Re-runs
Due to this happy little accident, I had to delve through my 'Edit your pages' archives to salvage my creative-type pieces, and saved them, html-codes and all, into a Word (TM ad nauseum) file. Sorry for inflicting these re-hashes on you again, but I just thought I'd group them all into one html-friendly page, for future reference (particularly since I'm so creativity-deficient these days)
Tempted
I am tempted to
Tear down all these pedestals
Where we place ourselves
2.
I am tempted to
Force us to reconstruct all
Thought and emotion
3.
I am tempted to
See us from different planes
Different angles
4.
I am tempted to
But I know I never will
And think, never shall
Little Tales
So this is what it feels like
to be the Scarecrow
with a head filled with sawdust.
So this is what it feels like
to be the Lion
with a carcass for a heart.
So this is what it feels like
to be the Tin Man
with a body that creaks and stumbles.
So this is what it feels like
to be the Little Girl
with an innocence lost.
So this is what it feels like.
And they tell me
There are no happy endings
Barter, no?
Hey mister,
can i buy your thoughts?
i can't seem to find mine.
Would a penny do
or my own brand of infinity?
Or would you prefer
a barter kind of thing
my soul for yours?
i thought not.
Definitions
To juxtapose
is to put things
side by side.
pros cons
here there
us them
To be ironic
is to speak in
opposites.
saying you instead of i
hello when you mean
goodbye
A paradox
is to be absurd
while telling
truths.
the jester adopts
chivalry
promises eternity
What are you
trying to
tell me?
--------------------
I like to rhyme. Too bad rhyming doesn't like me.
Exit Sandman
Oh come now, my Morpheus,
Come to my bed,
Give me a dream
or a tale that you've read.
Oh hush now, my Morpheus,
Stop teasing me so,
Lend me your breath
and don't let me go.
Oh hurry now, my Morpheus,
Chase my demons away,
I want to look at myself
in the cold light of day.
Oh please now, my Morpheus,
Won't you come to me once more,
With that glint in your eye
as you break down my door.
Now then, my Morpheus,
One vow will I make,
Then your charms will be mine
your dreams will I take.
Archetypal Gossip
They sing songs about you, you know
Paeans and dirges, some good,
others bad,
nauseatingly so.
Extolling your wit, charm, grace, beauty
I could go on, but that would be
redundant.
They call you names, you know
Like Helen or Cleopatra, all those
sisters under flawless
skins.
Pedestals are built,
each one more grandiose
than the last,
only for you to
trample,
each one more carelessly
than the last.
They kill or be killed for you, you know
In agonies of rapture, for just one, swift
lick
from your blue-flame eyes.
To have you wrap them
around one perfectly manicured
little finger,
Play walk-the-dog, or any of those
tricks you have
up your immaculate sleeve.
They become cannibals for you, you know
You prise their hearts out, with
surgical precision.
Feed it to them, with a
side-order of pride, and a
lemon dressing, very
nouvelle fusion chic.
They become animals for you, you know.
Silver-tongued dogs, you keep them
as pets.
Laugh when you tickle, grin when you
spay, and when
they bore you, they don't come back
from the vet.
They think I know you, you know
Having seen our heads together, in
supposed confabulation.
I do apologise,
madam.
I never meant for them to
think that,
I talk far too much,
just as you said.
Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.
(Dream in Dream Country (The Sandman), Neil Gaiman)
The world can be vexing sometimes. Just as you are about to beat your breasts and rail at that cloak of ugliness we call reality, it chooses to provide you pale glimpses of its real self, like snatches of paradise from a latticed window. And you think, perhaps I shan’t talk of ugliness after all- ugliness is like a lie- the more it is talked about, the more it convinces itself that it is the complete truth.
Perhaps I shall tell you of reading a verse in a poem which made my skin tingle in tiny, delicious waves, all starting at the base of my spine and breaking at the top of my head. Perhaps this is what a snake feels like when it sheds its old skin for a brand new one, like shedding old lives for new.
Perhaps I shall tell you of seeing a glimpse of a ray of sunlight being filtered through a window and landing, softly, on a red brick wall. Perhaps this is why painters choose to paint, because even a thousand words would be insufficient to describe the way your eyes, pained by anger can be suddenly healed by the joy of that one dancing beam.
