Fear--a bird trapped in a glass house at night, outside bright camera lights blaze.
Confusion--you go to sleep and wake up in a new time and new place, you step outside forgetting where you are, how you got here. You run down the streets looking for the question.
Faith--a light that does not exist, only felt, given only the faintest trace. It is also the smell of flowers when all around you is concrete as far as eyes can see.
Promise--a dangerous thing which we fool ourselves into believing. Like money, it is lost and found. Transacted, changed hands. Even if you hold on to it hard, it still flies away without your knowing. You wonder where you spent it on. Who you sqaundered on.
Life--finding a nest on your air-con unit with eggs waiting to hatch
Life--drinking all the milk from the carton, then realizing it is long overdue.
Love--a walk under a drizzle, some hears music on the pavement, some catches a cold.
Fate--two women wearing the same shoes and sharing the same lover smiles at each other on a crowded bus.
Birth--a child baptizes a toy with a name and an existence. An art is discovered from a pile of trash.
Birth--a shooting star and a morning blindness when the sun eclisped.
Fame--standing on top of a thousand flight stairs platform looking at the glittering and flashing world below you. The climb up has been difficult enough, but how do you get down from here?
Happiness--a walk on a clear beautiful day sees the person on the other side of the road losing hold of a red balloon, the balloon floats away, the loss made everything beautiful. you both look at each other. Shrug. smile.
Disappointment--realizing you are all you ever will be
Peace--finally seeing that you are all you ever will be is the greatest blessing.
Courage--a dance among sparrows on a field of mines
Forgetfulness--a whitewashed wall once stained with history
Poetry--a one legged bird preparing for flight

She watches on television as the Oscar goes to another BEST ACTRESS, BEST ACTOR. She watches them as they beam reaching for that "highest honor" thanking their parents and their religion their GOD in a superificiality only capable of being shown by the worst kinds of actors in the world, their kind. Actors acting as actors. The most superficial of actors and actress, people who sell their art and then receive awards for their cheap trade. Their stinking breath and their sultry moves, their slick and grease as they taint the televisions and screens imitating life, offering slices of "reality" and fantasy dishing them out as classic one liners people foolish enough to copy as if they were gold left in stream. She can almost feel the food moving against gravity up her gut as the actress, dabs her eyes, trying to keep that mascara intact, sniffles dramatically under the lights. Like some sleazy goddesses sold on the internet for repressed middle aged men. "I am so thankful for this..." she could bear those pursed and puny lips no longer, she turned off the television and tried to clear that picture of the tear rimmed, glistening and hopeful eyes upon that fake stage giving out honors like a cheap dirty gift as millions around the world gasp and feel a tug at their heartstrings as they watch that Talented beauty's heart brimming with gratitude. Her tearful eyes and pursed lips will be splashed across news frontpages, entertainments magazines all across the globe as people all partake of this. Spilling their saliva like their gossips into each others' soups during lunches.

"Daughter...oh.. my heart..get me my medicine...it is killing me. Oh. I can almost die right now."
Came the classic line of the ailing mother played almost to the faultless by her own mother. And her dutiful response to carry that medicine on a tray next to a glass of warm water right to her very bed as she watches in an agonized face imitated so well by that same sleazy actress to warrant her a global recognition. The perfect filial child.
"Oh dear, that is sweet of you.. Could you get me my supper too?" A weak rasping and then a groan followed.
She smiled as she has always smiled at her mother for the past thirty seven years, living day and night as the perfect filial daughter never denying her anything the dutiful child could provide. She lovingly took her mother's hand and told her in a gentle whisper

"Of course."
BEfore she left the room she could see the tear glistening at the corner of her mother's left eye just below the wrinkly and droppy eyelids where flesh crumpled.

In the kitchen, she saw the neighbors stroll past, husband and wife in each others' arms. A loving gaze at each other under the moon and star light, a peck on the cheeks and wifely giggle ensued. Then a meeting of eyes and neighborly waves and greetings exchanged. She could feel friendliness and warmth oozing out of her. Lightening up her very face and whole whole body is filled with that strange light of goodness. She can see the twinkle in her own eye through their own. She will exchange pointless information with them the next time they see each other, ask after their children and remember their birthdays. Attend their Christmas parties.
"My, isn't she a sweet one, looking after her mother like that. Such devotion." she could just hear them saying as they returned into their cosy little house.

She thought of Tom, and how he would one day propse to her with flowers in his hand. Maybe. And she would mime her shock and surprise. "Oh. Tom I never knew...I.." She would take her time to be speechless and maybe cry that she can finally play this part so well without a fault. Or she would descend into a deep depression spiralling till she could not even move when she tells him she already knows about his other girlfriend. She has seen her signs all over every time, and yet she has acted as if nothing has happened. She played her part well enough of ignorance and feigned happiness. She did not cry, beg him to change, she did not kill herself in a dramatic way that ACTRESS did. She went on as usual. Smiled at him as per normal, danced with him. Just as she is heating her mother's supper with her loving smile. Entering the room and giving her mother a loving kiss Goodnight.

