THE GLASS PANE

Chilling to the bones

2011-05-23T02:23:00.001+08:00

2011-05-22T01:14:00.001+08:00

because you don't love me back

Rosemary Chicken Sandwich

2011-02-18T16:52:00.003+08:00

I didn't know what I felt anymore. The strain of watching him fall apart left me numb, and by the third week of August I was walking around in a trance. The only thing that mattered to me at that point was to keep up an impassive front. No tears, no bouts of despair, no lapses of will. I exuded hope and confidence, but inwardly I must have known how impossible the situation really was. This was not brought home to me until the very end, however, and I learned it only in the most roundabout way. I had gone into a diner for a late-night supper. One of the specials that evening happened to be chicken pot pie, a dish I had not eaten since I was a small boy, perhaps not since the days when I was still living with my mother. The moment I read those words on the menu, I knew that no other food would do for me that night. I gave my order to the waitress, and for the next three or four minutes I sat there remembering the apartment in Boston where my mother and I had lived, seeing for the first time in years the tiny kitchen table where the two of us had eaten our meals together. Then the waitress came back and told me they were out of chicken pot pies. It was nothing at all, of course. In the large scheme of things, it was a mere speck of dust, an infinitesimal crumb of antimatter, and yet I suddenly felt as though the roof had caved in on me. There were no more chicken pot pies. If someone had told me an earthquake had just killed twenty thousand people in California, I would not have been more upset than I was at that moment. I actually felt tears forming in my eyes, and it was only then, sitting in that diner and wrestling with my disappointment, that I understood how fragile my world had become. The egg was slipping through my fingers, and sooner or later it was bound to drop.

-Moon Palace, Paul Auster

words that came at 2:03PM

2010-11-30T13:58:00.004+08:00

she caught too many fish
the fish that she caught swam away
she dropped her net into the water
everyone caught fish except her

2010-11-14T01:25:00.005+08:00

the day was celebrated with a new toothbrush
and a toilet bowl choked with tissue paper.

back to the old of sleeping in the living room with slow films running.
staring into empty spaces, we do not die.

along the way, we forget how to.

2010-10-31T01:48:00.000+08:00

I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier ‘til this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.

-Virginia Woolf

2010-10-27T16:53:00.008+08:00

Thanks to Operation Memory, each of us woke up in a different bed
Or coffin, with a different partner beside him, in the middle
Of a war that had never been declared. No one had time to load
His weapon or see to any of the dozen essential jobs
Preceding combat duty. And there I was, dodging bullets, merely one
In a million whose lucky number had come up. When

It happened, I was asleep in bed, and when I woke up,
It was over: I was 38, on the brink of middle age,
A succession of stupid jobs behind me, a loaded gun on my lap.


Excerpt from Operation Memory, David Lehman

2010-10-20T17:07:00.000+08:00

She Thinks of Him on Her Birthday

It's still winter,
and still I don't know you
anymore, and you don't know

me. But this morning I stand
in the kitchen with the illusion,
peeling a clementine. Each piece

snaps like the nickname for a girl,
the tinny bite it was
to be one once. Again I count

your daughters and find myself in the middle,
the waist of the hourglass,
endlessly passed through and passed through

but holding nothing, dismayed
by the grubby February sun
I was born under and the cheap pleasure

it gives the window. Yet I raise the shade
for it, and try not to feel it is wrong
to want spring, to be a season

further from you -- not wrong to wish
for a hard rain, a hard wind
like one we sat out in together
or came in from together.

-Deborah Garrison

2010-09-08T10:49:00.002+08:00

When it comes to having faith and hope, there must be no compromise.

The opposite of faith is not doubt, it's certainty.
-Anne Lamott

2010-09-05T15:16:00.001+08:00

2010-09-05T11:16:00.002+08:00

Where you are, right here and now, this is how bad stories end. But it's also how the best stories, begin.