Perhaps I shall tell you of the sheer delight that is a baby’s gurgle, and the way your mouth wishes it had not forgotten to make that sound of complete mirth. Perhaps it is that sound which makes us forget the despair of a baby’s cry, and to remember instead the amount of possibilities contained in one chubby, little finger.
Perhaps I shall tell you of the utter contentment that is a cat’s purr, that deep rumble which is the epitome of satisfaction. Perhaps this is why cats are their own creatures you think, their contentment with life seems to lie solely within them. They don’t rely on dreams, or hope, or destiny, and you almost wish you could be a cat too. Then you think of dreams, of hope, of destiny.
Perhaps, it is the little things that matter after all.
Make me.
Go on I dare you
don't you want to?
Come on
You know you do.
Make me.
Turn me inside out
Scrape out all my fillings
lick the bowl clean
You know you want to.
Make me.
What're you waiting for?
sterilize my head
Scrub me out
You know you want me pure.
Make me.
Take me away from myself
replace my blood with
Novocaine
Balance my damned aura
You know you want me calm.
Make me.
Go on I dare you
You really want to
well
You know you do.
--------------------
Not good. Not bad. Just mine.
--------------------
Why should I blame her
That she filled my days
With misery or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men violent ways
Or hurled the little streets upon the great
Had they but courage equal to desire.
W. B. Yeats, 'No Second Troy'
- I went to a talk on the destruction of evolutionary theory. Oh, my short attention span.
First Mammal to Wear Pants (Apologies to Pearl Jam)
Tell me
little Ape-man,
Who taught you
those little tricks?
Who taught you
to dance attendance
to the histrionic music
of my whims?
Who was she
that trainer from Vegas
with legs
reaching to your seventh
hell
of lustful delight?
Did she teach you
that wonderful Art
of whispering bittersweet nothings
in my bleeding
ear?
Your words like
delicate morsels
of stale oysters.
Who taught you
my little Ape-man
that trick you do at
parties
of looking at me
like there's no one else
While you do
every girl in the room?
--------------------
Confessionary
Forgive me
my little games
of hide-and-seek
when I make you count to
ten
while I run to conceal
me.
Forgive me
my little bursts
of tag
when I make you catch up
to the person I think
I am
and laugh
when you trip.
Forgive me
my little habits
of saying
only what you want
to hear
when what I wish to say
lies prone
in the ether.
Forgive me
my little white
lies
Before everything
we have
turns black.
--------------------
Life as we know it
Take one puppet
Tie with string
Make it feel as if it's dancing
to the beat of it's own
drum.
Take one puppet
Knot with dreams
Make it feel as if it's using
a mind of it's very
own.
Take one puppet
Glue with hope
Make it live as if the life it has
belongs to no one
else.
Take that puppet
Throw it on my
fire.
Let the strings dissolve
like melted fat.
Until it's nothing
Nothing
At all.
--------------------
Sometimes I feel as if I am walking along the thin and fragile line between hope and despair, and the defences I have put up in my mind threaten to give way, leaving me a weeping morass on a cold cement floor.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to abandon me, and take on some other skin, rip off the old one, and let the unreal me explode out of this shell I have carefully constructed over the years. With a scream that shall pierce the empty vessels of the heartless.
Sometimes I believe that there is really a wild side, and it is these times in which the barriers I have erected to protect my precepts threaten to crumble, and my heart wants to be to be torn out.
I once was able to see my emotions in terms of colour. I felt, and the walls dripped what I felt.
Anger was crimson.
Frustration was vermillion.
Despair the rust of clotted blood.
Red. Everywhere.
Red.
--------------------
Filing
In another world, another dimension, she would have been revered as a Super-Bureaucrat.
She hated surprises. Her whole life had been spent pre-empting the Unexpected News, the Shocking Result, the Surprise Party. She hated the feeling of lost control one felt after being caught unawares.
She liked control.
She became a dedicated compartmentalist.
