Uninspired

My canvas is a splatter of black and white,

even in this plain piece of work they call it art.

The little splatters that made no sense,

somehow someone said it breathed pain.

What do they know about my art?

I had spent three years painting my soul on canvases,

Black and white,

fiery red hues and calming ocean blue,

lush green imbued with bright yellow irises.

In these great mix of colours,

it was more than a little splitter splatter,

it was more than “pain”.

Today I’m sitting in front of my canvas,

with withering fields and torn up work,

everything I touched turn to ashes,

and every colour I painted became a faded grey.

My legs crossed,

head pressed against the canvas,

the only thing imprinted on this work

they call art

and the soul of the artist

is:

Mediocre

I am in a mediocre relationship.

We joke, we get along but we don’t have anything concrete. We tell each other about our day, but we hardly shared our thoughts or feelings.

We mask our disagreements as a compromise. He brushes my opinions away, he tells me how he feels but all I hear is “I know better than you do”. I am well-read, and eventually, I let the silence be our middle ground. I dismiss his choices and ideas, I tell him “it’s just not my type” but my heart screamed, “I hate it on you”. He doesn’t hear it.

We don’t fight, we laugh. A lot. We are happy but we are lacking. He is trying to navigate his way through the maelstrom of life. He tells me he has a dream, but I see him at the roulette table betting his resume on jobs that brings in the biggest wins. He paints me a picturesque image of his passion, he idealises a life of luxury and salubrious pastures. But all I see is a man who burns his days running after days that were never his.

He loves me, he doesn’t cheat, he calls, he reassures me, he makes me laugh. He seems to be the perfect boyfriend, but why does it feel like the bare minimum? Why does it feel like he doesn’t love me enough?

He tells me stories that change faster than the wind. He doesn’t tell me I am crazy, he just tells me I don’t know any better. He doesn’t tell me that he barely respects me, he just weasels his way into every decision I have to make and does it for me. He tells me he loves me, but why does it feel like a lie?

My family hates him, but his family adores me. The pendulum in our relationship never seems to reach a median. We are polar opposites, yet our disguises tell us we are the same.

We are moving forward but somehow apart.

Rookie Town

I woke up one day and hailed a cab,

told the man to take me to Rookie Town,

“I’ve met a man,” I said. “He told me about this quaint little town.”

He nodded his head lightly and drove away.

“It’s a pretty sight he said. Happy couples and fancy houses,” I continued.

“He told me I’ll never be alone and I’ll have a soulmate.”

We drove into boulevard of Rookie Town,

a picturesque sight indeed.

Lush green tries and flamboyant fauna,

pretty faces and sugar lips,

screaming colours under the bland blue skies.

Clean roads and sandy beaches,

I could almost taste the crisp fresh air inside the stale yellow cab.

“But doesn’t it reek of carcass and foul breath?” the driver asked.

“A pretty town indeed, but can you hear the shrieks amidst the singing nightingales?”

I shook my head and cried, “But isn’t it a wonderful place to be?”

“Where the empty gets filled and the halves are wholes?”

The driver looks through the rear mirror with melancholic eyes.

“Oh dear child,” he sighed.

“Can’t you see their red dry eyes and mendacious voices pouring deaths in their purplish hearts?”

I shook my head and cried, “You’ve got it all wrong, that’s not what the man said.”

I was bewitched by the mesmerising beauty of Rookie Town,

I believed the ‘truth’ of the man I met.

The driver took me for a spin round this heavenly little town and as he pulls up onto my street,

he turns and tells me. “It’ll be ten dollars for the round we took on your street.”

Someone Great

If I can have many one last with you,

one last kiss,

one last hug,

one last meal.

They will amount to forever.

To lose someone great,

this parallel analogy to losing someone you love,

will never match up.

To have waves of “we could’ve been” retreating and surging,

and have a barren soul with an aching longing between chambers.

This is the kind of bitterness I had a taste of.

To have wailing dry eyes,

parched lips,

hunger pangs with a fading appetite.

Embarking on this someone great loss,

is the kind I see myself with two minuscule whites,

that I have no prescription for.

Gone are the romanticised drunkard wildness and tobacco savour,

losing someone great is a new kind of glare.

The one where you hold pockets of supercuts,

worthy polaroids hanging while waiting,

and the pills you choked on,

with a smothering conflict.

