The last Cordelia

'O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

-La Belle Dame Sans Merci
John Keats

__________________________________

What can ail thee,
But a smattering of self, broken
reflections in age-worn mirrors
Too old to back-date.

On which you weep elegy,
Scrawling lines of woe etched,
Of who where when,
sometime or
Other, life trampled hard enough,
though not nearly.

Is it man who breathes, yet
With each gasp, manacles one’s throat
To stifle breath? Is it man who drinks,
Yet with each gurgle, envision death?

Is it man who lives, yet
With each moment spoil,
the steady beats to which life pulsates?

Is it man who loves, yet
With each moment deny,
This gentle loving gently wake?

Lave, lave the suffixes
of full Abandon! The man drowning in sand,
will at his last soliloquy take
some living weed, to make lavish
His sepulcher.

This is your Dionysian joy.

For which you live,
For which you, will I destroy.

No man's land.

Amazing how in the grand scheme of things,
between the mad-rush and voting boxes,
You stand dictator,
as ailing Democracy is vetoed,
and majority loses its last war.

This is no time for mavericks,
Bombs tick your ambition
while all other dreams
Detonate.

Seemingly self-defeating
Seemingly triumphant
Stoically non-partisan

You slash the jugular –
Knife curved like a smile.

Soon there will be three bags full.

The Memory Refrain

The place hasn’t changed;
The dusty tiles bear the colour
Of paint, splattered, across days months years-
Layer upon layer, tile upon tile
Of memory coagulated onto a knowing canvas.

The change is mine.

I smell sawdust, long settled into cracks.
I hear the grating drill, plunge into
Pliable wood; incessantly, persistently,
Stubbornly. For at the very last note
It all ends. Or will end.

Or ended.

I go to our haunts, now haunting,
Like ghosts ill-revenged, wailing
For a second turn.
I trail the corners, shy of light,
Like children demurred, crying
For a toy returned.

I don’t remember why we sang
Like crazed lunatics; seesawing
Ungainly shoulders to a tune.
I still remember why we fanged,
Like taskmasters, gainsaying
Innocent laughter far too soon.

I must look stupid, remembering so much
And yet too little. The mind records
What the heart scoffs,
And now, the tiles rebuff
And mock
this Delightful Loss.

Lotus Song (inspiration from 12 lotus, royston tan)

Prologue
How pitiful you are dear lotus,
Cast into the murky soil.
The wind murmurs your name now-
Dear girl, will you sing?

(i)
Dust falls low in Sana’a
Lightly brushing the smells of porridge
That wend its way through every household.
We sit by the well, all *baltho - waifs
chewing hallucination under a veil.
Ah, the pleasure of being unseen!
-from fingers, hand, and the occasional foot.
In this shrouding sarcophagus
the world unravels its whole brilliance.
Identities fade, our bodies strain, come loose,
deconstructing into the most basic algorithm
Allah used when he lovingly moulded humankind.
Unspeakable joy-
Soon our man will return
And we will bloom like prescient flowers,
My sisters and I, as we scurry
To gather buds that wither down below.


(ii)
We had not met-
As custom went, but fortune, face, and family
Had gone ahead of us to make their loves;
Ours they sealed in dowry.
Hand henna-bound, forehead etched red.
The mark burned, though less,
Than the husband’s searing glance
As he pledged to worship the ground
That I walked on – his part is easy,
For that pledge I walk these steps-
How quickly does sari turn to ash?
Flesh to dust, bone to fine sand?
Till death do we part? Never.
Not even so. I breathe,
A short breath-
Before I take my place beside him, in his pyre.


(iii)
To him whom I have loved before-
Write me no letters;
I wish you death, quick and easy
Let a bullet stop your gentle heart
and make no mark upon your face.
So many men have kissed the dirt, mouths agape
In this roughly hewn piece of hell;
But let no penance singe your beloved face,
Or tear the laughter from your brow.
May youth dance its graceful Art,
Upon your lips, and go you to some greater sphere,
Heights my flights of sorrow cannot scale.
I only pray – that some strains of music
Ease down below, not to pleasure me
But to know you are now in joy,
And not the dank trench where good men sweat
tears, fester, and bring on
This bitter wasting of a woman’s years.


