A glimpse into my own mind

2009-07-24T23:39:00.000-07:00

I could feel the girl next to me on the bus looking at me. She was peering at my face with a strange kind of concentration. I kept looking at my book, but I felt a nagging sense of discomfort. She was watching my face closely, her wide eyes hardly blinking. Whenever I made a slight head movement, she turned away quickly, but let her eyes settle on me once I lowered my head to the page again. Her eyes were wide and took up most of the spaces on her face, this was not something I saw, but simply sensed. It was unnerving, this feeling of the big eyes on my face. She was studying me closely. I controlled my breathing and kept staring at the crawling words on the page. It was started to irritate me, what was she looking at?

I jerked my head up quite suddenly, I turned to look at her. She turned away then pretended that she had been looking out the window the whole time, not my face. She was a young girl, probably sixteen. She had straw blonde hair and, as I had guessed, wide eyes. She had an astonished look, it was not unpleasant. In fact, she was quite pretty. But I felt an intense sense of fear that stabbed me quite suddenly so that I had to look back down at my book. She had been studying me, I was sure. It was really creepy, those jelly bright eyes that stayed on my face like some kind of wet creature that had landed on my face and stuck there. Her gaze was limp and hollow. The thought struck me quite suddenly, the girl is probably crazy.

The bus bumped along Columbus street steadily. It was nine in the evening and the sky had already darkened into a velvet black. It was starless but the lights from the many store and restaurant signs made up for the lack of stars. They blinked and blazed. I kept my eyes on the page. I turned it over slowly, I found it hard to read when the girl was staring at me so strangely. I was reading a short story compilation and the story I was reading was by a Lisa Grillan, it was flat and uninteresting. I looked at it merely to avoid the gaze of the girl that was thrown on my face like a head beam.

My only thought was: Creepy creepy creepy. The bus bumped half-heartedly down the familiar Stockton street. There was still fifteen minutes before I get off. Oh God, please don't let her start a conversation with me. I have seen too many crazy people on San Francisco buses to return a crazy gaze. The best strategy was merely to ignore the crazies. Pretend that she was not sitting next to me and was not looking at me like I had a hole in my face that only her sticky look could fill.

The words drift past me without any real emotional grip. Besides, I was starting to think of octopuses. The girl's eyes were starting to remind me of a giant octopus I had once seen in an aquarium. It extended its tentacles and flopped around, throwing its arms out like a giant net, gulping the darkness in the tank greedily. Greedy for the darkness, for nothing at all.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her watching my face closely. She glanced over at my book once in a while nervously. I could see her hands, they were clenched and white in the knuckles. She was twisting them in agitation. I was determined to read on even though the story was uninteresting and the narrative voice dry. I signed loudly deliberately. She glanced away. I hastily turned the pages in the book to see how many more pages I had to read on before the story ended. Three more pages. I wondered if I would finish it before I reached my stop.

The girl was insistent in trying to make eye contact, several times she inhaled deeply as if she was about to start a sentence then changed her mind. Two stops before mine, the girl stood up and got off the bus, she did not look at me when she got off. I was one page away from finishing the story.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Immediately, the air felt fresher and lighter. The heavy sense of weight and gravity that seemed to drag itself on me and the flimsy page of the book was lifted. I raised my shoulder and shook my head from side to side to clear that heavy sense of unease.

I closed the book. I would return it at the library, it was boring and the narrative voice unappealing to me. The author's picture on the back caught my eyes. There was something familiar about those huge eyes. They reminded me of sea creatures lurking in dark caves under the ocean. Just like one of those octopuses' eyes. Even the light blonde hair in the picture was not enough to give those eyes light. They just seemed to suck and suck. I thought of the girl on the bus. I wonder if she knew that I had finally finished the story that she didn't have to worry. Thoughts are altogether quite private and boredom is not easily revealed.

2009-07-13T11:10:00.001-07:00

Paula knew something was up when her sister called. Her family and her had stopped talking for a few years now. If someone should ask her now if it hurt that her relationship with her family had fallen into a disrepair, she would wonder how to reply to that question. It hurt, sometimes, if she chose to think about it. Most of the time, though, it was like something rotten left to stay in the fridge. It was mostly harmless. She left it alone and when the occasional thought of her family arose at night before she fell asleep, she brushed the thought off and thought of cows in meadows instead. Her sister's voice on the phone was eager with a note of nervousness, she wanted to invite Paula to her daughter's third birthday party. Paula was suspicious at first. Why the sudden change? Besides, wouldn't she bring bad luck to the party? Her sister's voice was strained with a forced cheerfulness.

"We're Christians now, we don't believe in bad luck anymore. Please come. Lisa wants to see her Aunt."

"Does Lisa know what her Aunt does for a living?" Paula had to control her voice for fear that all her anguish and sarcasm would bring a flood of bad memories to them both. She too, had adopted a slight kdding tone.

Her sister laughed, Paula thought nervously.

Paula promised that she would check her schedule and call her back. She wanted to think it over before she gave an answer.

Besides, she too had a busy life. She did not have a family, but there were always clients she had to tend to. Death never took a holiday, and neither did she.

Paula's mother had been a beautician and had been so proud of Paula when she graduated from beauty school. Back then, Paula's dream was to open her own beauty parlour. Her mother had been so excited she would squeal at the thought of seeing her own daughter's beauty parlour. Then Paula's father died.

It was not his death itself that transformed Paula. In fact, his father's corpse had impacted Paula much more than the man did when he was alive. It was what she witnessed as the undertaker dressed his father. How the undertaker closed her father's eyes with such care. Then took out a make-up kit she had seen plenty of times and chose a foundation that was close to her father's skintone when he was alive. She watched as the undertaker used a brush to give his father a slight blush as if he had just had a good laugh after a beer. Paula was amazed.

The undertaker, a kind man by the name of Mr Took was a little surprised at Paula's interest.

"Most of the time, people prefer not to watch the process. They feel, uncomfortable."

Paula nodded. It was a little bizzare, she had ot admit, watching this man apply make up on the ashen skin that she knew must have felt cold anad stiff to the touch.

"Is it disturbing?" She had asked, when Mr Took applied a hint of lipstick on her father.

He shook his head. "One gets used to it." Then after a pause. "Someone has to do it."

"Did you have to get a license for your er...practise?" She wondered if her question seemed rude. She didn't want him to think that she questioned his ability in anyway. If anything, she thought his profession noble.

"Well, back when I started doing this. There wasn't such a thing as licensing, but now, it's hard to say. I never had any formal training." He leaned over Paula's father to remove the excess lipstick.

"I'm a beautician. Can someone like me be an undertaker?"

It was then, that Mr Took paused. He straightened his back and studied her. There was a pause when neither of them spoke. A slow light seemed to dawn on Mr Took's eyes. At first they narrowed in suspicion as if detecting if Paula was making fun of him, then it slowly widen and softened.

"It's a calling. Not everyone can do it." Then wondering if that was a tad discouraging, he smiled at her. "Besides, I prefer to be called a Mortician."

It was through such a strange encounter that Paula gave up her dream of being a beautician and took to learning the art of dressing the dead and preparing them for their final departure from the world of the living.

Her family was shocked at her decision. Her mother, heartbroken. "How could she?" she kept asking through hysterical sobs. It was morbid, they agreed. Why would she prefer beautifying the dead to the living? It was a treason not only against her family but against all of the living and breathing.

"It's disgusting." Her sister had said.

The drift with her family happened slowly. She did not get invited to her mother's birthday. Then when her sister got married, they sent her an apology for not inviting her. The groom's family, according to her sister, was a supersitious bunch. When Lisa, her sister's first baby was born she was not informed and only heard about it from a distant relative. The baby's full-month party when she was one month old also excluded Paula. Once in while, she would receive photos of Lisa and she would reply with cards to congratulate. But slowly, the letters became fewer and Paula had given up on hearing any news from her family.

She never would have guessed how difficult it was to be a mortician. Her first encounter with Mr Took did not give her a clue. He was cheerful in a way that did not seem unappropriate. He made things easy for the families and guests by putting himself in such close contact with the dead. People did not want to be reminded of death, the stillness, the coldness of it. They wanted to see warmth and traces of life even on the dead. But it was hard. She lost a few friends and when strangers ask her what she does for a living, they would show shock then ask to be excused.

Before Paula and her family relationship fell into total disintegration, her mother had beegged her to change her mind.

"What kind of guy would want a mortician for wife?" She had asked and cried.

"Perhaps, I can marry another undertaker?" She thought it was funny, but her mother had been insulted. Back then, she did not know that her mother had spoken the truth. The life of an undertaker can be a lonely one.

"Hello? Jessica? I'll come to Lisa's party. All right, see you soon."

As she put down the phone, she felt a a tingle on her fingertips. She was nervous, but she could not deny that she was happy. It would be the first time she had seen her sister in three years.

She wanted to get Lisa something. Something significant, yet not over the top to show how much she cared for not just her niece, but also her sister. What would be an appropriate present for a three year old?

At the toy store, she strolled along the aisles of toys. There were so many, she felt like she had entered into an alien world. There were kids screaming and running. A little boy was spinning on the floor, cluthcing a toy robot and his father was adamantly shaking his head. "I'm going to leave you now." The father threatened but the boy kept screaming.

She wandered into the dolls section. She and Jessica had spent so many afternoons looking at dolls in toy stores when they were younger. They loved dressing them up and doing thier hair for parties and dates. A little girl was looking at the various dolls in the diaplay cabinet. Paula joined her. The dolls were all in beautiful gowns. They each wore beautiful jewelries and had their own handbags and high heeled shoes.

The little girl turned to Paula. "Aren't they beautiful?"

Paula nodded.

"When I grow up. I want to be just like them. I'm gong to be a beautician when I grow up."

Paula could see the glow in the little girl's eyes. Paula smiled, she was surprised when she felt her eyes misting over. She tired to think of cows on meadows, but the visions of the dolls in their dazzling gowns was overpowering. She felt the wetness on her cheeks before she could stop herself.

2009-06-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

'Get out of the bus!" Alicia and Stacy were banging on the bus window. "Get out."

It was a stupid idea. Doris had flipped her middle finger at Alicia when she saw Alicia's gang walking by at the intersection. She didn't think that she would be caught. Alicia happened to look up, then she told her gang and they ran after the bus.

"Get out!" They were shouting.

"Why should I get out?" Doris turned her back to them.

"Because I don't like your ass."

"So why should I get out?" Doris shouted out the window, half expecting them to board the bus to get her. But the doors closed and the bus pulled away slowly. She could still see Alicia and the other girls flailing their arms at her, glaring and taunting her. She knew she would get it in class tomorrow.

Alicia was pretty in a way teenage boys went crazy over. She had nice curves and nice hair. She had a wide smile which hid a hint of meanness. For some reason the other boys loved her meanness. It made her seem confident and sexy, but she was such a bully. Doris, on the other hand was plump and dark, she had curly hair that she tied up in a bun. She also had a little fuzz around her lips that Alicia and the rest called a "mustache".

Alicia was vicious when it came to people who offended her. For some reason, everyone did whatever she wanted them to. Those other girls--her lackeys were meaner than Alicia. Alicia didn;t have to do anything. All she had to do was to declare her dislike for someone and that person was marked. her gang would make their school days so horrible they would cry. There was once someone who threatened to kill herself to stop the bullying, but all it did was to make Alicia and gang alienate the poor girl. She moved away shortly after. Doris still wondered how she was doing.

Doris watched the trees brushing by the bus window. She was worried. What would happen in school tomorrow? She tried to think of all the fun things she would do when she got home, but her discomfort on her own position made her worry. Jessica, a tiny Chinese girl from her class was on the bus and she witnessed everything.

"Why did Alicia say she doesn't like you?"

'I don't know" Doris frowned, "but I don't like her either."

Jessica nodded thoughtfully. "Yeah."

Then silence. Both girls were deep in thought.

There really wasn't anything else to say. Jessica was trying in her own small way to make Doris feel better, but even she felt afraid for Doris. People like them needed to stay out of the way of Alicia's gang. The more invisible they were, the better.

Doris told herself again and again. It really wasn't such a big deal. She could handle it, whatever Alicia planned. But Alicia was intimidating, in front of her, Doris would feel her own strength draining. She had seen what Alicia has done to others. There was home, but it was not much of a protection against Alicia. Her life now, as she understood, revolved around school. Alicia would make sure that she would have no place to hide.

It was her stop and Doris got off. She slowly lugged herself home. It was a long walk uphill, but tha would help her clear her mind now clouded with fear for what was to happen to her when she got to school tomorrow.

An old bum lying on the pavement with a sign that said: Why lie? I need a beer. looked at her. "Hey you young girl. It's about to be summer soon."

Doris nodded. The old bum was helping her take her mind of Alicia and the rest.

"It's summer. You should have fun. It's right to have fun, but make sure you have something under your belt. So that when you're twenty, twenty-one. You'll have something. Summers, they go by fast."

Doris nodded again and started to walk away. She could still hear the old bum mumbling "They go by fast."

The next day, she got up as usual. Her mother was already in her hospital scrubs ready to leave the house.

"Mum?"

"What is it?" Her mother was chucking the dishes form the table into the sink that was already piled up with dirty dishes.

"I don't feel well. Can i stay at home today?"

Her mother looked at her face. "What's wrong?"

"I feel kind of dizzy."

Her mother placed her hand on Doris's forehead, frowning deeply. "You're fine. Get to school."

She shooed Doris out of the house and locked the door with a resolute click. "You know why you need to go to school. Do you want to grow up and spend your life cleaning hospital beds like me?"

Doris shook her head, she could feel her eyes clouding over.

"We didn't come to the U.S for you to stay home and watch T.V. Your life is already so much better than mine. Now get to school."

Doris dawdled to stall time. She took a detour to the bus stop. She usually took the eight-fifteen bus that was packed to the brim with students like her and others all trying to get to work on time. But that day, she sat around at the bus stop watching the world rush by. Then at eight-fifty she got on the bus. It was strangely empty. She had never seen a bus that calm. The bus was full of empty seats so she sat by a window and watched the scenery outside.

She got off at the usual stop. It was a ten minutes walk to school. She strolled slowly in the direction of school. She watched the many houses and the gardens, trying to name as many of the plants as she knew.

Outside her school, she could hear that lessons had already started. There was the soft murmuring of the voices of teachers and the sound of whistle blowing in the field where some of the students were having their physical education class. She sat down on the pavement. She could no go any further. She sat and she waited. A white cat was walking on the pavement towards her. It must be one of the cats from one the neighboring houses. It studied her for a moment, then it purred and tried to warp itself around her legs. She patted the cat, stroking its soft fur and looked out . There was a road in front of her. It was grey and empty. It seemed to stretch on forever.

2009-05-14T17:00:00.000-07:00

"The salami witch is here." Jake whispered to me as I was helping a middle aged blonde. I looked up and there she was in her mob of black curls and that signature snarl. I wondered if she knew how much she resembled a dog when she snarled like that. We made up stories about her during our lunch breaks at the deli. Jake came up with the idea that she had been abandoned at birth by her mother because of how ugly she was. I thought perhaps she got cheated by a boyfriend when she was young. I deliberately took my time scooping the potato salad to aoivd helping the witch. I strolled to the weighing machine slowly, I could see Jake was doing the same. Neither of us wanted to help her.

"Anything else I can get for you?" I asked the blonde sweetly, hoping she would sense my desperation and order some hand-made ravioli that were kept in the back.

"That's all."

I sighed. I could see the salami witch twitching impatiently. Her pudgy fingers scartching her left eye. She was in a bad mood, as always.

The blonde left without turning to say thank you. The salami witch came forward to the counter. I noticed that she took up the length of the counter completely. I put on my friendliest smile.

"Hi, are you back for more salami?"

She growled at me. Tapped her bloated hand on the counter, made a clicking sound with her tongue then nodded, glaring at me as if I had just mowed down her entire family with a monster truck.

"Ok. More pepperoni salami I assume." I kept being cheerful, thinkg that maybe that would piss her off further.

I grabbed all the pepperoni salami we have hanging off the side of the counter and plopped them down in front of her. I knew what was going to happen. She was going to inspect each and everyone of them. If they weighed too much I would have to take them back. If they had a little unnatural bump, she growled and tossed them back to me. It was a little ritual I was familiar with. If she was not satisfied with the batch she made us go to the back to bring out more until she was happy.

I watched her eyeing the salami like a diamond expert. She was searching them out for flaws. I tapped my foot and watched her face--that frown, the slightly crossed eyes, her face which resembled a cold pudding more and more by the second. She is a perfect specimen of ugliness. I thought it was possible that she had been abandoned at birth by her parents. Perhaps her parents took one look at her face and decided that there was no God and left her to her own devices.

"I'll take these." She groweled. She clawed me as she handed me a twenty. When I handed her the change, she snatched them right out of my hand and stormed off but not before giving me and Jake another evil look. I looked at the clock. There had been an improvment today, she only took twenty-seven minutes to pick her salami.

"I wonder why she only buys salami." Jake was still gloating from the fact that he got lucky.

I was still sore that I was the one who had to serve the witch.

"I don't know. Maybe it's her staple diet. That would certainly explain her looks."

Jake laughed. I felt better.

"Hey." Jake came closer.

I could sense that he was hatching some kind of no-good conspiracy. He was always trying to get me in trouble.

"Hey." He tapped me on the shoulder as if wanting to let me in on some secret.

I swept his hand away."What is it?"

"You want to know something?"

I frowned at him. Jake can be such an asshole. "Just say it."

He leaned in. "I know where the witch lives."

"How do you know?" I tried not to sound too interested.

"I saw her walking her cat." Jake sniggered. "She had her siamese on a leash. The cat is as ugly as she is."

"No one walks a cat." I could not help but smile.

"That's why she's a witch." Jake was up to no good, I could tell by the way he smiled and looked at me with his impish eyes. "I followed her to her apartment. She lives five blocks from here."

"So?" I didn't want to give Jake the idea I wanted in on whatever plan he was cooking up.

"So, I'm saying. Let's go check out her lair and see what she is brewing up there."

"You're stupid." My true sentiments--if Jake ever had an idea, it was dumb.

"She lives on the third floor, I saw her at the windows. She always walks her cat at night. I say we go in when she's out."

I should have said no. But if I did, Jake would call me a chicken and make life hellish at the deli for me for months. I said nothing. He took it as a yes.

That night, we walked over to the witch's arpatment building after we locked up the deli. Jake pointed at a window. It was dark.

"Let's go."

Jake must have been planning the thing for a while. He knew exactly where the staircase was. He climbed up the stairs two steps at a time.

"I bet you, she is doing some vodoo with those salami."

Jake was excited like a puppy. I followed him, feeling a sens of dread at the bottom of my stomach. I didn't think it was a good idea at all. But I couldn't say no, not after we've gotten so far.

Jake got to her apartment door. Signaled a monkey grin and pulled out a swiss army knife.

"Watch." He nodded at me, showing off. "I learnt this from my cousin."

He took the smaller blade and stuck it into the keyhole, twisted it around and miraculously we heard a click. The click seemed to echo down the empty corridor. I wanted to go home.

"After you." Jake extended his arm and bowed like a head-waiter at some fancy restaurant.

The room was dark. I stumbled around and found the light switch. I flipped it on and the room came into view. It took a moment for our eyes to adjust to the light. But we caught sight of the thing at the same time.

On top of a large dinning table that could easily have sat eight people was a whole city made out of salami. It looked like one of those medieval towns. It had a castle inside a fortress, there were towers, a cathedral. There were even stables and farm houses. We walked closer to inspect the town. EVery part of it was made out of salami. The witch had cut up little salami slices and placed them on some kind of wood or cardboard for support and she made a whole town out of it.

"Oh My God."

I could hear Jake's gasp. "Oh man, she is crazy. This is sick."

I couldn't say anything. All I could do was look at the intricate town made out of slabs of salami. The salami I sold everyday. Common chucks of meat. Even the floor of the town had salami cobblestones.

"Oh My God. She is sick. Let's go. I don't want to have anything to do with the crazy woman." Jake was pulling on my elbow.

"I wonder how long she has been working on this thing." I still couldn't take my eyes off it.

"Who cares. Let's go. This is creeping me out." Jake was already walking towards the door.

I didn't want to admit it, but it was the most amazing thing I have seen in my life thus far. I took one more look at it. Its red marbled majestic towers, cathedral and castle walls. I thought I could hear trumpets sounding in the little city.

"Hey." Jake called impatiently.

I switched off the light and ran out. Jake slammed the door and we ran the rest of the way. We didn't stop until we reached the deli.

"That is the craziest thing I have ever seen." Jake muttered.

I nodded, but all I could think of was the pieces of salami that formed a whole city. I thought of little salami people and little salami cows.

"Want to grab a pizza before you head home?" Jake interrupted my thoughts.

"Sure." I said, "just as long as it is not pepperoni."

He laughed and we headed off into the night, our thoughts still on a salami world that existed somewhere out there.

2009-05-13T01:43:00.000-07:00

The sensation struck him as he was working on the numbers. He had been doing numbers for the past thirty-five years. It started from his chest then it spread to his abdomen then down to his legs and his fingertips. It was a soft kind of rumble, like a tingling but much subtler and gentler. He had not felt this way for as long as he remembered. He got up from his chair and started for the coffee machine, but when he got to the pantry, he changed his mind and kept walking. He walked past the managers' offices, the receptionist who gave him a strange look and out the door. His briefcase, his lunch box, his coffee mug all still at his desk like soldiers on duty, anxious to be of some kind of use. All he had on him was his wallet, but the feeling was so strong, he kept going. he hit the down button for the elevator and when it arrived he got in without hesitation. It did not strike him as strange that at ten-thirty in the morning when he should be working numbers he was instead leaving his office building.

The morning sky was beautiful at ten-thirty on a wednesday, but the people he passed by on the streets seemed not to notice the sky or him or anything. They were all busy in their own thoughts. He had not idea where he was going, all he was sure of was the feeling warming his chest spreading up to the root of his hair. And that his legs were leading him and all he had to do was to follow. It was a feeling of security familiar to children, but for a man of forty-seven, it was strange as it was assuring for a child.

He had trouble walking. It had to do with his weight. He knew he was overweight and sometimes people gave him unpleasant looks on crowded trains or in restaurants. The waitresses were especially accusing when they took his order. It was as if his wanting to purchase food was indulging in some great personal evil that they were ashamed of being an accomplice in. For the longest time he could not see any priviledge to being fat. People assumed a lot of things when they saw his size, his belly hanging low, his waddle. But now he understood the beauty of obesity, it is privacy that the world afforded him in moments like this. No one gave him any attention, they steered clear of his path. And that morning, it was as if the sun was shining for him alone and the road glistened under his feet only for his eyes.

He followed his legs. They brought him to the train station. They skipped down stairs with a lightness that surprised even himself. Then the legs just stopped right at the platform. He watched people come and go with the passing trains and his legs remained still. He found himself a seat on a stone bench and just waited. People rushed in and out of the train doors. They all seemed to have a blindness to them that had little to do with being underground. They dashed around madly, and the trains rushed in through one end of the tunnel and left. He just sat and watched. THings, people moving into and out of view, the world forever in motion. That warm feeling that had summoned him here had faded a little. He started wondering at the strangeness of it all.

An emergency phone sat beside him. Above it was a huge sign that said: Only for emergency use. The sign was red and obnoxious, but the phone itself was a quiet navy blue. It hung lonely and still on the wall. He had always wondered what kind of a voice would be at the end of a phone like that. Then that same feeling drove him to pick up the phone. He had expected the feeling to be exhiliarating--doing something illogical and illegal. But it all felt quite normal. It was merely a phone with a sign above it.

A strong vibrant voice that he attached to a face of a sturdy black woman picked up the call. "Yes, how can I assist you? What seems to be the problem."

He stuttered a little from the confusion of having nothing to say. "Nothing is the matter. It's just that I...it's all going to sound very strange to you."

"Sir, is this a matter of emergency?"

He could detect a hint of irritation in the voice. "I wouldn't say so, no."

"Then, why, may I ask are you using the station's emergency phone? "

He had no answer to that, so he stayed silent.

"This phone is reserved for use in case of emergency. "

Then there was a silent. Both of them now had run out of things to say. He had revealed that there was no emergency and she had stated clearly that the phone was only to be used in the case of one.

"Should I put down the phone?" He asked doubtfully.

She said nothing but he imagined a irritated grimace on her face. She must be thinking he was such an idiot.

"You should be fined five hundred dollars to teach you a lesson."

She waited for a response but he was silent.

:"Is this some kind of a cheap thrill for you?"

"No, not really, no" he tried to find words to explain himself "Quite honestly, I don't know why I did it."

There was an expectant silence on the other end, so he continued. "I had this strange feeling that took me from work this morning and brought me here. That same feeling made me pick up this phone."

The voice muttered a disbeliving "hmm"

"It is so nice out. I have never noticed the world outside at ten thirty. I am usually so busy working, I don't see the sky until it gets dark. I never knew that this phone existed until today."

There was a sigh at the other end of the line. "Next time, do not use this phone unless it is a matter of urgency. I usually give citations for offense like this, but I'm going to let you off this time. Don't pick up this phone again, you understand?"

He nodded, but before he could say anything. The woman hung up. He put down the receiver and sat drinking in the vibration of constant movements and the slight rumbling of trains that trailed and hung in the air like a signature.

Grace, put down the phone. Marcus, a station security, walked into the station information booth. He was a big Latino who looked like he could rip a phone directory in two. He watched her face.

"What happened?"

Grace shook her head " just a weirdo."

Marcus rubbed his eyebrow as he watched his own reflection on the glass of the information booth. "The city is full of them."

Grace nodded. She looked outside. It was ten-fifty. Indeed, she thought, the sky is beautiful.

2009-04-30T23:57:00.000-07:00

When I was a child. A strange character lived right above me in our apartment building. My family lived on the second floor and he lived on the third. All of the people in the building called him the Malaysian although he really was a Chinese. Perhaps it was because of his tanned skin and his build. Unlike the other men living in the building, he had broad shoulders and was tall. He had wavy hair and everyone agreed that he was handsome in a slightly unorthodox way. He was strange. In my memory, he was always the person people gossiped about. He was supposed to have been forty five and had for a while worked in Burma doing hard labor, but I think all that were mere stories people made up. He had that mystery about him. For the ten years we lived in the apartment, he had retained that same mystery. He was not young, but because he never had any family, he always had that bachelor charm that made him seem younger than he really was. Even for his age, he was pretty wild. He had so many girlfriends, even the building's gossips could not keep track of them. Every other week he would invite some woman to his apartment and for several days we would see his women coming and going, but then, they always mysteriously disappeared and someone else would take their place. It was a cycle that we got used to in the building.

For all his mystery, there was one thing we all knew about the Malaysian, he was a compulsive liar. Everyone knew that. He lied to get extensions on paying his rent. He told a different story every time anyone ever asked about his past. Even his women, he lied to get them to go home with him. That was what the adults used to whisper about. There was always a certain excited buzz when the adults discussed the Malaysian's lies. The women would talk about his lies admiringly, claiming often that if they had such fancy stoires to sweep them off their feet, they too will follow him home. The men grunted in disgust, such cheap tricks: women as they all knew were a bunch of softies and were, according to their logic, extremely gullible. Still, that did not explain why the land lord granted him rent extensions month after month. I asked him once, why he still gave the Malaysian credit when he knew that he was lying. The landlord merely exclaimed that I shouldn't fault the man for being a good story teller. So in all the children's eyes, the Malyaisan had a mythical quality, a secret knowledge on how to get away with things that we as children tried so hard to get away with.

For a while, the Malaysian dated the daughter of the owner of the grocery store on the street corner. We would watch him drop by every afternoon on pretext of buying cigarettes so he could chat up Lucy. Though it was obvious as day to all of us kids, the whole thing seemed to have eluded the grocery store owner who didn't seem to notice that the Malaysian was trying his tricks on his daughter. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, for the grocery store owner, the Malaysian soon lost interest in Lucy. We caught him trying to steal kisses from her in the neighborhood movie house but we thought that was as much he got out of her. I tried to ask Lucy why she would date a liar, but she just battered her lashes at me and shrugged her shoulders.

It made it all the more infuriating when we were taught in school that lying was wrong and that one should never in any circumstance lie. I asked mother about this and all she said was that I should try to be a good boy and not worry about the Malaysian.

"Sometimes," she said, "people are just the way they are."

"But surely, he can change?"

But my mother just smiled, " Sometimes these traits are in people's characters, and you can't change that."

That got it into my head, that perhaps if I was bad for long enough, my parents would accept that it was just in my character and that I could never change. But of course, that never happened.

The summer I turned eight, I remember trying hard to unrevel the secret of the Malaysian. My neighbor and I would spy on his apartment from the roof of the adjacent apartment building. Once in a while, when we hung around in the lobby area we would run into him and he would say hi to us. But always, I held him in suspect because I thought he had a skill I could learn. Being so good at it, to the extent that he could even fool my mum made me resent him a little.

It was that same summer that a new apartment building on our street got completed and we started to see a lot of new faces walking our street. It made the owner of the grocery store happy to see new customers. But we the kids of the building was unhappy because that meant sharing out territories with new kids we were not familiar with. We also lived in constant fear of older kids who might try to push us around. To our relief, most of the new inhabitants seemed to be old folks. Sometimes we would watch them shuffle slowly down the street and imagine shooting our sling shots at them.