Losing someone great,

reliving how great they made you.

This will be your trace,

when the nights flashed to mornings,

this sobered version of me is your legacy.

If Only

If only things were different.

If only we are just a couple years apart.

If only I was more mature.

If only you were younger.

If only the cold splash of reality never hit, things would be so different.

For many months I had lost my flair for writing,

and here I am back to ground zero.

Found my muse again in this mountain of ‘if only’s.

I think there should always be a certain number of times we could mull over the unknown,

drawing up scenarios of different variables for the perfect fairytale ending.

To deal with my first ticket of mutual farewells,

this ride had been a rollercoaster of stories with different perfect endings.

But yet the gripping reality has seized me by my neck,

and here lies another scribbled draft with no whimsical end.

Say five years from now,

if only you were single,

if only I were single,

maybe we can pick up the typewriter and finally write a story with no wonderment of the bizarre future.

This will be the last if only I will hold on to,

should we find time in its allocated slot,

these sighs of woes would vanish into wisps of smoke,

and in this fog would be our fairytale ending.

Tragedy

Is this how my days would burn by? 

Going about every day doing the same old shit, 

feeling the same old things. 

Perhaps an occasional pain and heartfelt talks,

a single tear that took a second to dry. 

I know deep within me, 

how capable my pain was but it had gone into hiding. 

I laughed, 

what could be so possibly traumatising for affliction to cower under the face of fear,

trembling under the darkness of my flesh and bones?

I looked out the window and somehow, 

this solitude isn’t eating me up,

neither does it mock me,

it gazes upon my silhouette and I heard her tell me:

You are no better than me. 

I laughed

again, 

for a writer who writes tragedies for stories, 

who mourns for the hearts in graves, 

who hears the tears,

who sees death rotting at their bones, 

and lets her words thrive in the ache of others. 

Is this my karma? 

Having pain as my daily meals, 

calamities for my dessert, 

are these the wounds I have sustained,

for me to be on anaesthetic every day? 

I write tragedies, 

tell me about your story, 

we trade hearts over a couple of drinks, 

I wear your heart for the few throbbing hours, 

and I pen it all down for you to come alive,

while my soul crawled to the edge of the cliff.

So it seems, 

I have thrown myself off, 

because now I am a writer who is mute, 

whose words no longer gnaw at the reader’s heartstrings,

I am now a writer who writes empty shells. 

Dear K

So what is the truth in our narrative? 

You tell your friends I come and go as I please to get your fleeting attention. 

I tell my friends you used my kindness to have control over my body. 

I think we are both tired in this fiction. Tired of the lies, the vanishing, the sideline characters. I think we are tired of the games and the manipulation.

I think we are tired of each other but we are afraid to let go because we could not envision our lives without the presence of us. 

Our story is always going to haunt us wherever we go.

You tell your future partners how easy it was for me to come and go as I please. You tell them I am a psychopath and I am crazy and I drive you mad. 

You tell them my exits were the opening statement and the punchline was me coming back. 

I tell mine how emotionally draining you were, how you could never let me go no matter how hard I tried. I tell them about your side chicks and the games we played just to provoke each other to make the first move. 

I tell them I gave all I had for a relationship that was not even a relationship. 

So what is the vulnerable truth we could barely see? 

The time that never matched up or the fact that my feelings were clear as glass and you saw the opportunities for your flesh? 

Maybe it is the times you garnered your courage to ask me on a date but I ended up leaving or the fact that I left because the ones you asked first was never me? 

But you know the truth is clear as day. 

In this narrative, we are both psychopaths desperately trying to fix a piece of ourselves we could barely comprehend. 

You let the historical walls of your memories haunt you while I tried to compensate for my shortcomings in an old relationship. 

and so here we are. 

Constantly caught in the same cycle, a highly dependant relationship.

You needed an emotional support, I am eight digits away. You needed someone to satisfy your burning lust, I am eight digits away.  You needed just a companion to fill your passing time, I am still eight digits away. 

I wanted to feel I am doing enough, you called. I wanted to make sure I was not neglecting you, you called. I wanted to be the kind of person who loved unconditionally and you never failed to pick up the phone. 

Somewhere along these vaguely coloured lines, we mistook this dependancy for love. We stumbled into the grey areas and forcefully pushed ourselves just to feel the part of us we lost. 