Everything and everyone could be easily labelled to her- everyone she met she was confident she could instantly divide into patterns. Patterns which consisted of certain types- The Leader, the Follower, the Politician, the Nice Person, the Annoying Person, the Bimbo, the Intellectual. Occasionally, as with all equations, there would be anomalies, and even these she managed to solve.
She particularly liked labelling those who were convinced they were beyond stereotyping. They might have thought they were 'different', she thought, slyly smiling to herself (she could almost see the Cheshire Cat grin gradually taking shape inside the dark recesses of her mind), but she knew better. There was the Follower who Led, the Annoying Intellectual, the Boring Politician. As she grew older the permutations grew. She began to think that her system was fail-safe, protecting her from having to deal with the dreaded Unique Person.
Experiences too she neatly filed away. She watched elderly relatives like a hawk, imagining the moment that she would be told of their deaths. At her beloved grandmother's funeral, she was complimented on her stoicism. She was a Pillar of Strength, they said. Little did they know that she had cried after rehearsing the moment of her stricken grandmother's death a month earlier. No Horrible Shock for her.
She thought herself fearless, since she had conquered her one fear- the Unknown.
-----------------------------
When she was little, her favourite toy had been one of those plastic balls with geometric holes, into which corresponding pegs could be slotted. She would spend hours putting the right shapes into the right holes, feeling an odd sense of power each time she heard the sharp 'plop' as the shape fell into the ball. She would lay the little plastic shapes out neatly, slotting them in turn- first, the circle, then the square, then the star, and so on. There was never a random order to things. Occasionally, when she was feeling adventurous, she would reverse the order. Eventually, she began to play with her eyes closed, pretending she was blind (therefore practising for that particular eventuality- she was nothing if not efficient).
At school, she played by herself, having been bored by all the Types she had silently observed. There was the Bully, the Popular Girl, the Momma's Boy, the Girl Who Tried to Be Friends With Everyone But Ended Up Being Bullied- having learnt all she knew of everyone (or so she thought) she didn't see any reason get to know them.
------------------------------
Her childhood play-thing soon became a life-long obsession. She had decided that she didn't want to be a Type, so each time she felt she was falling into a particular hole, she changed her shape. Like playing with her favourite toy with her eyes shut, this was another innovation in her pattern. She swerved stereotypes, triumphant in the feeling that she was Unique, that no one could file her away.
Except herself.
She had become a Square Peg in a Round Hole of her own making.
--------------------------------------------------
Last Night
Last night
When you made me
Pluck that star
From the cold, unseeing
sky
I cupped it
in my thirsty, grasping fingers
Still heady from the memory
of you-
Remote, yet close
So very close
And I saw you.
All Good Things
All good things
Like all good love affairs
Said the spider to the fly
As she languorously devoured
his delectable heart
End in 'id-
Torrid...
Turgid...
Putrid...
"So really, darling"
A flawlessly manicured pincer
Stroking one delicious
artery at a time
"Can you blame me?"
I'm only doing
What nature does best.
--------------------------
I got the idea from here, which I got to in turn from here. The muse happened to be in for once, and I managed these whilst waiting for Mr Nads to pick me up from work, and then continued while he watched, of all things, 'Starship Troopers 2' (as if the first wasn't enough of a cinematic travesty!).
Granted, my muse mayn't be as good as some other people's, whose writings make me feel like hanging my keyboard at the sheer folly of me attempting to write, but at least I have one. And she visits. Occasionally.
1. He looked lovingly at the tiny ball of sunshine lying in his little brown paws. He caressed it gently, affection growing with each passing moment. Suddenly, it grew restless, and began to peck.
He panicked, and squeezed.
His first lesson in love: Don’t hold on too tightly, or too long.
2. She had laughed when this happened to others. She never imagined that her heart could be wrenched by something like this so easily, but the tear-drenched tissues lying forlornly on the table were proof of her vain hubris.
“Nevermore,” she thought, “never.”
“That’s the last time I watch a Hindi movie.”
3. Your eyes looked into mine, and I could see in their light brown pools our unborn children, the house in the suburbs, the MPV. I thought, “No, I don’t want this, I want to be free”.
Yet, “How do you feel?” I asked.
