anecdotes.

anecdotes don't make more than just one mere data point, but often it's the understated that claim tyrannical significance. it never is about the person, but how do you ignore the assault on principles that one would have held as categorical imperatives, only for clauses and circumstances to exclude them as imperfect duties? there is no greater denial of existence, than dispelling the very ideas that one would stand for. there ought come a point when enough time has been spent in purgatory, deeming every punishment as divine justice. no, I will not lie in wilful submission when my thesis is trampled upon.


- researcher notes, before being judged by the scales of censure

prosaic.

I haven't written for a long time. The truth is, social networks kill writing and the ability to think cogently for more than 1xx number of characters. It teaches, at most, another style. The style of murdering your words, letter by letter, just so that you get your point across in a creative manner. In a 'I'm-not-whoring-but-I'm-intelligent', 'oh-please-anyone-but-me' fashion. That's trending now. Add a hashtag, and it fragments your thoughts to the point where you get disciplined into thinking about something. And then, nothing.

Writing requires discipline, I suppose. Which I don't have. Because to me, writing seems to be just a release, where emotions are so caught up in the moment and you just seek that very outlet to vent your feelings on. An empty abyss, where you look upon sometime later and find out it's has filled with a strange clarity of thought. Some welling up of nostalgia, like you almost knew the guy. Unfortunately, I procrastinate.

But not today. With that rich gamut of emotions filled up, I ran, jogged, and then walked briskly. A pyrrhic victory in the end, since that very inspiration emptied itself out en-route. But to write anyway, to at least hope that that half-hour of genius did not go to waste, to eulogise that fleeting moment in paragraphs that meant nothing. Nothing but trash, perhaps, looking back. But genuine, and one can never beat reality.

So how does one lose everything and anything, and start with that blank slate of mind when a lit screen of mostly white stares back at him? it is unblinking, except for that damned cursor, that dares one to write. Except for the disclaimer that one needs to input, at the very start, writing at length but not compensating for brilliance, that this is free-flow, unorthodox, ill-disciplined writing that is all spur-of-the-moment. Yet writing a specific form of writing, is exactly that. Conformity. Writing is not a talent or breaking down of barriers or an act of defiance against the norms of the world. It simply is. Is? Is what? What do you expect from 'it simply is?' Nothing. It just is not, not that it is. Since writing that it is something requires you to substantiate some feeling of the moment, flavour of the month, that ultimately is, of course, what it is. Ridiculous fleeting thoughts, twisted, wrung, dried and then pieced, jigsawed and rearranged into your very own 360-piece argument.

I had hoped that this could wait. That the blog would wait until my other trivial travails  have passed, so I can really really begin to write. I begged to defer, yet somehow you can't keep the tide from flowing back in, dammit. You just had to stem it, build a dam, divert some flow and hope it turns out something good from a churning turbine of machinery. It's not looking at all either, and I'll be ashamed to call it my own. Some bastard child that ought never to be. Someone that I can't bear writing a letter to. Like a Foster Wallace, only uglier and dirtier. Someone doomed to the unemployment line, queuing in soup kitchens, getting handouts, forever stuck to the lowest 10th percentile.

But so it is. Life is never fair. And things, people exist just to remind you of it. I loved to write, once. I hope I will like it, someday, again, and again. Discipline makes a good writer when one can really get down to write. But discipline also killed the writer in his sleep, but ensuring that all fun is sucked out of whatever he produced. That everything is necessarily judged, first by ego, then by applause. But it cannot be. Feeling, events, people, things, they need an outlet to be validated. Just by writing them into permanence. Into a concrete existence that one day I can point to, and say that I felt.

So here it is, to the joy of writing. I hope I return to these roots. Again.

certain seating plans on the MRT

I take the same train everyday

the 06.57, housing three 1-year-old institutions to voyeur

the 40-something housewife clutching a basket empty

the short-skirted teen with self-esteem made from fleeting glances

and the straight-laced male executive wedged in between

conjoined triplets craving

what little acknowledgement of their existence

beyond the beeps of their punch cards

 on society’s gantries

the auntie is charity’s druggie

enacting a daily habit

of dominating thrones, only to abdicate

to the most wretched case she sees

and then mistaking gratitude for willingness

to listen to life stories

when everyone would rather eavesdrop

on everyone’s iphone

or not at all.

I know where the guy stands, ramrod straight

the way he looks at the opposite window

without excuse

a brazen criminal after the tunnels of Tiong Bahru

to memorise every minute detail

whereupon in the evenings after work

he would pore over photos on facebook, half-naked

and finding none, settle for someone else instead.

the girl likes to stand at raffles place

after a generous 7-minute display of her thighs

to offer an additional serving of the rear

even while she endures incessant droning and a warm fuzzy feeling

pretending to use her phone

she celebrates others’ lives online

everyday’s 23-minute ride

starring weird auntie and stalker uncle

where likes and comments and cattle prods

become vindication of one’s worth.

people play-pretend isolation

when in fact, they desire to touch

more than just plastic hand-grips or cool metal bars.