But we knew how badly it ached. I watched you cry and my friends watched me cry. I would never let a tear drop in front of you because I had to be your pillar while you were on the floor trying to pick up your own pieces. 

When I met you I was barely healing from a broken relationship.

When you met me, you were already riddled with wounds. 

In this savage dysfunction, the story of us was already fractured before it even started. 

So who is to blame? 

Having one girl for the night is never enough or my erratic assumptions that I was never enough? 

Answer me this: If you really liked me, why would there be room for someone else? 

So who is the liar in this narrative? 

My exaggerated version of truth or your melancholic side of it?

But now I had broken out of this cycle and I am moving on to the next season of my life. Are you going to continue weeping and be blinded by the darkness of your own vision?

The world is your stage K, and your audiences in your narrative never told you the hideous side of your performance.  

 

Universal

English is a universal language and somehow it never tied with my soul.

In the wee hours of the morning, I have no recollection of English letters formulating in my heart.

In the wee hours of the morning all I heard were the melancholic voices of the singers who bore the remanence of their own heartaches in a language beyond the universal language of English.

In its own simply complicated form, these tiny little characters painted a masterpiece that stood gloriously in the hallway of heart breaks.

Perhaps for some people they take a little boat ride down the murky rivers, rowing through the tenebrous water bodies as they lay in silence.

Pause.

This silence is no longer deafening.

I would think maybe this language that forged the bonds with many of the posts  I had written on these digital walls would keep my fortress steady.

Bullshit.

In a language I call closer to home I learnt what it meant to be closer to the ebony soul, taking a little voyage deeper into the well and if you get too close to the edge you end up falling.

Tie us together chamber by chamber, in a language that had sustained me for almost my entire life, here I bask in the tranquility of a foreign character that had paved a path edging me closer to a destination away from the world.

小心，

害怕走太远又看到你那熟悉的背影，

害怕走太远就永远走不出你的手掌。

好可恶，

幸福太短了。。。

Dead Rabbit

Existence is a pain. 

They say when a writer yields the pen, 

the waterfalls of their agony cascades,

years of terrors unleashed upon their lives morphing into letters,

and for some they sit at the flatly lit corner of their room,

hunched backs and exasperated sighs. 

I wonder how true it is that writers write their own pain. 

Maybe for some they lay awake in the cold allure of the night,

watching the moon orbit round the clock as their nights gently eased into a new day.

Maybe for some they lay in waiting for the candle to extinguish itself.

Existence is a pain,

as though it seems, 

while many spend their nights taunted by their haunting dreams,

while others obscured by their own solitude,

there goes the writer sitting in the musky silence with a glass of whiskey in her hand. 

Her fingers clutching on to the delicate body of the glass,

watching the swirls of whiskey pass their seconds by,

wondering when will her body catch up with the corpse of her soul. 

Existence is a pain, 

a couple more dead rabbit-

and you will be fine. 

Just watch the world pass you by while you lay in the thundering darkness,

letting the burn ease down your throat and into your gut,

while your fingers clutched on to the rims of the cup. 

You can hear it, 

the sound of the hands ticking,

the muffled screams drifting through the air,

and you can see it,

the aching soul behind the eyes of your own. 

Just a few more glasses,

you will not let such an exquisite brand go to waste would you? 

Twisting the cap and tipping the bottle over, 

just a few more and by the break of dawn,

you will be the dead rabbit. 

5 love language- V

red satin ribbons,
cherry scented boxes,
this was our last straw,
and your materialism,
the very last of it all. 

if it was not aesthetic,
it was not the perfect fix. 

Receiving gifts—
the best present was your presence,
my desire comes from your seconds,
and my heart only asks for your embrace.
these were the only things I took as gifts.

Receiving gifts:
your definition:
the extravagant parties,
huge crowds and pretty little outfits,
dressed to the nines.
wine for the lines,
and perhaps a light for the crowd.

an elitist carefully masked under layers,
I never made it to the gram,
so I was not the one in your hands.

while she fit your definitions,
and being with me called for alterations,
you made a choice,
you chose decorative,
over the genuine.

still—
this truth would be a stab,
you did not have to cry a lie,
so I could shrivel,
and you could live guiltless with her.

you are a glass, honey.
I see you you.