Daddy

2010-09-04T10:54:00.000+08:00

You are the water that goes with my pills, the peeled prawns, the McMuffins sitting on the dining table, the long legs I can hardly keep up with, the hollowed back-view,

Draft

2010-06-24T00:07:00.015+08:00

23 December 2009

Dear,

Sitting by the library window, I wonder if writing can really keep me in touch with my feelings. How does the act of writing cross over from being a source of affliction to being a form of exorcism which is still not exactly a happy ending? This limited piece of writing skimmed over my mind, and only half-succeeds in presenting the surface residue. Feelings can be so hard to bear with, and it is a constant struggle to stumble from one day to the next. Sometimes I think there must be absolutely nothing in me that is basic or strong enough to carry on and an internal suicide occurs, episode after episode - something in me shuts down heavily.

Yesterday I was here too, and it was pouring through the clear glass pane. The panicking mynahs were swooping around in wild circles, trapped in a flurry of madness and not seeing the infinity of the sky that wraps them. It was frustratingly beautiful to watch, so much that I just had to take my eyes, and myself away from this window scene. So that I would not be possessed by a clutching fervor to break my head against the glass.

I had a thought: encircle the heart, never let it break. The heart should be circle-shaped, it will then keep running and never lose its tail. Somewhere along the way I must have forgotten how to write and how to love properly, with fears, without metaphors. Was it because of what you said -smiling wryly-, and in that chance I knew you would never understand my metaphors, even when they are built upon you and your hopelessly careless brick-foundation. Chips, knocks and scratches only add to the attraction.

Sinking amidst reports that are necessary due, to seek more urgent funding, writing has now become or had long became a necessary self-denial- a cooking up of a storm and punchy phrases for a meal that I myself have never attended. I am polishing utensils nervously and biting half-moon fingernails, having to think that my dishes will become convincingly real once I specify the right ingredients. Of believing that it is real when it is not yet real, so that it can then become real.

My dreams dissolve with this stirring of rain, the crashing flight of delirious mynahs, strictly heart-shaped hearts, __________________. Please stop tearing and start living. Is loneliness a feeling you get from other people? Is this thought already a sign of weakness? Even that assumes that loneliness is weakness, but who sets it that way?

Wake up, chin up.

I received the first in the mail

2010-06-24T00:02:00.027+08:00

March 2010

Dear,

I wonder where you are now, as you are reading this. 'What did you do today?' Many of them will always ask what you are doing, and are more concerned with the things that happened to you on the outside rather than the things that happen inside. Did you stumble through your door into the security of your impossibly messy room, only to find an envelope laid out on an unused surface which is hard to come by in this middle of these clutter. Will you remember the afternoon you had, putting up frames on the wall, and trying to work out an unbeatable combination of frames? There is no turning back once the holes are drilled, no room for regret in this squashed place with small walls. And when you are halfway through and sitting on your mattress, looking around, what should call then, but Mr Void knocking lightly at the door of your soul. Or more specifically, at the empty door frame of your soul?

Wait, and who decides that there shouldn't be a door; the few-minutes-ago self who wrote that very sentence and pinned it into an unchangeable ink and white-background reality, the self who sat there aching at the frames not yet up but supposedly secured with set-up spots of blankness on the walls, or the self who clings on impossibly tight to that bit breath of Destiny who is uncontrollable, and dishes out lemons and downpours to beings all around the globe?

To have pretty things, but not feel pretty. To be surrounded by what is called art and other clever designs, but left to drown in deepening pools of miscellaneous souls or someone's pocket that is filled with scarred stones. To have this warm corner to call your own, and to be washed away by a draft of lemon rain.

Of all the cards in this series, horrid-looking as they frankly are, I still believe they deserve to be mailed out and unwrapped by earnest fingers. This slogan on the front echoes deep, as deep as a coin that could not audibly stir the bottom of a well. A well in a forest that nobody knows of, that has trees that never grow old and do not not say a word. They merely ruffle their branches over your head and let one of their own green drift downwards to the feet, but not before capitalizing on this 'frozen in mid air' moment. A fishing line has been spun outwards, holding all things together, suspending this half-awake heart that is finally heading to a new place and choosing to not know that it is a breath closer to numbered days - one, second, next, a crinkle and a goodbye unsaid. Though you have already touched my toe once, for the first time.