“Like I’m home.”
And so was I.
--------------------
Dedicated to MzMin, a Romance Novel Connoisseur par excellence
A cup of coffee. A foggy window-pane. And thou.
It doesn’t get any more clichéd than this, does it?
What’s missing would be the booths with the cracked vinyl chairs, the street-wise waitress with the heart of gold, the Wall Street-Madison Square types scurrying away from the rain into the sauna-like subway stations.
What’s missing is your hand clasping mine, as you look earnestly into my eyes, me in a cosy-yet-fashionable sweater and you in a black turtleneck and geek-chic glasses.
Except this isn’t New York.
Except this isn’t a Nora Ephron movie.
And I’m trying to exorcise the parts of you that are here, sodden tissue by crumpled sodden tissue.
One 2-ply Kleenex for your charmingly crooked teeth, the kinks in your hair, the little white scar that breaks your right eyebrow in two.
Another for that distinct smell that I thought only I could detect- cigarettes and Aramis and that other thing- let’s call it pheromones.
Yet another angry swipe at one reddened eye for all those times, the times when we spoke without voices, the times when we laughed at jokes other people never could and never would understand, the times that made me think – this could be it. You could be it.
Don’t worry, I’m saving a whole box for that last spiel you made- the infamous ‘It’s Not You It’s Me’ speech. No no, not because I was duped, not because you sounded so goddamned convincing, so earnest, that I truly believed that It Really Was You, Not Me.
The whole box is for the fact that you couldn’t respect me enough to be creative- you just had to revert to a stock-in-trade, another bloody cliché.
And I just had to do this in a Starbucks. In KLCC.
Where’s Yusuf Haslam when you need him?
--------------------
I'm sorry if not using the world's most widely used second-language is construed as being rude. I construe that it is ruder to have my tongue remain stiff, neglecting its heritage.
Catitan Kecil
Sahabat,
Kau katakan padaku bahawa dunia ini tidak adil.
Di manakah dia keadilan jika hatimu boleh dicincang lantas dipijak dan dibuang, oleh Tuan Puteri yang selama ini kau sanjung, yang kau puja, yang kau tatang, yang kau timang?
Di manakah dia keadilan jika engkau terpaksa hidup dalam kehinaan mengemiskan cinta namun dia, yang merompak jiwamu, hidup dalam kemewahan, dalam kebahagian, dalam keindahan?
Di manakah dia keadilan jika dia yang dapat menghancurkan persada cinta yang kau bina selama ini, tidak punah malah semakin subur, namun kau semakin layu dalam kegersangan, sesat mencari ketenangan?
Aku katakan padamu bahawa dunia ini tidak adil.
Di manakah dia keadilan jika kau yang mempertahankan bumimu boleh dicincang lantas dipijak dan dibuang, oleh Jalut yang selama ini punya meriam untuk menghancurkan batu yang kau lontar, yang punya kereta kebal untuk mengejar anak-anakmu yang baru belajar berlari, yang punya kuasa melenyapkan kau dari muka bumi ini dalam sekelip mata sahaja?
Di manakah dia keadilan jika kau, seperti nenek-moyangmu, terpaksa mengemis di jalanan namun penyamun bersenang-lenang tidur di katilmu, meraih rezeki dari tanahmu, berlindung di bawah bumbungmu?
Di manakah dia keadilan jika anak-binimu mati kebuluran kerana kau kononnya memberi keizinan untuk ditindas, untuk diseksa, oleh seorang yang bergelar Momok Antarabangsa?
Mengapa dipersoalkan Dia yang Maha Adil?
Apalah sangat neraca manusia yang kerdil berbanding dengan neraca-Nya di Hari di mana amalan sebesar biji sawi pun akan diperhitungkan?
Apakah mungkin kita merasa hidup di alam yang fana ini terlalu lama?
Tidakkah tercetus di hati bahawa ianya seolah lebih pantas dari kelipan mata?
Maaf. Aku tidak berniat mengguris hatimu. Aku hanya sekadar mengingatkan diriku. Allahu'alam.
Sekian,
Diriku yang serba lemah dan hina
nads went at 17:02