you, a distant, bright, brittle star.

*

i wish i had a camera then, to freeze this fragile memory - you in black, uncurling in the chair, in the yellowing autumn light. that heartbeat of vulnerability when you turned from the window and looked at me. i wanted to hold you then.

*

But there are distances we cannot close anymore. i wonder where the boy that was has went. or if he realised the gift he once left me, beyond the strawberry cheesecake kitkats and letters. i don't think i want you, as much as i wanted the connection we had then. and i wonder where the girl that was, has went.

*

goodbye slipped off the tongue easily. but it was strangely hard.

Four

One of my resolutions in 2009 was to go back to writing, and that was one I fulfilled. This piece has been a year in the writing. Crys will be reviewing it and perhaps it'd make print too. Four, for each of the seasons.

spring

9 Jan 2009

The emperors married their daughters to foreign tribes for peace. Whose peace, I wonder.

Where's home, when that which I've become familiar with, is not my own.

I open my veins each time, pick the threads of healing scabs. I wonder if my blood will run dry before life will grow on this soil.

Planting spring in dust. The season of fecundity used to begin with virgins led out into fields. But the fragile are not the only ones who bleed. Grasp my pieces.

Unbidden, some seeds take root.

You, a bittersweet plant, such sharp leaves. Hungry, the child makes the mother bleed afresh. Is this what being alive means.

Lick.

Desire, sweet wild pale. Crushing unwilling blossoms into life.

Taste on my lips these violet trysts.

And kiss spring.



winter

23 Feb 2009

Twisting the flesh, I wonder idly at the absence of pain. I prick my finger as the queens of old did. Snow, blood.

Glass.
In the cold, tendrils of senses freeze. Mold creeps over the colours, slowly curling into grayness.
The edges of consciousness still its graphite blade.

The child dies, his cries lost in the low, keening wind. There is no smell.

Full circle.

Your death returns me, to me.

In the distance, a storm of snow approaches. I lie on the ground
naked as the flakes cover me.

white.

colours.

black.


In this cocoon of whiteness, I finally feel my heart, beat.

It is only in winter that I feel my warmth.

Sleep.

I close my eyes and fade to nothingness.


summer

25 March 2009

Sitting quiet on a reed, the naiad breathes the warm air. Sunlight opens a fissure on its head and the shell crumbles into flecks that sink into the belly of a fish. A dragonfly emerges and all through the pond, a thousand tiny summers begin.

Strange, foreign beauty. Inside, are you still the naiad or have you become the dragonfly.

But thought is neither real, nor is feeling anything but a flame of ephemerality mimicrying permanence. Summer comes in spite of, and you, like me, must bloom. Break. Cast off the old form.

The reeds whisper and the air shimmers with the scent of damask roses and imperceptible changes. Fragile wings write patterns of flight, and the new body glistens glass-red in the heat. Light on my finger.

My hair grows to my waist and the eyes become clear. Roses and vines coil and pomegranate-stained lips spill with laughter as many hands reach out, mutely grasping for life, as if one living could make up for many waiting. I see your gaze tracing my movements as I dance for you and know love as equal parts desire, hope and fear, if only, for the season.

But no reason is needed for blooming.

I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.

And no reason is needed for loving.

You are alive.

So live.


fall

20 Dec 2009

there is a lushness in decay, this over-blossoming of life.

I feared falling. feared this porcelain life would be riven by off-key notes if just once, I let go. yet consistency is not constancy, and the yellowing flesh burned for completion while buried among a thousand

prosaic

what-ifs.


Inside, I was the changeling child laughing about eggshell inconsequentialities, a moth-winged heart waiting for lightness, yet not daring the light.

And fall I did anyway, in a day much like today, fighting every breath of the way, the ordinariness of you a swallow of cold air to the gut. And in falling, learnt that grace was not always found in perfection.

In many ways, dying clarifies living.

From the remnants of the year, a new self looks out - lighter, more real, more constant than before. The flesh is softer now, curves of thought and feeling in confluence where before, there was only the harshness of a will that never knew how to let go.

in my bones, I carry the imprints of the you who touched me then.

the air is heavy with ghosts of love past, phantom children who cry for stillborn hopes. and this I finally understand: I loved you then, as I do now, more than you'd ever know.

it leaves me the present, to make peace with choices and fragile consequences. And I grasp with both hands now, what the unconscious mind sensed in cutting us apart: growth is but internal change made visible, and deconstructing the girl I was, gives wing to the seasons to come. the cages finally break - these bonds do not bind.