But I distinctly remember that it was that same summer that I witnessed the Malaysian's magic with my own eyes. I was in the grocery store with little Tam who was two years younger than me. We would reading the dollar fifty comics. The Malaysian was lounging around the cashier small talking with the grocery store owner when this old lady came in. She was in dsitressed, wringing her hands in agony. She asked if the grocery store owner could help her make an overseas call. She had heard from her son-in-law that her daughter got into a car accident and was hospitalized. They lived in the States and she did not know how to make overseas calls. The message about her daughter she had gotten from a relative. Not being able to learn about the daughter, she was overcome with worry. She told the grocery store owner that she had tried getting help from her neigbors but none of them could make international calls. She handed a slip of paper with a phone number on it and asked the grocery store owner if he could help her call the number. The store owner was reluctant, naturally because international calls were expensive. A five minutes call could easily have amounted to twenty dollars and that was a lot of money back then. The Malaysian, seeing the grocery store owner's hesitation, told him to do it and to put the bill on his account. The store owner looked at him in a way that I can only describe as a mixture of admiration and gratefulness then started to dial the number on the scrap of paper. He didn't seem to remember that the Malaysian was already buying things on credit from the store. The question of where the money would come from didn't seem to cross the store owner's mind.

The Malaysian watched the old lady wring her gnarled hands, her eyes red with anxious tears. He put his arm around her shoulder and told her
"It's going to be okay. My son was once in a car accident, he broke his leg and fractured his ribs but he survived. Now, he still plays football and outruns me. It's going to be alright, you'll see."

She was silent and watchful, waiting for a sign from the store owner that the call has gotten through. We all waited when the store owner passed her the receiver. After what seemed like a endless conversation. She finally put down the phone. She had spoken to her son-in-law and apparently her daughter was not in danger, she would have to wear a cast for the next few months but she would live. We all breathed a sigh of relief. Once she put down the phone, to our surprised, she hugged the Malaysian and burst in tears. Then as abruptly as she entered the store, she left. We watched her leave. Having witnessed the whole incident I was full of wonder. When the Malaysian walked out of the store, I followed him.

"Why did you lie about a son? We all know you don't have a son. Why did you lie?" I kept asking even as the Malaysian kept walking. He didn't answer me. I stopped walking and watching his backview moving away in the setting sun.

" Why do you lie?"I shouted.

The Malaysian turned around and gave me a smile. I couldn't read his face, it was lit a gentle orange by the sun but half his face was in the shadows. He smiled at me for a moment, then without a word, he turned around and kept walking. I watched his back view get smaller and smaller until eventually, he was out of sight.

2009-04-23T22:56:00.000-07:00

There has been complaints for weeks about noises at night in the apartment's dumpster. He was instructed to keep a close eye on his night patrols to spot any suspicious activities in or around the dumpster. Having paid so much to live in the apartment complex, the residents did not want a bum hiding out in the place they have allocated for their trash. And he was paid to keep inconveniences such as these at bay. Carlo, the manager of the apartment told him to keep trouble and bums out of the place. He was an okay fella but the residences were a picky bunch and he understood that Carlo had a job to keep.

He had been keeping an especially close watch over the dumpster. There were no signs that anyone was inhabiting the place but the bums had their own ways of getting in and out of places with little visibility. Having been ignored so often, sometimes it almost seems as if they really have attained a physical invisibility. He spent the first hour of his shift, patrolling the complex grounds. He always started at the front gates then headed to the back garden by the pool then coming back a full circle to the front gate through the side entrances. Then he took his ten minutes break in the office, eating the leftovers from his dinner and making himself a cup of coffee form instant mixes in the office.

He went back to patrolling and as he passed by the dumpster he heard the indistinct shuffle. It could have been an animal but the shuffling had a rhythm to it. Whatever was making that noise, it wasn't being discrete. He put his hand on his baton and crept up to the door of the dumpster. He was not afraid, whatever or whoever was in the dumpster would not be a menace. Something that could be so attracted to the unwanted waste of people would not be a big threat but he still wanted to be safe just in case. Baton in hand, he strode to the door and pushed it open. It was a tiny figure inside. For a moment he thought he was looking at a mutated creature of sorts but after his eyes adjusted to the dark he could make out the shape of a bent-over woman. She had her back turned to him and seemed not to have noticed his entrance. She had her hands all the way inside the trash cans. She was digging up cans and bottles. She already had a bag filled with plastic bottles and recyclable glass containers of all sorts.

He shone her flashlight on her. It was at the intrusive beam of light that she turned around, half astonished, half irritated that he had interrupted her in the midst of her task.

"Hey Mam, you can't be here. This is private property."

She looked at him curiously, then turned her back to him and started rummaging again.

"Hey. Hey." He strode closer turning the beam on her face. She looked at him and squinted her eye, she showed no fear, only a look of incomprehension. Her looked at her grey hair , they glowed in the light.

"You understand English? You can't be here. You got to leave. Leave."

The woman muttered something to him, he guessed it must be Chinese.

"I don't know what you are saying. But you" he pointed at her "have to leave" and then pointed at the door.

She said another barrage of undicipherable words, motioning with her hands, gesturing at the trash cans, the bags and herself. He just shook his head and told her she had to go and this time to make the point clear, he picked up her bag of collected cans and moved them outside the door, then pointing at the door again, he told her "Go." At that, she reluctantly closed the trash cans and left.

He told Carlo in the morning. Carlo laughed.

"What? So all along those night sounds was just an old Chinese woman collecting cans? These people make too much of a fuss over nothing."

He tried to laugh along with Carlo.

"But whatever it is , just make sure she doesn't come back. Personally, I have nothing against the old lady, but the people here... you know."

He nodded.

When he told Rosa this, she frowned at him.

"So do it. What's the problem? Just tell her to go the next time you see her. It's not like he's asking you to beat her up." She rubbed her swollen belly, the baby was getting big fast.

"But Rosa, you don't understand, she's old and she's bent over. It's like she needs those cans or something."

Rosa just stuck her belly in front of him and said "Think of our baby. Plus, you need the job. Just do what he says. You can give her twenty bucks or something."

That night, he felt nervous, for reasons he couldn't pin down. He had two cups of coffee. He tried to delay passing by the dumpster by taking extra long on his patrol route. He walked the pool four times and went back and forth through the side gates so that he would not pass by the dumpster off the side of the main gate. When he walked past the dumpster, he heard the shuffling again. He went in and the same old woman was digging through the trash with her bare hands, picking out bottles and putting them into her big plastic bag. She didn't hear him, or perhaps she pretended not to. She kept combing through the piles of rubbish. He watched her for a little then he turned on his flashlight. He waved it to get her attention, she turned around with her empty hands outstretched, her palms facing up. They stared at each other for a moment, then without his asking, she grabbed her bag and left. He watched her shuffle slowly out and watched her disappear down the hill with the half empty bag.

The next morning, Carlo was displeased. "There was a complaint again last night. Did you tell that woman not to come back?"

He shook his head. "She don't understand English. I tried. But last night, she left by herself. I didn't need to tell her."

"You should have scared her away. You could have made your point clear."

"But Carlo, she's old. You should have seen her, she's tiny and she's hunched over. She's like a hobbit or something."

" I don't care what she looks like." Carlo scratched furiously at his hair, he did it whenever he got frustrated. "It's our jobs we're talking about here."

"But what do you want me to do? Kick her?"

"Just make it clear that she can't be there ok?"

He nodded to appease Carlo and to avoid trouble but he didn't know how he could make the point clear.

That night, he skipped patrolling the complex, he just stood by the dumpster waiting for the old lady to appear. He spotted her a long way off. He watched her shuffle up the hill on her tiny feet. Taking one step at a time carefully, as if any moment she would lose her balance and roll down the hill. She had good stamina despite being so slow. He wondered if he would be able to climb up that hill if he was as old and as hunched over as her.

She took a while to get to the top of the hill. She saw him standing in front of the dumpster and spoke a stream of words he could not understand. He shook his head at her. When she tried to open the door, he put his hand on it to stop her from getting in. She pleaded with him--he could tell by the way she was gesturing like she was making little bows to him. He told her he was sorry and that he had a family to feed. He took twenty dollars from his pocket and handed it to her. But she shook her head and reached into her bag and pulled out a plastic bottle and pointed at it. He told her he was sorry and that there was nothing he could do, he didn't have a choice. He stuck the bill out to her. He was begging her to take it, but she just shook her head again and then turned to leave. He watched her disappear into the night, slowly and with great effort down the hill and out of sight.

In the morning, Carlo pat him on the shoulder and told him that he didn't need to worry about the old lady anymore, they were going to install a lock on the door so no old lady or bum could get in.

He waited for the old lady for several nights, but she never came by again. He often wondered what happened to her. Every time he walked past the dumpster he would think of her. Some nights he would watch the stars by the swimming pool, deep in the night when the world slumbered. He would watch the stars and think: how they looked so much like burning and sinking teardrops falling from the night sky.

2009-04-22T15:05:00.000-07:00

The cameras have stopped rolling. The audience has left, filing zombie-like out of the auditorium, their heads still filled with images that will take days for them to fully digest. Another successful show. The producer has been extremely pleased with the night's installment. A double incest, two attempted suicides and a pregnant daughter. He knew it was going to be a good show, the moment he saw that father. The man was acting tough, but he knew that the father wanted the money or else he wouldn't be on the show. He was the kind who would break on national television. He always felt a sense of success when he could make a man cry on screen. The audience loved it, they had stood up cheering in excitement when the father broke down. He liked to think he was giving the people what they wanted, they wanted Roman Carnival and they wanted to moralize. They could jeer and throw abuses at these messed up people with no sense of morality while for the two hours of the taping forget about their own smallness.

"Great job, Jack." Murray the producer gave him a pat on the shoulder. "Keep the drama coming you hear me?"

He nodded at him, gave him a thumbs up and quick smile then retired to his changing room. It was exhausting, the spotlight had melted his make-up and his was still shaking from the frenzy he worked himself and his guests into.

He loved this quiet hour of the night when the studio was empty, and he could have time to sort out his thoughts on the night's show. What was good, what drew audience reaction and what he had failed to do. There were always nerves he failed to touch, important questions that would make his guests break that he forgot to ask. He sat down, the soft backing of the chair felt good against his back. Despite all that talk about progress and civilization, people still wanted drama. Spouses cheating, illegitimate babies, incestuous relationships. From where he sat he could see the faces in the audience, they always looked base when the good stuff came on. They could pretend as hard as they want that these things were cheap but they loved them. They couldn't take their eyes off the anger exploding on stage, the uncontrollable sadness. It was all very freakish.

There was a knock on the door.

"Jack?"

It was Murray. What did he want? He reluctantly stood up and shuffled to the door.

He opened the door to see Murray with his arm around the shoulder of a tiny woman. She was about forty-ish. She was wearing a pathetic looking cardigan with ugly pink smudges attempting to resemble roses. He smiled at the pair.

"Hey Murray, what can I do for you?"

"Jack, this is Mrs Ellen Wood. She is here to meet you. She won the radio contest for a pair of tickets to the show and to meet you in person."

Oh Christ, not tonight, he thought. But he gave her a brilliant smile.
"Congratulations Mrs Wood, how very nice to meet you."

Murray gave her a cordial nudge. "You guys have a good chat. Mrs Wood, once again it's very nice to meet you. When you are done with your chat with Jack, you can exit the studio by this door right here." He motioned at the exit and left without turning around.

Damn Murray. He was always the first to leave at the sign of trouble. He made way for Mrs Wood and welcomed her into the dressing room. She strode in and stood watching him.

"Would you like a seat?" He offered her the chair, but she shook her head.

"Mr Murphy, I just wanted to see you in person." She said, her voice squeaked and made him think the metallic screech of brakes.

"Please, Mrs Wood, you can call me Jack."

"Well, Jack, as I was saying, I just wanted to meet the man behind the show. I have always wanted to ask you a question."

He smiled at her encouragingly to get her to speed up the meeting so she would leave.
"Go ahead, Mrs Wood."

She rolled her shoulders back and straightened herself a little. She looked him in the eye, and he could see a sharp glint of light.

"How do you live with yourself?"

"Excuse me?" He shook his head as if he heard it wrong.

"How do you do it? Exploiting people like that. Making money out of their private miseries. How do you do it? Do you just go home and sleep after you humiliate people the way you do? Do you think everything is wonderful after you degrade someone in public like that? It's disgusting."

He stared at her ugly sweater, his eyes focusing and unfocusing on the gross pink spots which made him think of mutated organisms on the sea bed. After an embarrassingly long moment of silence. He looked at the little woman and he opened the door for her.

"Mrs Wood. Thank you for stopping by. Have a good night now."
She scoured at his courtesy. "You disgust me." Then she storms off.
He lets the door close behind her, hearing that wonderful click of it shutting.

He looked at himself in the mirror. He could see the face make-up flaking. It was dried and he could see the deep lines forming around his eyes and his mouth. He looked haggard.

How does he live with himself? How does anyone.

He bent his face closer to the mirror. He could see the flakes of powder on his eyelashes. The light from the mirror made them glint, they seemed golden. He stepped back still looking at himself. He watched his eyes, his nose, his mouth and ears fall apart and come together again. He summoned up a smile. It has been a long night.

2009-04-12T01:19:00.000-07:00

Those black leather shoes, sized ten, was the very first thing she saw as she stepped into the apartment. There they were, standing, pointing at the door, ready to go. Marty's shoes. His good business shoes, shoes he had worn to meetings, walked on in foreign lands on important trips his company sent him. They were not the last pair of shoes he wore. They were still standing waiting, for the next time they were to be put on, to conquer new places, help seal new deals. Seeing them was shocking to her. They way they were causally yet neatly arranged by the door, quite apart from the rest of the shoes, all anonymous, but this pair, this pair stood out. The way they made her feel as if any moment now, Marty was going walk into the hallway, coffee mug in hand, ready to slip into these black leather shoes. Marty and his nitpicky ways, he probably shined his shoes every other day. They were well-worn, one could tell by the folds and creases of the leather, along the toe line, but they were well-kept from the way the leather shone with a kind of quiet pride. She stepped over the shoes and walked into the cool, grey apartment. Everything was neat. Marty had always been very well-organized. His apartment showed this clearly, there were no general mess, only an unwashed coffee cup, a plate with toast crumbs on the sides and a tea spoon in the sink. His breakfast. He would have returned to wash them, after his morning jog. He was never one to leave a mess for visitors to stumble upon, not even his own sister. But there the dishes were sitting quite innocently and dumbly in the sink, reflecting the coolness of the apartment with a kind of detached carelessness.

Her eyes followed the neat lines of the apartment, everything felt so smooth and liquid, it was as if she stepped out of clumsy world into the tasteful contours of Marty's choosing. Marty had always been the tasteful one, even now, she felt a kind of envy for his sense of aesthetics,--clean, simple and intellectual. The apartment was not beautiful or welcoming, in fact, it was not even comfortable, but it was..stimulating, yes that's the word. It was the kind of rooms, magazines featured, the kind that real people did not live in. That was the way she felt, she had been sent into this catalogue apartment to pick out unreal things and to catagorize their importance. She bumbled into Marty's apartment with three cheap cardboard boxes and faced with the immensity of her task. She had not known Marty well, ever since he moved out on his own. Little brother Marty who used to sing lullabys with her at night. Little brother Marty.

She had gotten a call a week ago, as she was having lunch with Selena, she was complaining about her new manager, then the phone rang, She saw that it was an unknown number and ignored it. She had thought that it was an advertisement, or people asking for donations. But the phone rang again. She picked it up. There was an unfamiliar voice at the other end of the line.

" Am I speaking to Miss Anna?"
"Yes."
"This is regarding your brother. I don't know how best to break this news to you, but your brother had an accident."
"Who is this?" She had wanted to laugh. A bad joke.
"My name is Tim and I am the manager from your brother's apartment building. There was an accident."
"Look, this is not funny. Who ever you are leave me alone." She could feel herself getting angry.
"This is not a joke." She was surprise to hear anger in the other person's voice.
There was a long pause, then he continued. "Your brother, fell down some stairs. He broke his neck."
"Oh my God. Is he ok?" she could feel a chill creep up her stomach into her chest.
" He broke his neck." The voice repeated. "I'm sorry."
she didn't remember how the conversation ended. She didn't know if it was the guy who hung up or herself, but she remembered Selena repeating the same question over and over again asking her what had happened and if she was ok.

So, here she was. Standing with three cardboard cartons to clean out the apartment. She was given the mission to clean up what remained of her brother. His things, the things that used to be Marty's, that used to mean something to him. Things he treasured, things he took for granted, things he didn't know he had. Things she was to decide if they were of value or were simply trash to be gotten rid off. Things that had belonged to her estranged brother. She didn't know where to start. She touched the walls, her fingertips lingered on the suede sofa, the coffee table, the paintings on the wall, the potted plants. She decided to do the only thing which seemed right. She picked up the dirty coffee cup, grabbed a sponge and started to wash the dishes in the sink. It felt good and right. Marty wouldn't have liked her to touch his things, but it was the way she showed that she still respected him for how he made a space for himself in the world that was completely his own. Perhaps, no one else would see this spot he made for himself, with things he picked, arranged in a way he liked, but she took everything in for his sake.

At first, she had felt such anger. At the fact that Marty had died in such a ridiculous way. People didn't die form falling down stairs, they broke a leg, or had to have a cast around their limbs for months. Then she had felt anger at the fact that Marty and her had not made effort to stay close throughout the years. And finally at the apartment manager's request that she go over to Boston to clear out the apartment. She had wanted to know why they couldn't just have someone donate everything to charity, but he had told her that they did not want to be liable to accusations that Marty's property had been unrightfully given away or taken, she had to physically take care of donating his things. All they wanted was for the apartment to be cleared out by the end of the month. She had grown to hate that voice on the other line over the past week. The manager had been wise not to show his face when she arrived. For even though all the interactions they had was over the phone he must have felt her animosity for him. Firstly because he broke the bad news of Marty's death to her as a part of his job, and secondly because he made Marty's death seem like an inconvenience. He always had that professional and efficient way of talking to her.

Even now, she could feel some of that anger throbbing beneath her fingers as she rinsed the cup. She was distracted from her thoughts by what seemed like flickering lights. It was a mosquito hawk flying. It made the cool light streaming into the kitchen waver as it flew lightly around the window. It twirled in its airy ballet. It was thudding lightly on the window. Tapping the glass to try to get through to the other side. She watched it. Then she turned off the water. She opened the window, watched it disappear into the brightness outside. It was spring, the sunlight touched everything. Half of her face was lit up by the golden light. Everything shone with a kind of internal radiance. She stood watching for a long time.

2009-04-03T12:08:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you a tale from when I was very young.

For the longest time, there had been a great fear of the demon in the old forest laying to the East of the village. Townsfolk traveling through often warned of the danger that laid in that dark mysterious woods. No one took the dirt path leading into those woods. They claimed that birds never sang nor flowers bloomed in among the tall dark trees. It smelt of evil, everyone said. Generations and generations of village people told this old tale again and again, renewing fear every generation. The woods that once shone bright and clear now was so overgrown with weeds and undergrowth that even the bravest of grown men felt a chill whenever they got close. They said that the sun never shone through those dark crowns of trees, breeding great evil. Because of this fear, the village developed a hush over the subject of the forest, and it weighed on its people like a terrible secret, an unwanted burden. Very few of the people smiled or laughed, the children were shut up at home the moment the sun set. EVeryone spoke with the anxious hush of the afraid.

Regarding the much feared demon, no one has seen him, according to the elders, for centuries. As long as no one entered into his dark territories, the village is safe. His wrath must never be awaken by thoughtless actions. All travelers must be warned of the danger. And guiless children must be constantly watched over to see that they do not in a moment of childish foolishness anger the evil in the forest.

THe elders told the story of the demon often. It was a story, a knowledge passed down through generations. There had once been a beautiful tribe of bird men living in the forest. They resembled humans but differed only in that they had wings, and a beak, but they were beautiful and strong bodied, and immortal. They kept their scared grounds while the humans ket their farmlands side by side. For centuries they had lived in peace, with little interaction. For there was never a need to interact. The bird men had their own secret ways. But there was a different reason for their isolation. The bird tribe had a fear of human females. They had no females among the tribe and there had an ancient prophesy that the tribe would remain immortal and intact until a chid is borne of any among them. The fear of a child borne of the bird people was not realized until the farmlands began to encroach on the forest. Each year, more of the forest was cleared to make way for the growing village. And often, young maidens from the village would wander into the forest in search of berries and firewoods. The elders of the bird tribe and the elders of the village then met in secret to form an agreement that henceforth, no humans must enter the sacred forest, and all alliance and interaction between the two groups were to be forbidden. This pact between the two group came to be and soon, the bird tribe was forgotten by the young generations of the village, but this understanding that the sacred forest must not be entered became a way of life. It was not questioned. It merely became yet another understanding of the small universe of the village.

Then one winter, according to the tale, it was an especially cold winter. Snow storms blew mercilessly on the village. A young girl wandered and got lost in the forest. The villagers formed search parties to hunt for the lost girl but to no avail. Everyone took her to be lost and dead. But miraculously, she returned two weeks later, dressed in a beautiful feathered cloak. The villagers tried to pry the tale out of the girl, but she was stubbornly silent. She said nothing. But when spring rolled around, she was spotted entering the forest. And when summer came, she had disappeared entirely form the village, only to appear for a day or two and then to disappear once again into the forest. Sometimes she spoke of a friend in the forest. They villagers took to understand that she had a guardian angel of sorts. As years past, she kept up her disappearance into the forest, she grew up to be beautiful. All the young men in the village wanted her for a wife, but she turned them down one after the other, until she had turned down every single one of the young men in her village. Her parents were concerned that she would never marry, but she just smiled unconcerned. Thinking that her strange behavior had something to do with her disappearance into the forest, the curious mother followed her one day.

The girl wandered among dirt paths, disappearing and reappearing among branches and brambles as if on a familiar path. The mother was barely able to keep up with her getting her apron torn and her hair caught in the trees. She was not a welcomed visitor of the forest. It blocked her way time and again. Only through sheer determination and love for her own daughter was she able to keep up with the lithe figure disappearing so lightly and quickly among the trees. She stopped at a beautiful clearing deep within the forest. It was full of scented blossoms and butterflies. To the mother, who had never seen such beauty in her life, the place was enchanted. The girl, stopped and whistled a tune and laughed lightly. A great shadow appeared and from the sky fell a creature, resembling a man but with a beak on his face where his mouth should have been and on his back, large wings with deep brown feathers the colour of old trees. The girl ran to it and put her arms around the creature. The mother almost fell down from fright, and the repulsion of her daughter being so close to such a creature. She wanted to run screaming to tear her daughter away from the monstrosity her daughter was showing such intimacy to. The monster held the young girl, her hair swung in the sunlight as he lifted her high above the trees and over the clearing. The mother watched rooted, in horror, as the young girl shower kisses onto the creature. It caressed the young girl making her laugh and gasp in pleasure. The mother could watch no more, she ran home her heart sagging with the weight of terror and disgust. As she ran, the forest around resounded with the voice of her own daughter singing the familiar song of women in labors of love.

The girl returned home happy and light-footed. When she got home, her mother slapped her and pulled her hair. Ungrateful, unnatural child! She was told never to set foot inside the forest again. And to make sure that she would never enter that forest again, she was to be locked up in her room. Bars were then placed on her windows and her door bolted and locked up with strong chains. She cried, screamed, raved at her mother for mercy, but they fell on stone hearts. What happened eventually became a well known legend. The villagers heard her pitiful cries often, for weeks she begged to be freed. She promised to disappear completely and never return to shame her kins again. Locked up in her tiny dark room, her beauty faded quickly, she took to talking to the air. There were rumors that her lover had came in the night to try to pry the bars open to free her, but the iron bars held strong. And men started patrolling the streets with guns and pitchforks after dark to keep the feathered monsters at bay. Finally, one dark night when the moon was new, there were crazy screams, then a eerie silence and the sound of a baby crying. The girl had been with child all the time she had been locked up, it was well known that she gave birth to a demon child. They took the baby away to be tossed in the forest for wild beasts to prey on. After they took her child away, the girl stopped talking altogether, she faded into shadows. After the girl had been so broken, she could barely walk, they unlocked the chains, removed the bars from the windows and opened the doors. But she neither walked nor looked at people. She looked past them as if the world was made of air. Although there were rumors that she drowned herself in the village well, the story went that she, no longer being in the world vaporized one day. Leaving only the thin white dress she had on, on the damp rotting wooden floor. Of the bird tribe, nothing was heard of them again. Although there were speculations that the pair of lovers had eloped, and escaped to a paradise on a secret mountain where they would no longer be bothered by petty humans. The version most people stuck to is that the tribe eventually broke apart from the grief of the dead girl and the lost baby. The bird tribe with their beautiful feathered wings and bird songs disappeared altogether. The forest took on the look of something evil. Paths running through it fell into disuse and the trees grew wild and angry. Thorny plants stuck out and malicious poison fruits darkened the forest with evil intent. There were nights when sad, anguish cries can be heard from the depth of the forest.

I was passing through the village, heading West to meet up with my band of brothers, each out hunting demons. It is the tradition of my people that boys left the village at thirteen to roam the world only to return when they have hunted a fair share of demons by the count through which boys became men. The village welcomed me as a demon slayer. I told them I have seen a lot in my travels but I have yet met a demon. I told them the days of dragon and gods no longer existed, watching the iron mills that were springing up along the edge of the village. But they begged for me to rid the village of their great fear, of the demon in the forest. Finally, when the village chief along and the elders went on their knees, I promised that I would kill their demon, and rid them of their great fear.

I entered the forest from the village dirt path which headed East running through the depth of the forest. It was a hard path. The path narrowed into a trail and led to a steep uphill climb. Thorns scratched at me at every turn. Every so often, a single bird would give a desolate cry. This forest was angry and vengeful, it had a heavily guarded secret and wanted no trespassers. Perhaps, this was the day I would finally meet my demon, the one the fates had decreed for me to take on that would make me a man. I walked quietly, the gun loaded and ready to kill, my small dagger sat expectant by my chest. I was alert to dangers and sensitive to movements in the trees. By midday, I had seen nothing nor found any tracks which might have belonged to the demon. The forest was starting to thin surprisingly as I headed deeper into the forest. While the exterior of the forest was heavily fortified and angry, the depth of the forest was less treacherous. Sunlight streamed in through the leaves, leaving stripes of light through the darkness. Here, the forest felt noble and just. I wandered on. By a shallow brook, I first found traces that this part of the forest was inhabited. There was a little bridge, built from branches which straddled the tinkling water. A few miles on, I found it--the demon lair. Except it was nothing like a demon lair. It was a little dwelling made from branches and leaves. It had no windows, only a single point of entry. A little door-like hole which i had to duck to get in. No one was in the little wood structure. Inside, there was a pile of feather, which must have served as a bed. And all around were beautiful twig structures, some resembling animals, but mostly they were just beautifully shaped structures resembling nothing at all. Finding nothing that told me the nature of the being which inhabited this hut. I decided it was safer to hide out by one of the rocks and watch for the inhabitant of the place. I sat silent and still, waiting for the owner of the hut to return. If it was a demon, I could get a clear shot from where I was and avoid any close fighting. If it was a human, I would ask him or her to let me stay for the night and for some supper.

I waited. Hours passed, and nothing. The afternoon sun was waning, the shadows were beginning to stretch. Then I saw it, at first it looked like a man, but as it got closer, I saw its deformity, its mouth was twisted and strange, a growth was on his face just below the nose. There were little tufts of feather on his back. He was walking in a funny sort of limp. As I picked up my gun, he looked at me and started walking towards me. I could have taken him out easy but something stayed my hand. Maybe it was the look in his eyes. A kind of gentle curiosity and a vague shadow of remembering in his look. He stood only two steps away from me. If he decide to attack, I would still be able to overpower him and kill him with my dagger. But all he did was stare. When he reached out, I shrank back in fear. I saw his hands, they were beautiful and finely shaped, not so different in form from my own which were coarse and thick from hard labor. He touched my face, running his fingers over my forehead, my eyebrows, then my eyes, lingering on the lashes. He felt my cheeks, my nose and my lips. Then he ran his own fingers over his own. We stared at each other for what seemed like a long time. Then he turned to walk away. I watched him. I sat for a long time, then I started to make my way out of the forest. There were tears on my face. I realized that I was crying. I did not know what to tell the villagers. There never was a monster other than the one that they had created for themselves. I unloaded the gun and tossed the bullets into the bushes. I looked at my gun, I would have no more use for it, and I tossed that too. Finally, I decided that I would not return to the village, but to head West through the forest to meet up with my brothers. I decided It was time to go home.

2009-03-10T22:32:00.001-07:00

The wave of sadness struck him as he was marking the students' paper . HE was lost to its suddenness. One moment he was reading a mediocre paper on Shakespeare's greatness, the next, he found himself on the floor curled up in tears. Collecting himself once again, he wondered at his dramatic outburst. He was not the kind of person to indulge in his emotions so loosely. He hated it when others lost control, more so when he himself lost control. What was it that had made him so upset? Now that he had calmed down, he could better analyze what just took place. He was mildly surprised at himself, it was almost as if something had snapped quite suddenly inside himself, but now he had not the slightest inkling as to what caused him to snap.

He thought of a female student of his who had cried when he gave her an F, how he had despied her then. She was grovelling for mercy. He had wanted to call her a stupid cow. Tears are weak and stupid, the worst kind of undulgence for the flaccid brained. But now, he pondered, but could not find an answer to his own strange behavior. The day had been like any other day--dull but uneventuful. Nothing went wrong in the past week, the past month or even the past year. In fact, there was nothing wrong with his life. He had a comfortable one bed room apartment in a quiet part of the city. It was in a neat little neighborhood where nothing sensational ever happened. Life was predictable in his second floor apartment right smack in the middle of the building. Here, the only sound was the contented purr of his stove and the comforting sound of the faucet. He never had to worry about sounds of gunshots around the corner or of neighbors being too loud in bed.