It was yet another Sunday afternoon across the car-park shrouded in sunlight, and into her car. "This is a sad song," she says as it starts playing on the radio. Ahead of us, a single brown leaf happens to lose its footing and to tumble down from the same place it has been for its entire lifetime. The wind teases, as the leaf now dives to its death in play-pause-play stages, not unlike the stages we undergo in life. It is a pause for me right here, right now and it falls with silent bravado that arrests my self, which is sitting in that metal but transparent vehicle (I can be sprawled across the road watching the leaf, in another version) and another self is clenching my sides and not breathing, watching it die.

For in dying, it lived beautifully.

"Remember that."

Love,

2010-06-23T23:35:00.012+08:00

Dearest D,

I begin writing this not knowing what to say, but these words would tumble out of themselves as this pen staggers forward. Here I am, seated at the wooden dining table where I have spent many a rainy afternoon, and there you are, in an opposite time zone, softly stealing my nights when I am soaking and rinsing the sun in my sink. That is what I do when I step into the apartment, after dark and slipping myself out of my shoes, letting my eyes fall halfway- I wet those worn clothes, gather soapsuds and dip them once, twice and again in the running water. The toilet holds itself still, and breathes most quietly and respectfully as I go about my washing.

The air there must feel very different, though perhaps it is so only because we think it in our mind. Look for something there, a job, and stay on if you can. Sometimes this can be easier when it is unplanned for. Then, there will be no expiry dates or ink circles on the wall calendar. There will be no casual waiting for someone who has left to return, only to most definitely, leave again - one departure is enough, and so are the replays in the cogwheels of our memory. Which is worse or which is better - leaving or being left behind? The airport is divided into two sides, the cold and the colder. The massive glass panel that divides these two countries stays the warmest itself, and the panting hands on it bleeds some of the warmth as they perform a final goodbye, waving and then resting on the vulnerably naked yet sturdy surface. I do not mean to sound melancholic or morbid, I am putting this across very matter-of-factly, like how someone would announce to the kitchen that we've run out of eggs or that the water is boiling and the fire should be shut down. There is no need for breaking into dispute, no bubbling of internal turmoil.

I believe that you will take good care of yourself, and enjoy these stolen moments away from our occasionally heartbreaking city.
L you.

There are fortune cookie messages written and wrapped for you, or yous;

1. For the curious geographer in you, the traveling cafe singer.
2. For the woman in you, the serious tea-drinking woman.
3. For the sometimes sad soul, not in you. When there is no nearby Cedele.

2010-05-24T22:05:00.002+08:00

Consider these 2 stories. Which is closer to yours?

You wake up everyday and work from Monday to Friday, and often, Saturday too. If you finish work early, you and your partner go to your parents’ place for dinner and see your child for a few hours. If you work late, you buy a packet of char kway teow from the hawker centre but eat it at home because it’s too warm to eat there. You’re not crazy about the job but you know that if you keep at it, you can afford a car in 3 years’ time, and in 5 years’ time, buy a condo close to the primary school you want to send your kid to. Your conversations with people are either for the purpose of networking, work, or for familial obligations you cannot avoid. On weekends, you play golf with your friends at your country club or watch a movie with your partner. Once a year, you go on a ten day vacation to New York, London, or Paris, and when your children are big enough, Disneyland.

Alternatively, you wake up and you have no idea what is going to happen today, tomorrow, 6 months or a year later. Ironically, because of this uncertainty, all possibilities exist for you. You can be the Prime Minister of Singapore, you can make a movie, you can cook a meal you have never cooked before, eat at a place you have never eaten before, you can color your hair red, you can skip instead of walk, you can volunteer at the school you have always wanted to volunteer at, you can write a book, or you can have a baby even though you don’t have a maid. You have conversations with people who set your heart palpitating and your mind on fire. Your weekday is not so different from your weekend because everyday you are thinking, creating, and more important, imagining.

Full text here:
Paved With Good Intentions, by Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

2010-03-26T13:09:00.008+08:00

+The Land Between Here and Mountains

2010-03-17T23:20:00.003+08:00

God is the God of the unsuccessful- the God of those who have failed. Heaven is being filled with earth's broken lives, and there is no "bruised reed" (Isa 42:3) that Christ cannot take and restore to a glorious place of blessing and beauty. He can take a life crushed by pain or sorrow and make it a harp whose music will be total praise. He can lift earth's saddest failure up to heaven's glory.