I do not know the woman I'd become, nor the man you'd be.

Perhaps fall is a finding of grace, perhaps fall is a return to flight. like kites without string, perhaps it'd lead us home one day. perhaps perhaps does not matter:

That which is broken is beautiful too. And always, there is life.

The smell of wood smoke and burning leaves fill the air, and the phantom children cry no longer.

intricate

these dreams have ceased - a small blessing of sleepless nights.
deconstructing the mind
carved holes in trees hold whispered secrets plugged with mud
doubts fears indiscretions, dead ambitions
scribbled lines write a temporary cage
worn safeguards against
the inside of my head, an avalanche of pages
from libraries since rebuilt.

paving the hands on old familiar structures
tasting comfort in orphaned stories. incompletion -
potential wasted or an end
no longer desired.

reconstructing essentialities
leaving behind
these pieces I can no longer hold on to.
daisies and smooth river stones
I can never go home again.

skipping a pebble towards shores once loved
listening for an echo of childhood
ink-stained fingers grasp for missing fragments
even as a new world spins into being

words blossom, fall away.
the light shifts, grows young.

but there are these times
when putting distance only brings me closer.

untitled

there are these roots that bring me
back to home

a seed does not ask
to leaf
blossom
grieve nor shed

nor to grow alone

the frost wakes memories sleeping in white bones:
a winged seed glimmers on the wind,
paper notes whisper
of quiet growth brushed by rains
aching summer days
when all things were
possible

but a leaf falls
all the same

by being I've ceased to be

yet there are these roots
that bring me back to home

porcelain nights

these nights i breathe
porcelain dolls and subtle cages
sifting the mind's fraying threads
cold fingers pick apart
wounds still warm.
unspoken expectations render
honesty a brutal flaw -
an old familiar pain
of failing perfection, yet again.

Planting

Digging in dirt is therapeutic. Spent my Saturday with plants, supper with friends, and re-reading old books.

The above is an epiphytic orchid with deep green leaves and a purple underside. The old man who sold it to me some years back said he had gotten it from some wild place, never gotten it to flower, and didn't know the type. I got a propagation of his original. It was on a bark tablet then, but not doing well. I repotted it into a clay pot with a mix of charcoal and tree bark. I'll know in a month or so if the roots take, and perhaps, I'll see flowers sometime.

Repotted another one I'd gotten from our Botanic Gardens (bought legally!) into a mix of tree bark and charcoal, in a hanging basket of coconut fibre. It flowered only once in the last years, a spray of tiny 2-3 inch flowers with deep red-purple, thrice-twisted petals and a white heart. A sweet fragrance too, which is rare of orchids. Typically, only the white dendrobiums have a noticeable fragrance, as if to make up for the lack of colour.

Both have a little clod of moss to keep them company too. Besides that, also planted a tiny aloe vera sapling, some clitoria and chilli seeds.

Tiny seeds, greening shoots. Hope.

The orchids were not struggling, but they were not growing either. Breaking the clay pots meant giving new ground. We take a risk with transplanting, and with rarer species, it is a hard choice. I do not know if I could find those specimens of orchids again.

We are often told to flourish where you are planted, or seek new grounds. Like my epiphyte of purple leaves, I've done both, perhaps with the same result as it has. Yet neither wishing nor waiting changes whether something grows or dies.

Air, sunlight, darkness, water, fertilizer.

All I can do is provide the conditions.

Each in their own time.

becoming

black

white

colours.

There are these times. Words trip, fall in the slipstreams of the mind. Halfling sentences, stillborn thoughts and I paint my skin with these fractal expressions which are rainbows to you but borrowed sleeves of colour to me and ultimately, gray.

I am one shade less black and one more white than you. It does not mean I have colour.

Suspension. Moving always, one creates the illusion of being stationary, running in circles. Trying to understand me, you seek references yet each frame captures a different phase, face. Confounding, frustrating, multi-dimensional, complex, I've heard them all. Movement, complexity are relative measures.