He was a teacher at a reputable high school, nothing exception or even memorable. To the students he was an old baldie whom they had to put up with for a few hours every week. They did not expect him to impart any great knowledge. For them, knowledge was to be found in the backseats next to someone they can fuck. He was just part of the landscape they had gotten used to. Respect did not come into the equation. They had a transaction, they gave him their time, he gave them a grade that can help them move on to another teacher and another until they eventually left school.

He looked at the old, scratched out coffee mug standing next to the pile of papers. It once said: World's greatest teacher. Now it was barely readable, only "Wors test er" remained. HE was mildly happy when a student gave it to him even though he knew the student did not mean it and probably got it at a ninety-nine cents store or was merely passing on an unwanted gift. He was happy nonetheless. He should have thrown the mug away years ago, but something sentimental in him prevented him from doing so. But now looking at it, it had all the sad look of a retarded donkey, too old even for someone to waste a bullet on --ridiculous and pathetic. It made him angry all of a sudden. He hated the mug, the ugliness of it all, he hated himself for holding on to it like some old trophy. And the student papers, the stash of mediocrity--trash typed out last minute by students who didn't give a shit about Shakespeare, Milton or anything. The sight of the scrawly letters repulsed him. His hatred for everything on the desk was violent. From the ugly mug, to the papers, to the old study lamp, he despised them with an intensity he had not thought himself capable of.

The apartment he had spent so many happy nights basking in its peace and calm was suddenly disgusting. The old dark green carpet, the wallpaper. The bookshelves with the many books he had spent so many hours putting together into a collection he had been so proud of now looked silly and pretentious. Everything was dumb and ugly. The radio with its one blind eye stared accusingly like an idiot angered. He hated his home, his bed clothes, his old slippers, they were moronic and reflected his own patheticness back to himself in surprising clarity.

The ugly red mug was still staring at him with a spastic glee. HE needed to destroy it. He needed to do something foul, kill some squawking thing then spread its sticky blood all over this room. He wanted to slash away the wallpaper and burn the carpet. The pages from all those books should be ripped out, the shelves mutilated. The mug, the mug has to go. It was intolerable.

The window stood gaping like the rest of the room in idiocy. It was still drizzling outside. He hated the smell of the wet earth floating through the window. He grabbed that ugly old mug, determined to fling it out the window.

Through the window, the world outside was peaceful, the drizzle had slowed the activities on the streets to a crawl. But softness and the slowness was ugly to him. Across the street, he could see a woman holding a white umbrella, she was wearing a pale dress that reflected the glow of the street lamps. Trying to sidestep puddles, she was worried about getting her shoes wet. He wanted to fling the mug at her. At that instant, a strong gust of wind blew the white umbrella clean out of her hands and into the sky. It soared past his window like a great white bird then disappeared into the night sky. She snorted in surprise, watched her umbrella take flight, grumbled curses at the wind, then ran free in the rain. He watched the umbrella sweep past him on mute wings. It glimmered for a moment and was then swallowed up by the darkness. He looked at the dark sky, it was clear despite the rain. The moon glowed hazy and cool, gazing down from a corner of its cold, detached eye. He looked full into the face of the city at night, he was surprised at its beauty. It was a beauty that had to be struggled with, the kind of beauty that one had to wrestle in order to own or even to see. Someone was trying to play Bach on the piano somewhere on the street. The melody came to him muffled, diffused. The music stumbled around confused, limping to catch the elusive right notes. He looked at the red mug he still clutched in his hand, he wanted to summon up the anger but realized it was no longer real. He decided to make himself some coffee.

2009-02-25T19:01:00.000-08:00

It has been fifteen years, since she has been back to the old village. So many things have changed in the country. She had felt it the moment she touched down in the plane, the scenery outside has changed, the feeling of the place has changed, she has changed. Her two boys were looking around curious and impatient, unfastening the seat belts before the plane has even come to a complete stop. They were pointing and gesturing at everything. The city was different every where. So many new buildings and roads and people bustling about ceaselessly. The pace of everything had increased to the extent that she had to struggle to keep up. Streets were crowded and cars were everywhere, honking, spewing black exhaust. Her husband had been quiet the whole time, just taking things in. He was a city boy, he had always been familiar with the city where everyone was anonymous and hence protected. The boys were excited by everything. Everything was new to them--the food, the faces, the language. They were bubbly even during the ten hour bus ride which brought them to her old home.

She had fallen asleep. By the time they arrived at her village, it was already dark, they checked in to a modest hotel, already the best in the village. At least it had hot water and soap and beds. The boys were as chatty as ever with their boundless engery, bouncing on beds, flipping light switches again and again. After much work, they finally fell asleep hours after midnight. She heard her husband's steady breathing and knew that even he was asleep. She was alone in this hour, back home and feeling isolated and all of a sudden, afraid. She had written to the few family memebrs still living in the village to inform them of her return, but still, she felt all twisted up inside. What would she see with the first light? How would they see her? With these thoughts whirling, she fell into an uneasy sleep. When she woke up her boys and her husband were already up. They had already been out to look around and had brought with them exciting stories and strange snacks that they were fighting over, then almost immediately lost interest in.

She took her time washing up. Reminding herself where she was. The smell of the village was overpowering--cow manure and something organic and alive, the trees or the grass or the rice fields maybe. She remembered those lazy afternoons in the mosquito nets with sister. How they took turns fanning each other. THe boys were running around letting out pent up energy from the night before. They were tripping over each other and they were " Mamma this. Mamma that." Her husband, as always, wore that same kind nonchalance. They had two hours before the scheduled meeting with her step cousin and her step cousin-in-law. The boys wanted to look at the local farms, but she wanted to be alone. Her husband agreed to take them to the farm, knowing that she needed some time by herself. Before they took off, he had put his arm around her for a moment. At that instant, she had wanted to break down and cry. She wanted him to take her far away from here like how he had fifteen years ago.

By herself, she wandered the streets, some familiar, others unregconizable. The old grocery stall was still here, but it was run by a different family who gave her false smiles reserved for the visitors. She wandered looking for signs of herself in things, but everywhere everything seemed to have forgotten her. The field where she and her sister used to play on with the other kids have turned into a school. The little dirt path running through it was now a paved road. She wandered on the new road, knowing where it would take her. Straight to her old house, where she had spent so many warm happy nights watching fireflies.

The plot of land where the old house used to stand upon was still there, but the house was a stranger to her. She could hear murmurs from within, women chatting. THe old pear tree was still there. The old tree where she had sat on with sister all those golden afternoons munching on preserved plum skins. They had buried secret treasures under it. A beaded neacklace, a key for sister's old velvet diary, marbles and ribbons. She wondered if that sacred metal biscuit tin was still there. She started to dig beneath the soil under the giant root but stopped herself. So what if it was still there, so what if it was not. Those things would mean little now, although once it had been her life. Perhaps it was better to leave it for some other sisters to find and to make special.

The tree had grown even bigger than she remembered as a child. She used to look up at it and watch the clouds drift by through those branches and leaves. And sometimes, when a breeze passed, little leaves and petals would fall. She used to climb onto the lowest branch then slowly made her way up to where sister sat reading a book or just watching the distant with those faraway eyes. Peple always told sister that she had beautiful eyes, they were beautiful and enchanting, with glassy shadows like some deep lakes. Her own unfortunate shallow and small eyes were always something she was secretly ashamed of. But sister was always so kind to her. She remembered the sunlight filtering through the leaves lighting up their faces and the world around them. They would munch on pears, while dangling their legs distractedly they would dream of faraway futures.

The Future did take them far away. Sister had moved to New York, the village was all in a clamour when she left. She was the first to leave to the place everyone still thought of as a legendary paradise on Earth. There she would drink soda and lie on leather sofas in air conditioned houses. Then she herself got married and moved to California. She had talked to sister a few times on the phone over the years, but the distance and their individual lives drew them apart. She had given birth to two boys since and had been juggling with work and family. Finally learning to keep pace with their demands and learning to balance and to keep the tempo of her life without falling over the edge. Three years back, sister called her out of the blue. Just from her voice, she could tell that sister wasn't well. She hadn't been well. She had ovarian cancer in the late stages and was receving treatment for it. Even before sister asked, she knew she had to make a trip to New York. Sister wanted her to bring the boys even though she had been reluctant. It was hard for her husband to take leave to make the trip with her and the boys were a handful. But she did it in the end. She went alone with the two boys to visit the Aunt they had never met.

Sister never had any children, but she dearly loved and wanted them. Sister told her on many of those hospital nights that if she had stayed on in the marriage with her husband, she might have had a child. But things just didn't work out and at that time she had thought it better to end it with resolute than to let things unravel painfully and slowly. Sister loved the boys and always wanted them to visit her at the hospital but the boys hated the hospital and were afraid of her. She couldn't blame them, sister looked terrible in the last days. Her face was grey and puffy and her jaw hung loose like the those of the very old or very ill. When she talked, her lips trembled and her saliva bubbled. She knew Sister was suffering and children never can understand suffering. They didn't have any memories of their Aunt to fall back on, all they saw was this ugly, sick woman on a hospital bed who kept wanting to stroke their faces. Sister went slowly, fighting, struggling then finally sinking.

How she wished that sister was here with her right now. That she would take her hand and kick off their shoes and climb the old tree. She herself had forgotten how beautiful Sister used to be and how bright and golden the world had been for them when they were young. As she stood under the pear tree, memories came rushing back from this world straight through her skin. She looked up. The tree was blossoming, it was full of clean white blossoms. A breeze blew across the fields and through the leaves, blossoms waved in the sun and the leaves shimmered. From a distant she could see her boys and her husband. They were racing up the paved road. She took a last look at the tree and walked towards them.

2009-02-14T23:30:00.000-08:00

Tree--under a blue sky, its leaves glimmer like green sparkles.
A woman--under a tree pondering a place she has not seen in fifteen years.
Soil--under a tree. Childish treasures are still buried.
Hands--under the soil reaching for the metal tin still alive with memories.
Tears--under closed eye lids.
Questions--under the blue sky as mute as sealed lips.
Boy--under the tree looking up at his mother.
Tree--under a blue sky, its leaves whispering in the breeze.
Breeze--through the leaves and over the fields.

2009-01-27T23:11:00.000-08:00

For two and a half years now, he had been going to that little coffee shop just around the corner on the street where he lived. Always, he woke up at around six in the morning and watched the sky lighten from blue to a deep bronze swirling with pinks, oranges and white. He waited for that first light of the morning, doing little things like watering the plants or reading a book until the streets started getting busy, then he put on his overcoat, his shoes and head down to the corner of the street.

Ever since he turned sixty he had found it hard to sleep and to stay asleep. Afterall, sleep is a privilege of the young, or "the lazy and the dim-witted" as his grandmother used to say, but that was so long ago. She herself had taken to bed for the last three months of her life, bed-ridden and furious at her immobility and eventually growing deranged, then forgetful and then silent. He had felt bad for her when he was younger, but now, in these last few years he has come to understand her frustrations better. Sure, he felt fear for what was to come eventually, but that fear is always over-emphasized by people at the height of their youth. Most of the time it was frustration at growing older, finding out there were more and more things he could no longer do with grace. For example he preferred the elevator to the stairs, rainy days brought mechanical difficulties, even tying his own shoes became too physically demanding, he took to wearing slip ons-those comfy old things. Still, things weren't all so bad. He still had a cozy little apartment with a window from which he could watch the park on sunny days and watch kids romp and scream. And, there was his favorite coffee shop just around the corner, the owner of which he had become friends with.

He graced it every morning and Al junior, the owner's son would give him a smile and a friendly pat on the back.

"Where's your old man?" he asked as he sat down.

"Gone fishing."

He admired Al senior's temperament. Al senior was the kind of person who would just up and go and decide to disappear for days spending time on different lakes trying to get a good catch to boast about when he got back. He himself never had that kind of adventurous spirit nor the desire to boast, not that it was a big deal when he was younger, but being able to brag when you got older somehow became a desirable, even admirable trait.

He liked Al junior, he always asked what he would like even though he always ordered the same--English breakfast tea with a slice of lemon on the side. But his asking made it seem as if he was more adventurous than he really was. He always looked at the menu and looked through the options opened to him considering each afresh every morning but always arriving at the same choice. It was less of a routine that way, more of a preference.

"Did the man in the grey hat come by today?" He asked Al junior as he placed his tea with the slice of lemon on the side on the table.

"No. Still haven't seen him." A heavy-set woman waved to Al junior from another table and he left.

The man in the grey hat had been coming to the coffee shop longer than even he had, and always he would already be sitting at his table sipping his black coffee, a peach tart on a little white dish on the side, with his paper spread open just as he arrived. The man in the grey hat would always look up from his paper and gave him a nod and a smile. But it has been two weeks since the man in the grey hat last came to the coffee shop. Could he have moved? He hated to think of the probable, he might be sick. When one got sick at their kind of age, the sickness usually comes with a kind of dark boding. He didn't mind it happening to himself so much, but it disturbed him greatly when it happened to those around him. He thought he would have gotten used to people dying and disappearing in his life by now, but it was something he could never get accustomed to and probably never would.

He remembered the first time he saw the man in the grey hat. He had just moved into the neighborhood. It was right after Martha's death, he had sold their old house, took with him the few pieces of items too precious to be given away or sold. It was the first time he stumbled upon this little coffee shop tucked into the corner of the street, throwing its quiet calm onto the busy frantic street. The man in the grey hat was sitting there reading his paper. It might have been the breeze and the blue sky of that morning or it might have been the way the man in the grey hat was sitting, but for that instant, he felt that he was looking at an ageless scene, that time had somehow froze or was moving in slow motion, dripping slowly like the light that was spreading slowly over everything, turning them into gold. The man in the grey hat must have felt him looking because he had glanced up from his paper casually and their eyes met. He must have smiled because he remembered the man in the grey hat nodding and smiling back at him.

The man in grey hat was sturdy, not in the way he was built, but in the way he held and carried himself--like he had had a secret kind of triumph in life, nothing petty like being rich or successful but something bigger, like finding dignity or discovering a hard-earned truth about life. But whatever it was, it could be seen in the way he held his gaze-steady and bright like a flame some quiet night. They recognized each other instantly, like the way people do sometimes when they meet someone who reflected themselves in the other person's eyes. They were of the same element-- Steady, earth-like and old. Two mountains gazing at each other from across a gulf.

They never spoke, there didn't seem to be a need to. Every morning for two and half years, they sat across each other and exchanged nods and smiles but never a single word. There was once, Al junior had brought him a peach tart. He had quickly told Al that he must have gotten the order wrong, he didn't order any peach tarts, but Al pointed at the man in the grey hat and he understood immediately that it was meant to be a treat--an acknowledgement of an unspoken kind of friendship. He ate the peach, juicy and coated with a layer of syrup. He was never a big fan of the sweets, but he licked the tart clean of the cream save for the crust which was too hard for his old gums. He pointed at his teeth when the man in the grey hat looked curiously at the crust sitting like a shipwreck on his plate, he had smiled and nodded knowingly as if to say "I know that alright."

He looked out for the man in the grey hat for a month. Finally, he found him in the obituary section of the paper. His name was Martin. His memorial service was to be held in three days, on a Friday.

That Friday, He found himself outside the church with a dozen of peach tarts deliberating whether he should go in. He did in the end, because he had always wanted to return Martin a treat but never did and now he felt sad that he never would. He entered the church, and almost immediately he regretted it. All around in the little chapel were his family members and close friends, mourning the passing and celebrating the life of their loved one. What was he doing in there? They talked of Martin's charms, little insider jokes about him, how he had once been in the navy. He felt that he had intruded in the worst possible way. Instead of returning any kind of favor, he was trespassing. Death was a private affair and he had no business here. He was just a man Martin used to see every morning over a cup of coffee. By God, he didn't even know his name until three days ago. He tried to sit through several of the funeral orations, but when Martin's long time friend from the navy talked about their time in the Korean War, he decided it was time for him to leave. On his way out, he looked at the dozen of peach tarts he still held. Martin's daughter stood at the back by a memory table dedicated to the dead man. The tip of her nose was red and her eyes starry.

"Leaving so soon?" she asked.

"Yes, I'm afraid so." He handed the tarts over to her. "I thought you might like these."

She opened the box.

"Peach tarts." She looked at him a little quizzically, but accepted them graciously.

"Were you a good friend of my father?" she asked just as he was about to leave.

"We were a little more than acquitances, really." He looked at the little trinkets on the memory table to avoid her eyes. When he finally looked up, their eyes met. A corridor between him and Martin's daughter opened for that short moment. It was filled with light.

"It was very nice of you to come. Thank you."

He smiled and nodded at her then he opened the chapel door and stepped into the sunshine. It was green everywhere, he observed. Then, he started on his way home.

2009-01-14T13:16:00.000-08:00

After Martha died, he had not been able to do anything. All he could do was to mope around the house, picking up random little trinkets which meant little but which now seemed to be haunted by the aura of Martha. He had been wearing the same pair of socks for two weeks now and he didn't care. He didn't care that the house was stinking of the rotting garbage, he didn't care that he was eating expired canned food. He didn't care that his phone has been ringing off the hook full of concerned voice messages from Tom and Jacqueline both worried that their aging father was spiraling into depression or worse, madness. What do they know? He wanted nothing to do with them. Their nagging concern and the way they looked at him as if he was a sickness they wanted to put away forever so that they could carry on with their busy lives.

He had always worried that Martha would go before him. He had tried to make Martha promise that she would die after he did. Maybe, he was being selfish, but from the way his world was rapidly falling apart right now, he could see how Martha would hold it all up, like the way she always did, like the way he could not. Martha would not let herself sink into a shit pit the way he was letting himself drown. He kept running this thought over and over in his head, if only he had Martha, he would not be in such a state. If only Martha were here to tell him what to do to put his life back together, the life which now seemed to have a gigantic black hole which nothing filled. Martha always knew what to do, she always told him things would be alright in the end, and she had always been right. But now, he didn't know. Would things be alright? Would things ever be alright again?

These questions were ignored whenever they floated up like bad smells along with the sound of the doorbell. It was Tom or Jacqueline no doubt. How he had loved them when they were little, carrying them on each shoulder, hearing their squeals of delight. But now, they squealed nightmarishly at him and their guilt and obligation were as obvious as their once-upon-a- time-delight. He was an old man, abandoned and afraid. Yes, afraid. Too frightened even to end it all off by leaving the gas running or jumping off a bridge. Too afraid even to mouth words like "Fuck." Tom had cursed him when he refused to open the door for the seventeenth time. "Fuck you dad. If that's the way you want it." It was followed by angry footsteps of Tom leaving frustrated. He had wanted to run after his son and to call him back to save him, but he was too tired. Besides, it was Martha who always saved him.

Nights were the worst. The bed was so empty and cold, the room so silent that he had to sleep in the couch in the living room with the T.V turned on. And still he could not sleep. He tried listening to music, good old songs which used to soothe his vexed spirits but now everything seemed to lack Martha. Martha hated that song or Martha used to sing along to that song as she washed the dishes. Martha always loved music. Now there was no Martha, and it was unbelievably surreal how things seemed normal everywhere else. Only his grief seemed real. He wanted to run screaming onto the streets that his wife was dead, she was no more, she no longer existed, how dare anyone even be happy, how could anyone have that right when he was in such misery?

He did not know how he spent those days just after Martha's death. Probably he was living like an animal or a barely conscious beast, something vile and lowly on the food chain. But Tom and Jacqueline broke the lock to his door eventually. He saw their horrified faces when they burst upon his living condition and could not hide his amusement at the extent of their horror. Jacqueline had gasped an "Oh my God" and Tom merely stared at the place stunned.

"Dad, you made yourself live in a stink hole. Do you think mum would have wanted this?" Tom was always quick to reprimand, he always reacted in anger.

"It's mum's funeral tomorrow, what do you want us to do?" Such a simple question, but he didn't have an answer to give.

Together Tom and Jacqueline had dragged him from his stinking pedestal and washed him. They tried to clean the place, but even they could not stand the stink. They called for professional cleaning service. To them, everything had a solution.

In the car on the way to Martha's funeral, everyone said little. He had not spoken a word to Tom or Jacqueline ever since the night in the hospital when he had told them they had arrived too late. Their mum had died even when she was in the ambulance. He hated them then. He hated how he was the only one to witness her passing, how he had to shoulder the grief. How they could weep with abandonment which was laced with a tinge of relief. She had died quickly and easily, nothing of the long dragged our battle which wore out the people around the dying who cared. Martha never troubled anyone in life and she did not trouble anyone in death.

They arrived at the cemetery. At the cemetery gates, Tom and Jacqueline stopped to get roses from a grim-faced lady. As they were bargaining with the woman, he saw a little boy across the street with a bunch of balloons.

"Are they for sale?"

The little boy looked at him suspiciously. "My dad bought them for me."

"Will you let me have one?"

The little boy looked thoughtful for a moment then his face lit up, "will you give me a dollar?"

"Sure." He fished for an old bill and took a red balloon from the boy.

Tom and Jacqueline looked at him funny when he walked towards them with a red balloon but said nothing. When you are the one in grief, you have the license to be inexplicble and what may seem inappropriate for someone else is infinitely excusable for the most grieved.

He went through the service obediently doing as he was told by the dry priest who muttered a bunch of unimportant religious nonsense. When it came time for the people to offer their roses and little parting gifts and kisses. He gave thanks for a beautiful life he shared with Martha and let the balloon go. He watched it float above the trees and high into the air. Past the narrow mouth of the tall buildings, into the infinite belly of the sky which stretched on and on and he thought on his love for Martha.

2008-12-22T23:42:00.000-08:00

She met that little girl in the forest almost fifteen years ago. She just turned forty then, her marriage was tethering, on the edge of falling apart and her baby daughter was only four months. She had looked into the mirror that evening to find that she had aged immensely. The lines of what used to be her smile now became deep creases which made her look miserable. Maybe it was merely an externalization of the way she felt. But those two lines by the side of her mouth running from the sides of her nose to the corners of her lips were clear and deep, stains of a smile she had faked so many times, now nightmarishly she could not wipe it off. They were like the stains of milk on the glass she could never completely wash off, only they were worse. Worse, because they laughed their little evil laughs at her. As if they wanted her to see something ugly inside herself, daring her to destroy them and destroy herself along with them at the same time. She had felt afraid. She had been feeling afraid for the past three weeks. Her husband had not returned home in days now. She knew he was in love with someone else. Someone else who did not have two evil lines staring her in the face everytime she looked at herself in the mirror and everytime she let her smile drop. Love. She had tried to keep the word out of her mind for a month now. She did not want to think of what it meant between herself and her husband. And she was afraid she did not know what it meant all along. If she did know love, why then, did she feel so empty and hollow evertime she looked at her baby daughter. They had named her Anabelle, a name she later found out to mean "lovable." She was afraid that she did not love her child the way she was supposed to. She was fearful that she had already lost her husband's love a long time ago. She was angry with herself. Angry because it was her fault that she did not know how to love.

She had been staring at her reflection for two whole hours. It was the baby's cry that broke her dark spell. She went to the baby's room, carried the child whose name was love and found that she wanted to throw up. She could not stand the soft scent of milk and honey and the promise of love. The child would not stop crying. She looked out the window, it was dark outside and it was drizzling. The sound of the rain made her think of oil jumping impatiently on the frying pan. She slammed the windows shut, to block out that horrible sound and thought of leaving the gas running until it filled this house, until it filled all her hollow spots so that she would be so full she would overflow her own being till she emptied herself and withered like a dead skin. The baby kept crying. To stop herself from throwing herself and the baby out of the second floor window, she left the house in the light rain. She ran, not knowing where her desperate legs would take her.

She ran along the field she and her husband had so loved when they first moved in nine years ago. They had laughed and named the field, "the field of sour lemons" because of the hard, shrunken look it had whenever the sun set, lighting up the scraggy grass so that the field looked like it was in a constant state of sneering and squinting at the sun. He used to tease her that it was the perfect spot for a sour person like her. Now she ran into the darkness, no traces of lemons or anything, only this black mouth she dived into hoping to be swallowed. Swallowed completely so that nothing of her would remain. Not her name, not her clothes. not her smile, not her smell, not her memory. Not a trace of her existence.

The rain grew wild, and the winds tossed the grass around her like a lunatic. She flew like a bird-- lost, confused and out of control into the sea of darkness. She was swept by the wild wind into the nearby forest to take shelter from the now downpouring rain as if the bladder in the sky had exploded. The rain was urgent and the wind moaned the loss. In its heaviness, the piercing rain ripped the membrane which kept the world safe. Now the world was savage and uninhibited, it could harm, maim and kill as it pleased. She crouched under a tree. In the darkness, the rain was only hungry sounds and the sensation of needles stabbing deep. In the darkness she thought she saw glowing lights, like gems inside a cave throwing the illusion of desire where shadows became deep and distorted.

Then like magic, she saw the umbrella, white and glowing in the dark. It was bobbing clumsily among the trees and shrubs and it was making its way slowly but surely towards her. It was a vision, she was certain, of an apparition of the forest, angered by her intrusion or perhaps hungry for her lost soul asking to be taken. In the dark and the rain, it seemed as if it was floating towards her. There was once she had seen jellyfish glowing in a dark aquarium, she was very young then and in that instant, it felt as if it was only her and the jellyfish in the whole of the universe. The feeling of awe was the same. It swept and washed over her, giving her chills which rose into a silent sigh. The umbrella apparition came towards her, glowing white and warm like fresh linen on a sunny day. It was luminous and clean-- unearthly in the darkness, in the forest, in the rain. A little girl of about twelve was holding it, she walked towards her the umbrella glowed like the moon of a lesser sky.

The little girl beckoned with a little waving motion of her hand for her to take shelter under her umbrella. Entranced, she stood up and walked to the little girl. The girl seemed to radiate warmth, without understanding why, she knew she trusted the little girl. The little girl said nothing but smiled at her. They walked for a long time in silence. She knew not where she was being led to by the little girl but she did not ask. It is often the case, that when confronted with the truly mystifying, the human mind skips over the questions like a river running over the rocks. Everything felt natural and sure even though she had no idea what would happen next. All she did was to walk, on a kind of blind faith. The blind faith of children that trusts the hand which leads them.

The rain had stopped. After what seemed like a walk for hours, they arrived at a fork in the road. The little girl, took her hand shook it and then pointed for her to take the road which led to West, while she gestured that she would take the road leading East. The little girl still holding the glowing white umbrella then walked without looking back. She stood there looking for a long time after the little girl left. There was something familiar about that little girl, something about the girl which reminded her of herself at twelve. Still, the world was now quiet after the storm. She looked up to see the moon a thin smile slitting the dark sky like a knife. She was afraid of the dark road and the night then. She ran down the road, hoping to spot her home, her life, her sanctuary.

She prayed as she walked down that dark road. She promised that she would start everything anew, give herself and her baby and her husband the chance for a new beginning if she made it home. She walked in what seemed like an endless night. Darkness which stretched on impossibly, but then like a miracle, she saw the familiar porch, the garden and the driveway glowing warmth, promising safety. The lights streaming from the windows seemed like arms outstretched to her drenched in the night and the cold. She ran wildly for the front door. When she flung it open her husband was standing worried. When he held her after the eternity of that moment of hesitation between the two of them, she knew everything was going to be alright. She was home.

2008-12-04T20:05:00.001-08:00

The wife has been hearing voices for a week now, surely a sign of an approaching nervous breakdown or worse, madness. The husband has been ignoring her rantings about some baby ghost possessing the house. For some strange reason, he has grown immune to all kinds of strangeness coming from the wife's mouth. She was merely part of the house he has gotten used to, even her voice, now thin with anxiety and straining with what is it? Madness? He had gotten use to it all. While she rushed around the house whispering and sometimes talking frantically to the baby ghost, he merely shook his head and told her to snap out of it. He was losing patience with this ghost business. It was getting worse. At first it was just her observation of this little baby ghost, of all the things it was doing. Now, she was going too far, making food for the invisible baby that he had to throw away. And her face, the ghastly paleness and the darkness around her eyes, and the horrible expression of constantly being in shock with her wide-eyed blank stares and her mouth hanging loosely like an O bent out of shape. He felt revulsion and horror at the thing he had married. THis creature of madness. Oh why won't she stop this nonsense.

Then at breakfast, he heard the wife, talking in that high-pitched voice of hers in anxious whispers without a pause like a speeding train about to be derailed. "She's coming! The baby ghost! She's coming!" HE looked up with slight irritation to see the old blue dress that the wife had worn when he had first met her floating across their tiny apartment. The blue dress, still on its hanger, flew out of their bedroom, past the kitchen, into the living room with the wife running after it moaning, begging for it to stop. HE watched as the blue dress, paused for a moment on the window sill and then flung itself hanger and all out of their sixth storey window. They went to the window, husband and wife, as they stared at the rumpled dress down below looking like something had died quite unexpectedly and grotesquely. Then the wife screamed. She screamed and she screamed.

2008-11-19T22:53:00.000-08:00

It was peaceful in the desert. For this strange fragment of time, the winds were still, and the sand laid silent, glowing faintly under the moonlight. The face of the desert for this short corridor of time between the rising of the moon to the rising of the sun remained, for the moment, still. Everything stood so frozen and still it was as if time was no longer relevant. Then out of this stationary fragment of deep blueness and soft white glow, a white parachute floated out of the sky. A tiny dot of a figure was floating slowly to the ground like a dream image playing in slow motion. The parachute landed softly on the sand, falling like a deflated balloon. A figure crawled out from under. He looked around curiously, turned three times trying to make sense of where he was but nothing on that faceless landscape gave him any clue.

He was lost. That was sure. But he was alive. He thought of his buddy on the plane wondered if he too was alive somewhere on this vast landscape of sand wondering about him at this very same moment. His ears strained for the sound of metal crashing or explosion but everything around him was silent. It was as if the mute button for the world had been turned on, like all those times when it had snowed when he was a kid. The glowing sand made him think of snow back home. It was so strange that everything should be so serene and so still here while somewhere else a war he was familiar with was still raging. This sudden confrontation with stillness and silence was frightening. He had gotten so used to the sound of machine guns and exploding hand grenades and the explosions which rocked one to one's teeth, leaving strange sudden vibrations for days. The shaking would take days, sometimes years to wear off.