She even switched off the lights in her mother's room lovingly, closing the door slowly as if her still moaning mother was already asleep and she did not want to wake her. As she walked past the hall mirror, she peered in, saw nothing but the greatest actress in the world.

AS I read the poems by Pablo Neruda
I realized, he has become immortal
the poet or the poetic voice
is of old, never the new
the young
it is seldom a celebration of the clean
unstained
Always, it is a lyrical lament
of existence
the questions, the passing and decaying
of life, of youth of beauty
That voice of old, extends beyond our own history
it is the earth we stand on
the material aspects
and the spiritual.
Yet it is the passing of time
the fading of things
memories
even stories
we lose in the wheel of time
and the writing, erasing and rewriting of history
The forgetting and the incomplete remembering
of our pasts
our previous lives, those skeletons
decomposed flesh
once the bearer of poems
music, now left whispering
some strain to hear
cry at night to discover that lost tune
a certain musician before he became reborn as Mozart composed
and so God watches
as we sing, laugh, cry and die
on our merry-go-round
Still the poetic voice speaks
sings the same old ancient tunes
the very first sounds uttered by cavemen were poems
and the first cry of the new born a song
still the same lullaby sung by the rivers
as we learn the names of things
so too we forget the poetic tapestry underlying our existence
the shallow mask of naming things made the poetic obscure
And yet, poems cannot escape the realm of the names
all it does is try to excavate the things beneath the names
a slow and painful process that of recall of the long lost
floating spirits of poetry still floating in the rain
the total recall at our instance of birth
and then the slow forgetting
only the occasional poems makes us cry for unknown reasons
even our hearts fail to comprehend
as if something very very old and ancient is sitting at our doorstep
all the while having been there
in its myriad of forms becoming suddenly
visible, real and unforgettable
and then as if suddenly waking from an important dream
the poem ends

(Inspired by Sim's a walk through her museum)

Our minds as spaces
made external, compartmentalized,
you wandered,
I stumbled into that secret place.
Strange columns and tombstones
lined the walkway
A museum of the grosteque and fantastical.

Clean. Sanitized.
For visitors
Hidden,
the dark howling wind and unmarked graves
of things prematurely buried
without names, without dates
on display, in glass cases
documents, exhibits seemingly unchanged with age.

yet,
Standing on different sides
they mutate
squabbles over what they in fact are,
Visions without ownership
Are they yours or mine?
We try to put up partitions
clean lines defining their space, their time
but they blend, merge become communal

Are you a relic or a ghost?
we ask in unison
our voices an echo, a harmony,
a chaos, a repetition.
What exhibition is this?
A performance. A dance.
An illusion.
The lights seemed to change,
they moved. Silence.

If these objects once had life
what are they now?
Transformed into memories
or a meatphor lying in irony
to the state called existence?
preserved in unnatural state
divorced from their reality
they call themselves and viewers into question.

I reach out to touch them,
Cold. Hard. Invisible
Glass--divides me from them.
Sudden . Seconds. They transform
they mock me.
They--of stardust and dream stuff
I--of atoms and bloodstreams.
we are one. NO.
we are not one.
As I wandered amongst them,
they wander in me.
Dancing on my fingertips,
they bring a familiar tune to the piano keys,
long forgotten.

EVerything is in flux--I forget where I am
they, forget what they are.

All of a sudden, this museum is organic,
it breathes, it bleeds
it becomes a forest--wild, untamed.
Magic.
I awake in an attic
cluttered with memories
coated with dust
ordinary and safe.
Locked away--with only semblance of the
ordinary ordinarily life.
Of mundane existence
Tax forms, bills, result slips, bus tickets, chain emails, advertisements, all of todays' news papers, receipts, ballpoint pens, pencil lead, eraser shavings, cut hair, plastic wrappers, drink bottles, coke cans, tissue boxes, scraps of gift wrapper, time tables, graph paper
Still and unalive
they point mute and blind
to the dreamlike lives of the memory
and the mind.

Every once in a long long while, stories worth telling, stories which tell us about our own darkest fears and our greatest strength comes along. Not only products of the imgaination, they are almost like wisdoms of the human race over long centuries and through perids of history. Forgetting and then remembering and then forgettin again such that these lay buried andn hidden from view, somewhere in the human heart. Lost in the human mind, dormant, waiting for someone to come along and pick up the threads and continue working on it. WEaving a new and complex pattern. Sometimes in harmony, at others in conflict to the story....

She woke up, yet another day, work, her children, her life--sometimes a burden. Often she have forgotten why she does any of the things she does. Cleaning that window in the back, scrubbing the stain on the carpeting, not wondering for a second why she even bothers with these things. Why? Why does she need to pick up the hair in the toilet one by one, as if they are some kind of morbid treasures for some strange collector who wants to find evidence for his own existence and the fleeting nature of it all.