J. R. Miller, Streams in the Desert

2010-03-13T23:07:00.001+08:00

"You were much more muchier (then)...You've lost your muchness."

2010-03-05T00:46:00.000+08:00

2010-03-02T16:27:00.015+08:00

Here with a desktop telephone, a glass of water, two cellphones, a journal, a laptop, headphones and a pencil- I have everything I need to keep me here, but nothing at all.

Something is too still, too stagnant.

Until the touch of raindrops on flesh, I have forgotten that I have a window behind me. It started pouring without warning and I leave my wooden table, feet clambering all over the floor, to shut the windows shut the windows. And to let in the rain. Back at the table with the objects laid out, strangely senile and oddly smiling, I realize I have now nothing but something in all, something small in a seed.

Sunset Way in late 2009, twilight

2010-02-19T19:54:00.001+08:00

Malacca, October 25th 2009

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day.  Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel.  None of these will bring disaster.

One Art, Elizabeth Bishop

2010-02-18T23:17:00.003+08:00

The quiet fear, that came nearer to the surface now as she scanned the pages- she was in the "Salads" section- was that this thing, this refusal of her mouth to eat, was malignant; that it would spread; that slowly the circle now dividing the non-devourable from the devourable world become smaller and smaller, that the objects available to her would be excluded one by one.
-The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood

2010-02-07T02:01:00.002+08:00

You're the first, the last and the 'right now'.

2010-02-05T23:40:00.001+08:00

and she is utterly convinced that everything she touches turns into dust

2010-02-05T18:41:00.000+08:00

we talked about you, we doubled the dosage.

2009-12-26T13:54:00.002+08:00

carries a lot of suitcases but all of them are empty because she's expecting to completely fill them with life by the end of this trip & then she'll come home & sort everything out & do it all again

storypeople

2009-12-26T13:41:00.000+08:00

How many people can you love before it's too much? she said & I said I didn't think there was any real limit as long as you didn't care if they loved you back.

storypeople

lift yourself up

2009-12-26T12:01:00.003+08:00

It is heartbreaking to listen to a child crying over the phone for an hour. Instead of feeling sad and helpless about it, what could have been done? What is the best that can come out of a situation as such? It is always about the doing, the stuff you got to strut, there is no feeling. The blues are bad. If it is negative energy, it must be swept under the rug.
Even this is a feeling that should be deleted.

2009-12-24T12:15:00.006+08:00

We were poor, struggling. Climbing walls that fall, stirring buckets of paint with chopsticks. Surely someday we will see that we were having the time of our lives, and all the ladders we had, had only taken us higher.

2009-11-25T00:49:00.000+08:00

Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
'Pooh?' he whispered.
'Yes, Piglet?'
'Nothing,' said Piglet, taking Pooh's hand. 'I just wanted to be sure of you.'

2009-11-09T21:12:00.002+08:00

It is strange. The unreality of it seems to enter one's real life, penetrate into the bones, and make the very heartbeats pulsate illusions through the arteries. One's will becomes the slave of hallucinations, responds only to shadowy impulses, waits on imagination alone. A strange state, a trying experience, a kind of fiery trial of untruthfulness. And one goes through it with an exaltation as false as all the rest of it. One goes through it, -- and there's nothing to show at the end. Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!

-- Joseph Conrad, "To E. L. Sanderson" ( 1899 )²

2009-10-27T23:31:00.000+08:00

午夜的兩點半
我走不進夢鄉
時間在逃亡
悲傷還在原地方

2009-10-11T01:30:00.001+08:00

If you turn up tonight, my life will not change.
If you don't turn up tonight, my life will not change.

this is for my soul sister.

2009-06-28T12:46:00.001+08:00

2009-05-04T01:30:00.005+08:00

For now I think I've ran out of affinity with this occasionally heartbreaking city.
Or patience, to be less romantic.

Proust says, the only possible paradises are those we have lost.

I did not roll my film properly.