Epilogue
Out of the muddy water,
She stands like a queen above the murk,
And nature gifts its purest perfume,
And light bequeaths its finest livery,

And love sings its most piteous song.



*black robes that women in the Yemen wear

Cinematic Magic - Thoughts from NTU Cinema studies

It is quiet here,
like all other human senses,
our curiosity stretches
Out, like a cat
trying, too hard, to claw
at the fringes of existence.

Nary a mew-

For what is reality but what we can
tease cajole and coax, belly up
into purring obeisance?

Life is what i record-
with my eyes, ears, mouth, heart,
Places you have touched, lingered
and forgotten,
in a time too long past for antiquity.

Life is what you interpret-
At once high fantasy touches your shores,
At once I am archaic in its backwash.

The Clown.

And then there were none.

The first to go was the recalcitrant youth. Adventure was his element and even the infinite waters of the sea could not contain his thirst for rarer shores. In no harbour did he find anchor, his gaze perpetually cast upon the next wave. He lived on the edge of oblivion and more often then not, taunted existence to throw him out. But just like the way moths take to flame and death, I punished myself in his inferno, and the pilgrim sang Prometheus’s song.

Second in line was the insignificant man-of-the-street, with his bowler hat of insecurities and pockets full of justified paranoia. His life was an oxymoron, his past, present and future showed the same reflection in the mirror. Between being and un-being he trod on a precipice. He was the man in the office, the man in the flat, the man at the voting box, the man hiding behind Big Brother. His end was exactly like his entrance, no one saw him go, no one saw him coming. No one saw him except me, and I quickly ushered him into death before life blacked him out.

Then there was the politician. He swept me off my feet with argument, and made all of life’s grievances sensible. I joined his campaign, and held his banner high. Together we marched down the long steps of our ivory tower and into the legions of Diaspora. We marched as comrades until the riot police came and vanquished our souls with tear gas and legislation.

Fourth was the prisoner, who held me thrall with his predicament. With him I felt the first stirrings of motherhood, and so I learnt that to be female was to be vulnerable to the weaknesses of men. Many were the nights where I cleaned the grime from his fingernails and soothed him to sleep in the godforsaken cell. Moonlight was only our company, and each other’s breathing our sole distraction. When he grew stronger, he broke the bars of his entrapment and walked free, and grief took me as his form joined the darkness and slipped away.

The fifth and dearest was the lover, the man who came to me in the night and made me belong. His words stoked fires, and all of life was ablaze in his presence. I bathed in his light and power, and felt eternity within grasp. But arrogance took him, and he was finally consumed by his own radiance, leaving me to weep Daedalus’ tears.

I knew them, if only like how each blind man knew the elephant. If only like how we all know and believe in the mysterious Mr Quinn.

The man who stands before me now is familiar, but stranger this familiarity makes him than strangeness. I trace the tousled criss-cross edges of his hair, inching my finger between the rough curls before lowering slowly to the face. Down my finger skims, leaving a faint line across the thickened brows and painted nose, to the obscenity of the plum red lips that instinctively tease themselves into a pout. I rub the soft flesh of my palm against those lips, feeling the colour rub off onto my skin, soaking in, initiating recognition. The contact singes my nerves, but I push on as the lips start to surface an earthly brown.

The face cracks, and peels, into a warm grin.

Dear god, I know you.

Look down, look down.

I read my old posts and hmm. Ji Ching is sick of being pretentiously intellectual. No more theasaurus.com. My old posts make me feel like an aspiring Adrian Mole.

This is my new resolution. To be uncut, uncensored, but not RA.

Bottled

Asphyxiate this emptiness
And it will be a tight squeeze
As the ball of gall gets rolling
Clinking,
Clank

Clunk.

Into the brains that were,
Taste the ambrosia of full-bodied
Amnesia. It is difficult,
To ponder, or stow-away

This endless rolling
On sharp ends.
Thud. On. Thud.

I remember the times when life was water,
Weaving in between set strands
Melodic like a fine tuned guitar,
Energy stored,
and then flow.

But the present make heartless
Grind. A drawn out sulk
Gives more comfort
Than this merciless banging
On sharpened nerves.

I need a break from rest.