But now this stillness, what should he make of it? What of this desolate beauty which dwarfed him and made him feel so alive and so small at the same time. What of this vast world in which he was tossed into quite unexpectedly. Was this a dream he was to wake from, finding himself half drugged half alive with a leg missing? He shook his head to regain some sense of reality but here he was still dazed in this feathery world of softness. The desert seemed almost like a woman, sensual and soft, so unlike the pictures of deserts he had grown accustomed to, that harsh cruel landscape where none could survive unaided by supernatural intervention.

He walked not knowing where he was headed or which way to go. His feet sank into the carpet sand. They seemed to yield to him at every step, falling away like foam. Now he understood why some people call the desert the land of water. It was perhaps truer to call it the embodiment of the idea of water, because the idea of it was everywhere even though the substance itself was absent. As he walked he thought, passing thoughts which drifted in and out insubstantial as shadow.

A large shadow loomed ahead, a silhouette in the moonlight. He walked closer. It was the wooden skeleton of a ship. Just the hull of it sticking out of the sand,a hollow rib cage, pointing skyward like a great finger which showed him the way out of the place. "Skyward. Head skyward" it said. Strange that he should find this ship here. Was it tossed and shipwrecked onto the desert like he was? He looked at the wood, brittle, roasted by the heat in the day and eaten by the biting sand at night. Just a testiment of some dead past now reduced to skeleton, soon reduced to dust. Did it miss the feeling of water when it got tossed here thirsting for perhaps centuries for the feeling of the sea? He felt for his waterbottle. It was still there, his metal flask reflecting the cold light of the moon. He uncapped the flask felt the uneven bobbing of liquid as he tilted the bottle this way and that. Then he poured it onto the old dried wood so much like the skin of an old man he once knew but could no longer picture his face with any clarity. Muddied, just like the rest of the world. He poured half the bottle away and kept the remaining half for himself. "Time to go, old friend." he said to that old ribcage still gaping at the velvet sky. "Everything gets forgotten in time, just like you and me." And then he went on his way.

The desert was still again. It was almost as if that young man from the parachute was merely an apparition, a dream of the desert. All except for a track of footprints in the sand heading off into the great unknown, the great forgetfulness that is the world.

2008-11-10T21:05:00.001-08:00

Recently, in class we celebrated the day of the dead. We set up an altar in the front of the class. Each of us bringing an artifact or a picture, something belonging to someone who has passed on, or even parts of us which we have outgrown and said farewell to. It was unbelievably moving hearing about things and people long gone. Memories of them which still resonate so palpably that in that classroom of ours with the white fluorescent lamps doing their nano-second flickers I felt the presence of memories of these people I have never met, so strong it was like the silent vibration on a violin string long after the note has ceased. It cannot be heard or seen, touched or smelt. It can only be felt and therein lies its magic.

Maybe, once upon a time I have wondered about where dead people go. Is there an afterlife? Do ghost and spirits exist? Do souls depart into paradise or hell, to another lifetime on a reaincarnation wheel? Does it matter so much, if we do not live our lives fully? The best and worst of men and women who have ever lived still leaves imprints on us when they die. Their lives and their deaths are still celebrated, even if they have not been perfect, merely human. No they may not have been famous, only someone in your family who spent the last days on a lonely bunk bed looking out of the window at the dark corridor outside, smoking miserable cigarettes, perhaps contemplating his coming death, perhaps carrying the guilt of a lifetime. Perhaps feeling that it might be too late asking to be forgiven. Perhaps trying to live out his remaining days with whatever dignity he could muster. But whatever it is, he is remembered.

In the class, I read a poem I wrote. Here it is:

For My Grandfather

To that man
Who was always too quiet
Gazing on family parties
From the sides
A silence so palpable
That as I child
I had felt it whenever I got close.

To the man
Who voice
Was thin and raspy
Like his presence
So easily forgotten
Like something transparent
Perhaps a ghost

To the man
Who was never loud
Looking for his photo
I could only find a few candid shots
With him lurking in the background
Always with him looking away
So distant
Like the man I could and would
Never know
He lived always on the sideline
A mute spectator

To the man
I heard so much about
His gambling
Being a bad father
A bad husband
So different from the man I know
Just a gentle presence
So guilt ridden
I heard he kept my cousin’s medals
Beside his packets of cigarettes under his mattress
On the double bunk bed
Where he slept on top
Through the windows
I have always peeked at the darkness outside

Grandfather, I wonder if death is as dark on the other side
Is it as silent and distant as you?
Does it always evade photographs
Looking away?
Did you finally get your redemption
And forgiveness
I have so much wanted to tell you
You already had
Even as a child
Even as a child.

2008-10-11T00:07:00.000-07:00

I hear the rainbow calling. Calling me to join it, to join its shimmer. In this silent world of mine where no sound penetrates my ears, still I hear the rain bow call. I hear it when other do not. It is there in my moments of darkness when I feel alienated from this world, I hear it. Hear it from the depths of my being. I saw the rainbow the summer I turned six. It was there gleaming in the sky in its brilliant colours, it was solid and translucent at the same time. I clearly remembered hearing a song, a deep song which came from within the earth or perhaps it came from the sky. The next day, I woke with a fever, it burnt away all noise from the rest of the world, and it burnt the song forever into my being. The moment I found this precious meaning is also the moment I lost contact with all others. It was from that moment on that people became gaping fish, always gaping in hunger-- hunger for meaning, hunger for contact, hunger for love,hunger for sex, hunger for words, hunger for sound, hunger for music. And this hunger became forever out of reach for me, because in my world of solitude, the last thing I recall from this world of hunger is the call of that rainbow. The hunger became yearning for me. To hunger is to suffer in a lack, to hunger is to absolve pain itseslf, because hunger is blind, it feeds on and devours even itself, it is to dwell in pain without the recognition of it. To yearn is to live on that pain, the pain is its food, it exists only so long as the pain exists. The pain is yearning's contract, without it, yearning ceases. Hungry people do not recognize yearning, everything becomes food. The fish pulled out of the water in the massive nets are food to the hungry, most do not see the yearning of the fish struggling so hard to breathe, they dance that impossible death dance of theirs, yearning to return to the sea. Because people have lost their yearning, all they will ever know is hunger.

People approach people of my kind with wary. It is not our silence that they dislike, it is our quietness they fear. Silence is a lack of sound, quietness is a state of being. They look upon us with pity that we can never understand the meaning of melody. But even now, I hear it in the song I heard as a little girl, when I saw that rainbow. It is there when the earth rains, those droplets like musical notations on a score, touching me in its special way, arousing secret parts of my skin and being. It is the random dance of little girls I see on the street, their little feet tapping knowledge of innocence and life into the earth beneath. It is the life inside me that grows each day with defiance and strength, calling out to the world beyond its darkness with its staccatos hums in its heartbeat. It is in the way the man I love touch me, his lips like a summer breeze after a fever passes, the calm coolness and a passing heat. There is melody in everything I do. There is melody in life. People tiptoe around me and the life inside me. What if the child will not be able to hear, what if it will? Which is the cause for celebration, which the cause for grief? If I can speak I will tell them to listen, listen to the rainbow and understand that deafness does not exist, but only as a hunger for melody.

2008-09-30T00:33:00.001-07:00

Where and how should I start my tale. Not at the beginning, because unlike what most people think, the beginning is not where things start. It is always the end which marks the beginning and makes everything fall into place. Besides, beginnings and ends are arbitrary. So I guess I shall start at my tale precisely in the middle, and then perhaps lead it back to its source.

My father died at 57, young for a man of his kind. He has always been a leader, a doer. If a word can define this man, it is accomplish, in both the verb and adjective sense of the word. He never understood what middleground meant. He always had his opinion, which he saw as 'the' opinion. But anyhow, my father died. One day he was up ordering people about and the next day he was dead like a bedpost.

I didn't feel much for him. I was the oldest and expect somehow to take over whatever role it was the man played in the lives of those around him. People without realizing it threw these responsiblities and expectations onto me. Unfortunately though, I was clumsy at catching these responsibilites, dropping them all over the place, and with these fallen disappointments, so too my standing in their eyes fell. Not that I cared, I never wanted their good opinions anyway. Not when I had to be constantly held up next to my father as if he is the light source which will make my existence clear to the eyes of these others. No. I am who I am. Everything I did made perfect sense in my own internal universe even if it did not to anyone else.

Perhaps there is indeed a greater power out there in the universe, churning out fates like well-tuned gears. And we are all part of this great machine and sometimes we find out how we fit into a greater scheme of things. Knowing or unknowingly we all play our parts precisely as who we are or think we are. I was never a big believer of fate so I never actively defied my destiny.

It was about a month after his death, I was going through his belongings, all the old books, pictures, trophies and letters which no longer held any meaning they were just things gathering dust like some poignant testimony to passing days and a resting place for the light footed dust. I came across this old box full of yellowing and moth-eaten letters with faded words. I cared little for his artifacts so I chucked it aside. It was quite promptly forgotten lying in the pile in the middle among other things which I could not decide were of value or worthless.

Then by some strange chance, I was among his things one day, I spotted that old box of letter and took it with me. Who knows why we do the things we do sometimes, perhaps there really is a voice guiding us to things beyond our own knowledge. That voice sometimes carry us to safety and deliverance and sometimes to forgiveness. But I did, I picked up that box once again and this time I looked into the letters. They were all addressed to my father by an old priest. I assumed the writer is an old priest because he kept quoting from the bible in the letters, and always at the end, he signed off "In the name of the father, and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen" or sometimes it is "All in God's will. Amen" It was as if every letter was a prayer addressed to a man as common, unruly and disbelieving as my father. I was surprised to find that my father had kept correspondence with a priest for so many years of his life, I believe, judging by the number of letters, the letter exchange has started since my father was a young boy barely in his teenage years. He had always been the one to proclaim in that booming voice of his that there is no God but man himself. Now, finding these letters, I was reluctant to read them. Perhaps it is mean spirited of me, but I wasn't ready for my old man to suddenly become this secret saint with all this secret past which would so easily redeem him in my eyes. No, he would not get away that easily for all those years he had made my mother and I suffer in silence for his brutish ways.

I tossed those letters aside in anger, determined to burn them when the opportunity arise. In my anger, some of the letters fell out of the box, scattering on the wooden floor like ancient characters from lands long past. For some reason, they had a hold over me, a kind of power which stilled my hand from destroying them. Perhaps there was still room in my heart to forgive the old man even though I did not know it then. Perhaps seeing the pains it took for the old priest to write all these letters all those years softened my heart. But whatever it was, I could not bring myself to toss them into the fire with the rest of the old furniture chopped up into firewood.

I had wondered about the writer of all those letters. How did he know my father and why did he keep up his letter writing to a man like my father all these years? It made me a little sad to think that I had never known my father. Beyond the fact that he was the constant authority at home, dishing out orders to everyone around him, I knew nothing of him. Nothing of his childhood, his youth, his past. The letters made me wonder--who was my father, really.

I read some of the letters out of curiousity. One of them especially, stood out to me. All of them addressed my father by the name of Dominic, a name I have never known. My father always called himself Dom. It was Dom I have lived with and it was Dom everyone in town knew. This Dominic is a mystery to me. But this letter, the last of the lot read:

Dear Dominic,

I hope things are getting on well for you and your family. I heard that you have had a boy from the neighboring town's gossips, they sometimes bring me news of you and your kins. Your fame precedes you. It travels far and wide and it gladens my old heart to hear of you. It is a pity that you live so far away from me and I, being so old and frail no longer have the spirit to travel the distance by road to visit you, your lovely wife and your sprightly little boy.

But perhaps, my time is almost up. As these days go by now, I feel less and less energy in my body. But I know that my lord will commend me to him when I die. I have paid enough for my sins, the lord above takes pity on my old soul. These years have been long and weary and full of toil for my redemption. But you, my boy, I still do not have your forgiveness. Will you not shake my hand and give me deliverance from your hatred after all these years. My old soul is about to embark on its final journey and I would like a kindly soul of my own kin to send me off with at least a handshake. Will you deny an old man this? Surely, the wrong I have done you and your mother must have been repaid? Your mother, God bless her soul, gave me a last smile before she passed on even though I had been but a brute to her. But I was young and ignorant. And God knows, I have paid for it since. Every single day of my life I have lived in repentance. Now at my final days, come sit by me once again like you had as a child.

I pray with what short time I have left that I may meet you again.

In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

I trembled as I read the letter. There was no name signed on all the letters. It was left hanging like an unspoken word, too painful to articulate. I looked up the town where the letter came from. It was not too far from our own town, three days of journey on foot would take me to it. I set off the very next day in search of the town from which this letter came, my heart full like a pilgrim. My journey and search took me to a quiet little town. I asked around and was directed to the local chapel, a humble little house of God with a quiet little garden. The Priest almost looked surprise at my entry. He told me they saw very few visitors in these parts and asked me if there was anything he could do. I showed him the envelop and asked if he knew the writer with that hand. "Sure." He gave a puzzled little smile. "This belonged to the old Reverend. A wonderful man, he loved children, but he died all alone in the end, with no one to console him. We could not locate his family and he could not say where they were." I asked if he knew where the old man was buried.

He was buried right in the garden of the church. I went out to the quiet little graveyard overgrown with beautiful wild flowers and busy with insects and butterflies. There among other rows of gravestones, one stood out to me, and I felt my eyes cloud over. It had the very same name I carried engraved on it, below it was a verse from Psalms 130. It said:

If you, O LORD, kept a record of sins.
O LORD, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness;
therefore you are feared.

Just then, a breeze blew across the field and I knew in that instance that all three of us have been forgiven.

2008-09-23T22:51:00.000-07:00

When she was very young her grandfather told her about the other side of the moon. He would whisper to her when everyone else was too busy socializing to notice a little girl that there was another side to the moon, and if she ever found it she should make her most fervent wish unto it and it would come true. She had asked if he had heard about the cow she learnt about in kindergarden who had jumped over the moon and if the cow got his wish. "Of course." Her grandfather had told her kindly. If the cow was brave enough to jump over the moon, he must have seen the other side of the moon and had his wish. What was his wish? She had asked. "No one but the cow must know. Perhaps it was so that he never would land again." How they had laughed picturing a cow still floating in the sky.

"What does the other side of the moon look like?" she had asked. "No one has seen it. It is invisible to the eye." He had said quite kindly. "But how will I find the other side of the moon?" She then asked. He told her that she would know when she saw it and she would know exactly what to wish for.

When she told her mother this, her mother laughed at her. "You and your grandfather are full of nonsense. Besides, the cow is a she." But soon after hearing about the secret side of the moon, her family moved too far away for her grandfather to whisper any more marvelous secrets. Before she left, she saw her grandfather at the airport, he said little, but looked at her with a twinkle in his eye, as if reminding her of the secret they shared. Looking back, she had wondered if that was perhaps a tear glistening. The next time she saw him was at his funeral. She looked at him with his strange yellow shiny and taunt skin of the dead and the blusher on his face which made him look like a doll. "What are you doing in here?" Her father had been so angry to find her peeking over the open coffin. He angrily reprimanded her mother for letting her see a dead person. Children are not suppose to look at the dead. Besides he was angry that they didn't make it in time to say goodbye to his father. He had gotten the news at the airport that they missed seeing him for the last time.

But life goes on. Nothing stops for those gone. Almost everything is forgotten. They way they talk, the way they walk, the sucesses they achieved, their little triumphs and failings. All except for those stories they have told and the secrets they shared which still resonates in some internal universe like some dark forgotten mystery.

And tonight, she needs that mystery. Needs it as souls needs darkness. She had just gotten a phone call that her husband had been in a motor accident. They did not have the details but his motorbike had crashed into a truck on the highway. They said he died almost instant. But they needed to further investigate the accident for a conclusive explanation. She had felt the kitchen spinning, she lost control of all her senses, she saw a dark shadow loom at the kitchen sink shaped like a grotesque black horn. She needed to wake her daughters up to tell them the news. She needed to walk down the corridor to their room--that haven where they still slumber ignorant of the fact that everything they have ever known was forever changed. But she was too afraid, too afraid to move. All she could muster was to keep breathing.

She stood there standing struggling to breathe. Outside, through the window, she sees a full moon. Bright, luminous and innocent. Its calm pale face, oblivious to the miseries of the world beneath it. Then she saw it, that shadow half, always hidden, seep out from under the light. She made her fervent wish. She wished for the strength to walk the corridor to her daughters' room and that she would have the strength in her legs to keep walking here on and after.

2008-09-22T01:01:00.001-07:00

A old story revised

Where she came from everyone lived high up, where gravity had the least pull on the ambitions of men and the skins of women. Everyone got used to seeing things from a great height and everything looked tiny and ant like. Everything was scaled down to dots and resembled pixels in a low grade image on the computer. Nothing was very threatening when everything was so small. But back then she was never afraid of the view outside her window on the 42nd floor. She could see all the way to the sea and moving dots of lights like some high-tech impressionist painting. That is how Harry Potter's world would look like if it had been modernized. And she could almost believe she was floating in a the air while she peeked at her neighbors at their dinner table. The space which divides one family from the next is an arm length fall of 42 floors. The curtains could never shut out the sound of conversations at their dinner tables and her family had to make sure they speak loud enough to cover up the intruding voices of the neighbors. Elevators were always a chore. Jam-packed with people in suits and briefcases every morning. It is the one time everyone from all those different units meet reluctantly for that three minutes of unwanted physical closeness. Being in elevators everyone held their breaths and if they spoke spoke in whispers. An anxious experience with a horrible mixture of colognes and perfumes and trances of breakfasts. She had always thought everyone and everything seemed especially grey and silent, Even though television sets were constantly left blaring on purpose to keep silence at bay.

Now she lives unbelievably close to the ground. Her concept of space seemed to have lost a whole dimension. Everything is larger-than-life. The people on the bus were especially loud, colorful and real. The grey muffled skin around her world has been rudely stripped away. She now saw stretches of sky uninterrupted. She missed the sky back home--always incomplete and cut off at an angle and she had always felt so much closer to the stars even though the glare of the city lights blocked out all views of them. Now she was so ground bound. She always had to look up because there was not much to discover looking down. It is just the ground beneath her feet. Colors are so solid and full here, it lacked that indistinct in-betweenness back home, it is as if her grey filter has been removed. The noise saturated silence is replaced by genuine sounds of people's ceaseless bubbly chattering. The full bodied stimulants of the new place seemed jarring to her senses in a way that was not totally unpleasant.

People always like to ask her, what does she miss back home? Her friends perhaps? Speaking her own language without the intrusion of a funny accent that people will detect as foreign and place her as an outsider. She never quite know what to answer. How can she tell them that she has lost a whole way of looking at things. A whole spatial dimension is missing and her color palette has been meddled with so that a certain indistinct misty grey has gone missing replaced by assertive colors more certain of themselves.

She was not unhappy. But neither can she remember the last time she was happy. Happiness seemed to have a double shadow now, she found herself trying to pin the tricky bastard down, fix him to make him stay. She had the same voice, the same laughter, the same sense of humor, but yet somehow something has changed. The worst thing about the change is she don't know what is different, so she can't remedy it.

She hated the words migrant and immigrant and still does. Such an ugly sounding words. Pronouncing them, one had to use an extra effort at the "grunt!" part of the words. It is strenuous and forced like the smile she pastes on herself at Chinese New Year. How she could never speak to her relatives for fear that her smile would fall apart and she would have to spend time putting the crumbles together back into its monstrous form. So she stuffed herself with food. As long as one's mouth is full, no one blames them for their silence. So it is the silence she relishes. The silence of being a third-party, an outsider. She talks to her friends from home and suddenly this silence catches up when the unindentifable change rears its ugly head. It is also the silence which falls quite suddenly like a blade when she converses with someone and her alienness makes everything awkward.

People congratulate her on being bilingual. Excitable Aunts explain the opportunities this special skill can offer. And everyone nod their heads in agreement that knowing English prior to her move here is an advantage. "See how fast she has adapted here?" What they cannot see is that it is so terrible to be in between. Neither here nor there. She felt sea-sick all the time. She feels like a fish out of water, struggling to breathe, all the while feeling her distance from the sea. She also feels like a freak. An amphibian of sorts--expected to straddle the two land, but finding that she now belonged in neither.

This strange new world she was now in seemed to be constantly floating on water. She wondered when she would feel grounded and attached to the land beneath her feet once again. Days went by in a haze, nothing seemed very real or significant. She has moved into her new home, a little house at the outskirts of the city where she lived side by side with people like her whose everyday struggle was to make themselves understood. It constantly surprised her that this was now her new home. The word home just didn't make any sense even though everyone was the same, her sister still walked around home in her underwear, her father still got angry when he had to wait too long for dinner, but everything was changed. She felt barren like her backyard where nothing grew except for weeds. She dug beneath the weeds once, and found that the garden was full of sandy soil, the kind that nothing, except for weeds, would grow on. Even though she had once loved plants and gardening, the backyard--the hidden desert could not interest her.

It was when she was out strolling on the beach which she found too cold, the sand too pale, the waves too icy to run and jump into that she found the coconut. She marveled at it, at its strangeness, at how out of place it was. A tropical fruit in this cold city which still freezes in the summer. It was being tossed around by the waves next to the stranded jellyfish. How could she describe the way she felt towards that coconut bobbing clumsily in the waves. She felt she saw herself right there in the waves, trying to stay afloat. At that moment she had no doubt that she was that coconut, and that coconut was her and that their fates were tied together.

She took the coconut home, she wanted to give it a chance to survive, a place for it to grow roots. The coconut soon became an obsession even she could not explain. She needed it to grow, she needed it to survive. She would water it several times a day knowing that the dryness of the city worked against the coconut which needed humidity. She would wait anxiously to spot signs of a new shoot which would give her the strength she needed in the new place. But weeks passed and nothing grew. The spot in the garden where she had cleared the weeds and careful dug a hole in the ground was the same as when she had first planted the coconut. Months passed, at first her family had been happy she had taken a new interest in the garden. Now they worry about how bitterly disappointed she was, and how she did little other than spending hours tending the coconut which never grew.

The days grew cold and grey, miserable rains came, then the days became dry and brittle, the cold air stung one's nostrils when one breathed. Then miraculously the days started getting warm again, the skies turned its brilliant blue again. Everywhere else, flowers bloomed.

One lovely day, her sister came out to the garden where she still sat waiting. She told her there was a place she needed to see. Taking her by the hand, her sister brought her to a plant nursery where everything was just beginning to bloom. They wandered among rows and rows of plants and flowers, a haze of scent and colors. Together, they picked out a young sapling, they hoped, one day would become a peach tree. Back in their garden, they went back to that same spot where the coconut tree never grew. They dug into the soil now soft, moist and ready for life, Removed the coconut, unchanged as on the day she found it. Placed the sapling in the hole and then covered its roots with soil. Standing, their hands muddy, they looked at the earth so full of promise, so full of life.

2008-09-16T23:58:00.000-07:00

Where and how should I start my tale. Not at the beginning, because unlike what most people think, the beginning is not where things start. It is always the end which marks the beginning and makes everything fall into place. Besides, beginnings and ends are arbitrary. So I guess I shall start at my tale precisely in the middle, and then perhaps lead it back to its source.

My father died at 57, young for a man of his kind. He has always been a leader, a doer. If a word can define this man, it is accomplish, in both the verb and adjective sense of the word. He never understood what middleground meant. He always had his opinion, which he saw as 'the' opinion. But anyhow, my father died. One day he was up ordering people about and the next day he was dead like a bedpost.

I didn't feel much for him. I was the oldest and expect somehow to take over whatever role it was the man played in the lives of those around him. People without realizing it threw these responsiblities and expectations onto me. Unfortunately though, I was clumsy at catching these responsibilites, dropping them all over the place, and with these fallen disappointments, so too my standing in their eyes fell. Not that I cared, I never wanted their good opinions anyway. Not when I had to be constantly held up next to my father as if he is the light source which will make my existence clear to the eyes of these others. No. I am who I am. Everything I did made perfect sense in my own internal universe even if it did not to anyone else.

Perhaps there is indeed a greater power out there in the universe, churning out fates like well-tuned gears. And we are all part of this great machine and sometimes we find out how we fit into a greater scheme of things. Knowing or unknowingly we all play our parts precisely as who we are or think we are. I was never a big believer of fate so I never actively defied my destiny.

It was about a month after his death, I was going through his belongings, all the old books, pictures, trophies and letters which no longer held any meaning they were just things gathering dust like some poignant testimony to passing days and a resting place for the light footed dust. I came across this old box full of yellowing and moth-eaten letters with faded words. I cared little for his artifacts so I chucked it aside. It was quite promptly forgotten lying in the pile in the middle among other things which I could not decide were of value or worthless.

Then by some strange chance, I was among his things one day, I spotted that old box of letter and took it with me. Who knows why we do the things we do sometimes, perhaps there really is a voice guiding us to things beyond our own knowledge. That voice sometimes carry us to safety and deliverance and sometimes to forgiveness. But I did, I picked up that box once again and this time I looked into the letters. They were all addressed to my father by an old priest. I assumed the writer is an old priest because he kept quoting from the bible in the letters, and always at the end, he signed off "In the name of the father, and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen" or sometimes it is "All in God's will. Amen" It was as if every letter was a prayer addressed to a man as common, unruly and disbelieving as my father. I was surprised to find that my father had kept correspondence with a priest for so many years of his life, I believe, judging by the number of letters, the letter exchange has started since my father was a young boy barely in his teenage years. He had always been the one to proclaim in that booming voice of his that there is no God but man himself. Now, finding these letters, I was reluctant to read them. Perhaps it is mean spirited of me, but I wasn't ready for my old man to suddenly become this secret saint with all this secret past which would so easily redeem him in my eyes. No, he would not get away that easily for all those years he had made my mother and I suffer in silence for his brutish ways.

I tossed those letters aside in anger, determined to burn them when the opportunity arise. In my anger, some of the letters fell out of the box, scattering on the wooden floor like ancient characters from lands long past. For some reason, they had a hold over me, a kind of power which stilled my hand from destroying them. Perhaps there was still room in my heart to forgive the old man even though I did not know it then. Perhaps seeing the pains it took for the old priest to write all these letters all those years softened my heart. But whatever it was, I could not bring myself to toss them into the fire with the rest of the old furniture chopped up into firewood.

I had wondered about the writer of all those letters. How did he know my father and why did he keep up his letter writing to a man like my father all these years? It made me a little sad to think that I had never known my father. Beyond the fact that he was the constant authority at home, dishing out orders to everyone around him, I knew nothing of him. Nothing of his childhood, his youth, his past. The letters made me wonder--who was my father, really.

I read some of the letters out of curiousity. One of them especially, stood out to me. All of them addressed my father by the name of Dominic, a name I have never known. My father always called himself Dom. It was Dom I have lived with and it was Dom everyone in town knew. This Dominic is a mystery to me. But this letter, the last of the lot read:

Dear Dominic,

I hope things are getting on well for you and your family. I heard that you have had a boy from the neighboring town's gossips, they sometimes bring me news of you and your kins. Your fame precedes you. It travels far and wide and it gladens my old heart to hear of you. It is a pity that you live so far away from me and I, being so old and frail no longer have the spirit to travel the distance by road to visit you, your lovely wife and your sprightly little boy.

But perhaps, my time is almost up. As these days go by now, I feel less and less energy in my body. But I know that my lord will commend me to him when I die. I have paid enough for my sins, the lord above takes pity on my old soul. These years have been long and weary and full of toil for my redemption. But you, my boy, I still do not have your forgiveness. Will you not shake my hand and give me deliverance from your hatred after all these years. My old soul is about to embark on its final journey and I would like a kindly soul of my own kin to send me off with at least a handshake. Will you deny an old man this? Surely, the wrong I have done you and your mother must have been repaid? Your mother, God bless her soul, gave me a last smile before she passed on even though I had been but a brute to her. But I was young and ignorant. And God knows, I have paid for it since. Every single day of my life I have lived in repentance. Now at my final days, come sit by me once again like you had as a child.

I pray with what short time I have left that I may meet you again.

In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

I trembled as I read the letter. There was no name signed on all the letters. It was left hanging like an unspoken word, too painful to articulate. I looked up the town where the letter came from. It was not too far from our own town, three days of journey on foot wold take me to it. I set off the very next day in search of the town from which this letter came, my heart full like a pilgrim. My journey and search took me to a quiet little town. I asked around and was directed to the local chapel, a humble little house of God with a quiet little garden. The Priest almost looked surprise at my entry. He told me they saw very few visitors in these parts and asked me if there was anything he could do. I showed him the envelop and asked if he knew the writer with that hand. "Sure." He gave a puzzled little smile. "This belonged to the old Reverend. A wonderful man, he loved children, but he died all alone in the end, with no one to console him. We could not locate his family and he could not say where they were." I asked if he knew where the old man was buried.

He was buried right in the garden of the church. I went out to the quiet little graveyard overgrown with beautiful wild flowers and busy with insects and butterflies. There among other rows of gravestones, one stood out to me, and I felt my eyes cloud over. It had the very same name I carried engraved on it, below it was a verse from Psalms 130. It said:

If you, O LORD, kept a record of sins.
O LORD, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness;
therefore you are feared.

Just then, a breeze blew across the field and I knew in that instant that all three of us have been forgiven.

2008-09-01T10:51:00.000-07:00

Ocean Beach on 8/31

The sand--fine array of glittery dust
through my hand,
in my mouth a sugar grain.
Evidence of last night's bon-fire
excavated like archaeological finds, reflecting the sun's
warm beam a black metal
smooth to the touch
and light on the hand.
Driftwood--aimless on the
body of sand,

fullstops

on the sandscape
for the eye to pause on.

