decades. The word was ‘I’. She is no longer a girl by now. There are breasts in the way – sometimes she pretends they are not hers, mostly she forgets they are; her hips carry weights, foreign and dull. These days she feels clunky, finds herself picking at a pimple that isn’t there.
On the day she writes for the first time in twenty years, she leaves behind her breasts and hips and phantom pimples.
First she writes an ‘I’, and then pauses. It blinks – innocuous, almost pleadingly – back at her. I in a sea of white, I stranded, I, vast and alone. A sudden sense of nakedness. The girl taps backspace and tries again:
She.
Q 