2009-04-23T18:46:00.003+08:00

And if the snow buries my,
my neighborhood.
And if my parents are crying
then I'll dig a tunnel
from my window to yours,
yeah a tunnel from my window to yours.

You climb out the chimney and meet me in the middle,
the middle of the town.
And since there's no one else around,
we let our hair grow long
and forget all we used to know,
then our skin gets thicker
from living out in the snow.

You change all the lead
sleeping in my head,
as the day grows dim I hear you sing a golden hymn.

Then we tried to name our babies
but we forgot all the names that,
the names we used to know.

But sometimes, we remember our bedrooms,
and our parents' bedrooms,
and the bedrooms of our friends.

-Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) by Arcade Fire

2009-04-23T02:02:00.003+08:00

fffound

'There is no use trying,' said Alice, 'One can't believe impossible things.'
'I dare say you haven't had much practice,' said the queen, 'When I was your age, I always did it for a half hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'

-Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There

2009-04-14T10:49:00.000+08:00

+source

if we're back to sixteen.

2009-04-14T10:22:00.002+08:00

2009-04-14T10:12:00.006+08:00

In our younger days, we named some boys in school after different parts of a house.
I liked Attic, because he had floppy rooftop hair.

2009-04-14T10:00:00.006+08:00

"What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs."
-Matthew 10:27

2009-04-14T09:45:00.002+08:00

Flawed is her vision, her awkwardness. Her face has blemished, she hardly brushes her hair. She is not conventionally pretty, although to me she is beautiful.
-The Crow and the Crab

2009-04-14T09:03:00.005+08:00

My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.

-Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

half-focus

2009-04-14T08:12:00.016+08:00

i am giving you homework to do
rub a red bean over your lips

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

-Jack Kerouac

The Horse Hospital

2009-04-14T07:42:00.010+08:00

Umfeld- A walking rainbow, Magnum photographers, "let's knit a pony!", cobbled streets, five stacked hats, teacakes, the drifter and the gypsy, a teapot with knitwear, paper-boat hat, ladder with lights, the Norwegian woods, clowns and portraits, "because i like it".

+source

I see monsters

2009-04-12T01:08:00.004+08:00

studded

2009-04-12T01:01:00.001+08:00

So much, yet so little.

2009-04-06T18:38:00.002+08:00

It is as impossible as needless to set down the innumerable crowd of thoughts that whirled through that great thoroughfare of the brain, the memory, in this night's time.

-Robinson Crusoe, Defoe

notes to mark my days:

2009-04-06T15:02:00.004+08:00

a. my days are a train through a tunnel
b. as long as we are in the same city
c. my love for strangers because they can amount to anything yet nothing
d. the perfect fantasy game
e. may you go with the sweetest dreams
f. downstairs light turns into upstairs light, playground lover it is bedtime
g. for we are only just too mortal
h. we were once, we-were-onces
i. life is too short, y is yes and n is no
j. balloons clouding my ceiling, the sky is here
k. this giant seashell on my living-room ceiling
l. when i touch your denim knee spot, our souls meet
m. smashed stained glass at the bottom of my mirror, it has been a month
n. heart it races
o. exquisite disaster
p. golden spot on my finger joint
q. i hear my heartbeat when i cover my ears
r. this man with three yellow balloons, let go and they will let you fly
s. courage, she said. courage, she repeated.
t. we are greater than we know
u. do not look at me with love, its placeable gestures
v. i eat sugar before bedtime so i can taste something saccharine sweet in my sleep
w. camisoles and garlic toast
x. yelling through the collapsing roof-- i know i know and i roll back to my dreams
y. rain slicked roads
z. stirring my tea, a spoon in the sink

2009-04-06T02:49:00.001+08:00

"If dreams and images in our head make up a human, I think he/she will come out to say thank you, for making me as real as can be."

-MAV

2009-04-05T00:03:00.003+08:00

The little sister we lost, let us set the table for seven, you left too soon, come back oh you will never be.

2009-04-01T22:07:00.003+08:00

Georges Seurat.
Gray Weather, La Grande Jatte.
1888. Oil on canvas.