Treasures, thrown up by the sea
fill my pockets
as I head home
hair thoroughly combed
(as I keep my balance in the carpet sand)
by the persistent breeze.

2008-08-17T15:05:00.000-07:00

She has always remembered Mother's little escapes from the confines of their house, late at night, in the deepest part of night when the world slumber, dreaming the little people in their little lives each falling into oblivious sleep one by one. Sleep has never been able to hold little children firmly, they slip in and out of that dream state like agile gymnasts. So it was, that she had heard her mother's familiar shuffling, and the door click its secretive little cluck like a disapproving bystander to some scandalous affair. She had woken up full of an electric surge of energy of one confronted by a mystery. She watched the shadow of her mother slip down the house stairs like some night bird in its own element. She had looked beautifully bewitching, her hair untied, only the blurry shape of a shadow intermingling with the surrounding darkness. Slipping out of the house as quiet as night, the stars and time. She followed, finding that darkness and the quietness protected her like a shield. No prying eyes of the neighbors, no chatters of the day. Everything was sacred and magical in the stillness, the darkness.

She followed Mother down the winding streets, past the familiar places of the day, now transformed by the night into some foreign enchanted place which exists only at this magic hour of the night. They hurried, each in their own shadowy cloak, down down down the winding paths, past the shops, the little drinking places, the funfair which at this hour resembled an abandoned kingdom, past the dock, to the place where the sea joins the land. In the day time it is always full of tourists, children, elderly folks splashing at the water, picking shells, sun-tanning. Now, only the moon sang its silent song, illuminating everything, and the sea breathed its gentle rhythm. Mother stops, stands bathed in the silvery light, her hair glowing. Just as she had dressed herself in shadow like a trained dancer, she now uncloaked her shadows, she stood naked and glowing in the moonlight. Through her child's eyes, she sees mother jumping across the sand, a white bird as it takes flight, changing into a white dolphin as she dives into the gentle waves. Her mother's a mermaid. She sees her disappear in and out of the waves, dancing, teasing, fighting the waves. Now she is home, the place where she belongs and where she is truly free. When she finally reappears out of those black, purple and silver waves. Mother smiles at her, takes her warm hand, and in her silence shows her their kingdom, their place of birth. She remembers how the salt grains and the sand in Mother's hair had glowed like so many jewels on a royalty's crown. Mother teaches her the mood of the sea, and its music. They took a dive together in the hour when both the moon and the sun both claim the sky as sisters and friends in their hour of friendly truce. Adding a golden tinge to the silver glow.

But that is past. Mother has long returned to the Sea. And she now, an aging woman in her empty nest in the big city, dreams of the sea and of slipping out of her aged skin like a sea bird, and diving into that silver salt water, a mermaid.

2008-08-14T14:41:00.000-07:00

I dreamt of a giant pig last night
it's ugly head-pink, eyes closed, scarred tissue
an intricate web on its face
in profile
hanging in that
white tiled room
It's insides all dug out
hollowed out
I can see its ribs,
a little bit of intestines
and other entrails and insides.
It seemed to have a mocking smile
I left the room in awe
and overwhelming disgust
perhaps shock
at my closeness to that thing
the lady of the cafeteria asked me what I would like
in my
Yong Tou Fu
Her head that of the pig
as I bit my lips and picked my food
I don't remember eating
or throwing up
the only thing I recalled
are chocolate jelly beans
which seem to glowing with a mysterious green
with that I slipped out of
that piggish world
in which ugliness is real
and friends are close
and chocolate jellybeans came in tubes

2008-07-29T11:47:00.000-07:00

At the edge, I see the green water beckoning
bottle green glass black and brown
I dived
it swallowed like a mirror and light
deeper
warmth and shadows envelop
I have been swallowed
down down
into the depth where heat and darkness protects me like a bubble
Black dark silence
I am floating, drifting, sinking
nothing
but the nothing seeping in and out of my pores
A vaccum where the only sensations are dark and warm
I am protected
No light, no noise, no life to interrupt
no sound no talk no thoughts
just this eternal black warmth in which
I slumber and forget

2008-06-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

Aphrodite speaks

A holy man scorns the legend of Aphrodite
she, no longer exists
love has a new definition
in the name of god
A savior
that is the new name of love

A practical man laughs off the possibility of Aphrodite
love, is just a fleeting chemical reaction
Science, can explain it
it all comes down to biology
that is the new name of love

A business person ignores Aphrodite
love, has no place in the market
it does not yield profit
in fact it often involves high risk
of unknown rates of return
Money
takes the place of
and is the new love

A player says of Aphrodite
love, is not related to sex
they are two different states of being
it is silly of the Greeks to place them into a single being
Aphrodite should be a hermaphrodite
Sex
is not love

A feminist says of Aphrodite
love, whatever that is
should not be an excuse
women, must henceforth never be made into symbols again
love, is love
and woman is woman.

Aphrodite, if she could exact revenge would
make the holy man betray his very own faith
and the practical man dismiss science and its shallow logics
bankrupt the business man for a scandal in which he loses his wealth and prestige
to the player, she would make him fall after a one night stand
the feminist obsessed with symbols, becomes one herself.

These things Aphrodite would do, if she wants revenge
but love, her symbol. Not
her the symbol of love ,as most people mistakenly know
is a mystery.
Even if she had her revenge
the holy man would call it temptation
the practical man would call it the eternal progress of science
the business man, a bad business decision
the player, a passionate fling
the feminist, a sexist society.

But if Aphrodite quotes Shakespeare
would say
revenge
by any other name
would be as sweet.

2008-06-12T21:16:00.000-07:00

Ever since the temporal revolution, time has been flowing backward. It has happened a little by little until people started noticing it. At first it was just fits and starts of such little time discrepancies. Like someone in a fastfood restaurant ordering something, he says his order, the person over the counter asks for the order once again in the exact same tone of voice with the exact same expression.The person orders again in the exact same manner. A mere glitch in time some people choose to ignore without big disruptions to everyday life. Or a train may pull up at the platform and reverse then pull up once again. Some observant people have noticed that something strange has been going on without quite being able to put their finger on it. Sometimes, something repeats itself in the exact same sequence without there being a truly identifiable reversal in time. For example, a mum with a baby was trying to take the bottle from her baby when it fell, she gasped, reached for and caught it. She then gives it to her baby once again, dropping it in process, gasps and reaches for it, catches it and hands it back to her baby. It is akin to watching a strange repetition of events. Sometimes in the same sequence sometimes in differing sequence. Sometimes with the same outcome sometimes with a drastically different consequence.

I have been noticing these strange little occurrences with interest and trepidation. most people do not even see it or have learnt to accept it and even assimilate it into their everyday life. I do not blame them. It is not a thing about being clever or even observant. Time is a tricky thing. Even if many people think they are in control of their time, that their watches never lie or are foolish enough to think that a day is made up of 24 hours or 1440 minutes or even 86400 seconds, they are often wrong. They forget that their measurement of time is not a fixed natural rule. Yes, the sun rises in the east every morning and sets every evening. It does not make everyday the same length nor the duration of the day a fixity. Their clocks may lie. Einstein almost had it right but he was too chicken to take things to their natural conclusion. Time, as so many have said, is an illusion. It is the same with any magician's magic trick. It works as long as most people believe it. The ancients may have had a better system, using concrete objects, like the rate of falling sand, or dripping water or burning wax. Time then had a physical nature not a mere conceptual presence as it has become today. but even the ancients were wrong. Using the placement of the sun only gives you a rough guage, as they found out quickly, the place of the sun varies in length and duration with the changing season. Our constant search to pin down time into standard fixed units have been a unsuccessful project, what we have done instead is to imprison our minds and instead have created tools which will fix our experience so that we may feel the constancy of time. But this lie is not an individual lie. It is not a prank some supremem powerful organziation or god-like being played on us. It is a merely functional phenomenon we have long ceased to challenge. It is a habit that has become a necessity for even survival. Trying to remove this understanding is like trying to turn a herbivore into a carnivore, it violates the human nature to the point that should one fall outside of this way of thinking, the person ceases to be a human.

Now the question gets strange and urgent. Every single human being has the ability to slip out of the trained way of experiencing time, and it happens at least once in a lifetime. Sometimes more often. The opportunity for an alternative understanding of time happens even though most fail to spot it not to mention fail to grab the opportunity. Some time ago, one such man experienced one such moment. His name was M Descurius. As he was stepping off a train, a newspaper boy brushed past him dropping a paper. M swooped down to pick up the falling paper. However as he was swooping down to catch it, he saw the big second hand of the station clock. It twitched then froze. He let the paper fall and it stayed stationary. He thought he had willed time to slow or to stop just by not taking his eye off the clock to pick up the falling newspaper. He did not move his gaze and still the second hand stayed, the newspaper was still falling even though time was for a second divorced from the physical reality. It had shown its stretchable flexibility. Most people, M says, gets distracted by the physical reality. They will react spontaneously to reach for the falling paper. They will by instinct look at the action, respond to it and later attribute the epxerience to the invisible constant flow of time. But M did not take his eye off the station clock and when he did he caught the newspaper in mid air and asked the boy if he had felt that, that inexplicable sense of the extraordinary flexibility of time. . The boy, shocked and scared by this sudden unexpected behavior, took off in fright. According to M it is like seeing through a magician's trick on stage for the first time. It is to discover the trick as it is unfolding. Most people are unable to see through magic tricks because they do not know the direction that the magician is taking them. They are trying to understand what the magician is doing on stage during the performance but not how he is doing it. They are too stuck on why he is doing a certain action that they do not see how he is doing it. The magician gives little clues about his act. so that not being able to piece together the reason for things, people does not look at what he is doing and how he is doing it. That question only comes later. It is the way we understand logics. But by the time we ask the question of how the magician did it, the question has come too late. But M also says it is a bad analogy. There is no magician for the case of time. It is the senses which are fooled. That he could even have spotted the still silent second hand of the clock was a mere coincidence. The only true thing which time cannot yet fool. And the only escape for humans from the illusion of time.

But it is never a choice. One cannot plan a concidence. It is to a large extent a dictate of chances, and chances never follow any pattern. It is not rule bound. Unlike the illusion of time which to our mind follows the strict pattern which we follow all through life. Most people are only capable of such a comprehension for a mere second of their lives. For that mere second when such a divorce happen they will be conscious of the discrepancy but they will not follow through with it, because these seconds usually carry with them the potency of chance. Their life is at stake, they will choose to react to the given choices in front of them. If a vehicle suddenly swerves left, heading right for your own car. You react to save your life. You do not suspend the divorced time. You do not marvel at the flexibility of time but rather at the gravity of the physical event happening in front of you. That is the human response, and to choose to do otherwise you cease to be human. And what follows after only those who can choose it can find out.

To want to see the slow effects of the temporal revolution, only those who have been so favored by chance as to escape can spot these little glitches. Should time the illusion continue to reveal more serious flaws, most will not notice but merely continue adapting themselves to these changes. Afterall, the illusion of time will not collapse as long as most people still believe this illusion. The magician still performs his tricks and the audience are still puzzled and amazed long after the curtain falls.

2008-06-02T19:41:00.000-07:00

I often wonder where people get their weird ideas from. You know, like wanting to fly, so we invented the plane. Or wanting to breathe underwater and hence the submarine. Then to explore outer space and we built rocket ships. We are a race of explorers of the unknown. WE have always wondered what's out there. It seems kind of disappointing to say that "Hey. Sorry but you've reach the end of the universe. No more out there for you to explore." But all good things come to an end. The era of external exploration has reached its end. WE have reached our physical limits for physical exploration. You know that feeling, when a world has been completely and utterly discovered and the ending has finally arrived. Like reaching the end of a video game, all possible goals have been accomplished. Now just imagine it on a much grander scale. No more objective remains for exploration. We have reached the end of the universe. The impossible has now been made possible. Physically, externally, no more impossibility remains. And Geez what a disappointment. What we found at the end of the universe is a random little star. A very random ordinary star. Even more random, more ordinary and smaller than Earth itself. The unremarkable star holds the very unremarkable message for all of us on Earth for our remarkable attempt to search for answers. And sadly, it is an answer none of us Earthlings would appreciate. Those kind of answers which flatten the question completely and to top it all off, the answer has to flatten the question with ultimate boredom and randomness. And after the answer, the whole race of Earthlings have to deal with the worser question. "What Now?" "Now What?" For a long time, no one quite knew how to react to the discovery at the end of the universe. WE have always been prepared for the worse. WE imagine the worse that perhaps, it is an infinity, it just stretches on forever it will be like trying to find the end point of two parallel mirrors where the reflection stops. Or we thought, perhaps at the end of the universe, we would find NOTHING. Appalling nothing and turn around and head back home and announce that there is nothing at the end of the universe. Even the thought of it all being a grand old joke as we pull back into earth and find that the universe is really just a big circle. The kind where you just end up where you started off. Even that could have made perfect sense. I would have much prefer if the universe was really just a big circle. The universe would have been so much more elegant despite its senselessness. Now it is just a cheap joke made at our expense. The only thing is no one finds it funny when the joke's on you.

Our discovery really made a big impact on certain cultures. You know the kinds of societies which value exploration, knowledge and had some kind of pride in human intelligence. Not to mention it destroyed some of the world's religions, especially the promise that human had a special place in the scheme of things. After our discovery, there have been cases of devastated individuals wandering off cliffs, randomly ingesting toxic substance at toxic end of the universe parties. Only the pessimists were secretly happy that they were right for once. And of course for cultures where nothing really mattered, this was just one more additional matter which did not matter. Many thinkers who have been locked up for the longest time in asylums with crazies celebrated that they were finally acknowledged for their correct way of thinking. And they could finally prove to themselves that they were indeed "not crazy". This time it was backed by concrete evidence. The NASA crash followed when truckloads of scientists at the celebration party for discovering the end of the universe while dancing stiffly to geeky electronic music suddenly found themselves jobless. And without a meaning in life. I can't go so far as to speculate what would happen in the future. All I know that the future of space exploration is completely certified dead. I mean we can still try to locate other intelligent life somewhere out there in the universe, or warn some others, but what's the whole point. If no one bothered to warn us of our find which could have spared us the misery, why should we be charitable? Why rob some other race of intelligent life of their fair share of devastation right when they felt that they were at their most glorious. The universe is fair, the same shit is dished out to all kinds, everyone gets the same serving.

I guess I really should get to the crux of the story. The part about my landing on the star and my discovery. You know, this story could have been worth a whole lot more if only what we found turned out to be completely different. I could have been hailed as one of the heroes of this century and the next instead of being the biggest loser of all time breaking the bad news to everyone that we are all sad sad sad losers. Afterall I am very much into this space exploration thing for the fame and the glory and of course the curiosity, but who knew. So we landed on that unremarkable star. I hate the word unremarkable because it can never convey to you unremarkableness of it all. The space shuttle doors opened, and we are faced with this tiny thing. Not even a planet, just a tiny pathetic star. Here we were breathing exhiliarted. In total disbelief that we have finally made it, decked out in our finest gears. We were the representative of our race at this new frontier. The best and the brightest, bearing the beacon of hope to this unfamiliar territory bringing all the good will from our little blue planet. The doors open and there in front of us was this pathetic little building. It had holes of all shapes and sizes, a little bit like a weird looking cheese. And there we were looking at this ugly thing made out of what resembles cheap concrete on Earth, trying to make sense of it all. Expectations can be very deadly thing. We should have known there and then to turn around, walk back into the shuttle and head back home saying "Yep, there's nothing for us here." But you know we were too stupid to let it all sink in that "this is it" "This is all." Somewhere at the back of our head, we still expect more. We all thought there must be more grandeur behind this. We marched on still high from our triumphant landing.

The building was even more hideous up close than from afar. We filed in through one of the holes, the secret must lie in there we all thought. We were shocked to find that the interior was empty and equally grey, safe for a big sign somewhere in the distance. The sign was what undid us all.

The giant sign had lots of weird scribblings on it. We were amazed at our find, bemoaning the fact that we did not have some of linguistic experts on deck with us. We were rejoicing our finds which established for a fact that there were other intelligent lifeforms then we heard the robotic announcer.

'WELCOME. WE HAVE ESTABLISHED THAT THE VISITORS ARE FROM PLANET.....E.A.R.T.H. PLEASE CHOOSE THE DISPLAY LANGUAGE."

We must have picked English somehow because the scribbles on the sign then changed into perfect English. It read.

"Congratulations you have reached the end of the universe. This is originally the finishing point of a race for different races across the universe to participate in. The first race to find the end of the universe was to get the grand prize. The treasure hunt has long been over, yet we still get participants turning up hoping to claim a prize. WE are sorry to inform you that the game has been over for 4500000000000000000000000000000019000billion lightyears 3876000000000billion millenias 5090200000000000000000billion centuries and three days. We are sorry to inform you that you have lost the game. Try again next time. "

Below that there were the organizers' statement:
"This is a fair competition for various races spread across the universe. The incentive is to drive the development of intelligence and curiosity. All race are given equal opportunity and access to development of capacities despite variations in designs."

The information on the organizers at the bottom of the sign said " Not available. Organization no longer active."

For the longest time we just stood staring. Then we silently headed back to our ship and made our way home. All the way home we played Britney Spears music. Nothing ever sounded so good and meaningful. Her songs now made perfect sense.

2008-05-03T21:12:00.000-07:00

Blankness, his mind, white, numb. Icecubes. No. He had a thought, something important, but it slipped, fell and broke. Fog. A white curtain. He tries to lift it, but it was hard and cold like iron. He charged forward in that eerie white nothingness. Silence, nothing. Nothing. "Come on. Come on!" "Where are you? Come out, come out.." Things, thoughts, beauty, ugliness. are missing. They are. Blank. He feels. nothing. He feels. nothing. What does he feel? What are the words. Dense. Black Smog. No. Papers. Blank papers. He reaches for a pen, it withers turns into black muck. White. Nothing again. A beep maybe. Then an echo, but his mind, still this box he is smashing his head against trying to open. How did he get locked outside the box? His wife asks him "Honey, where did you put the key? You didn't leave it in the car did you? How Silly of you.."
His wife. Whife. White. whyt? Wait. No not wait. It is going, the light is red. Stop and wait. Don't. Go. Just Go. No. wait. White. Silence and white noise. Static, the radio. Numb like icecubes. snowflakes. His fingers raw. His mind gropes. ropes, burning as he fell as a kid. Crying. Tears on his lips, they. They are shredded papers. Black muck eating his hands, starting with the fingers. Nothing. no thing. No word. No no. "Hello...." His voice bouncing back, endlessly. End lessly. Endlessly blank. Blank. Clank. the metal grates.

2008-04-06T21:42:00.001-07:00

What is that bumbling old man up to? He has been mooning around like some schoolboy for days now. The first instinctive anwer any woman would give is : another woman. Bouncing around with eagerness like a puppy waiting for a bit of tasty treat. I wonder what little hussy has put him into such a state. Disappearing for a few hours every Thursday at some annonymous hotel, on some bed-bugs infested bed, probably. Who knows what is in the head of these men. It is as if years grow skins around their ears which harden year after year, until they grow deaf to us. He thinks me naggy, tiresome, a bitch at home he can't wait to rid off for a few hours of happiness and freedom. BUt then, who can blame him. He is silent and withdrawn all the time, watching TV, going for ridiculously senseless strolls, taking random trains. Men, their silence, their weapon. Words are ours. It is like they build this wall around their ears and their hearts when they want to shut you out. And we try, God knows we try, repeating the same old words again and again like some old chant. Then increasing our volume trying to find a way to get in. Screaming even. Then they just retreat further, or leave altogether.

What Thursday rendevous is he having? For sex, no doubt. We stopped having that for almost a year now. I know he masturbates to the teen magazines my daughters subscribe to, secretly in the toilet. BUt what secrets does he have from me, or I from him? I am not the type to follow my own husband. What for? To find what out? For what purpose? To make myself more miserable and rip the surface peace into painful little pieces? When they say trust is the biggest ingredient in a marriage, what they really meant is this conditional trust, this blissful ignorance we all force upon ourselves. It is good not to find out. It is safe not to know. Truth is only looked upon with regard by the young, the young are not afraid of truth. Not women who have turned 50.

After all these years, what men really want is still adventure. Something new. And we women, still want that same elusive thing. "What women want?" that philosophical question still unanswered. We still want the same thing--to be understood. But men won't understand. NOt that they don't want to, perhaps they don't know how to, and we still haven't found a way to make them. But ask any women, and they won't tell you. They can't. Telling you is to betray their secret. This understanding cannot be given, men have to search for it. Dig for it in the depths like some treasure. Then after some time, finding that they are never going to get the answer from women, they just shut off altogether and go off every Thursday to have some fun.

He came back from his usual Thursday rendezvous, all upset and grey. What did the little hussy do? It is hard to think that his heart can still be broken at this age. I thought it had ben thickened by years of experience to be quite numb. BUt he was silent all throughout dinner. And at night, in bed, he cried. It scared me. I was afraid for him, and myself. Sad for him, and myself. I took his hand, like I used to when we first got together, when we were first in love. This man I loved, love. I didn't ask him what's wrong, or what happened. Just held it for as long as he needed. Then silence fell between us.

After the longest time he said "I am young no longer. I am old." "I am old too." I said without thinking. I wish I can say we then have ravenous sex, the best sex we ever had in our life, like when we were hotly in love. But he drifted into sleep, and I heard him snore. HE was still clutching my hand in his sleep. Then I closed my eyes too and waited for peaceful sleep to descend.

2008-04-01T21:09:00.001-07:00

He carried his sock with him all the time. Yes, he has a weird habit, but don't we all? Yes, he loves his sock.

"Do you have a problem with this, miss? Maybe you'll want a sniff too. Or should I give you a taste of wet sock? Maybe then you'll learn to keep your eyes to yourself."

Whenever he felt the urge coming, that stringy feeling at the back of his neck which runs like an electric vibration right into the depth of his nostril, he feels the compulsion to pull out that sock and give his nose its comforting little rub, and take a whiff of that stinky smell. Um.. so appealing.

It is an unremarkable little sock. Navy blue with a little red logo on the side which said "Beedoo Speed". HE loved seeing those little red words, they always manage to cheer him up no matter how bad his day has been. He calls the little guy "Speed" out of affection.

Every morning he would be sure to put the following items in the according order into his backpack:

1)Speed
2)His wallet
3)His handphone
4)His keys
5)His yellow folder with Harry Potter on a broomstick looking his menacing best
6)And whatever other miscellaneous items he might need for the day

Everything was going fine for him. Everything was as it should always have been. Trouble started when his mother came to visit.

"My dear! No woman is ever gonna want a sock sniffing weirdo. Don't you think it's time you got rid of "Speed"?"

"Ma, we've been through this a million times, Speed's with me. Anyone whoever can't accept Speed will never have a chance with me anyway."

"but dear.."

"I'm sorry to have to cut you off Ma, but craving calls, Speed is beckoning. And don't you have to continue touring the city with your book club ladies? Ta-da"

That was supposed to have been the end of the discussion. He had thought he made himself quite clear to his mother. But two days later, he received her call saying that she had made a dinner reservation for him and a mystery date. Some daughter of her bosom buddy in the association of ex-cafeteria ladies and caterers. She had very cleverly booked a table at his favorite restaurant. SO the temptation was too great to miss. But she had forebade him to bring Speed with him.

Rubbing Speed under his nostril a few times to calm himself and to clear his head in view of this impending disaster, he decided to go for the dinner and be at his obnoxious best.

After placing Speed gingerly into his backpack, he set off. His head full of marvellous schemes to make sure whoever his date was would never stay five minutes into the dinner. Leaving him to enjoy his food and Speed's company in peace. The restaurant was tricky. Once the manager had told him that other customers found his behavior disgusting. Can you believe the man? He actually said the word "Disgusting." Anyhow, he found a way to slip Speed into his dinner napkin when the urge came, discreetly. Not that he found his relationship with Speed to be anything worth hiding. It was only so that he would be allowed to continue patronzing the damn place. Damn his love of the food. He had explained this to Speed and found Speed to be very accomodating.

He reached the restaurant and had barely settled down when he was hit with the craving. the shivers and the itch inside his nose. He unzipped his backpack, slipped Speed into his napkin brought it to his nose took a deep satisfying breath. As he was breathing in the salty stink, he saw a petit girlish red head, no he would say orange haired figure approaching him. He had to admit, his mum did a pretty good job, she was the type of girl he might look at a second time in a pharmacy.

Then the unbelivable happened. Just as he was reaching down to put Speed into his bag, a waiter rushing an order slammed right into his moving arm. It sent Speed flying through the air across the restaurant straight into the face of the orange-haired girl. With reflex of lightning she caught Speed just as it was about to hit her in the face.

"I believe you dropped this." She said quite calmly.
He looked up to see her smiling down at him. Her T-shirt had a red logo that said "Beedoo Spree". He had a feeling that tonight is going to go very well.

2008-03-26T18:02:00.000-07:00

The light in the studio was dim now. she peered out, silent and a strange loneliness descended upon her. She had looked for hours at the profile of the artist in the light of the dusk. Dusk, the word sounded so weak, like a gust of wind could blow it away. Yes, a breeze could blow the image of the artist's profile in orange twilight away like powder. When the artist left, leaving the door ajar as always into some other world which existed somewhere else. She had looked again and again, with that same hunger. Was it hunger really? Or maybe it is just this loneliness. She heard sound of rats feet, or maybe sand thrown against the wooden walls on the exterior of this tiny space. Where she waits. She has asked herself so many times why this waiting. She feels powerless all the time. Weak like that word dusk. Like the shadows which lengthen and stretches across the floor of the studio eventually reaching her lap. The end, she knows is always the same. The shadows take over, always. Like tonight, and the artist leaves. What makes her patient? She is not, she knows she is not patient. Still she is here. Why? She has forgotten.

The artist's profile in the orange glow which lit a side of her face. Whose face? Her face or the artist's as the shade deepens and the stars appear in that window which looks over the trees, river just behind that profile. There were twilight stars. She told the artist, and she had turned around to look at the twilight blue powder sky. Once the artist had said to her "bread and water" and she had felt alive. "Don't move. I can't capture you, your essence". She should have said, it's because we are dusk.

The studio is dark now. She can spy a corner of the moon over the window frame. So silver ethereal. Its liquid spilling all over the studio floor. What a mess, she had cringed. She always hated the nights, where everything became so sharp like the edge of a blade. There were hours when everything could have cut her. Everything in the studio, from the basin to the chair became brittle and knife-like. And the light sets aglow the small mirror in the corner of the room reflecting the wooden floor, tiny bed and her. The mirror like a magic portal, a gateway of silver fire light and razor blades. She catches a glimpse of her own eyes in that awkward angle. She is looking to the side, her profile inside a frame. She sees once again tonight, her picture world. How she can only look out of the window frame or only see that door ajar but never turn around. Through the mirror she can see the world behind her. It is the world of a studio in the light of dusk. In that world behind her which she can never turn to see, there is no mirror, and the door for the first time is closed.

2008-03-11T20:14:00.000-07:00

She looked around. Panicked. She had a single match, this candle she has been clutching and the hungry darkness which engulfed her. That draught of sudden cold air had killed the light quite suddenly and abruptly. Should she wait for the signal? Would either 2687 or 2689 come for her. What if they too failed to protect their own light and let the wind wipe it away with its chilly breath? And if quite a number of them on the series had their lights put out too, how long would it take before someone reached her from either end? It could be days or weeks even if a long line of them suffered the unexpected light out. A distance of almost 15 mile separated every single one of them. She could run in this blackness with nothing visible nor any light to guide her, but then she could never be sure there weren't some treacherous hole somewhere waiting for her to fall through to her demise. She waited. How long? The candles were their gauge for the passing time in this darkness where no light of the sun nor beam of the moon touched. They were deep inside the Earth in this abdominable darkness with its constantly damp smell of death and decay. All things go into the depth of the Earth in death. It could have been one candle burning time or even two.

She heard a whistle. Was it the wind rushing in with the directed energy of a bullet through a shaft through the deep tunnel? Or was it one of her own calling out in the distance. If it was a signal what could it mean? She has been in here for too long. A chest of burnt out candles and disfigured wax, she remembered. But she couldn't be sure. without any stimulant here for memory it was hard to remember. It was easier to work, act and not think. She had a rope and a shovel somewhere. She believe. But without her sight, it was hard to believe anything. Equally hard to confirm anything, she felt her own face. Just to be certain. Then her neck, shoulders, torso, arms and legs. Her arms were damp, wet with sweat? Blood even. Has she been bleeding? What if she had injured herself unknowingly and was now bleeding to death? When the shaft of wind came and the blackness which followed was so sudden, she had felt a jarring sensation of losing consciousness. It was as if she had been knocked out, and now in the moments which followed she had to convince herself that she had somehow survived a trauma and having survive mentally she now needed to survive physically too.

The whistle again. She howled, not knowing how to whistle and thinking that might carry her voice further down the tunnel then if she shouted words. Words do no good in this place. The echoes would soon distort any sound. That's why the high pitched whistle was efficient. Anyway, what were the words one used when in distressed? she no longer remembered. Her howl reverberrated into the darkness. A whistle in reply. But how far away did the whistle come from? 15 miles from here in total darkness? She still had that match but if she had forgotten everything she had not forgotten that that match was only to be used in life threatening situtations. She only figured out the futility of this action at this moment--that if she should be in peril, that little match would do her little good. IF anything it was a symbol of hope, soemthing she would not use unless she has come to terms with the idea that she would die. If she did not want to belief that death was on the horizon she must in no circumstance light that match. If not she would surely die, from the very fact of her acknowledgment in lighting it.