Deconstructing the mind. For how long could I whittle myself down to fit another's perceptions. Reflections are mirrors with silvered backs. Don't look for your completion in me. I could, yes, take whatever form you require. I would, and I have. But that is a testament to me, not to you. I have my own dance and is it me that betrays then when I say my real name and move in ways foreign to you. Or was it a lie because you never saw me.

I move differently. But I am ordinary. And mostly, I'm afraid you'd see that.

tides & cycles

*INTPc Writing Exercise: Write a soothing novel in 12 paragraphs.

*

Been visiting my grandfather at the hospital across Saturday and Sunday. Needed to breathe some air, so escaped to the beach for a few hours.

There is a quieter stretch just away from where the Big Splash swimming pool with its water-slides was. That has now been redeveloped into a dining complex, with a bar where the beautiful hang out.

The casuarinas are old on that strand, and the ground is littered with their fallen needles and spiky fruits. Old men sit by the side of their boats, and they look past me to the sea. There are first loves which time never steals.

I have loved the sea since I was a child, before the area was developed into the hip/sexy/cool hangout it is now. That was some 25 years ago. The sea was cleaner, the water much further back. The years brought development, pollution. But quietly, inexorably, the sea has taken some strands back. The waves there are clean again. Full circle.

Small things litter the memory. Weekends wandering by the shore, picking up shells, stones, bits of glass and wood, being burnt brown as berries. Digging for little clams and crabs, learning to throw a net to catch the tiny silver fishes which feed near the pier, or the shoals of shrimp. How my dad one day decided his daughters would learn to swim, and unceremoniously tossed us in. Even now, I do an awkward doggy paddle if caught unawares.

We learnt to read the sea. The preternatural, opaque green stillness which signalled a rainstorm approaching. The dark blue, almost black howling during the monsoon season. The pale-pink, morning sweetness after. Where the tides changed and where the currents were strong, where the sand-bed would do a sudden dip and the water would turn icy.

How the mornings would have pink bougainvillea and red ixora blossoms washed on the sand, blown there by the land breezes the night before. The afternoons would have sea coconuts, sea almonds and mangrove seedlings brought by the tides from the neighbouring islands.

Love also brought the first encounters with death: Dead fishes and the sun-bleached cartilage of squids would come to rest some days. I remember burying the fishes as a child, constructing little tombstones of stones and coral bits, hoping their families would not be too sad.

In the evenings, if you were lucky, you could glimpse horseshoe crabs mating near the shallows, and glistening fish-eggs deposited among patches of seaweed. Life follows the tides. We would range the shoreline, watching the fishermen pull in their boats and their floating nets, entranced by the garoupas, pomfrets, crabs and bass, paying particularly rapt attention if an unfortunate stingray was hauled in.

Growing up, the beach was where I would run to whenever I grew distant, disenchanted and frustrated. In her ever-changing moods, I found solace and constancy. It calmed the restlessness in me again today.

I know I will have to bury my grandfather soon, and the tides will change again and my turn will come some day, some time.

In my selfish way, I hope there would be someone to bury my bones then, who loves me deep enough to mourn me. Like a blossom carried on the waves, I would touch their minds with the sea's knowledge of the tides, the cycles and the years, and so quiet their grief with the gentle certainty that they are loved, more deeply than they ever believed possible.

Postscript: My grandfather passed away a week later.

Fractal Memories

Writing exercise #72: Synesthesia.

For bluebell.

I remember learning to write,
gripping the pencil
tight in my fist, tracing how
love is yellower than live, and
life, a champagne's breath fainter.

*

When I told the grownups the sky was not blue, but red-blue, "because the s is red", they laughed, tousled my hair, said I was imaginative. I doubted my reality even then. Perhaps you saw that. You walked over and whispered, "Such pretty colours, princess? Those who see differently need to breathe a purer air." Then you picked me up, tossed me high above the others, as I laughed and forgot what being different meant.

Reality fractures so easily. You saw the pretty colours too, didn't you?

I'd show up at your doorstep whenever it rained. You'd smile gently as I chattered on with eyes brighter than bright, about the rain, how her droplets were small, blue-brown cylinders, and how they tinkled so. Bedraggled, hair clinging to my face, I would drip puddles on your doorstep and you'd listen.