Flash- instant of time or of dream without time; inordinately swollen atoms of a bond, a vision, a shiver, a yet formless, unnameable embryo. Epiphanies. Photos of what is not yet visible and that language necessarily skims over from afar, allusively. Words that are always too distant, too abstract for this underground swarming of seconds, folding in unimaginable spaces. Writing them down is an ordeal of discourse, like love. What is loving, for a woman, the same thing as writing. Laugh. Impossible. Flash on the unnameable, weavings of abstractions to be torn. Let a body venture at last out of its shelter, take a chance with meaning under a veil of words. Word flesh. From one to the other, eternally, broken up visions, metaphors of the invisible.

-Stabat Mater

2009-04-01T22:00:00.001+08:00

Are dreams better dreams when they remain as dreams?

Closure

2009-03-31T16:28:00.001+08:00

A Lesson Taken.

2009-03-30T18:49:00.006+08:00

One night,

riding pillion on a friend's bike (read: bicycle, not motorbike- snort) I think I almost know what romance is. Disgustingly sweet. Hanging on for your dear life, ambushed with the possibility of crashing and dying together. Cruising through deserted roads, adorned with glowing orange streetlights. A thickened silence when we pass by a row of trees daintily decorated with Christmas lights. The cool metal cutting through my skin and bones. Getting stalled in the middle of the road, surrounded by cars on both sides, going nowhere while the green man’s walking faster and faster. Laughing and shrieking, when he swerves left and right and pretends to almost crash into a wall.

And when it was time to get off, for a second I could not remember how to walk.

Crippling insanity.

Sick sweet roses.

When ten minutes feels like an hour.

Hair

2009-03-30T18:37:00.006+08:00

A Walking Slumber

2009-03-30T18:17:00.006+08:00

I am walking, I am searching. What I find or do not receive does not matter.

The warm presence that gathered my stray hairs into a ponytail while I’m concentrating on finishing my porridge, the hand that held a sugar doughnut peeping in through the windowsill - everything blends into the air, bound with a fragility that permeates through my being as I stroll past the playground. This, so thin it could possibly break. Kids, making merry in their untucked school uniforms, carelessly carefree.

I remember another day of visiting old ghosts, when I returned to the old church building for the first time in a long time, and when we played basketball together again, after so many years.

The two oil drops in my spoon are wobbling, they must be cold but I will keep my gaze.

This is really touch-and-go, it does not do justice but I have places to go and ticks to make on my list. All these letters I wrote beginning with Dearest, I am sending all my memories and moments tucked inside these fragments of paper, I am counting on someone to help me remember, help me never to forget too much. And someday we will sit together to remember, and never go away.

2:00 A.M., I wake to rain, apartments dark where other travelers sleep.

-li-young lee’s the winged seed

Saxophone

2009-03-25T14:36:00.005+08:00

And its soul.

2009-03-15T01:02:00.004+08:00

each time you light a cigarette from a candle

a sailor fails to return home from sea.

Photographer: Bruce Davidson

you made my day(:

2009-03-14T01:51:00.000+08:00

"I think I had more confidence because you encouraged me."

2009-01-29T17:47:00.004+08:00

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities trans. William Weaver

2009-01-17T14:11:00.001+08:00

So I cleaned up those chocolate chip cookie crumbs.
Because I was angry looking at them.
I'm sorry.

2009-01-01T19:06:00.007+08:00

Image: The Selby

Packing bags and leaving in a huff..

why not do something about the baggage?

Night high.

2008-12-18T11:42:00.003+08:00

5 ladies, 1 car and a great deal of laughter and madness. To the extent that I had to do a cockroach laugh.

On a sidenote and for memento's sake, here's also what we picked up at Holland Village;

i. Olive Theory
ii. Love Language Theory
iii. Substitute Theory
iv. Proxy Theory
v. New Carpet Theory

2008-12-07T20:03:00.002+08:00

A holiday goes missing if I don't sit by the window and read my maps.

2008-12-04T00:43:00.001+08:00

And when i see you

I really see you upside down

But my brain knows better

It picks you up and turns you around

-A Lack of Colour, Death Cab For Cutie

how to make you real

2008-12-02T20:52:00.005+08:00

Out of a scrap of paper I chanced upon:

I want

to love you simply,

without fear, without metaphor,

but it is difficult

in English.