The whistle again. She moved toward the sound and sounded a howl of her own. It was a good strategy, because if she whistled back, the person at the other end could never be sure it was not an echo of his/her own voice whistling back in mockery. The whistle seemed to be growing louder, just as her howl must have been growing louder for the other person. Her howl and then that whistle in reply, she kept inching forward toward that sound. Forward? It had to be forward she thought to herself. OR backward. There were only two directions in this place. Forwad or backward in the tunnel depending on where she was facing. She had no idea which side held the key to exiting this dreaded place. She had been in here long enough to lose all sense of orientations. The whistle again. Louder. She picked up her pace. she had been running she realized. she howled as she ran. Even if she had no conception of the passing time, she knew that the faster she got to the source of the sound. The higher the chance of her preserving her life. A whistle came back. She howled and ran. She wondered how many inside the tunnel at this moment was doing the very same thing. She was lucky she felt. She had heard only sound from one direction. If she had heard a signal from both ends, she might have been confused and forced to stay put.

After God knows how long. Running. Howling. Listening. She felt that the whistle came from almost right in front of her. Close. The sound was close now. The darkness she had long gotten used to. But now what? The darkness was still complete and ruled over the place and hers senses. She imagined she could even taste the denseness of the darkness. The whistle was within her reach now, it was still too dark to do any good. And the closeness of the sound was not comforting. Her match. Use it. She thought. She struck it, lit her candle. The light was blinding even though it should have been dim and comforting. A small circle of light surrounded her. Forming an arc, encircling her almost in protection. But that circle of protection was small, darkness still reigned outside that small circumference. She hummed now instead of howling to show she was not aggressive and wanted contact. Silence. Then a timid whistle as a boy her own age stepped into her circle. He held out one unlit match and his extinguished candle. She nodded. Smiled. Placed the burning wick next to that dead black wick of his. The fire caught, the brightness of the circle doubled and enlarged. Then they stood in the new found brightness. Held hands for strength and called out together into the darkness which stretched far beyond their knowledge into the unknown. Silence. Then the sound of another call. Together they set off to find it.

2008-03-09T19:13:00.000-07:00

The end, will
come--arrive in grandeur
like fall falling
upon us unprepared
I will forget to be
sad
no longer hoping
remembering, recalling every excruciating detail
every action, a wrong choice
and hateful regret of your smiles and my
hesitations
haltingly, jerkily moving forward then creeping back into the black wormhole
to hide from fear
to be safe from God-knows-what
we did to dare to feel, to go forward in that dreaded word
and backward again--like a drifting
thought
places will no longer be special
private meanings a mere joke, a satire of my desire
which is in itself silly
Nothing will signify anything
worthy of my attention or time
or lingering
Movement
will replace the frozen time--stagnant
and breeding maggots
to feed upon my cherished girlish fancies
I will go to places
take off
and leaf
and fly
if I can only find that wind which
will take me away
and make me forgetful
blisssfully

2008-02-19T18:18:00.000-08:00

Where she came from everyone lived high up, where gravity had the least pull on the ambitions of men and the skins of women. Everyone got used to seeing things from a great height and everything looked tiny and ant like. Everything was scaled down to dots and resembled pixels in a low grade image on the computer. Nothing was very threatening when everything was so small. But back then she was never afraid of the view outside her window on the 42nd floor. She could see all the way to the sea and moving dots of lights like some high-tech impressionist painting. That is how Harry Potter's world would look like if it had been modernized. And she could almost believe she was floating in a the air while she peeked at her neighbors at their dinner table. The space which divides one family from the next is an arm length fall of 42 floors. The curtains could never shut out the sound of conversations at their dinner tables and her family had to make sure they speak loud enough to cover up the intruding voices of the neighbors. Elevators were always a chore. Jam-packed with people in suits and briefcases every morning. It is the one time everyone from all those different units meet reluctantly for that three minutes of unwanted physical closeness. Being in elevators everyone held their breaths and if they spoke spoke in whispers. An anxious experience with a horrible mixture of colognes and perfumes and trances of breakfasts. She had always thought everyone and everything seemed especially grey and silent, Even though television sets were constantly left blaring on purpose to keep silence at bay.

Now she lives unbelievably close to the ground. Her concept of space seemed to have lost a whole dimension. Everything is larger-than-life. The people on the bus were especially loud, colorful and real. The grey muffled skin around her world has been rudely stripped away. She now saw stretches of sky uninterrupted. She missed the sky back home--always incomplete and cut off at an angle and she had always felt so much closer to the stars even though the glare of the city lights blocked out all views of them. Now she was so ground bound. She always had to look up because there was not much to discover looking down. It is just the ground beneath her feet. Colors are so solid and full here, it lacked that indistinct in-betweenness back home, it is as if her grey filter has been removed. The noise saturated silence is replaced by genuine sounds of people's ceaseless bubbly chattering. The full bodied stimulants of the new place seemed jarring to her senses in a way that was not totally unpleasant.

People always like to ask her, what does she miss back home? Her friends perhaps? Speaking her own language without the intrusion of a funny accent that people will detect as foreign and place her as an outsider. She never quite know what to answer. How can she tell them that she has lost a whole way of looking at things. A whole spatial dimension is missing and her color palette has been meddled with so that a certain indistinct misty grey has gone missing replaced by assertive colors more certain of themselves.

She was not unhappy. But neither can she remember the last time she was happy. Happiness seemed to have a double shadow now, she found herself trying to pin the tricky bastard down, fix him to make him stay. She had the same voice, the same laughter, the same sense of humor, but yet somehow something has changed. The worst thing about the change is she don't know what is different, so she can't remedy it.

She hated the words migrant and immigrant and still does. Such an ugly sounding words. Pronouncing them, one had to use an extra effort at the "grunt!" part of the words. It is strenuous and forced like the smile she pastes on herself at Chinese New Year. How she could never speak to her relatives for fear that her smile would fall apart and she would have to spend time putting the crumbles together back into its monstrous form. So she stuffed herself with food. As long as one's mouth is full, no one blames them for their silence. So it is the silence she relishes. The silence of being a third-party, an outsider. She talks to her friends from home and suddenly this silence catches up when the unindentifable change rears its ugly head. It is also the silence which falls quite suddenly like a blade when she converses with someone and her alienness makes everything awkward.

People congratulate her on being bilingual. Excitable Aunts explain the opportunities this special skill can offer. And everyone nod their heads in agreement that knowing English prior to her move here is an advantage. "See how fast she has adapted here?" What they cannot see is that it is so terrible to be in between. Neither here nor there. She felt sea-sick all the time. She feels like a fish out of water, struggling to breathe, all the while feeling her distance from the sea. She also feels like a freak. An amphibian of sorts--expected to straddle the two land, but finding that she now belonged in neither.

2008-02-18T21:19:00.000-08:00

If I did ever meet God, where would that have been? What kind of a setting would that meeting take place in? Somewhere by the ocean, and perhaps he'd be holding a guitar singing a sad song while the waves crash and howl--so unruly a rebel. Would he smile as he sing his sad song, or would he be frowning in concentration while the light of the setting sun reflect off his eyelashes making them gold as i watch his profile? Perhaps he was that strange black man I once saw at the funfair at the jetty in L.A with that strange old radio and his rag puppet. He was trying to make his puppet dance to a hip hop tune with little success. It flopped badly and looked clumsy but I had laughed such magic. Or even my sister when she was telling me about a woman with a disfigured face at MACY's shopping, wondering if it was fire or courage the lady wore with bravery everyday and she had shone under that overcast sky heavy with silence as the cars whir past. God, was that you on youtube the other day calling yourself Jerry Jeff Walker and singing Mr Bojangles once in 1978 and then again in 1980something first with such gentleness and ease and then how you carried age and wearied eyes yet still sound so so beautiful? Were you that glowing cup on stage?
Did you talk to me once that homeless woman with silver hair I thought so angelic with the flashing lights from Old Navy making them glow and pulse with such energy and anger at injustices? Did you ever call yourself Matthew and make me cry with such gentleness and understanding I thought I finally shook hands with my reflection and broke the glass in mirrors. Were you that book I happen to pick up at the library and thinking you a bore I left behind randomly for someone else to pick up and find truth?
I know, you were a woman in childhood saved my foot when it got stuck and cried and panicked while trains doors were beeping to close. I still remember you. Am thankful even though I have not used them to dance with grace, I stomp on it in frustration all the time. Your name is also mistake, regret, anger and grief how we hate and curse you all the while forgetting. You are so forgetful and careless I thought you must have temporary blindness occasionally rarely often. If those were not you and I have yet to meet you I hope you to be a void a nothingness, no music, no blackness, no cycle. Most importantly not

complete

2008-01-19T21:54:00.000-08:00

Red--red a passion
a madness an obsession. He had no idea when it started but not a night has passed since he could keep his mind off her hair. The beauty of her hair. Its deep watery vision like water and moonshine--a deep mysterious lake reflecting starlight. And its perfume, something sweet and spicy. It radiated from within that silvery darkness like something from the earth, something from an ancient myth. It could be made into a potion which could tie a person and bind him or her forever. He shuddered at his own madness. What has he come to, envisioning her hair in all its splendor, it blowing in the breeze, the feel of it, the weight of it. He imagined it covering his own body, its softness, its coolness. He could get hard just thinking of the hair. He feared for his own sanity, it is as if her hair has taken on its own life in his imagination, haunting him, taunting him, whispering behind his back, or teasingly laughing a deep feminine laughter of its own, or humming a little tune, seducing him. It is an object, he reminded himself. Yet, it turned into magnificent creatures in his visions, a black serpent with the mark of the northern star on its forehead, a river Goddess of some celestial river where the Gods bathe or a winged demon which was but a shadow and took him into the depths of his own existence. The light, the bright silver blade he could draw blood from her hair and die from it. Some age old secret resided in that hair, a poem, a song, something to ease the pain of his existence. It was a secret, it was a desire. If the hair could attain a form he would wish it a skin, something to cover his own with, to feel it on his skin, to breathe in its mystery.

As he lay on his bed, he felt the heat emitting from his flushed skin, his hot breathe, the taste of desire. His heart racing. He tried to concentrate on something, anything to take his mind of the thought of her hair, the thought of it as a rope around his neck, as a musk blanket of silk to cool his boiling blood rushing under his skin. He tried to focus on the little digital alarm clock next to him, its little red blinking digits, a second, a minute, an hour. Yet he still tossed and turned and the peaceful balm of sleep refused to come. The night was hot and the heat was like a sticky film that permeated everything. The night was coloured by that heat. The night shirt felt tight and scratchy on his already sensitive and expectant skin. He took it off. A light breeze of night air cooled him and offered him a moment of comfort. But that same cool night air aroused his senses. He looked out the window and saw the full moon, that silver flood of light beaming on him and illuminating the fields outside the window, everything was alive and enigmatic. The trees, the earth was calling. And she was calling. He could see her standing beneath that old tree, muscles tense and waiting. She was waiting for him. He saw her hair hanging loose in the still night air, glowing from the light of the moon, it swayed a little as she moved her head. It was the third time she has come to his dwelling uninvited. She came out of the wild, out of nowhere, called by some desire he had no name for. He knew she did not want to be tamed, he wondered why she keeps coming back to him. Did she sense something in him which drew her like a magnet? He felt an electric magic everytime he touched her hair, her taunt skin, that energy which laid waiting to explode in her sent a buzz which filled the night world.

He climbed out his window, landed softly on the grass and approached her slowly. He did not want to scare her away, he could sense that she was still afraid and felt him a stranger who she could not trust still. The moonlight set the world on a white flame, and trees gave off a strange glow, so did her smooth skin and her dark wild hair. He ventured closer to her, she was still. He laid a hand on her neck, she staggered backward a little out of fright and suspicion he coaxed her softly to calm her. He is an experience rider but he was not confident that he could ride her without reins, nor was he sure she would let him mount her. She was, after all, not domesticated, and that made her unpredictable. He could get hurt if he tried to push his way on top of her. He could tell she had a temper and could get aggressive. For now he would just be contented to stroking her neck and her long hair, he pressed his face into her hair and inhaled the wonderful scent of wild herbs and sweat. A new cool breeze started to blow from the trees, he heard a musical rustling in the leaves. She stepped closer, he knew as an experience rider that she was inviting him to mount her. He sat on top of her, felt the strength in her legs and knew if she should break into a run, she would be fast and he could be in grave danger should he lose his balance, but in the magic of the night filled with a pregnant silence, he let himself go and she broke into a run. He felt her hair in the wind brushing his face, and he looked ahead at the speeding world, it felt like he was riding a starlight into an enchanted world of abandonment and beauty long forgotten. In the magic of the night, they ran. Man and beast.

2008-01-05T15:22:00.000-08:00

Immortality. What a strange idea. I think it is as loathsome as the idea of an eternity. Only a truly cruel God can conceive of this, and only the truly ignorant would wish for it after such a temporal existence. I am such an improbable creature--something immortal, but not in that flimsy way of the angels or even vampires as concocted by your limited imagination. To be immortal is not to cease. It is not like that despicable and childish fantasy of yours in the vampire, living off human blood. So that when the human race perish, they too as a race would follow. It is not like the afterlife experience, because death is still written in the equation. It is simply not to cease in a tiresome, lonely existence which is solely personal. It is a punishment or a gift tailor made only for you and this burden cannot be shared with another nor can you grace another with this special favour. It is like life, and it is like 'death', It is yours to bear alone. I don't recall the first time. The whole idea of a first is confusing to me. There is no first or last, and all semblance of a linear movement in time, space or whatever you can name is no longer relevant. And memory that protective case around our being no longer shields you by letting some things fall through the gap into the darkness of oblivion. I remember all.

IT is lifetime after lifetime of being and that sudden gap yawning when I am on my death bed waiting, waiting for merciful death to take me in its wings and bear me away. When life's little moments run its eventful mundane images before my eyes; when every choices and opportunities missed make its final bow before the curtain forever falls; when what comes after is that great mystery like some unfulfiled journey across the deep that is when a thought like a bubble rises from the bottom of my being and floats ever so slowly up. what if I have done this instead of a that, how different would my life be. All of a sudden I am back at my juncture in the road at the moment of my decision. I take the other path I have not taken before and live all over from that moment on. I reach the end once again like a film that has almost reached its end, but yet again, I think as my life plays itself before me how things would change if I have done this instead and I am brought back to that specific moment in time like an endless dream I refuse to wake from. Maybe this is the heaven and hell people talk of after death. Maybe this is just death itself. Maybe death is an eternal process and immortals are merely this. An endless combination of the same. Afterall no one ever said death was a fast process, it was suppose to be short and sweet and simple like a full stop. Maybe death only truly comes after I have exhausted all possibilities of my existence perhaps then I can cease to exist and go out of existence like a flame--- after all of my life's variations cease to exist and have died all its possible deaths. Even now I lie here awaiting the end and I think how things could have been different.

2007-12-12T21:49:00.000-08:00

This blue, I find incomprehensible
this reluctance to share
with joy
the abundance of words and imgination
of things
they way they used to be
and can be
of wings and things
which cannot be seen.

I can't understand this dryness
this inability
to think and feel
and to let it flow
to fly with it
like some song in the wind
to escape this body
this space
this time
this obsession

It is as if some part of me is dead
turned dry bark
it shrivels
and I feel the fear and blackness
as it eats me up
some monstrous fetus which refuese to be born
but hollows me from inside
like some sickness
it is what life would be when imagination is external
things I frantically try to gather
like some sad old lady with her bag of cans
and then to sell it cheaply

It is what god would feel
if he realizes he can no longer create
or sing
words which matter
when songs lie on my lips
dry and cracked into little pieces
when there is nothing left inside
and that desire
that desire
to spin words like melody is gone
when I can only be a thief
snatching tidbits from great poets
pickpocketing the genius and inspiration
of some other

My tears are tricks
what I feel a fake
like so many people at a Christmas party
their smiles and small talks
when that void becomes clear
a dark lake
and I try to look for my reflection
but see this sewer hole
that the moon has long fallen in
shred to bits
even as I try to find a light
to cleanse and purge this dark soul
the rats are gorging the silvery pale face
and the stars stink.

2007-11-29T21:48:00.000-08:00

Farther out at sea he still sees that blue grey vastness, a little bit like something too big to be real. Is that the sky or the sea? He wondered. For a moment he forgot he was he amidst this incomprehensible space, as if he too was empty. No, it was as if he did not exist, only this wide expanse which stretched on farther than his eyes can reach, longer than time itself--When time was not even a concept, this whiteness and silence have been here. When eyes have yet viewed this creation it has been. Everything dropped away, even silence, even wideness. There was no God but this, no time, no fate, no season, no change but this.
There was nothing but this. He was this space, this sea, this sky and they were he. He felt the waves roll inside, over, under. His skin dissolved and he breezed through the whiteness a cloud, a breath, a sigh. He travelled miles stationary. He lived millenias instantaneously.
A creak from his little canoe drew him back to his minuteness his averageness, to the fact that he is alive and distinct from the sky, he sea, and he had a home to retrun to. Somewhere back there, a lighted home and warm dinner is waiting.

2007-11-15T20:54:00.000-08:00

"...because I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling."
-Hunter S. Thompson

2007-11-04T14:46:00.001-08:00

I'm sick of this shit!
Im gonna give up. For sure this time.
I supposed to have outgrown this a long time ago.
I Just want to swear. FUCK!
I hate how stupid I am becoming.
I can't even think straight
and cry for no apparent reason
and cry
for a stupid reason
I hate this
I'm
weak
foolish
and still I keep
waiting.
What is happening?
What
is
happening
?

2007-10-30T22:27:00.001-07:00

Dear VOice in my head,

I hope you're still there. I hope everything is going well for you. I heard you don;t come out often now. I'm sorry if I neglected you, but as you would probably already be aware of--living inside my head, most of my energy and thoughts are spent on a certain person. Are you in fact the one who is responsible for my mild obsessive compulsion and my waste of mind power? Maybe that's why you're keep ing quiet because you, for once, are silenced and don't know what to say. Becuase you have been subdued defeated, and Logic your good friend and room mate have long fled the scene and left a mess for you to clean up.

Maybe it's because you are speechless, and all your flowery word plays and little tricks are no match for this inexplicable lack of control. Or maybe you got lost--knowing how my mind have been drifting lately, maybe you are stuck in some lost zone, having been distracted threading a story and was left behind whne my mind drifted off without you. Maybe you're like a child abandoned at some foresaken train station, waiting for smoeone to come pick you up again. I do miss you sometimes, come and visit me again soon. I miss you flowing out of my head like a tune, like a stream of sand, little grits all glistening and golden after a shower in incense of imagination. Thoughts and words I never knew I had inside me.

I'm sorry if my feelings recently have been moodswing-ish. did it scare you off? Or perhaps you are burnt up as fuel for my desires and longing. Or are you trying to teach me a lesson for having laughed at Shakespeare's Romeo and for thinking that he was a swine and a fool who was a fraud and was not the greatest lover the world has known. Now I understand how he has suffered in his banishment, and why he cried in the Friar's cell. Now I know. Perhaps the trick to making Romeo and Juliet believable is to cast too perfectly ordinary and plain people as romeo and Juliet....Will you come back and explain the world to me again?

Or are you jealous that I spend too much of my waking time thinking of that person? Maybe you're like a possessive sister, or you are trying to get me to quit a bad habit the hard way, but being aloof and hiding away from me is not helping much--just so you know.

Im miss you. Come back soon. My fingers are going cold waiting for you to make them dance on the keyboard again. Just to remind you, I am not a very patient person.

talk to you soon,
Me

2007-10-09T14:07:00.000-07:00

Shit! Am I obsessing?
Is it freaking unhealthy?
Shit!
Shit
shit
I don't think I should hang on
bang on
getting an answer
perhaps it's just a lesson that
the world
is
an Uncertain place
where you have to live
with questions
msyteries
and the lack of an answer
the worst of all
regrets
.

I don't want these things
but
you don't choose to be born
and you don't choose alot of things.
I did choose you though
and to obsess
about your silence
which infuriates me
but I can't
choose to blame you
(yet)
Soon
I might
but now--just an unhealthy
amount of guessing
and wondering when I'll get too freaking
tired
of waiting.

I like black and white certainty
you win or you lose
a Yes or a No
not this
not
this

Shit
shit
shit
Stop obsessing

Move on
(not yet)
Let it go
(wait)

2007-10-03T10:52:00.000-07:00

Sometimes,
I wonder at myself
my immaturity
my impatience
insecurities
My weapon against the world
and my weakness:
my pride
logics and reasons--the old man at the back of my head
droning,
which I rely on
as much
as that airy fairy
barefooted nymph dancing on diamond dew
grass
green
singing, laughing spitting
fire
spewing tears.
And this new being
a desire
which burns in my groins
and consumes me
my singed hair
and burning eyes
flaming with tears whcihc spring from nowhere
of an unknown origin.
Probably the bastard child of the imagination, fascination, and
biological chemical reactions.
The attraction cannot be pared down to science nor reduced to poetry.
And this fire
cannot be quelled
by either
the wisdom of the old
or the innocence of the young
It is that in between grey
of that indefinable
space
from which its romanticized name
was born
bloody
still with its umblical chord strumming
like those on a guitar or a piano
sending out vibrantions and chills
every time you are next to me
and my wise man and playful nymph falls silent
only this space remains
waiting for you to step forward into that sacred space.

2007-08-16T21:41:00.000-07:00

From the moment between being held down on the wooden board
waiting for the executioner's blade
or the fall of the guillotine
is an eternity.
A hellish torture of suspense and waiting.
From the moment between the bright lights of the station
the darkness of the tunnel
and the rushing winds and howling
to the next light of day as the train sighs-- easing out of the blackness
is an eternity.
From the ticking of the second hand till the light of dawn peeps through
the crack of a sleepless night
is an eternity.
From the last thought of my night till the new awareness of day
is.....
an eternity
A waiting
like me
waiting.
From the time between a question
and the answer
a yes or a no
is an eternity.
No
God can endure,
only his lesser creatures.
Between my carefree independence
a contented freedom and completeness
to a realization of my
lack
and incompleteness
that I need and want you,
is an eternity.

2007-08-04T21:59:00.000-07:00

So it's been a month almost, since I last updated this blog! To all my dear friends who still visit here!! I still have that urge to write stories and stuff, and that wierd narrative voice which sometimes peep out and start conversing or scripting stories is still there. Pretty inactive and comfortable in its slothy existence/non-existence. It can't seem to quite make its mind. I guess that's the price you pay for these voices--some romantically call muses, crazy split personality, overactive imagination, whatever. These things are pretty tempermental, they feel good, they start to write songs and direct movies in your dreams. Words flow freely and ideas come bursting out like supernovas--creating wonderful new planets, galaxies. When they are on strike, there is nothing. NOTHING you can do to strike a bargain for them to do anything even remotely constructive. They just want to be self-destructive and wallow in self-pity. Wait a minute am I talking about the voice, or me?

Oh anyway, I have/or rather my voice in the head have decided that I will not write more for now until I have experienced more! The voice craves for a vacation from the fictional world, the voice needs nourishment, the voice needs new experiences and stimluations! I am currently focusing all my efforts on doing inexplicably stupid things--like asking a guy out on a date. Yes, I have done that! Unbelivable! Full of indescribable regrets and a very unnatural high from doing stupid things. Like people jumping off bridges on a string or diving out of a plane with a backpack. That kind of thing, you feel like a jackass when you land and finally become sober. But then you feel high because you just do. Now I know why God created stupid people like us. You need stupidity in some degree to feel any heightened emotion. And a good containemnt system in your head to block out all rational decision making abilities.

So you go "don't think, don't think. just do it" Nike---wants to make us stupid, but we still should buy into the last part of the slogan. Because sometimes it is a thin line between heroic courage and pure stupidity.

My voice in the head also does not like suspense. So it has burnt itself out with exhaustion form predicting outcomes which of course have not yet happened and is all really futile. So what will happen? The soap opera in my mind right now will be continued should any of you want to find out.

2007-07-05T19:36:00.000-07:00

We all become robots? OR are we all robots programed to believe certain things about us, our world. To believe that Love is the best thing, the most powerful emotion only capable of being expressed by humans, our special perogative. That animals even should they protect their young, or have complex processes of courtship and mating is just a shadow of real love, the kind written about in all holy sciptures, the kind that is said to exist between us and our Gods. That there are promises, betrayals, stories of where we come form, who we are, where we are going. That our tears and the most precious, speaking of pain, hurt and something higher than the cows facing the slaughter house. Those tears are just an imitation of real pain, the fear is just an animal one. The cow tears are empty. Just like everything in nature are materials, they are things for us to take and build our dreams upon. Cut down those trees, that we may have a house to live in, and have the warmth of family inside these little wooded wombs. Tear down those wooded limbs that they may be turned into little white sheets for human secret desires and human genius to freely dance on. Ink like little birds in flights, which eventually become monuments of human race's achievements. These becomes pages of great literature, music sheets of the most divine music, and letters of the most pirvate thoughts shared only between the most intimates. And so their stories have been long forgotten by us. So that we believe in all sincerity that Genesis is the right version of the very beginning. That the world was prepared for the arrival of men, and women. That God had created all these animals and plants and beautiful things only that it may be viewed by our eyes and awe us and make us cry. But perhaps there was another version before this one.

God saw that everything he made was good. He looked upon all his creatures and plants, the beauty of his creation and called them together. He turned first to light and darkness and told them, you are the eldest of my creations, the first of anything in existence. You will be the guidance of all the other living creatures, their lives will be dictated by your twin essences. There will be light and darkness in all my creations. Then he looked at the earth and the sea, you are the second of my creation, I will place you in charge of my other creatures that they may have a home in you and you being their provider shall be blessed to see the changing times of this very existence. Next he turned to the sun and moon and stars, I gave you great beauty that you may guide the world, you are to keep the balance between light and dark that there may be equal time for both for all my living creatures which I have gifted with this dual nature. He then looked at the plants and smiled that them, I amde you the way you are that you may be strong and silent and still. The creatures which come after you may mistake your stillness for lifelessness and unconsciousness but I have given you intelligence too that you may in your special way be fruitful. You will play an important role in sustaining the life on this planet. Lastly, he turned to the animals, you, my children will be free to walk, swin abd fly this earth, and live and be happy in my bounty, I gave you everything that is needed to be happy and you are all blessed to be satisfied with my gift. Then he turned to all his creation and said. I have plans for my youngest of creatures among you, they will come last and will think that because of that they are the most special. They will be filled with a lack which will drive them to keep taking from the rest of you. But in all things there must be a balance, I gave you all great gifts that you may give. That is your mission and your calling. Now I will create creatures who will take. They may seem less of grace than you but they are as much my creation of goodness as you. You will love and take care of them as elder siblings will for the younger. They will think themselves different and not understand your language but have their own, they will be ambitious, they will be stubborn and disobedient, but they are my children as much as you all are mine. With those words, the sky, the earth, the sun and moon, plants and creatures all bowed their heads and made a promise which they have been faithful and loyal to till this day.

2007-05-31T20:52:00.000-07:00

The first rule on time travelling: You are to remain invisible, and to leave as little an impact on the past or the future as possible.

The second rule on time travelling: You are to time travel at your own risk, and a return to the original time-space vector is not a given.

The third rule on time travelling: You are responsible for your own time travel route. Should you get lost, you are to locate and construct your own time marker to get yoruself back onto your designated route.

The fourth and the most important rule on time travelling: You are not to interfere intentionally with birth or death of any living creature. Any preconceived interference would automatically mean a destruction of the primary time marker which will lead to an erasure of your primary form at the point of origin.

Time travelling is now possible.
You laugh. Don't. BEcuase you can't be sure that the person you sit next to on the bus did not come from another time zone, posing as someone from your own time. Nor can you be sure that the next cockroach you stomp on is not some tourist from the future. In fact, the fact that cockroach is the oldest creature on earth has a story behind it. In 2489, a new breed of cockroach were sucessfully sent back in time to cross breed with ancient breeds. The sucess of sending something back in time fully intact and raised a storm all across the globe. Scientists got more ambitious and sent cockroaches as far back in time as they could. So cockroaches may not have been the million year old creature you are now being taught to think. And by 2489, human consciousness has become something transferable from embodiments to embodients, that is the fastest way to travel by the 25th century. Physical movement is too slow, the psychical transference is much faster and more efficient. You no longer have to call a friend just to send information or a message, you just need to possess the nearest thing you friend is holding or using. You can become a possessed cup in her hand and then send your mental message to her. That of course made cheating on spouses and girl/boy friends extremely difficult. So new devices have been created to block off the intruding psychic forces, or at least have some kind of alert system to prepare one for any out-of-body intrusion which is on its way to haunting your pen, your cups or any ordinary items.

And that of course put Einstein and his followers in a difficult position. In fact, all scientists were put into a terrible situation where material reality, rules and physic laws are no longer as important or all emcompassing. Shamans, priests, palmreaders, any psychics are the movers and shakers and inventors in this new century where people have discovered the power of mental and soul force. The body and the external is no longer as emphasized as in the past.

In fact the activity done the most in the future is to sleep and dream, menial labourers, the lowest in the social hierachy are still around to feed, dress, clean the masses. As always the people closest to the dirt of phyiscal reality and the secretions of flesh and blood occupy the lowest rung on the ladder. And by 25th century, the person with the highest mental, soul psychic force became the leader. Development of mental skills were important if you did not want to be mentally controlled by another of superior power. Unless of course you chose to abandon the pyschical realm for the real. There are stranders who refused to be part of the network and became vagabonds hovering a little between the two, they tried sleeping as little as possible so as not to intrude into that realm, but they also stayed away form the hard dirty work demanded of the physical realists.

