Golden sunset

When did dusk’s first rays start to falter?

I dream of the time when all your delusions

were also mine, how we played like children in a

Golden sunset that; us thus observing,

could hardly bear to touch horizon.

How we wasted time, languishing in an infinity

we were sure we held asymptote. If only we knew -

Those waves licking our feet were not caresses, but rather,

trenchant reminders of a now bygone shore.

Then, words did not need much imagination to stir,

nor did your glance require evening’s softening lights

to make tender. Silently we communicated, rapt as

sea made harmonious conversations with sky.

Now I know you but through the water’s reflection.

Though every feature’s constant, my right reaches out, only,

to meet your left – and while we move still in tandem,

We move still, in opposite direction.

Sometimes the sea breeze scatters your image

and I glide a lone gull, veering across

luminescent waters so strange that I oft in my curiosity

contemplate a migratory course.

Yet always I dream of a golden sunset – though now we expect

that night must surely fall; it is still this hand I know that will

catch mine, prepare, and make patient,

For tomorrow’s golden dawn.

Through the window

Sometimes I in the window see
Muted shadows, grey yet bright to me
Sometimes I in the window hear
Conversations made, whispered yet clear
Sometimes at the window’s side
Sit those I’d past in life’s quick strides
Sometimes at the window’s end
 A love gone stale; forgotten friends.

Now; caressing her wooden frame,
My gaze upon that cognizant square -
Here flesh and bone a rhythm let
The other side, a rhythm dare?
Connected thus, each limb to limb
And every quirk and foible mine,
Reflecting all I might have been
So binds. This window of my mind.

the wing-ed life.

I will always remember how the snow fell.

Not straight down to earth; but lingering

Diaphanously ; riding the warm drafts of our

Breaths - visible automobiles of air

stonewalling the snowflake’s sojourn, though simultaneously

melting, so that each delight prolonged makes more tenuous

the existence of its host. A moth’s philosophy -

Wings beating closer to life,

Wings beating closer to death.

I thought this would be easy. After all we were

One breath. You understood my exhaling,

Iceberg psychology, undercurrents cold and

Warm. How well they mixed, these nascent upwellings of

youth made profitable. I imagined us

El Nino and La Nina; weather’s recreants and

Recreators – incommensurate with the world, though

constant with one another.

How many snowflakes, does one miss in memory?

Your words now, frozen, in the cold recesses of

Thought. Deconstructed and compartmentalized-  

Intonations, Inflections, Insouciance.

It must be rational, this love. A veritable store

Of been-theres, done that’s; well-stocked with hopes

Wished and wished for

too much. Softer words screech stalactites and

static might-have-beens. If only one could tarry to

see temporal;  it is not for winter as a season I pine

but the naked glimpse of serendipitous

emotion, incandescent in your eyes.

Maybe Time is no custodian but a jealous

Divinity, dangling contentment as its prize,

seducing us with the promise of tomorrows

not worth living for -

We turn sacrifice, you and I,

our moments made forfeit as we are raised

and razed, at eternity’s altar.

Pray - let us be as snowflakes

and in the struggle to stay afloat, and love

We will.

Jewish Memorial

they must be grey

quiet blurs of humanity, tossed randomly

by Fortune’s dice

and there entombed

the whispers of many, cloistered echoing

to others, entice.

to be a Jew,

yes god forbid – and men forbid too

your right to Life

still yet You live,

In german shame, german stories,

german sighs.

How long the stretch

from block to block, each coffin

gently sloping rests?

How long the pain

from son to son, each man

upon other men impress?

I mourn for You,

my human brethren, as the living

must surely mourn.

I grieve for You,

and all the children, snuffed out

ere their candle shone.

yet make not Vengeance

newborn to history, must babes

this shroud of shame to don?

blight not their youth

with sin and gravity, for a deed

they could have forsworn!

So rest, so rest-

for now the living, all must Rest,

before the Dawn.

Those lights

Those lights -

Ezekiel’s whirlwind, fire enfolding,
Born and bred of the sky.

Baby’s first cry, life exclaiming,
Fluorescent tears left an eternity to dry.

Dead souls, their painted faces,
Breaking at horizon’s shore.