palliative care

silent foetus -

when you went, it was head first

severing the cord only made you grow more

at life they hunger, they beg, they claw

with refreshed firmware, just plug-and-play

like you saying through a Zeitgeist, hey, I'm ok

stillborn child-

silver-haired, but frothing the same bile

no longer the jaundiced yellow-skin, but forever blue

only green waves, breaking the humming plateau

how they crash, never to return

only foaming waste in grey machine, churn

alone I wait, here in the wings

until the most frequented went rare, and then ceased to being

ever-patient, with permanent room-and-board

one becomes just a number that they jot

so here’s to you, my last ode

then let my hands rest down on your throat

unspoken rest, ten years late

asphyxiate, asphyxiate.

an addict’s morning

auntie downs a cup of drugs

to which her lips smacks simultaneously, in their

caffeined agreement and

an experienced tongue follows, consuming every

last bit of excitement

forking her way around each hollow

like a lover’s appendage

in another

-                 - she can only fantasise

and then to conclude her daily routine with a

240-volt smile

powered by the three-pin socket

on the back of her palm-sized mirror

a spotlight that demands immediate fall-in

from her new plastic recruits

satisfied, the drill sergeant inspects her tanned veterans

at flimsy attention on stamped soil

and commands them to henta-taki twice

before pulling out a shoe brush laced with white kiwi

to flush all traces of today, tomorrow, and every other day’s high

down the porcelain sink of her forgotten youth.

the Queen as a victim of circumstance

mirror, mirror on the wall

who in the land is fairest of all? – Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the

abyss gazes also into you. – Friedrich Nietzsche

triumphant Dictators waltzing in with both

heads held aloft

trumpeting their victories when

while treasure chests have burst at their seams

vaults can still be rented

where they are again

immortalised and savouring pride long gone

naked swashbucklers without being reminded of breaking their buckles.

virgins want to cast no coloured shadow in the reflector

that acknowledges their cubicled existence

rather prefer a stay in the anonymous dungeon cell

and its ceramic-tiled partitions

unlike certain parrots who perch up the highest rung and reign

with talons wide open, even on the shoulders of their giants.

yet all lasses eventually skip to the loo

(collectively because they are too afraid to face themselves alone)

dainty darlings who between hops and spins to draw applause

question their art privately in a studio of mirrors

isn’t ballet supposed to be choreographed so?

still when it comes to en pointe

all they can hear are commands to spread or lift

and work them for grunts of approval.

when exile comes via infirmity

they’re bestowed Her Majesties in lone thrones

abandon polishing to slice apple skin

vain attempts to prevent fair maidens from committing the same sin

but only divining one count behind or in front

condemned to the same time-lapsed pirouette dance.

close one eye.

no wins, no mentions, so everything's out in the open.

You died

Starving

Not the only one

with a three second memory.

Scavenged treasure chests

deserve a sea burial, no less

opening the creaky hinge

I stare into (my own) greed already sunk

and then I walk you 9 storeys high

to plank you down in refuse

while you sailed your membraned globe

I was the lone constellation, the northern star

the one sailors of your kind worship, devouring

your radiance with beige palm-shaped clouds

when it pleases me -

yet darkness engulfs us both

I peer into my blinkered periscope and observe

how your scurvied skeleton surface

when I drop rusty depth charges that are

defused, with equal parts desperation,

disdain, and contempt

you’ve lost your bearings, and so too my moral heading

I remember now

what Guilt forgot

obfuscated under a childish grin of

smoke and mirrors and

a selective eyepatch.

what's your motivation?

everytime there's a slight, nurse that internal fury and fester it deep down inside, until an explosion into something beautiful. spurred on, just to prove everyone (and no one) in particular, dead wrong. there is, and must be, a universal arbiter. or just build the damned system that respects you.

grandma’s in Wonderland.

something i submitted for movingwords, but it didn't win. I suppose for good reasons: a somewhat magical, imaginative leap of dementia, with a sprinkling of artistic and factual liberty. on the other hand, i did win the Before We Forget Photo Challenge, which perhaps was an all-together weaker competition. I would have preferred this though. But it still makes for a good combination.

Mad hatter

Buck-toothed, crazy-eyed,

even logic’s said its good-bye.

Literary nonsense couldn’t prepare us more

For You licking gruel off the ground floor

Track-marked face

North-south, or East-West?

now the cheshire cat asks in jest.

your habitual grandson-to-grandson trips a month ago

that’s when Your mind’s concession decided to go

We can afford it

A private car, private carriage,

only when your mind’s turned to cabbage.

Grant you your shimmery rosary beads

Drawn by a foreign tanned steed

Your last

Train is coming, train is coming

In case of emergency, press to hear the fat lady sing.

Or if You’d prefer, I have Your storybook, let’s go

Thud-thud-thud-again, down the Rabbit Hole

because every dog has its day.

because between a taxi-driver and a factory worker, between sharing 6 years of education culminating in a PSLE certificate, between a 3-room HDB flat that we can never seem to get out of, between hilarious attempts at learning (broken) english greetings, between life, till now, and the sum of its parts, between sorry-i-can't-take-you-to-another-continent-but-at-least-a-malay-palace-with-a-head-of-state, we can finally look back and laugh, with hope, pride, and vindication.