I scare myself sometimes. We can talk all we want on papers, write about sexuality about gender as a ambigious, and permeable category that sometimes bleed into each other, and unlike night and day, black and white, there are those grey zones, areas in between. But in reality, when we find out how easy it really is to cross boundaries, it becomes scary. It is as if everything which has protected me and gave society meaning is suddenly fluid, I can break rules if I want. I can betray fixed notions, I can turn against myself, I can transcend expectations. I can feel attracted to all kinds of people, all kinds of gender. When your sexuality becomes a question, it is deeply unsettling. Sexual awakening comes all of a sudden, it is like menstration. An ambush. You know it is coming soon and your body gives out little signs and signals you pick up but want desperately to ignore until red visits and stains everything from your underwear to your bedsheet, and you feel afraid, as if the self, the body you have been so sure of has suddenly become a stranger. It rebelled.

And sexual awakening is not the sexual act itself, but the potential of it. Knowing that you are a sexual being. There is that suspense, that waiting. The secret knowing that your body is a sexual instrument, and that desires bubbles up often at the strangest moment. A glance, a touch, a graze. But often it can be even more subtle than that. It is a sound, a scent, a flashlight, a bicycle, a fabric. It becomes frightening because it is illogical and your rational mind tries to take control like it has always done, only the desires, the feelings escape it. Eludes it like shadowy creatures which escape once in a while to brush against your ears, whispering words, sculpting ideas.

I think that that gay man is attractive, that lesbian girl excites me sometimes, that straight man makes me tingle. Then you realize how superficial even terms like gay, lesbian, homosexual, bisexual becomes, because really none of it really quite captures the elusiveness of it all. That erotic sensations can arise from anything, human, plants, inanimate objects. I can feel attracted to all labels, and yet I transcend all these categories, but not the cage of sexual desires. Nor the knowledge that everything is potential. It is the potential which is erotic. Trying to find the right category to fit yourself in is the unsettling and strage part of the epxerience, because the name, the lable you are trying to find narrows that range of possibilities and it feels wrong, too small to explain the sensations.

So what am I? A homosexual, a heterosexual, a bisexual, a lesbian, a gay, a straight, a woman, a man, a girl, a boy, a HUMAN? Why must the list of question accompany this sudden emergence of sexual awareness. As if you can only be one and that will put the uneasiness of possibilities of anyone being able to remake themselves and experience anything away. It is disturbing because you know that none of these words can explain you, that the complexity of it all, of being both a man and a woman, both a homosexual and a heterosexual, that these are skin shallow when you are all along a body of possibility. And stepping out to explore you want to cling to guidelines, even if some of these are supposed controversial, they are still that--limitations. Suddenly, the penis, the breasts, the virgina all these become too conrete. Sex is not eroticism. Freud never did understand what eroticism is. No, we do not have penis envy, it is not a lack. We are all lacks, we all are holes from which little blossoms can spring up.

Loudly triumphant, gays, lesbians differentiate themselves, they want their unique literature, their rights, but really these are all bubbles. And I feel them constantly bursting around me. I get butterflies in my stomache everytime they burst, I feel excited. Men and women, cars, trees, the wind, the cold, words, poetry, music. These are all erotic elements, and to think that only humans, partners, lovers can be stand in for sexual experience is perhaps shallow.

Log hair or short, skirt or pants, it is not that. Perhaps it is an understanding that we are all deeper than that, that we can never fully grasp someone no matter how close their skin is, that we cannot break through. That we can never truly merge, it is always that little distance which separates. It is not a membrane which separates, it is not the labels alone and names we learnt form young which distance. But the explosive knowledge that we as being are fluid and we can never be captured, that inside, we are all dark matter, potential. We are all buds waiting to blossom every moment. I can become a man, a lesbian, a song next. How then are you going to contain me? But only dip yourself in this flowing stream and learn that we are all liquid.

Today, on my way to class
The Starbucks sign seemed
like an executioner's
axe
above my head
ready to fall.
The traffic light flashed
an ominous walking man
a testimony of my passing time.
An American flag
dangles
like stripes of blood
and a piece of starry sky
sewn together.
The Virgin sign
lights up only gin
Everything spoke
of imminent age and decay
Then,
the sun came out
lighting up the whole world,and
two windows washers on a ladder.
everything became meaningful
yet again.

lying on the ground, hearing the tires rush past on the gravel, feeling that warm liquid oozing out surrounding him such that the cold winter air is suddenly gone. replaced by this warm, living pool of pulsation embracing his body. THe very thing which ran through his veins have suddenly poured forth like a dam has burst from inside. All of sudden, insides and outsides, here and there, now and then, past, present and future become insignificant. His skin which separates him from his surrounding all of a sudden became permeable, the world flowed into him as he flowed out into the world.