Why? Why does she not have questions about the reason, the reasons why why why she was around. Why she is a mother of two boys, she found she could not love unconditionally like how parents are suppose to love their own offsprings. They were supposed to feel spiritual and totallty changed by the experience of motherhood. Why does she feel that she is not a chosen one, but had this task thrusted onto her, as if she had come along one day and like someone giving out flyers, she got two boys instead of flyers adn found she could not locate a trash can along the way to get rid of these unwanted flyers. And worse, she has to make the best of these flyers, make flower origamis out of them. Give them wisdom of life, they have found along their long walk in life. She felt so inadequate, she has found no gem of wisdom in her life, and could not give them what the whole bloody world want parents to give. Some sound advise on life, to better prepare them for nasty surprises. All she has along the way are shocks and scares everytime she gets ambushed. And she still jumps everytime. Nothing in life has prepared for, nor will ever will prepare her for the next one or the one after, or the one after.

They are just a series of bunps she just tries her bloody bestest to stop falling over from. She trips again adn again. And what did she learn, keep her balance and her mouth shut through it all, and now here she is. Mid-life crisis of the non-exisistent crisis. NOthing that the books describe ever fits her. She should be happy by now. By now, she should have it all made, feel some kind of satisfaction for her situation and feel thankful she is alive. By now she should have cried out with sheer joy from the happiness of motherhood and found her meaning in life. but by now, nothing has happened still. Nothing.

As if she was one of those unlucky ones born with some kind of emotional blackhole that prevents her from crying out loud, thrashing her face, slahsing her face, nor can she laugh out loud, jeer the whole world. THis kind of anger should have left her long ago. It is what teenagers used to pride themselves on rebellion and a spirit to feel angry with everything. BUt she is now a forty year old woman. The She-against-the world kind of attitude is unbecoming. She is a mother for God's sakes, and yet she still feels like a child, unprepared. It is no longer that kind of fright that sweeps her in the face when she is confronted with a crying child, demanding, demanding what from her she does not know. Just its small face red and a huge ugly face screaming. She had wanted to stuff some tissue into its mouth to silence it. She had read of mothers putting heir babies into microwave ovens. Everybody read the articles and thinnk" how cruel humans are" how can a mother not love her own child? It is abnormal! It is a sin! A Crime! Ghastly!

But she had so often felt it clearly, a hatred for the child, she had wished that it would stop crying even if it meant that it would stop breathing. She had often felt a heavy sene of remorse and guilt after that. Such a heavy burden of guilt she is carrying that sometimes when her son gives her loving hugs, she felt that she cannot possibly deserve it and that he is just playing with her. She felt scared and frightened by her own lack of maternity instincts. How different her reality is from the sweet advertisements with sleeping babies and their soft silky skin against the loving mother's breasts. How they always show happy mothers with their angelic child. What was she doing wrong? Why was it that she never felt the way mothers are SUPPOSED to?

THere is a way mothers were, are and will always in the future and far far future be expected to behave. Unconditional love, and wanting the best for their children. Was she a mistake, a warped case of something wrong genetically such that she cannot feel love oozing out of her for her own offsprings. Offsprings, the little aliens, staring at her wanting to get love, knowledge, wisdom, slices of life, their whole world from her. And the fear and pressure she feels sometimes when she feel their eyes on her. AS if she was being judged continually by her own creation. but who have their own minds, their own thoughts, their own motivations. Who ever since it had its first cry had been an indiviudal she feels she tries hard to show she is in control of, but in fact has none.

It is all a farce, a sily farce, she feels is slowly unravelling around her. She looks at other mothers, they make it seem so easy. She has never told anyone her own fears and how sometimes it gets so bad she wanted to downa whole bottle of asprin just to take her mind of her supposed role as a mother.

Motherhood---no one prepares you for this, no matter how much you're heard, read or thought about it. She wondered if everyone was cut out to be a mother, whether there are people in the world like her who were not and never were meant to be good ones. She is not one of those child abusers, but she feels so afraid everytiem she looks at her children.

SHe had felt something in her the moment she first saw that little feet. she didn't what that feeling was.. A kind of wonderment at the creation fo life, and a deep sense of inadequancy. Almost a sudden realization of her own minuteness in a much larger and wider universe from which this tiny fingers evolved from somewehre mysterious, somewhere beyond her minds limitations.

THe breeze blows across her face, tingling her eyelashes, she looks on as her boys sleep their peaceful slumber. SHe feels tenderness for them at this very instance. She bends down and kiss their soft cheeks, leaves the room and think on the challenge she will continue to face tomrrow and the day after and the day after. All these fears and insecurities and groping in the dark along the way. A step at a time, she hopes her children will forgive her, and perhpas they will understand too, one day.