It is difficult to imagine how we are

together,

gecko to the other in the permeable

air.

You live in me,

outside me.

- Rindu, by Isabela Banzon

Bon Voyage Johanna!

2008-12-02T15:28:00.000+08:00

2008-11-29T00:07:00.001+08:00

This sky
Where we live
Is no place to lose your wings
So love, love
Love

-Hafiz

"to want, to want and not to have"

2008-11-21T09:30:00.013+08:00

toothbrushes all over the country
just one of those lips
it could be something i ate
an abashed affliction
plunging under blanketed limbs

a missing cup
says one cannot touch an epiphany
with words
words alone
shall chase this forest
you are running in
chimney smoke clouds as
i sit and sew your dreams
at the edge of your forest

Image credit: Denise Grunstein

why I am unable to submit my papers:

2008-11-20T04:54:00.003+08:00

1. The zombies next door really attacked me.
2. I choked on my Macs breakfast by swallowing an entire hotcake.
3. My coffee can knocked me into concussion.
4. A troop of giant insects ate up my laptop.
5. I would rather get on with this, hit a hundred reasons and attain Nirvana.

Why, Villager says- because that's the difference between them n'us.

2008-11-20T00:11:00.006+08:00

one hour with you can last me a year

Image credit: myfolklover

Hy-phen

2008-11-19T16:53:00.008+08:00

As I sit here, this line whips across my mind 'For the greatest man there would be an unnoticed and necessary someone right alongside' (note that 'greatest' is subjective) I went wow and almost immediately I felt like hurling myself out of the half-blinking rain-slicked window pane and throttling all way down in a massive blur of canary yellow which chirps of the building's happy-exterior. Right-o-down, what a ride it would be, that would take me with a bump next to the Waffle Shop.

No, I am now not suicidal. But does that mean I believe in flying?

I would be lying if I said I do not enjoy flying and its immobile exhilaration.

Tell me it is just the allure of the full-length! glass windows. Or the effortless freedom of the black crow outside with its beak-up-in-the-air, slobbering at me slaving over my papers.

Chugging churning 5000 words.

Maybe that means I am a subconsciously repressed woman, what a chuckle. Perhaps Daryl could shed some light on this? What is repression?

In reflex, I think I have messed up my oceans. Oceans apart, in their separate basins of tears and deep-dark creatures, ought not be conjoined. But oceans aside, it is this faded yet sustaining little rowboat which sits snugly in any ocean, meandering rivers and even my bathtub. It's best friends with Rubber Duck.

"You and your metaphors", someone would say wryly.

Once, on the way home after a medium-rare trip of muted days and nights-so-cold, my driving dad said: You will give your sweat and your hours to the world, you may have to smile along when everyone is smiling. But there is one thing that the world can never take from you, your heart.

It is still the same, swimming above buildings and flying underwater.

a thousand oceans to sail you home.

2008-11-17T18:07:00.003+08:00

C says: Don't ever give up, fight the good fight.

my Superman, my Superglue.

2008-11-17T13:43:00.004+08:00

"And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work."

2 Corinthians 9:8

I don't care if she is a tape dispenser. I still love her.

2008-11-14T20:48:00.001+08:00

2008-11-14T20:40:00.002+08:00

waterfest'08

Never leave a single inessential thing in your boat.

Not all who wander are lost.

2008-11-14T11:16:00.005+08:00

On Tennessee Williams:

"It is lost souls that preoccupy him, the people whose sensitivity condemns them to total disappointment. The rude bluffness of living which destroys them is the same harshness that hurts or toughens everybody."

This is for some of you out there, you who live in these echoing lines.

There may be smoke in your eyes, but the windmill turns all the same. The reds will grow silent, the blues will go weary, the greys will fade, the blacks will fall into a whisper, the whites will just be- all things come to pass.

Go with peace, a day at a stride.