The psychical mases could have communal dreams, and travel in time merely by posssessing objects in the future or the past. OF course, no one bothered travelling to the future, simply because the objects open for haunting were so few. Physical reality no longer has importance in the future, so there are little pathways for them to travel to, portals became miserably few. BUt the past, that was a rich playground for the adventurous and those who wants to create a little havoc. But none of them dare betray the rules for fear that they very own existence could be put into jeopardy. The past though massively acessible were a riskier part of the game. They could by accident change things such that events follow a different path eventually leading to their own destruction or just the simple fact of them not ever being born.

Call it universal karma or God's divine rules, personal influences on past or future is greatly limited. Not your silly science fiction type movies where a person can try to change the course of the world or bring history of mankind down a different path, because it has already been proven that a person's influence on the matters or people, or events around him or her is extremely small. It is like an ant trying to bring down a whole forest. So no change of consequence could be wrought by a single person or even a group of people. To seriosly change past events like the elimination of Hitler before 1939 or to let the first emperor of China be assinated before the unification would need several generations of people to all work together, and even then sucess is not a given. Often the only changes time travel would bring is personal, your own un-doing or little triumphs which would only matter to the individual, at most a community.

The worry that someone from the future might try to bring critical information back to the past which would lead to a precognition and hence a possible wave effect into the future is also unnecessary. Because as it is already obviously known, the human race is notorious for their bad judgment, and lack of imagination. Any well intention person from the future would sooner be locked up in the asylum than be listened to. Their well meaning advice would sooner cause their own end than to be treasured by the ignorant throngs. By the 25th century, the futility of trying to advice people from the past and warn them of dire consequences of their course of action has generally been accepted. Time travel while it was once seen as a portal to bringing about great chances have by now become just another tourist opportunity, another great escape from the here and now.

Ladies and gentlemen, now that you are familiar with the system of time travelling, the safety and even profitability of this enterprise, you are also free to invest into this arena of great future and past possibilities. It is also a vehicle for generating tremendous revenue. Especially if insurance commercial segments also show an interest in partnership. What I am doing here today coming all the way from the future, is to assure of the profitability of your investment today, that it will reap a great reward in the future and of course figuratively also your past. Now, if you have any questions, I will open the floor for questions.

2007-05-28T21:14:00.001-07:00

If I had to pick out of the seven deadly sins
perhaps pride
is my greatest fault
because I cannot see you
Evil and goodness
Miracles of life abound
like that documentary about our origin
the beginning of the universe
how I felt a shiver
a tingle
how uncanny
how small
how indescribable the ice and how I felt an out-of-body experience
for a moment I felt so connected
and tiny
that the very atoms of my body came from
an explosion
of stars
that I will one day turn back into
the star dusts
how my life is so temporal
How, I would rather
become materials in deep space
than to drink from fountains of life
clothed in white

No, I saw you
caught a glimpse when I saw the immenseness
of the darkness
and mystery
of the galaxy
where life
LIFE was a gift
where for a fleeting time
time and all the right conditions
made it possible for us to catch that glimpse
of where we all came from
a miracle
but suddenly
you became unbelievable
a santa clause
a easter bunny
a fairy
an old man with beard
with a son who died without sins

If you created the universe
you will have no hands
no face
no image from which we are borne from
because the most wonderous things
have no forms
like the immense black of space
like music which speaks to my
very soul
like the very feeling in my heart now
of the gratitude
the disbelieve
and desire
to reach you
like the tears behind my eyes
not yet formed
they have no shape
nor substance
I do not want to rely on what the eyes can see
or even what the mind can conceive
or what the heart feels
nor do I want to name you
find you
like the WORDS
they are a child's
You will be outside of words
but they are all I have to offer
and all I can reject
but
I can never live without
like the believe in you
even if you are no longer
GOD
nor a father-in-heave
nor a Jesus
you are not a you
permeating even the vacuum in space
in everything we call fate
in time
in life
in death
in existence
in non-existence
in materials
in non-materials
in prehistory
in history
in the good
the evil
you are there
and you are not YOU.

IT IS.
It is not.
You are.
You are not.
I am. Not.

GOD?

2007-05-16T13:54:00.000-07:00

We are so intelligent
yes clever
so darn superior
we spin lies
like being the most intellgent species
or a chosen race
so evolved
we invented atomic bombs
and almost destroyed ourselves
nine times over
made cars, televisions, all those
scientific mumbo-jumbos
so amazingly progressive
we wrought global warming at unstoppable pace
all in a couple hundreds of years
so ambitious
we explored space
littered the galaxy
and blind ourselves to our insignificance
so categorical
we named things
and then classified them in little boxes
and propagate them to our future generations
so humble
we congratulate ourselves
every single day
on how far we have come
the progress we have made
See, how amazing washing machines are
people used to wash in the rivers
that's when they understood the value of nature
our dependence
but we have grown from that
we are weaned on nature
no longer
but latex, plastic, neon lights

How great mankind is.

2007-05-15T11:45:00.000-07:00

To that place where memories still reverberrate...

She set off one day, to find that secret place. The place where the past still exists not in some long forgotten dream, not in some yellowed archived pages, or words from the long dead, but where they still live and breathe like the trees around her. Where they become things, living things with a life, instead of something half-dead clinging to the living, like pieces of driftwoods after a ship wreck. Where they are more than artefacts, a testimony silent but dead to a past time. A falsifed witness. A liar who chose to omit things to the eyes, so that we only see what we want to see. No she wanted to see the past independent of memory. Independent of tenses. She wanted to touch the secret core of existence, the independent existnece of things which have come and passed, like the rain.

When she told them of her intention and her journey, they laughed.

"You'll have to be dead first." Cruel laughters.

"it is impossible, you are looking for the impossible. That place you look for does not exist. Only in your mind, it has no external reality. All the past has already faded, what is real is only now. LIsten to the wisdom of the Buddha." Wise councils.

"That is scientifically illogical. physically imposssible. What you are talking about here is a mere fantasy. You would not be able to travel to such a dimension even if it existed. And even if you did, you will no longer be you, so what's the whole point of this foolish entreprise?"

Whether it was out of stubborness or a staunch faith, she heeded none of the warnings, their teasings, and the truthful confrontations by the wise. She knew that the place existed, somewhere outside of time, outside of human knowledge of possibilities. The only problem is how to get there. Must she really die first in order to get to that place. Perhaps that is the only way to break out of the cage of human-bound physical reality, to get to the one inhabited by past memories.

Books and imaginations could not describe this place, because all those are the outputs of human mind. Sanity--is our guidepost and our chain. To fly perhaps she needed to break that chain. People who cared for her started to worry that she is going mad.

"You are obsessed." They say.

"Obsessed about things which lay out of reach. The past cannot be retrieved, and you are being foolish. Let memories lie, like the dead, don't go disturbing them."

"What is this journey you are planning? To travel you need a destination, you need an intention. What you are talking about here is crazy. there is no such place you can go to. Why don't you just stick to anticipating visiting the future instead of trying to return to a past." Their concerns had no place in her desire.

Once a desire has been placed in your heart, it is like a stubborn stain which refused to be forgotten. It surfaces time and again in your consciousness, haunts your dreams, and like a slowly rising tide, removes the extraneous, until all that is left, after the flood is the essential, the core of that desire. she envisioned herself paddling a tiny wooden boat in this sea of liquid dreams time and again--trying to find her way to the palace of the past.

Every old photograph was a testimony to this place. EVery captured moment of sunlight filtering in, on a incidental passing person spoke like a secret, a frozen lake of time beneath which the past still swims. She refused to be fooled by the eyes or the senses. Her knowledge has a deep dark spring well, the same place where babies and ancient wisdom came from.

In dreams, she returned to the sea inside. And all around her, the watery expanse was vast, and all she could hear for the longest time was just herself calling out and the echoes which returned. All she could see was that misty whiteness.

"Wake up from your fever, little girl, come back to us, to reality." Voices, disembodied and yet familiar, like an old song--foreign and familiar.

Mechanical blips sometimes filtered in unto the still lake of whiteness, she still paddles on, looking for the way to the place where Elvis songs and Mozart pieces drifts and blows like breezes through leaves; not the replicas on little silver discs, and Mona lisa smiles with a secret that is warm like blood running beneath veins. Where the childhood sunshine still burns her skin, torched and tattooed in a memory which threatens to evaporate every second, which seeks to mutate and recreate every instant into something new strange, foreign.

At the edge of the massive sea, she put down her burdens, strips her clothes and her past, leaves her shoes behind. And she never turned back.

2007-05-08T20:06:00.000-07:00

I dreamt I was a in an aquarium ICU
they put exotic sea creatures in tubes and little machines
they had mermaids and mermen
watching over them 24-7
heads bowed in concentration
hair floating in he salt water
bright lights
flourescent
glowing mysteriously
like the creatures in the tanks
immobile
strange
eerie
I walked past the tiny red sharks
racing
There,
I saw
aquatic medusa
her dark hair
like seaweed
lifelessly dancing
secret currents
her eyes closed
her face pale
tubes, and a clear glass case around her head
a guard praying
all that moved was that mysterious current
hospital and a circus
rows after rows of fish tank
of imaginary mythical creatures
now real
now helpless, immobile
and me behind a glass
equally hapless

2007-04-23T21:11:00.000-07:00

After a thoughts-churning virtual conversation with a friend, an artist, a poet of sorts....

Of Artists and writers. Are these the same? What makes one such and not the other. Is it because the artist paints, the writer writes? Because on a certain level, they are both in they own ways trying to create a new way of looking at the world, another experience of being human. Is it because the artist deals with visions, and the writer uese language as his/her tool? Does this make them different? Does being the artist means that visions in the abstract which escapes the language gets the ultimate priority? Because many would argue that language is the structure to the whole sense of our world, to everything we know even our senses, we need to put them within the framework of langugae or else they would not make sense. Blood, Happiness is only meaningful as experience encased within language. So in a sense does the artist attempt to escape the mental cage of language by confronting their viewers with an existence of an experience which cannot be captured in words. Splashes of red and black paint on a canvas cannot be properly worded. And to call it a "painting" only severely reveals the limtations of language. Perhaps that is where the discordant between the art work and the title arises. I always feel the title and the work pulls at each other, threatening to pull things apart. Because they are in fact two forces at work (very rarely in line with each other.)

Perhaps, this sets the artist a little apart from the writers; creating a new vision comes from a different stand-point for the two. I once read somewhere that the the great writers seek to be understood not admired. And this is true, writers eventual seek understanding, a new view of the world, perhaps also an intention, but primarily they seek to be understood. Writers celebrate language not as a barrier to understanding or expereince but as the ultimate bridege to connect human experiences. This is different from what the artist hopes for--to be misunderstood. Because understanding and agreement is not sought after in art. It is the disagreements, the confusions, the misunderstanding and the spaces in betweens which interest the artists. It is from this which that new vision of seeing the world is created. The writer wants to be understood and to understand the human condition. The writer says "hear this, listen to this, take time to see this from this point of view? See it from this light, doesn't the world look very different? Yet it is the same world we are inhabiting." The artist says"Look. Experience. Don't try too hard to understand. The world we are inhabiting has its mysteries and you can never understand them. So open yoru mind and heart to experiences. They are more important than understanding."

It is for this reason that writers are in and of this world. Artists position themselves a little apart from the rest of the world, because it from this gap where their inspirations arise and visions are given brith. Writers need to immerse themselves within the world and soak up the everyday and ordinary. Artists need to look past the ordinary and make people aware of the uncanny underneath. That is why writers tend to be humanists, this is because writers are always surprised by human nature, by the everyday life, by society. Artists are more often disappointed. Perhaps this is because artists are the more idealistic of the two. Writers are in this sense more pragmatic, they, in many ways accept the human condition--our foolishnesses, our petty existence and the fleeting nature of it all. They may poke fun at it, but at the heart of it, there is an acceptance and even an appreciation of it, becuase it is from this that human dramas arise. The artists are never quite happy with just the human condition as it is, even a self-portrait reveals the uncanny-ness of it all. It is more often a lament than a celebration, a lament that this reality is not quite as expansive as that of the imaginary landscape. Of an alternative imaginary plane where life is infinitely more rich. Art work always seem to point to the fact that we are not quite there yet, there always seem to be this subtle accusation that life lacks something, that it it does not quite attain certain "something" which once again escapes the plane of words. Even the most celebratory of art works of human condition speaks of a certain lack. I have yet to experience an art work which consoles the way writings do. There is always that layer of a "lack" surrounding art works. An unspoken absence. Even if the process of creation had been a happy one, when it comes to the interaction with the viewer, eventually there is that slippage. An alert that a gap exists between this created world and the one the viewer is in, and undenaibly cannot escape.

I find it strange when art critics talk about viewing art as a kind of conversation. I feel that art is a frustration of conversation. It is always an argument. Frustration of senses, logic, agreements. There is always a talk of art as healing division and bridging differences--that i have no doubt of, I believe in that healing power of arts, but on a very personal level, art throws a viewer into an internal turmoil. The greater the art, the stronger the internal conflict. Writings on the other hand, no matter what the subject matter or style does not achieve the same effect nor does it intend to. To understand the best of writers, you need to immerse in your present condition. You need to empathize and be whole. To understnd the best of writings, you need to understand your present self, your human condition. The better the writing, stronger the connection within yourself, across time, across histories, across differences.

Perhaps my present division of the artists and writers is superficial, and silly in a way. But something very different happens when I read a writer's work and experience an artist's work, and to lump them together in the same family might perhaps detract from both. But then again, I have given both art and writing my own definition and as always definitions are dangerous things. They are best left open-ended. Discussion relies on solid defintions, and if I am to take everything with a pinch fo salt, the world would be intolerably saline. Sometimes I would rather be wrong and live in a world that has a variety of flavour than to be a skeptic. Because as lovely as questions are. Sometimes we need the illusions of answers for life to be tolerable. To expereince life in its many splendor, sometimes the questions need to cease in that instant for beauty to be appreciated.

2007-04-19T15:29:00.000-07:00

He sits on the chair.

"Are you ready?" the Doctor standing over him in the white lab coat asks. HE could almost see his nose hair with his head positioned directly under that dazzling operation table light and the besepctacle face.

"Hmph..." He tried to nod but the leather strap bounding his head and the plastic strap in his mouth prevented him from talking.

"This will probably be the last thing you'll remember before I start the procedures." Came the monotonous voice of the bright face, the galsses reflected the white light. Everything looked so clean. He wondered if heaven looked like this, or perhaps hell.

"Mr, Erm.. Chandra, once you've woken up, your whole life would be different. Nothing will ever be the same again. For now, I just need you to relax. Think of green fields and breeze. Think of your childhood."

HE shifts uncomfortably in the leather chair, this reminded him of dentist visits in his childhood, how they will con you into relaxing before the jab, how they will tell you everything is going to be ok before that sharp pain like a drill bore into your flesh. So shocking you forogot to scream. HE felt tears forming uncontrollably around his eyes. It is too late to change his mind now?

"Mr Chandra." Came the hypnotic voice again.

"Pre-surgical jitters is all quite common, you do not need to feel nervous. THis happens to all of my patients. Once the process has started you will see that you have made the right choice. You have made the wise decision."

He leaned back and tired to concentrate, but confusion was setting in. THE lights were too white and too bright. His thoughts fell into fragments. Illogical and scattered. Dream objects seemed to float about him. The smell of anesthetic seemed to be laced with the smell of blood. Perhaps it was his own. Did fear smell like this? PERhaps this was what all soldiers felt before the first charge. Facing the enemy, fear was concrete. It filled a room. It filled this room.

"MR Chandra." The disembodied voice again.

"MR Chandra, I need you to look at me. I am going to inject you now and start the procedure. IF everything is fine, please blink twice."

He tried to coordinate his muscles, but they have turned to stone. His eyes kept raoming to corners of the room instead of focusing. He felt faint. The Vertigo just befor you fainted. Or that millisecond on the rollercasoter just before the dip.

"I need you to relax. Take your time. When you are ready just give me two blinks. Take your time. Collect your thoughts."

THe last three words, seemed strangely an order. Like the preschool days when you understood nothing, but you still had enough mental power to obey.
HE tried to collect his thoughts, but they were tumbling wildly across the room.

He tried to blink.

"MR Chandra, in order for the operation to go smoothly I will need you to focus on thoughts of your father. Everything you can put together of this figure. His smell, his texture, the way you remembered him. All the tiny details..."

THe voice faded away. THere he was standing by the swimming pool. Go on son, he was saying, only it was a silent movie. He kept pointing insistently to the gapping water. The reflections blinded him. There were other children laughing.

You are not to play with my cigars son. The brown coat he wore to work which smelt of a minty aftershave. A large hand stroking his hair. Brown and leathery, soft and warm on cold nights. Pass me that screwdriver son. Riding on sturdy shoulders some Sunday afternoon to ice cream parlor.

Handshakes, pride. Man to man. The silence by a lake, long walks in a forest where everything smelt of pine. Then the bitter disappointment, a deep sense of betrayal and the failure to live up to expecations. A deep resentment. A fragile smile and white hair, and the crispy leathery skin now lined with years.

"Sometimes the best way to heal is to forget, Mr Chandra."

The tears now flowed uncontrolled. His sobs must have sounded pathetic with the plastic gag.

" The Father complex is something we need to overcome in order to have a more complete life, and experince life on a greater plane, to free up the mental restrictions we have put ourselves through."

He wanted to be free the burden of the father. To carve out life without a preceding legacy. HE wanted to see life without being under the tyrannous rule of the father-in-heaven. A hug at the airport. His coat which smelt of stale tabacco. Teras and smile. "This is goodbye."

"Mr Chandra. When you are ready, please blink twice for me."

HE blinks twice.

2007-04-11T22:24:00.000-07:00

I want an adventure
I want an adventure
I am sick of everyday life
every day
every day
every other boring day
I am sick
sick
of the same
I want excitement
I want contamination
I want purification
I want
I want
the new
the shocking
I wnat to trangress
There is the temptation of the unknown
and I want to plunge headlong into it
I want danger
I want to go forth
in courage
curiousity
I want to experience life
in its fullest
I don't just want the light
I want the dark
I don't just want the safe
I want the scary
I want to see a ghost
I want to see Blood
I want a hell of a ride
I want to kiss a girl
I want to kiss a guy
I want to hike in the wilderness
I want to fall free
and then cling on for dear life
I want to steal from life
I want to disobey

I understand why Eve did what she did
I understand why mistakes are important in life
The trouble with being right all the time
is the boredom
is the dissatisfaction
the incompleteness
I understand why Satan exists alongside God
I want to touch God and also brush the Devil's hand
I want more experiences
experiences
I want more
more
more more from life.

2007-04-09T16:32:00.000-07:00

I have X-ray eyes. Not the kind superman has. His x-ray eyes are inferior, it is superficial and pierces only the shallowness of life, he uses it for necessity. That explains why it is superficial, anything used only when necessary cannot truly be deep or cut right through to the heart of things. My X-ray eyes can't be controlled, like all special gifts--superpowers, they come with a price--incontrollability. Any Prof Xs who tell you that you can control special powers is a liar, probably just power hungry people or people with their own agenda and mission trying to recruit members to expand their ever increasing power fortresses. If you read comics and think Prof X is the good guy, you are a fool, but I can't blame you, afterall you have no X-ray eyes.

X-ray eyes lets me see this world, its past, its future and the inevitability of it all. Existence, end of existence, lives, past lives, reincarnations, next lives. Lots of people don't want believe in reincarnations. Lots of people want ot believe in reincarnation. Especially new lovers, they want to imagine their lovers and themselves in past lives. OK. He was a rat, you his droppings. You could say that you have a pretty close relationship.

I see this guy reading Aristotle on the bus, a homeless man sitting next to him teases him about it. The guy makes some lame conversation about the book belonging to his girlfriend, a colledge reader and he was reading it just for, well, fun. The homeless rattles on about how good readings are made so difficult, and how they really should have more discussions in schools on the subject. THe guy slightly irritated tries to end the conversation. Wanting to wave off the old guy like some fly buzzing around his dinner plate--what a nuisance to converse. What the young guy doesn't know is that the old bum is Aristotle reborned. Well the old guy doesn't know it either. But that's not the point, the point is, the spirit of Aristole or any Greek philospher in today's age has been destined to become a homeless bum. Homeless people have lots of great philosophies about life. IN fact they are our modern age "greek philosphers". People who used to sit around all day doing nothing but talking, thinking about life, about the universe, coming up with crackpot theories about everything, has today, become the homeless on the streets. Well they are the equivalent, only the society has changed, and thoughts without a practical reason, which does not derive ultimate utility are worthless just like the thinkers. They who used to be the high and mighty--have in time turned to be the lowest rung on the ladder. They have been doing pretty much the same thing, only in a different time. That's the world for you.

Confucius just boarded the bus. He has been reborned as a middle class, slave to some small dingy office. He who still detest the merchants, and all those multi-national companies, is, in this lifetime a loser. The advocate of honest hard work, he who placed the merchants on teh bottom of the social order in his thoughts, is today obliged to serve the rich merchants who manufacture nothing but illusions, desires and empty jumping digits. He works in his small office, with no ambition to rise above, he sees no evil, hears no evil, speak no evil in hs bubble of oblivion, while office politics and the aggressive wars rage around him. He of course has no guts to invest. HE saves his miserly wage, and just prays for an uneventful life. An African American bumps into him, sneers at him and he cowers.

Jesus and all your biblical matyrs have in this life gone extremists. Their spirits of pursuing a cause to death and their firm faith has no place in this half-hearted world of our age. Everyone is half-hearted, eat half-hearted, breathe half-hearted, who believes in nothing but only what can be seen. They willingness to die has been condemned, and their acts are seen as futile destructions. Jesus so powerful, charismatic in another lifetime, whose death has been replayed and replayed and its majestic beauty been retold again and again, cannot be real in this life time because when someone matyrs his/herself, we see it as senseless. IF you choose ot kill yourself in this life for an invisible God, you are crazy or worse, terrorist.

Everyday I open my eyes and I see these same old spirits inhabiting new settings and how quickly they become irrelevant. How the old still lives, only badly parodied. I am not cursed with responsiblity with my great powers, only a dsiqueiting sadness which pervades everything I see and do, but I still see great beauty admist all the great hyporcisy and the changes which everyone pretends not to see right under their noses. How if all the great people came back and revisited us, they would be so sad, so shocked, or so ordinary. But the flowers still bloom with constancy and the new life still cries with that same deep sense of hope, and I close my eyes to smell the blossom and hear that first cry.

2007-04-05T12:35:00.000-07:00

Softness, saliva tongue and entrance
the body and its desires
irrepressible dreams of skins
and pleasure
no longer frightened
or guilty
Society and its cage
why the discomfort for something all quite natural
and the control
which is biased
why should females suffer the greater consequences
for desires.

Sex--its hold over us
our fear, our fascination
our wanting it
our running away from it
pretending it doesn't run at the base of our lives
a lie
or rather
distractions from the fact
that all of our civilisation
all of history which erases
or ommits this fact--
is founded on that basic act
every animal and man knows in his/her instinct.

What is so scary about the truth?
Ridiculous jokes about stocks and crane deliveries
Babies, new life
becomes something of a myth
and sex a dark secret
which has become dirty
What are we afraid of?

Why turn away from the truth which comes at
the foundation
of our existence
we cannot look ourselves in the mirror
or tolerate our nakedness
or the fact that the most fundamental of human acts
has become perversion
and attained the status of sin and evil.

We live a lie, and call it purity.
Rosaline is a hypocrite
the chaste moon goddess
a fool
as are we all
to think we should let our blind eyes
grow
and take deep roots
in our being
while ignorant or the monsters
they forge in us.
It is us we are afraid of
we are afriad of our naturalness
our bodies
to the extent that we should have to cover it
and call it modesty.

Shame.
We should look at the word
and reconsider ourselves.

2007-03-30T21:51:00.000-07:00

Hitler died and went to hell. That is the common perception on the place of the "evil" dictator in his afterlife. But that perception is wrong. Instead, Hitler is in heaven having tea with God, sipping his minty tea and having chocolate as the warm liquid tickles his strange little moustache. It angers people to think that someone as "evil" as HItler should have a place in Heaven. But mostly that is because they don't understand the nature of God and the meaning of that nature.

People who tell you that God is good. He is love, he is compassion, he is justice and all that only has gotten it half right. God, I loathe to say "his" greatness is far more than just that. We have to think of God as a person, perhaps superficially a white bearded male clothed in light on a heavenly throne up on some clouds, that is a childish version of a God who is infinitely greater and has more wisdom than this image that has become a parody in this age when evil, beauty everything has become so blurred, and we have, as a race, become skeptical of any concrete polars between all these absolutes.

The truest nature of God perhaps can only be found in the first pages of the bible, because at the core if we really want to find the heart of a genuinely believable God in our day and age, and not find any hypocrisy or even any deep contradiction which will pull many a truly devoted believer apart who truly wants to fathom the heart of God. That is perhaps, impossible, but nevertheless we are a race which will keep trying, because it makes everything more bearable, and keeps us sane to know that out there somewhere there is a GOD and existence is not devoided of meaning.

Hitler is not in hell for a simple reason. God is the truest artist, the greatest and the most noble. He is in the deepest sense a creator, not just of the universe, of everything, but the act of creation itself, the freedom of artistry. (I cannot help but fall into the trap of saying he, because I, myself have been entrapped in this system which makes GOd impossible to be articulated without a human form and a gender). God, we must be aware, created all things, he is a story-teller, not in the sense that he dictates our lives and the events unfolding on earth, but he is a storyteller, a story weaver. He gives space for stories to unfold. Even if we do not want to admit the fact that God indeed created evil, he had allowed it to take place, to form itself.

I have asked myself this question so many times, if God is infinitely wise and all knowing, why did he allow evil to exist? Why did he let Adam and Eve betray him and hence the ensuing misery for all of human race and the ultimate sacrifice in his son. All this is so too very dramatic and at times too convenient. But if we are to take the Bible literally, we miss the greatest lesson-- in that stories is the heart of God. The Bible is God in its truest sense as stories. God as words, only half captures its beauty. God is the creator of stories. He induces stories to take place. God is the absence of the absolute, he is an absence, because he is a space, a freedom in which he lets our stories unfold. If God is only all goodness, and light, and we only know of one sided conrete-ness, then God is a tyrant.

But God is an artist, a creator without hypocrisy. An old movie on Jesus is titled "the greatest story ever told" perhaps speaks the most truth. That God allowed great evil in the world, that he allowed the holocaust, is the hardest contradiction we can ever swallow. If God is good, then how could he let this happen? "Evil" in this case is not the problem; it is God's goodness which is problematic.

WE have hence created a double sided twin for God, a satan to take the blame. But instead of making GOd more powerful, the creation of Satan diminishes God's power. God is not whole, he is a split, he has a twin, a dark half which is in some sense a nemesis and even an equal. Satan is a human creation, because we cannot understand God. God in the truest sense of compassion and love, is freedom and creation. And God is whole, beyond our limited understanding. I cannot conceive that God is split, that not everything in this existence is his creation. Because if I do, then there is at the heart a contradiction which I cannot live with. And I cannot live with the belief in such a God, who is only half formed, a surface, a contradictory half truth, a creator of intolerance to his creations, and who is a tyrant pretending to be an artist. If Hitler does not have a place with God, then neither does any one of us.

2007-03-22T15:31:00.000-07:00

The jungle in the middle divides the two races. For centuries now they have not known of each other's existence. No one ventures beyond the dark fork in the jungle. It has been said that on both edges of the jungle, on both sides it is perfectly symmetric. They are the perfect mirror image of each other. The West side of the forest has a dark fork once travellers have passed the bubbling purple brook, on the East side it is exactly the same. No one has seen the source of the stream which according to oldwives tale has no beginning and no end. Rumor has it that if you went beyond that dark fork, you would never find your way back. And it was the entrance into some darker realm. THe fear was so powerful and held so many hostage that no one ever dared find out for certain what laid at the heart of the jungle.

Legend has it that there used to be two kinds of people who walked the earth and had lived in harmony, each the complement of the other in some way. They are meant to complete the lacks and flaws of each other. To the two races divided and without knowledge of the other, the other was just a myth, a fairytale. To the West of the jungle, war is raging. War has been constantly raging, the world there has turned altogether dark, grey and brown. Always the smell of burning and fire and war songs, shootings, explosions. THe stink of trenches, the world in grey. To the East, the tribe lived by pure instincts, songs and dances. The words-- history, civilization has lost their meaning. Language have long evaporated on both edges of the jungle. Strength on one side and the body in motion on the other side of the jungle were the rules.

A young soldier running from battle on a certain fateful day from one side of the jungle, traversed the dark fork. A young tribe dancer from the other end crossed the forbidden boundary while on a hunt. THey came to the heart of the jungle, in wihch laid a smooth lake like a mirror, bathed in mysterious moonlight, the sun was still high in the sky except the mysterious gleam of the moon shone slyly on the lake and the pair. It was both night and day, and time stood still for the moment. They looked at each other both in disbelief and in an old familiarity as if they have known each other for the longest time. As if time had a past tense in whcih both existed. Confronting the other, they have only heard of in legends and myths. THey faced each other like miror images of the same, freed of the vestiges of their differences. They stepped into the gleaming pool of mercury. The tribal dancer cleaned the blood off the soldier's face, and the soldier wiped the paint from the dancer's body. Then honest in their ntaural state they stood in front of each other. THey explored the other's body without shame. They were different. They were the same. They discovered the nuances of the body, the little spaces in between, the places where water may fall in and be contained, or places of the body that became extensions of the being in space.

An ancient source of wisdom teaches the couple what to do. How to dance an ancient dance-- a ritual of life. The source of the river opens glows a magnificent green, silver and gold. They can see that they are standing on the source of the river of life and the end of it. They need to reach the core of the other, reach out and unlock the person on the other side of the mirror. IF the dancer overwhelms the warrior,a boy will be born, if the warrior overwhelms the dancer a girl will be born. The life being will enter the river and follow its trial to its mysertious end. The couple continues to struggle--coming together and pulling apart. At the side of the pool, a hermaphrodite--the gaurdian of the lake watches with a knowing smile.

