Bitter, bitter

Heavy noxious smoke
Comes curling
Out of the foul black pit
Threaded with a ribbon of
The sickly green
Sulphur within

I am suffocated
Drowning in the sticky
Acid sour
Webs you spit
Anchored by the need
To clean, scour

To wash that filthy soul of yours out with soap

Lather in vain
For no abrasive
Can scrub away
Such bitterness

Goldfish

Goldfish, 1911 - Henri Matisse

They peer at the

World around

Mouths agape at

Distorted refracted

Images and reflections

(Closing in)

Colour filtered through

Paradigmatic glass

Bending the outside

(Closer)

Confinement has never been

So liberating

They swim and they go

(Nowhere)

I see the world

As does a goldfish

(In a bowl)

Shit for Brains

Roiling Stupidity

Licks soporifically

At my senses

Soaking my synapses

In sedimentary

Stupor

On the Computer

Clickety Clackety Clock

The mouse is in the dock

Hours pass by

Shut down and sigh

Clickety Clackety Clock

Feeling Blue

Blue Nude, c.1902 - Pablo Picasso

You

The harsh halo of

Fluorescent lights

Envelop you

As if in my embrace

A thousand

Camera flashes

Preserved and extended

You

In that one moment

Paper and Ink

The reluctant humdrum, drone, whine

Of tired cogs and wheels

Creaky joints protest, pout, pine

Screaming for better deals

(Is that not an omen, a sign

Of death’s maw at its heels?)

Churned out ply by ply, sheath by sheath

Reams of trees beaten down

Cardboard castles, an ode, a wreath

‘Mere skeletons’, they frown

Rusty blood and metallic ink

Seep into dry papers

Endless veins that ceaselessly drink

Thirst that never tapers

Painfully dripped from hearth-side urns

Stoking failing fires

Panacea for cuts and burns?

Yet she never tires

(Machine and body, it still turns

Held by hope and wires)

Representation in Blogging

The frivolity and shiny showiness of a life you’d just love and are envious of. Look at me look at me look at me. Live vicariously through me, why don’t you. Is that not why you read? And is that not why I write? And of course, the pictures, for visual proof and evidence that this is authentic, this hedonistic, worldly, traveller with chronic wanderlust is real. Look at me with my friends, friends of the same calibre, and perhaps you reading it means that I too may one day shed the ambient light of the camera on you? Let’s throw in some choice music for a multi-faceted me, all for sensory details and joys that I appreciate better than you and you. For a confirmation of my awesome adventures and a legitimisation of the path I have taken. This way, and not your way, and look at how I turned out! Wouldn’t you love to be me? Also, don’t you love me?

Either that or I am the brooding, tortured soul, replete with typical posturing and affectations. The anti-establishment, fuck-everything, I’m-so-mysterious-aren’t-I, pensive beatnik young punk bad ass. The Holden Caulfield of today maybe, only more deviant, more obvious, what with the trainspotting shit. I might even put on a beret just to dress the revolutionary part. Play the guitar, play my angst, if I could. Or present myself as nothing short of deep. Try and read me behind all those fancy words then, just so you discover that I am actually more morose than I appear to be, and oh, what a surprise, a thinker, if you will. Is that not why I present myself in ever-revealing episodic peeks into my, dare I say it, character? I say I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think, though I’d gladly and perhaps sadistically kill millions for it.

Or I could be the literary genius wannabe. The failed writer who finally dares bare her soul in order for some sort of verification that the written word so carefully manipulated and thought through exists. That some sort of post-mortem and rudimentary dissection by unskilled surgeons will mean that it once lived and breathed. Read, please read, and leave a comment, if you will. Tell me I’m good. Better yet, leave me a poem in response, so that I too can engage in some literary circle of you and me. The academic arty-farty, shall I say, connoisseurs of the fine and fabulous. Strip me of my pretensions and see that it is constructed entirely out of rickety scaffolds of towering vocabulary and convoluted, labyrinthine semantics.

I am the epitome of the everyman, so I say, though I like to think of myself as social critic of our times, and what troubled times it is. What era does not need its soothsayer cum bell-toller, the paperboy of notorious opinions and loud voice laden with self-importance? Read a piece of my grey matter, let me share my thoughts, I want to invade your consciousness and brand my own stamp, sear my ideas into your brain. I just want to screw with your mind – mind-fuck, is it? Let me whine complain berate rebut criticise and of course analyse everything down to the minute details and link it to the macrocosmic structure of the world as I, and now, as you, know it. Did I not shatter you, transform you in some way?

Representations. I am disgusted and ashamed, yet I revel in the stinking humanity of it all.

Time

I was just about to title this post something along the lines of filling time. Fill time. Spend time. Waste time. Pass time. Keep time. Make time. Kill time. I think I've typed 'time' so many times it now sounds really funny to me. Seems to me, time is both full and empty, ironically at the same time. Fixed and fleeting. Oh god, look at the time. It's nearly 6 in the morning and I haven't slept. Time to try.

The 2007 Harry Kurnitz Creative Writing Awards

Causeway, Freethinker, and Pontianak were my entries for this poetry competition in UCLA last year. Pontianak is however officially buried and put to rest amongst other dusty dreams. It could perhaps be floating in the cyberworld out there, though I have combed it in many vain attempts at discovering my own long lost child. Here are the other two, though I must say I have pandered almost ingratiatingly to who I thought was the intended audience. In other words, to the American judges of a competition for international students. I think their comments on these poems speak volumes, though maybe I shouldn't get into this now. Read of it what you will.

CAUSEWAY

An umbilical construction

Of motherland and child

Banked on the Straits

Stones paved in colonial legacy

Setting in the silted waters

A birth of two nations

Once severed in a bloodbath

Of war and aborted rulers

The land of the landless

Misconceived impregnable fortress

Ridden over in a swarm of strangers

Penetrating proliferating

A child afloat in unspoken hopes

Ferried across and led by a maternal prow

Amidst a sea of tired cars grimy helmets

Vessels of nurtured dreams and desires

Fed with history reprinted reread regurgitated

The causeway a link

Of a sepia past and a glossy future

Stagnant waters and the swift eddies of

Endless turmoil and unrest

Threaten to surge forth and flood

Water breaking and the cleaving of ties

As mother and child grow

Apart

Strangers and families drive through

Trampling gritty history into the soil

And stirring up clouds of political dust

FREETHINKER

Early morning ablutions

To the Quran’s mournful prayers

Travelling across the still-dark sky

The melody resounding from the minaret

Calling to followers of faith

Mid-morning assembly

Convent girls lined up in the hall

Heady hymns and wine

Communion to the

Murmurings of rosary beads

Afternoon dalliance

Sikh boyfriend with

Chinese girl in tow

Communal meals at the temple

Chants to the Gurus’ teachings

Nightly respects

And gold coins

Paid at the altar of ancestors

Of incense and yellow paper

Joss-sticks leaving pink stains