First blood.

The very first fight we won.
We with fittest tails and Cunning
pre-programmed tricked nature to relinquish
Life. Meaning became us.
Pliant walls shut in, and for the fallen
Eschewed all purpose. We eye our first Death
(If death could be so privileged
To those who have not yet lived)
or Murder, cut through the throat
by Competition’s guillotine.
‘My neck or theirs’,
We’d let the blade fall
and then pleading, desperate heroics
They died so we might live.

How costly, to say I am.
How we race, only, to teeter closer to the precipice.

Tomokii

‘I need you to be early’
The microphone whizzes
Oriental eyebrows spring-dancing
Time-sensitive like your data
Probably significant, probably…
Is that blush a tinge of sakura,
Bold Confucian brushstrokes splayed
Upon a too yellow face?

I turn, like sumo, layers of carpet dragging,
Turnstiled, to uncover common history
Drawn through the stomach, up, this
Liquid memory, straining into vapors
That featherstroke the moment
Slightly nudging, gentle
authoritarian. The patriach plays geisha,
Now mild now coquette, still binding.

Face, caned into a grimace.
Courtesy’s not normal, requiring
A few degrees of imbalance –yours? Or
Mine. Your back is bamboo and I
Willowy. Gomendasai sensei.
I think of winter, come too early,
And then the bend, and inevitable snap
Of a twig broken early morning.

To a boy, aged 16

I was reading your old blog posts, all the way from your Secondary Four days. It was a strange feeling that, peering into the consciousness of a boy so foreign, with woes and joys that appear to be from a different sphere, and yet so familiar, like the smell of bread on your skin, that I could not help but be overcome by a wrenching desire to be there at those moments in time. This you, who had not yet come into my life, I too want to protect from life’s vagaries.

It is as if I got know you all over again, maybe not you, but the clay that would become you. I watched intently as you were slowly and painfully molded into shape by life’s skillful (and cruel) hands. And how she betrayed you sometimes! She who gave you the ability of love gave you too much, and soon these excesses morphed into duty, guilt and a punishing conscience who picked fights at every turn. Great love, unchecked and unrequited, becomes monstrosity, a death-hungry Cerberus, day after day, gnawing down your bones and dignity.

I suppose it should disgust me, watching you sweat out your cold turkey, the bloodshot eyes, the puke, the pornos, the loser behavior, the desperate need for attention, the blood-thirsty vengeance, the insensitivity, the selfishness, the immaturity, the boy crying for validation the only way he knows how. You were a bastard perhaps, but as I journeyed with your past I couldn’t help but notice how beautifully you thanked people for going out with you, how passionately you organized class outings, how desperately you wanted friendships to last. Of course, you were disappointed again and again, and my heart sank each time rejection brought you closer to hell’s door, where the devil’s fires blaze anew.

I know how hard you fought it. This constant oscillation between hope and despair would stop, if only you could time life’s pendulum swing. Yet she is a saboteur, each time she sends you up the pedestal, each time she brings the weight crashing down on the return trajectory. But you never did gave up, and your cheeriness pains me, as some god, who knowing what will pass, must see the celebration before the Trojan horse.

I saw a Vincent, struggling, to paint his first work of art. Every time he sets his brush on the canvas, someone comes along and begs him for help with their own. He always obliges, believing that these seeds of good he sows would someday bloom into prescient flowers he will water colour. Yet as the months go by and no flowers come, he sits like the Beast guarding the last petal. Resentment tempts him deeper into misanthropy. He cuts off his ear, stops listening. He becomes a gargoyle, and embraces the grotesque. But all those who shudder are deceived. He is a Prince, and he waits, for that moment before the last petal falls.

Knowing this, what can my response be, other than love? You think I mock you, by frolicking with a persona you want to forget. But this curiousity is love. Love that is strengthened by the intense desire to know all, see all and from that knowledge be remade again to take new forms, as new crystals metamorphosed from old rocks. Love hard enough to bolster and yet tender enough to cajole, sooth and whisper. I love you because you are poetry; you in your nature will always play slave to the dictates of love, victim to emotion’s raging tempests, and servant to the noblest ideals. You are humanity that I cannot be, humanity that I cannot write, humanity that repels yet when I’m at my least conscious, reels me in.

I feel like I’m caught in a time bubble that floated, unwittingly, into this kaleidoscope of colours you call your past. No words travel, but the transparent walls vibrate with each upheaval, and I feel shaken, though cloistered still by time’s impossible barrier. Helplessly I call your name, willing that those eyes would find mine and be comforted, willing that you could be happy now, for tomorrow. I want to hug, reassure, but fate demands you make the pit stops. Oh if only one could know! If we only knew then that we were not alone in this struggle with a relentless world. If we only knew that this relentless search should one day find harbor at the bays of the present. If only we knew, we could have comfortably lay down, made peace with life, and better savoured the days till July 2005.

Where have you been these 17 years? And where was I?

Daddy

You came too soon, you came too soon.
On the back of a junk, too many of you.
Slavery in the folds of a dirt bag,
Masters of donkeys, opium and poo
Douche-bags, all of you.

And when the tide came in, you grew
Became a gavel, a Confucian tool
With your rear end playing peak-a-boo
Now I’m his disciple too
You were here before me,

Were you? I read you like a history book
Three whips to a page, that makes
Good flagellation a sport. Like those
Marathons and marathons and marathons.
Over kill, maybe it will too.