'Muser'

2008-10-23T01:04:00.001+08:00

you made me a mermaid for a day:)

red apples like heart

2008-10-20T15:40:00.004+08:00

Image credit: shawn

-

2008-10-17T00:47:00.002+08:00

see you tomorrow
but i don't have a picture
now
i ran out
of pictures
of tomorrows

monster

2008-10-17T00:01:00.004+08:00

who ever taught me that crying on buses is not allowed?

Timeless

2008-09-28T16:07:00.001+08:00

"And surely I am with you always,

to the very end of the age."

Matt 28:2

Endlessness

2008-09-28T15:59:00.004+08:00

"All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full."

" When I am awake,

I am still with You."

A Doll's House.

2008-09-28T15:26:00.002+08:00

A Pinhole Telephone.

2008-09-26T01:21:00.005+08:00

image by steven meisel

For myself, unreconstructed as I am, I'd rather hold you in my arms and walk through the damp of a real English meadow in real English rain. I'd rather travel across the world to have you with me than lie at home dialing your telepresence.

-Written on the Body, Winterson

I've always believed in water therapy.

2008-09-26T00:09:00.002+08:00

nacho alegre

Falling, no.

2008-09-25T00:48:00.005+08:00

(Just a self-reminder for a restless night ahead.)

When the moth flew straight into the flame and a fluttering death, did it question where it would rather be? Perhaps it was the light- too white to be seen.

It blinded the moth.

endless distances

2008-09-11T02:42:00.004+08:00

Margeret Atwood--

To believe beyond.

"The one word that will protect you from the grief at the center of your dream, from the grief at the centre."

To be.

"I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary."

:)

2008-09-02T12:03:00.001+08:00

i realised that happiness can be a simple thing.
when everyone's happy, i am too.

it got me smiling on the way home.

Any Other Ending

2008-08-20T18:07:00.003+08:00

Teasing,
you laugh-
making way for a full stop
to fall into place.

Teasing,
you laugh.
Making way for a full stop
to fall into place,

Holidays Hangover

2008-08-19T00:00:00.001+08:00

-a dosage of basketball:)

Ghazal of Oblivion

2008-08-18T18:59:00.016+08:00

by Alfian Sa'at

When the blind are lonely do we lend them our mirrors?
If only we would vanish when the lamps are turned on.

To wake up is to break these cobwebs on our bodies
And to stay awake is to spin them all over again.

I wish to fall over and over, losing every contact with the world.
Even drowning is to be intimate with the skinlessness of water.

How many people can you pray for before you lose count?
In the candle's aura only the fervent loneliness of your lips.

Darkness is what I ask for, where my breathing becomes familiar
In harsh light the shadows keep dancing with the restless sundials.

Alfian, remember that pale dawn after a night at the playground?
You brushed sand off your body as if you were a cracked hourglass.

From my first roll-

(mx)

2008-08-18T01:11:00.001+08:00

"It never changes,
when the groom lifts the veil, when the bride accepts the ring, the possibilities you see in their eyes, it's the same around the world. They truly believe their love and their marriage is going to break all the records."

In forgetting, we remember.

2008-07-28T21:35:00.003+08:00

I think I've memorised that back-view of yours

Maybe is a Dirty Word

2008-07-27T17:36:00.010+08:00

by colin cheong

You may be right
to not decide
to withhold your 'yes'
and save your 'no'
keeping options open
keeping love in hope
keeping guilt in doubt
keeping commitment at arm's length
but still within your grasp.

Your hand is soft
your head is hard

your heart is harder

fever

2008-05-07T08:14:00.013+08:00

in between all the runaways and replays,
sunfalls and jugs of milk,
and half head way out of a closet of substitutes,
the screwy skeptic thinks i need you today

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
John Singer Sargent, 1885-1886

they played in the rain

2008-05-02T17:48:00.015+08:00

although they had examinations the very next day.

(Photographs taken by Old Man Charles)

the rain washes the whole world away

my day

2008-05-02T01:02:00.003+08:00

- goosefeathers
- damning romantic rescues
- 曹格's 沉默玩具
- justice notes
- "if you're a bird, i'm a bird"
- instrument of peace
- grey, hollowed stone
- Kierkegaard-Olsen
- b's bruised tangyuan
- weepy tea, watered down