He felt warm and happy like a drunk, only he had had the best cosmic cocktail. He is among the stars. He thought of his Mum, and how she would grieve and cry when she finds out about his absence tomorrow, but he felt a strange detachment, a liberty, as if all the chains, responsibilities which had had him for so long had evaporated. He felt at ease, peace in a very deep sense. Like monastry bells in a Buddhist temple he once heard on a mountain in central Asia. It rang deep and clear and touched him right in his core. Peace was a raw, and intense, he submerged into it. It made him feel small then, as if he was just a grain of salt dissolved inside this overwhelming of existence.

But the feeling now was quite different, his blood surrounding him reminded him of his mother womb and brings him right back to the very beginnig of his existence, the sounds of the body, his mother's blood circulating against the walls of her womb. He felt himself grow bigger, larger than his own individual memories. As if the very skin which divided him from the rest of existence, finally caved in and he expanded and grew small all at the same time. He had never been one to think about his own end. He lived day to day. Yes he has his regrets, but all that seem unimportant and small now. The fallen leaves on the side of the road was more real. They were beautiful, almost in a transendental kind of way. As if this beauty was more permanent than all of his life, which seemed like a great movie at this moment. HE felt his skin fall away, as if it was just a slippery suit he could easily slide out from.

All his questions and plans for the next day slipped away, glided across the blue sky like those clouds he saw, like the breeze he felt still blowing those sails somewhere else. Is existence so pointless afterall? He thought at his final moments at least he would receive an enlightenment and a putting together of all those confused pieces of the puzzles, of all those moments of his life, places he have been, sounds he have heard, people he have met all these would somehow form some beautiful elaborate pattern which explains his birth, all those seconds, moments past and finally his...death. He saw an ant by his little finger, crawling onto his nail up the back of his hand. But no such enlightenment came, no flashback like a tape rewinded, only the falling away of questions, of trying to make sense of his life, of finding the answer. Only the tenses, did it happen, is it happening, about to happen right now? Time what is time? space? What is space but the confirmation of being fixed, of being only a single point. A quietness descended.

Passerbys and concerned drivers have now stopped all along the raod, and made to witness this young man's flight. But all they saw was this mess of blood and some thought they saw stars in his eyes, perhaps they were tears. Or maybe it is his life flashing before him. "Life is so senseless. a woman mumbled and uttered a pray. ' God take this young man into your hands' . Like a butterfly floating in the blue blue skies, he became leaves, and the wind, and returned to the place all existence came. Bells ring in a mountain monastry as it once did to the ears of a young man.

Sitting by the lake on a sunday afternoon
watching the wind do its its little gliding dance on the surface
a ballet on trained toes
like skilled artist's hand
though the satin shoes hide the wrinkled
twisted monsters under the pink ribbons
and tights beneath the tutus
so the colours and the composition
masks the anger, passion, sweat
of paint stained nails
dark nights
countless torn and broken canvases
and skin and flesh reduced to grey
the colours long fled to another realm
the parallel world only envisioned
then imagined
for what comes to light
are only a figment
the rest lay in shadows

not forgotten
but abandoned
the failures pulsing underneath
the celebratory sucesses
wants recognition
the waiting, the time gone by
the failed experiments
the lost chracters
doomed to become a psserby in your masterpieces
demands their rights
the boy on a bicycle
a woman crossing the road
the lake on a sunday afternoon
they ache to become more than background
more than description
to partake of flesh and blood
like pinocchio outgrowing wood.

Right now, I'm thinking of Garang Guni
and their long walks along HDB corridors
or that Aunty at the foodcourt who wiped the table
somewhere in my memory they are but passing background
unimportant blurred images
I try to excavate them
their voices and sounds
and give them life
but the video game raging in this very room
drowns them out
somewhere he is still following the complex maze
of corridors
calling out
without echoes.

Ballad of John, MLK, Jesus and Gandhi

There is enough space here for us to co-exist




his eyes spoke as he looked his assilant in the eyes

before

the shot.