Will it too. Run me to the death
As longs it pleases you.
Gas-tank, slung over. Smoke me like
Pot, with a huff and a puff and achoo
I’ll do what you cannot do

Jump through these smoke rings, whoo
Trapeze on your words, somersault too,
A leg lift, fold over, and then the fall
A Cirque Du Soleil doll
I’m your darling, ring master

Ring me thrall. The scars are
your love, some trophy to polish,
Minutes of minutes of you,
It’s a scorecard, and guess what daddy?
I’ll place my bets on you

Always the financial mogul
With your stocks and your shares and
Everyday blues. I remember mummy
Sprawled like a starfish, teething a smile
Like some goody-two-shoes

Mummy’s a mule
Plodding on with a leaking vat of you
It gets lighter and lighter,
Her back straightens and straightens
While I lick the drips on her shoe.

But Daddy I grew and I grew,
My foot grew too big in your shoe
My age now starts with a two
With a zero behind, with a zero behind
I zeroed my memory of you.

Daddy you better love me too
Love my hand and my feet and my heel
Daddy daddy roll the wheel
The fleece on your head shows through
Daddy daddy daddy, I’ll make three bags full.

On learning your grades

Thistle funnel breath
A cellular anorexia,
Squelched like Boa-meat
Air betrays its own nature
To boast rotund.
And then the smooth slide
Or gallop, into the gut.

Pelunk.
Stirred like hot mash
Witches cauldron gurgling
Day old leftovers, hot air
Propelling bumper-car romance
With intestinal fervency
Appendages clasp accidents
Rolling them into balls.
Salivate. Mothball smells from
Baby socks. These don’t come
Off easily.

Singles pining for a
Similar constriction.
Sudden rising of bile plume.
Expanding air to invade every
Fleshy Hiroshima. Then the
Release. Snake skin
Peeling back for freedom
All shapes evaporate
To muster

This gush, this suffocation
This edifying upward drift
Of my bell-jar asphyxiation.

Shut up and Sit Down

How many times -
Did we crumble under the divinity
of a wagging finger crossed
twice, as if creation got found out and
now sheepishly sought,
the forgiving (and forgiven) innocence
of a schoolboy’s childish folly.

How many times –
Did we smile as he hid behind skirts
and issues, attributing this bashfulness
to a virginal pathos, one that we in
Reason’s gloomy subterfuge
should cradle as first bud in spring or
last dash of snow. So he is
nursed, o infant joy, blessed
by our cowardice to compound
Eternity in never-land.

How many times –
Did the rod of invention strike foul to spare
this Happy child? No love runs
Thick as his tears, no music sings
Sweet as his tantrums. To his moods
we cling, bouldering the precipice
though blisters fester
And primordial veins, traitors to their inheritance,
scream sermons pleading
That we let go.

How many more times -
Will we turn the other cheek, so old wounds
don’t bruise? Like ostriches we place
our heads in holes, not, to escape
Death, but to silence out
the screeching decibel of fear.
What have we nursed in this rock-a-bye
but a dormant wind, now gentle in its caress,
but when next it blows,
upturns the cradle?

Intellectual Conversations

We began in autarky,
Two outliers deviating from the crowded mean,
too far flung to enjoy Pareto, fettered
within the boundaries, of our own sub-optimal
Consumption.

The invisible hand gestured,
Beneath the veil of ignorance
Worn diaphanous by desperation, two egos rode the
Utility function. Epicurean delight moralised,
Into a grand equilibrium.

So said Pandora: ‘Ceteris paribus, we are better off.’

The hand made visible feels warm,
Rubbery, like leather from the backs of some endangered species,
An ignoramous? But then, you always were
Unashamedly bipolar, while my likert scale
purports a proclivity to moderate.

I am your muse, you say, as if Paris
Ever bled poetry in his death. Much more a siren,
Greasing your odyssey with ambrosia wails
Till your ears grow lesions, and henceforth no music from my mouth
Harmonises yours.

It is a competition, and we run each other down.

Yet the enemy doesn’t always sits across the table,
Xenophobia is shared, like a couple lunch.
Outsiders taunt laughs, and sub-lunary microcosms clear
The throat, though always with a bitter aftertaste,
Maybe we never really left Nash.

Maybe we are our own Darwin, predicating our own humanity
On some stupid Galapagos birds squawking – why
I am not waiting for Godot. Why we, yak about
Paradise lost with Miltonic heroism, why we persistently ignore
The irony behind a theist and atheist.

Why why? Exactly how we undermine ourselves.

How we talk, and sip on gasified water,
Pauses interspersed by words, or is it the other way?
Semantics stifling silence. I like this democracy,
rhetoric riots better than any Lynch mob, even
in a rambunctious bull run.

Still, we are doubly exposed, through this
small aperture we print as bold italics, underscored
Struck through. Since when,
did we start to auto-focus, zooming in as fast as we zoom out,
Quid Pro Quo?

You tell me transition matters, I can’t figure out the beginning from the end.

A smile lingers in the places our minds wander,
We shriek like children in a game of tag,
I catch you mid-sentence;
You catch me when I fall,
Down the slippery slope of love.