Brush of a fox’s tail, playful paces,
Tilting nature’s palette more

Above us, the cosmos pivot
All these stories, every tale

Surge to pry all words asunder
cast as ships the darkness sail.

Was there a time not yet bespoken
where we as ions happily danced?

On our shoulders no world beholden
Passion and youth in tandem pranced?

Those lights, and us, how we surrender!
Caught like fish in magic’s ebb.

and nature, philosopher,
Opens wide her ponderous gap -

Soon earth’s matter, around us shatter
Atoms, quarks sucked in the flush.

We stand still, in time’s sepulcher
hear the clamour turn to hush.

From your hand, a warmth beginning
Touched by light a world renew.

No past present future yearning
may this moment sublime yield -

A greater ecstasy or glee
than you and I, these lights we see.

She, Mona Lisa.

Do you smile
Or do they know?

Those very many years ago
These brushstrokes made with expert hand
Tell they your tale? Did they portend-

The hundred thousand flashing lights
Machine mutters, day and night
A life behind the polished glass
Prostitute’s cell, and sell you must.

Da Vinci’s, or so they say
A woman owned, your story clay
Shaped and molded to their taste
Da Vinci’s whore, he sold your face

A face the scientists now explore
Eighty percent, maybe more,
What joys and sorrows due to thee,
Joys and sorrows that they see?

All who come will surely trace,
The oft admired meeting place
of lips, sensuously undulate
skywards, or so we speculate:

O Mona that you lived too soon!
Were you a lover, dame or lun?
Patient of syphilis, blood and gore
Give us the dirt, and then some more.

Light the flame of our desire!
Stoke our heart’s coals, make raging fire!
Then like history let us combust
Turn from you and turn to dust.

And when the ashes gently fall,
And the crowd our lives recall,
And silence does reverberate,
Peace and rest facilitate.

In the night when drunk with sleep,
Do those corners softly creep
From their immortal fleshy throne,
Down to life, or death below?

And will you hang stiff in the dark,
The smile from your countenance plucked,
Will your eyes then smile to see
A woman, unsmiling but free?

Jönköping

She sits at the curve of Vattern’s frozen belly, while a flock of swans beat at the dark blue waters, trying to simulate their summer frolicking. She smiles. They play in vain. There is no cure for this weariness, this dreary half-waking.

She sighs, a cold breath. The lithe swans scatter as wind cuts through their ranks, a punishing executioner’s knife, covetous of the youthful and lively. She thinks of her childhood, of King Magnus, and days nearer the beginning of things. Perhaps it was as cold then, she couldn’t remember. Too many pillages and burnings, their ravages do their damage. Tighter now, she pulls her clothes over her hoary body.

Harder the wind blows. Sometimes she leaves her icy seat, go down to that part of town where more people linger, more people move. Too fast, really, for her slow eyes. Quick, ground-devouring strides, their legs like motor, a technology she still can’t quite catch. Perhaps that’s just how it is nowadays. Everything everyone is moving on, and she’s just there, waiting for something to give. Some kind of technical fault, error message, virus. Of course in the end nothing gives, nothing except her.

Sometimes she feels like the poor china that people are too embarrassed to set on the table when important guests come. Or a poor relation that people want to forget. They zoom past her with their eyes down, hands in their pockets. She likes to pretend they still think of her sometimes, on the warmer days, when the wind is kind, or when the sun shines a wee bit brighter. Those times she dons more colours, hoping to catch a glance or two, or if heavens allow, someone to stop, take a breath, take a picture.

God, it is cold. She strikes a match, looks at the flame. Such a fragile holocaust of warmth; so quickly alive, so quickly dead. She strikes another match, lights up her smoke, and watches the fumes travel out over the frozen waters. It’s been her weakness since middle age, when the machines came. The fights wore her down, but their smoke gave her comfort. Maybe she’s still paying for that betrayal, but it’s been too long past for that to matter. It’s been too long past anything really.

Now she rises, white clothes gathering about her. Her hands and heart are ice, but her eyes lukewarm as she looks out towards the lake’s horizon. Vattern is melting, yes, there is always that. Perhaps an early spring and maybe, just maybe, another chance for green.

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.

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.