When you left, a part of me went silent. Sometimes in dreams, I see a little girl at a doorstep, waiting with bright eyes that fade, at a door which opens no more.

*

Tom. The memories of him taste of pomegranates and sticky summer afternoons. He was a clean rain on these senses. I'd cling to him, memorizing his scent, the lines of his body, the make of his feelings. Those nights we slept together, every thought, need, unnamed desire, burning deep into my psyche. I will always carry you in my bones. Perhaps it was love. Yet it wasn't enough.

*

Holding my pictures of you, these bleeding senses drench the mind. I know your fear, a curling blackness that crosses the ether. It watches me too. These days are spent waiting for the elusive blue of your shadowed smile, that lets me know you are alright.

I wish I could pick you up and toss you in the air, and see you smile freely, as I once did.

Personal rituals.

Personal rituals. The things we hold on to, that keep us from never having been.

There are days which blend into a sameness, where half-forgotten things crawl, gather, and a vague restlessness chokes the air. The eyes go blind. The fingers grasp for the yellow straws of normalcy. Whatever normal means.

I mute my screams and photoshop my memories.

I need to breathe again.

*

I love dance. The studio, the music, filling the emptinesses within, without. The old, familiar aches of the back, neck, the bruises on the shin and ankle. Etching the song into space with the lines of the body. I live pain, without its suffering. I take pleasure, despite its bitter reality.

Somewhere, a cage sits silent. And a broken-winged bird died, dreaming of flight.

The music flows, whispering life into rose-leaf memories and stillborn futures.

The emptiness, it becomes a channel.

Expression?
Catharsis.

For the things beyond words, the body speaks for me.

And in that heartbeat between notes, within songs.


I burn once more.


Written for CM. 9 April 2008

Strange and beautiful

Been staring at the blank screen, not knowing what to write for the last weeks.

Work has been busy, changes within the organisation, within the team too. Not sure how it'll work out.

Catching up with friends (including a hilarious date with a fine lady), some weddings to come, cha-cha and rhumba lessons, MBTIc-ing, besides preparing for the impending secondment to Hong Kong and trying to arrange the trip to Hawaii after.

'Tis a full plate of activities, but there's a certain weariness that does not go away. Feels like I'm operating on remote.

Feels like the new year never really came, sometimes.


absolution

the quiet sea breaks.
on iced shores of fragile bones,
unfinished nights weep.

dry-eyed, the day stares
at empty faces, places.
reasons fade to gray.

spring brings with cupped hands,
atonement, absolution
or just. forgetting.

Jan 2008

ghosts...

Untitled

tomorrow shimmers pale
in the distance but

pain hazes red
yesterday's memories.

the dead find it easy to forget,
it is the living who must bear burden of proof.

words fade and

breathing is difficult.

April 2003

But I "still have not learnt to let go with the heart".
Sometimes we hold on to pain. Perhaps because it has come to define who we are. But still. Comes a time when we must let go.

A song for a song...

Almost love

hey, stranger,
your voice dissolves the years.
I remember
the clean smell of you and
the whiteness of your soul.
you were sunshine
and the taste of rain.

And I know, you know
for a lifetime and maybe,
a day,
you'll seek me in your memories
i'll carry you in my bones.
we were, this was
almost,
almost love.

we paid the bloodprice for honesty
flew on a fairytale built on pain.
but not all endings
were birthed in beginnings,
and we have moved on,
just the same.
not the same.

but comes some nights like these,
when the memory of sunshine
is all that keeps me together.
then
hey, stranger,
seek me in your memories,
carry me in your bones.
we were, this was,
almost,
almost love,
love.

Tom.
Thanks for giving me a song.
Jul 2006

fireflies

Moments stand ablaze
with siren possibilities
as i held you,
some wildling thing
poised for flight
yet
unwilling to leave,

caught,
in this slowdance of light,
and sleeping

childhood memories.


Feb 2003

Anniversaries

Mel, 2001

remembering
the infinitesimal heartbreak
of each passing dawn when
you asked for morphine and
i carried our pain

the glimmering sadness
of stillborn days watching
mute
our footprints

slowly wash

away.


Jan 2003

always missed & loved.