2007-03-09T12:52:00.000-08:00

The Beatles asked this question first, not me. Scientists have finally found the answer or believe they have it, this time. Apparently, lonely people come from other universes-- out of that vast expanse out there we call the 'galaxy', but whose (yes, whose)real name is in fact John. John has been the 'galaxy' for almost 50 millenias now, he's still new to the job and occasionally these lonely people coming from other universes slip past John's noses (he has 10,000). Lonely people are in fact illegal migrants, immigrants from other universes. For example, just today, I met a man from the universe cheese, I was able to alleviate his lonely condition for the length of our conversation, but basically he had a relapse the moment I said goodbye. This makes a lot of sense because, lonely people feel like aliens. Well, in fact they are.

We earthlings must have sniffed out something uncanny in these people's beings. Maybe they smell like the wrong kind of cheese and we find their company unbearable. And what is new but discrimination and cruelty of human beings in general. WE are a xenophobic life form. We are afraid of our own fellow inhabitants of the planet, we chop them up into little bits or sizzle them on a pan in our tasty cannibalism, or we cut out body parts and wear them or use them as art decorations. What the heck that's us, and poor unfortunate lonely people have to choose to migrate here of all places. Migrants--these homeless lonely folks. Though, the studies have been inconclusive as to whether their loneliness was the trigger to their migration or a consequnce of it. All migrants are aliens(in legal terms) and all aliens are lonely. And all lonely people are aliens. A circular argument of sorts, but nevertheless still very logical in an Earthly kind of way. Mind you though, "alien" is a relative term. They have not always been aliens, back home they have been something else. The word Alien is of course a label and a vulgarity.

I think I will name my daughter Eleanor Rigby, so that she can have her origins marked right out and not try to blend in crazily, but I'm sure she will try her darnest to fit in. Lonely people are just like that they know the eventual outcomes, as history has always taught them, but still they try. I don't know where the line between preserverance and stupidity is. I don't even think line is a good word. And lonely people can never get together and form a society, because afterall they are lonely people. They can never just rise up and demand lonely people rights. Though they do protest on their own every single day.

I think crazy people have it much easier. Afterall, they are in their home ground. Craziness is an Earth-bound disease. These crazy people migrate to other universes and get labeled as cuckoos. But unlike lonely people, crazy people usually have a better chance, they don't bother fitting in, and do a pretty decent job of flaunting madness and turning pop stars.

Anyway, lonely people are almost certain to be misunderstood. I doubt you can understand all these sincere words from a lonely soul. (As to whether aliens have souls that is still currently being debated.) You probably already smell something fishy in this piece of prose. It won't be long before you whiff the cheese too.. Thanks for stopping by though. For a moment I felt less lonely.

2007-03-01T20:39:00.000-08:00

Those little mangoes-- ripe and stupid
yellow monsters
sweet rotting meat
attracting the flies.
Those yellow
yellow
yellow
color of madness
heat
summer
and decay
unbelivable
strings--voilin
drifts in the air
dumb taiwanese pugilistic films
stupid
stupid
stupid
stupid
crap
crap
crap
crap
crap
crap
humpty dumpty
fall down and crack
die you ugly egg
no body will put you back together
all your yolk spilt and dried up
sizzling up in the sun
yellow
yellow
yellow
birds--crows
picking up the broken shell pieces
dead dead humpty dumpty
face smashed
into a million pieces
eyes plucked by crows
humpty dumpty leaning back
laughing at the crows trying to pick mangoes from trees
laughing laughing
leaning
back
a little
leaning more
crows watching expectantly
suddenly the earth spins just that little
humpty dumpty feels gravity's pull
the wall shifted beneath his ugly pants
air all around
the stout little arms flailing
a sound of sputtering and cracking
his insides are all out
the mangoes on the floor
yellow
the crows feed.

2007-02-21T22:14:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-02-16T21:38:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-02-13T22:13:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-02-08T15:36:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-02-04T22:31:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-01-27T22:21:00.000-08:00

She had no idea when exactly it all started. It was just a little after puberty, past that age when goodness and evil, innocence and knowledge became all of a sudden chaotic, confusing, as if the clear demarcation between the two suddenly became invisible, altogether disappeared. And with the changing bodies, those inexplicable impulses, worldviews all along taken for granted became unrecognizable. Innocence arose from a kind of unknowing not of evil just of the self. She became aware of her desires as what they really are, something animal yet it all seemed so natural. She was a humanist, at least that was the way she would classify herself, she did not see that human had some sacred duty to prove that they transcended animals by their denying of impulses or by repressing certain urges. She had felt all along that human were part animals and it did not pay to punish that part of themselves which made them exactly what they are. Imperfect, yet, that was what we all are, she had always thought.

She had felt frustration when it started first as a burning in between her legs then a sensitivity around her nipples. When it came, she had not felt surprised, nor dirty as women or girls are expected to feel regarding this very taboo issue of sensuality. She had often wondered about the bodies of others, men, women, not in any sexual way but just out of curiousity. What built us all, there had to be very physical and tangible aspects other the spiritual, the intellectual, the part which often classifed as the filthiest, that we all somehow hope to rid of in death. The physical part of being which partook of materials and discarded waste. The faeces, the urine, the blood. The fluids she was taught to feel repulsed at as a child, taught to shy away from. But she realized that as she grew older, more than acceptance, she developed a certain fascination for them all.

And when the sexual awakening happened, a slow process which invovled a lot of coming to terms with the self, with the shame which females are made to feel by society, with their innate desires, of the unspoken, only in little hush and whispers and denials and fear. When she began to feel herself changing and desiring, she had realized that shame was not part of the equation for her, she felt liberated, and honest for the first time. When girls began flirting during puberty, and the eventual curiosities and experimentations in secret happened, all these were closeted and kept so silent as if none of all these actually took place in girls. As if only boys had sexual fantasies which needed satisfying, and the society seemed more ready to accept and even condone.

Tales of big bad wolves waiting to ravish little red riding hoods were spoken often enough, she did not know when she outgrew fairy tales. She loved them still, but only as a blueprint for behaviors she saw that she now had the power and the possibility to reshape and trangress. She was all in all sick of the place little girls, princesses are made to stay in, those little circles the stories so well loved placed them in. Always they had to wait for things to happen to them. Always they had to be saved, or victimized.

Somehow along the way, her prayers as a child had changed from "keep me good and pure" to one in which she prayed that she would not have to die a virgin. She had learnt that she no longer felt that sex was dangerous and that girls needed self-protection. Somehow that dissolved into a myth, a myth built to keep women from feeling guilt-free of their sexual desires. "Why?" she wondered did society provide sexual outlets for men as something quite natural and accepted but pretend that women really did not need any of these. Was outright display of sexual desires a perogative of men only? IF so God was unfair, men had their sexual organ displayed on the exterior and they can display their desires and yet have a free conscience. In fact the more transparent the more they are seen as normal. Repression and denial only breed perverts. Yes boys, you should all talk about it, sweat it off in some healthy games. while women must always have their's hidden from sight, like their sex organ, something mystical, unfathomable.

IT was always the pretend that society had a fear of rape, when in fact the anxiety had always been about virginity. It is not the act which terrifies but the desires of women. They are not supposed to desire, they are supposed to be desired. No, they must not look, they must be looked at. So have society moved a long way, all that talk about gender equality and women's liberation when deep down, women are not socially permitted to talk about their sexual desires, their needs and the very real need for sexual liberation. A courage to confront something society still wants to pretend is not there.

Once upon a time, the movement had been to let girls go to school, let them have equal education rights, let them have the same working opportunities. She wondered what happened to all those movements. All of a sudden, all the material and surface aspects seemed to have been satisfied, there is nothing more women can fight for. They have achieved it all. We even have female presidents now. See how far we've come? But she still suffers from the silence surrounding this central aspect of being human--that sexual ache. The need for discussion, and acknowledgment. And there is nothing she desires more than to stand honest with her sisters with the frank and courageous acknowledgment of the secret which burden them. It is the secret the had partaken when they ate that forbidden fruit and have been punished for ever since, with that mute-ness and inability to talk about its taste and how she had once tempted Adam. Once she told him about her desire and made him share in her scheme. Once she made her desire material. Now she is made to bear the punishment. Of eating that fruit but never ever having the power to discuss its taste and her discovery of it.

2007-01-25T14:34:00.000-08:00

chained up. Look for that special key which opens that heavy gate.
Death to that white dragon. Stinky beast lose all your scales.
That blue fairy of death guards the entrance
No exit. No exit. Even if you die.
Drink some tea, vomit blood
tear your throat apart screaming.
Deep dark black red
sharp and dull
my anger
a beast wanting to break loose.
Trapped animal torn fur
losing sanity
the dragon is slayed but not its spirit
it still foams and howls
flap its dead stiff
wings like stale meat
blops of fat hanging from its greasy trap
Shut your trap. shut your trap.
Take a walk, s slipeery fall
long slide down to that hellish dungeon of decay
where human flesh have been rotting for a thousand years
the kindgom of flies
a paradise for maggots, a million
zillion white grubs in those hollows of flesh
coming to life after death
coming to life, swamps,swamps of them.
There the queen resides on her throne
her lovers with their face guards and their lances drawn
the palace glorious decked with faeces.
THis insect hell hole a lybarinth
turn left, turn right and right again
Dead end. Dead end. Dead end. DEAD. END.
Fallen soldiers, massacred, and the human forms disintegrated
intestines overflowed and bodily fluids drained into the
blood stinked gutters
next to the falling blossoms of the season
everything is ripe
pregnant and waiting to give birth to all sorts of monstrosities
Anger muted drowned out by the red dust rain
a mudslide buries it all
in that desolated landscape of black withered trees
once a magical forests
stands all these ugly plastic figurines
of the grosteque forms possessed by rage
my handprint on all of them
my babies spawned from my agonies
AMong these dead wood where only the foul breath of dead moans
Thunder strikes, volcanos erupt, gun shots, glass breaks,vehicles collide, things fall apart in confusion, the plates underneath cave in and give way, all things scream in unison
A fire breaks out
Burn, burn every red hot
let this seething flame
rid this landscape
exorcise and purify.
I close my eyes and I see red
and feel peace wash over like blood tide.

2007-01-22T20:19:00.000-08:00

Frustration like those nights of dinner with intolerable relatives. Intolerable because everything is an absolute bore. And that boredom seeps into one's core, not silent like black water but like those jackhammer on roads, vibrating till the very teeth and your bones chatter and jump to its rythmn. That's how I feel right now. Just an inexplicable boredom with Life. LIFE for god's sakes. I never feel frustrated with life. OR at least maybe I have not reached that stage in life when boredom like an inescapable blanket descends out of the sky and every single thing you touch turns to dust, to ashes. I am looking for a way out. Any escape, but all these are so feeble. It is like moving to another room when what you need is another universe. I have thought about suicide, not anything bloody, or vio.lent like swallowing a bullet coupled with a rich cranberry juice, but just a nice peaceful sleep and a flight away into my dreams to cease this mundane existence. Not that kind of suicide, just a murder of this grey grey reality.

This reality where the rest of the family is still at the table discussing a reality television show. Where I can hear the cheers of the audience ready to partake anything of a slice of fantasy a suspension of the real. They sound like canned laughter, those fake laughters on comedy shows to cue audience to :" Laugh. This is funny." The audience, their excitement and their gullibility gets on my nerve. Suddenly my space, my desperately needed isolation is betrayed, destroyed by a wandering Uncle. Flipping through his magazines and things while I am trying to get away from this horrible dimension. He is folding his pillow case for bloody sakes. I feel even more anger and black hatred for no reason other than the fact that the sanctity of my time and need to be alone is intruded upon. It is a sacriledge. I am afraid of the next sentence which is trying to force its way into my consciousness. Try to bubble its way out of there, this swell of poisonous emotion, it is as if hate for the first time is given a shape, a sound, a word. how do you hate for no reason, why is there this rebellious instinct to bite the hand that feeds. Because the dog has an urge to attack and a stinky hand appears? Is it then the dog's fault?

THis dull chain hangs heavy, and my need for inspiration, for the beautiful and the natural and the meaningful all these seem to be too light and high up there. Floating, floating in the bright blue sky with those magical sun beams and the rainbows. While here I am tied and anchor to this tiny space, too small for the inhabitants, for our physical reality, our psychical necessities and our imagination and dream. I want to fly away on a balloon, feel that our existences are unbearbly light and airy. While here I am grounded and feel myself becoming fossil, turning into stone. My immovability scares me. I want to shatter myself that all my dust pieces can disintegrate and flitter off when the next wind blows, scattering me far and wide. Away, anywhere but here. Anytime but now. I want to break myself to free myself. I want to cry to scream to laugh but there is nothing here to cry about. I have no reason to feel sad, no reason to feel mad no reason to feel anything. I am fed, clothed, sleep well, but where are my dreams. Those magical moments when I hear a whispering voice, a mystical song, and an unbelievable beauty. When I see truth. Now all I see is what is.

Superman cannot be real, because if he is he would have flown away long ago. The 'real' world is intolerable especially when you have seen so much more. No one needs him anyway. We don't need people with special powers, just enough slice of reality placed on television for us to bitch about. Another advertisement to convince us we are powerful and more myths about our ladder up evolutionary charts. Our dominion over animals. I would rather be an animal, nothing is boring, beautiful, things are the way they are nothing more nothing less. Now-a-days these thoughts become depressive. A flower calendar in its bright artificial colours make me want to cry. Hearing music makes me feel as if they have all been synthesized. And that longing to return to where I came from is ever so strong.

Nature has become inacessible. "From dust were ye made and dust ye shall return." I long for that existence. If all of this world is of a similar consciousness, I wish a huge star rain would cleanse everything that is conscious. I want to believe that the rock has life, but I see those huge billboards and I think if those have a life too, I would much rather not exist alongside it. Suddenly nature is a category, and I have, even before I was born, been excluded from it, classified as distinct from it. I try to look for the way back but things have already irrepairably shifted. There is a gulf and to jump, to jump would only be a dream. If only god would speak to me. But now he only talks through words, speeches, images on screen and songs written by man. Everything is man-made, even his words. I want to hear that grass swish, those leaves rustle, the sea scream through rocks, but my ears have evolved, to take in too much words people tell you, songs pop singers pour down our ears, products we believe will buy us happiness. I wish I knew what happiness was. I raise my hands and try to touch my God, but all I am touching is just air. I look across that irrepairable gulf and see him there trying to get back to me. I try to feel. A tear.

2007-01-21T19:36:00.000-08:00

Rain. rain. rain. rain.
drain.
Drained.
Brain. brain. brain,.
Drained
rain.rain,rain. Rain.

television a taiwanese chatter incessant
the middle lies empty
voices I'm sick of hearing
the house I long to fly free and escape
Brainless. Empty.
More tv-dinners
superficial conversations
"yes, the weather's really cold today."
"I'm better thank you."
"More soup for you?"
"Thankyou maybe later."
televisions incessant chatter
hollow
hollow
hollow
hollow

dinner time of silence
hell
Hell is not other people
it is your family at dinner time
asking you to eat more and more and more and more and more
you politely declining
more talk of the unimportant
"thank you"
"I like that"

Eternally.

2007-01-16T11:43:00.000-08:00

I wait. Waiting for Godot? Hah a good joke. Though too dry and intellectual for my own taste. I wait. For the bus? Too boring and mudane, who cares about people waiting for buses. People don't give a damn about the ordinary. I wait. For death to descend, too metaphysical. Besides, aren't we all sick of death by now? What? Am I sitting at a candle lit dinner table waiting for my date with Mr Death all dressed in black to appear and sit right down and start carving his bloody steak. Please. I wait. What am I waiting for. Bloody hell. This is the worse kind of question. I wait. For the love of a lifetime. Dah, down with fairytales here. I'm in no mood for sunset rides on horseback with royalties. I wait for my lucky break. For that lottery number to materialize. No, the wait is too long and most certainly will lead to nothing. An unfulfilled wait. Then what's the whole point? Where's the drama of waiting? I need more suspense. I wait in the claustrophobic office for my job interview. I wait. I wait. For the microwave oven to do its little counting down. I wait for the food inside to explode. No no no, too morbid. And besides I already mentioned people don't give a shit for the everyday. Unless it is the fictional kind of everyday where peole are nothing like the everyday dressed up to be everyday-like. Do you get my point? I wait for the information to sink in. I wait for you to understand. Catch up with me. I wait.

I wait. For the phone to ring. How the hell should I know who's call I'm expecting? The phone haven't rang off its crackers yet. Ok, this definitely does not work. I wait. In line. Always the second, the third, the fourth. Never the first. I wait. I wait. On a sunday afternoon, for something extrodinary to change my life? I wait. With patience for an acknowledgement and understanding of myself to evolve. I wait for my calling, my meaning. I wait. I wait for the frivolous. A letter? A telephone bill? The wait must be of an indeterminable length of time, it must be torturous and feels like eternity? I wait for eternity. I wait. It is too spiritual. I wait.
I wait for an inspiration, a song from the muses while I am musing. I wait for the muses to change their sex, become a man and then seduce me. I wait for the mould to grow on the bread, watch nature paint a white surface.

I wait. For this story to take its shape. Become meaningful. Fruitful--a wait. Unlike all our little waits our whole life. Lives after lives after lives of waiting. Waiting. Waiting for Godot is no longer funny. Only the waiting remains.

I wait.

2007-01-04T21:26:00.000-08:00

Inspired by the song " Year 3000" which starts: " I said I've been to the year 3000, not much has changed but they live underwater..." and a late night conversation with my sis.)

AsoihOITHosiatj osatj aojgokjnoak jgfo dijoadfj oifjsdi oidjf sadojif osj fokds ofj
Yes, I've been to the year 3000, but unlike the stupid boy band song, No. They don't live underwater. Things are not fine and dandy. What has been rapidly happening in the 21st century-- a deep suspicion of the progression of man and the upward path of history as a long drawn road of improvement and evolution has long become a myth, so badly disfigured and destroyed, no one any longer recognizes it in even a mangled resemblance of humanity's once glorious past and deep but naive belief in its ability and destiny. Once upon a time, like in the fairy tales, humanity had a glorious period of culture and growth and that deep faith in its unique destiny to fulfil on the planet. But that is all gone now. It takes a traveller who has seen where the world was heading in 3000 and what was left of it really, to say this.

People are asking themselves questions, difficult ones, even in the 21st cenutry, by the time it reaches the 31st century, the questions have almost altogether disappeared--no point in asking them any longer. Everything no longer needs an answer nor even a question. The Earth, I can't even bear to say its name or rather what is left of it, is no longer the idyllic paintings we see in Renaissance nor even the cheesy photoshopped calendar photos you all are so used to seeing and taking it as a stand-in for the real nature in your little steriles office spaces and homes. I don't see the point in describing the view of the world in 3000, it is not all grey, black, red like some angry expressionist painting of a bloodied mess. No it is not ugly, but beauty is no longer relevant, nor is nature nor is anything for that matter by the 3000. Nothing is relevant, nothing is reverent by 3000. I wish I can say it is because of boredom. Human kind have reached its peak and boredom quickly took over pride and ambition, boredom is of course a more lasting emotion than many we call inspiration, anger, love, hate all those. Boredom is long drawn and lasts much longer. But it is not boredom, at least it did not start out as boredom. As always it is a new discovery. It is always the new discoveries which destroy, but this one. It is different from all those which came before it.

When the cavemen discovered fire, it changed everything. The new discovery destroyed everything old and ushered in something new, a step up some would say. Then there is that realization that the world is not flat, then a whole series of major breakthroughs which of course changed our world views forever. The occasion great philosophers dotted the earth and gloried the world with their ideas and they too, forever changed the course of humanity. There was Jesus, Buddha, all the Greek godheads who came and are gone to become stories. You in the 21st century are alreaady starting to challenge a certain notion called truth, only by 3000 they will take it even further. Even in the 21st cenutry peole are curious about what the next great breakthrough and next earth shattering discovery would be that will forever change our perceptions or should I say misconceptions.

Galileo suggested that the earth was not fixed and that it was the sun which was stationary, Newton and his theory of gravity, Einstein declared that time was relative and many more scientists in the 20th century contributed greatly asked many great questions sought the magnificent answers and shaped the way everythign is understood. The reason why questions no longer became relevant by 3000 is because perhaps, the wrong kinds of questions were asked and tragically, the wrong kinds of answers were found. It may seem strange or even crazy to you that I may even suggest that answers can destroy questions. Douglas Adams discussed this when he in his way of trying to shed some light on the nature of finding ultimate questions and answers--an impossibility because his characters can never both find the ultimate question and the answer, if you have one you cannot have the other in that way you can never make full sense of it all.

I wish I can tell you Adams was right, if he was then it would have saved alot of trouble and perhaps the 31st century, but unfortunately he is wrong. By the time of 3000, the reign of science and scientists the great movers and shakers of your own millenia has long drawn to an end. It fizzled out slowly, the fierce battles between religion and science destroyed each other. The both have little life left by the 3000s--what was left were the many philosophers who have for the longest time been forgotten and left to fester in isolation, publishing works and saying things which no one gives a damn. Turns out, by 3000 they are the sole survivor of anything form of knowledge even left intact. But knowing philosophers, they have to question everythgin and destroy all assumptions--they are in other words people who can only make a mess out of things and not put them back together. Descartes of course is enough an example--he was trying to prove without a doubt the existence of god, what he did was prove that nothing can be trusted for a certainty and no one has been able to patch up his mess ever since.

The philosphers, somehow, have managed to come up with an irrefutable argument. A question and answers about the foundation of all of humanity's knowledge. Philosophers need to attack things and as always they work from the foundation up. Turns out Galileo, Einstein, Newton and all that gang of famous photos you can do a quick google on the internet were all wrong. Darwin was wrong, Jesus, Buddha and everyone preceeding had it wrong all along. It is a very simple fact about human is that they learn things by building one block on top of the other, we call it improvement. We 'improve ideas', meedle, make it better find more evidence to support our knowledges put them in shatterproof glasses so no one ever touches the core the foundation. Even if we are wrong we will be safe from finding out. But by 3000 we can no longer even fool ourselves from ourselves. All our millenias of mistakes built one on top of the other, have finally fallen to the dust. The very first caveman was wrong, Darwin the wrongest of the lot. He most famously observed the flower and the butterfly seeing how the butterfly's delicate tongue was almost designed to fit the flower to better feed on its nectar gave him the idea of evolution. Of course they fitted because the problem started long before Darwin, when the first caveman gave a distinct name to the flower and the butterfly, he had been wrong. when our ancestors first thought of themselves as separate and distinct they had made a mistake. Darwin could have been the first to discover the mistake but of course he was still too blind to humanity's own foolishness to see where his theory was pointing. Of course they fitted they are but one organism, the butterfly moves from flower to flower but really all that is one thing, it is only our system of classification which made things different. And boy, you can imagine how knowing that our most fundamental system of classification was wrong threw the world into a fit.

To make this easier for the peole of your time, just imagine what happens when bloodcells start thinking that they are distinct from other things functioning in your body--that apparently was what was driving the Earth to death. Just be thankful bloodcells have yet evolved consciousness--ok that is a bad joke on my part. By 3000, evolution is really just a good joke along with everything that has happened in human history thus far. People just stick to thinking about the everyday that is just safer, no questions thank you, no answers either. HAve a good day. No one is interested in anything anymore. No, Nietzsche was wrong, God was not dead in his time. God is dead by 3000, he is only dead when questions die. And when the last question died so too did God.

And that is why I'm back here, life without questions is just intolerable, people are trying hard to revert back into being an animal but really that is just foolishness. WE have gone to far and gone on too long to turn around now. Stuck in the middle trying to carry on, that is the hardest. Hey but knowing you, me and all of this humanity, I know you are just going to take my words as fanciful stories told by an imaginative drunk. But anyhow, that is they way I like you to take my little story, go on question this. It is the most precious thing we ever had and don't just take my word for it.

2006-12-27T22:32:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-26T15:17:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-12-15T22:52:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-14T13:17:00.000-08:00

(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.

2006-12-05T13:58:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-11-23T22:15:00.000-08:00

THe first time he saw her, he thought " Yes, she is the type of girl I would like to murder, kill her slowly, and then bury with my own hands and cry for her heartbroken at the end of it all." she had merely smiled politely at him, the way strangers do sometimes when they are in a good mood or trying to pretend to be in a good mood. He had liked the way she walked around the music store, picking things up at random and then absent-mindedly place them back on the shelf, throwing her critical glance over things with a kind of amusement and sacarsm. " Yes, life is a good joke, isn't it?" he spoke to her in his mind. As if sensing this, she looked up momentarily and then returned to her book again-something about global warming. " I think people are getting so careless about the nature" he imagined walking up to her and saying that to her in a warm friendly way.

She moved on again, flitting away from books' corner like a restless insect. " A bug" he decided but nothing as fanciful and fragile as a butterfly, something more terrible and beautiful, maybe a centipede, maybe some poisonous insect? HE wanted to get stung and then smash it relentlessly. He wandered away from her, his eyes still on her. Elusively, secretively. She, she. He had to keep reminding himself that she is a she, all the while SHE seemed to be morphing, into fire birds, phoenix, some wild plant, exotic, insects, ghastly visions he wanted to exorcise.

HE went to pick up the book she had touched, he saw her fingerprints on the shiny cover, he felt a wave of disgust sweeping over himself. Vertigo. HE wanted to throw up on that fingerprinted waxy red cover and on that ugly flower carpet floor. He took out a piece of tissue and wanted to clean up the fingerprint marks. Suddenly the smudged marks looked like lipstick stains on a wine glass. He imagined he would find on a hotel lounge table. SOmething he pictured he would find before finding out her infidelity with some greasy guy and he would then plot to murder her. He pictured himself purchasing ropes to strangle her with. HE would go from rope to rope feeling out the textures, even perhaps smelling them as if he was choosing her a special anniversary gift. SOmething special just for her. HE had chosen so that it fit her like a silky lingerie or a necklace he would place gently around her soft neck and then help her tighten it feel her spasms of excitement and her gasp and her fluttering heartbeat, and then her silence. The silence of such a fitting necklace around her throat.

He looked up to see her happily chatting up with the staff of the music store, he felt anger. Betrayed that she should forget his presence. HE had been standing around for the longest time and yet she chose to make polite conversationg with that pimply teenager. How Dare she. "Bitch" he wihspered hotly under his own breath. I really could kill her he thought. Today is a special day. He smiled to himself. How often do you get to meet your perfect victim. Teh person you could kill possibly only once in a life-time. Even more rare thatn the love of a life time. Not many people realize that could meet that person and then they would change, become unregconizable even to themselves--entertaining danerous, passionate thoughts. Yes, "we all could be murders" it doesn't take much to turn into that pyschotic murderer you see on news and verhermently condemn, happy that he is gonig ot hang for his dirty deeds. Yes you don't realize he is the exorcist, he did all that to ease your own guilts about the possibilities that you could turn into a murder if only the cirucmstance was right and you met your victim or you became one. Only one thing stopped you if that should ever happen--fear. But for now he did not feel afraid.

She is now planning on leaving the shop, the music shop guy has now turned away distracted by some other customers' demands. Before she could get clear out of his reach and before his mood can change. He walked towards her, he was going to speak to her when she turned around

"Pete, what are you doing there, sneaking around like that! It's just like you! You're really becoming one of those foolish beer-bellied middle aged man you once feared you'll become! What did I ever see in you! WE have to get on home. Jeanie is waiting for us."

He followed her in silence, his fantasy broken, a quick wake up call to his flabby-pear-shaped-wife reality, and his role as a middle age father, on his way home to help prepare dinner and then wash the dishes. He would stalk, and maybe murder, another day.

2006-11-20T22:47:00.000-08:00

Driving on the freeway, a real sense of freedom
and space
the wide, speed, road
the signs
pointing out the next exit
to North San Francisco
last exit
must stay on right lane
whiz past dragged watercolours
the wind
whistling howling whipping
my face, my hair
melt into one with the raw feeling
cold fresh
the pacific
stretching ever on
reminding me of both distance
and connection
to the people I love
somewhere on the other side
of the ocean
the equator
the timeline
I feel like I'm chasing their time
their days
mornings, now night
bump, i jump
lower the window and
stretch out my head
life: like the passing guidepost
flying by with brilliant colours
and a terrible mess
--a drive in speed
look now
and breathe the fresh wind
before they zoom past
or is it I?

2006-11-12T20:59:00.000-08:00

Standing there, watching the people appear, disappear like shadows, like the creeping tide which gets on his nerves, he took out a cigarette, wanted to light it and decided against it. Threw it away. More people entered and left through the revolving doors, some in suits, caucasian ladies in evening wear on that red lush carpet under the chadelier. Old men with dark wizened faces, women who smelled of bad luck, like their thin fortune flushed down, spinned away at wheel, thrown into card games. Everything seemed to be in fast motion, winning,losing, coming, going, laughing, sighing--people call it the sin city. A city of Casino, but really it is a city of human drama, of human life, the frailty of wealth, the illusion of the value of money and the joke called luck. HOw if you stared hard enough you could see beneath the thin veil of deception, beneath the glitz, the lush riches, there are flesh, blood, skin of organisms throbbing. A city of flesh, blood, bodily fluids and excretion. The sweat on the palm of the gambler as he throws in his final bet because his night closes, the saliva of the winner on a ucky streak stained the wine glass, the pee which escapes the card dealer as the manager stands behind him, suspecting him of cheating with one of the guests at the table. The stink carried on the losers leaving he casino like a plague he could smell, like the lingering smell of cigarettes, gone stale. He waits.
A group of women, black faces, that smell, he knows--gambling addicts out of luck tonight. "Take us to the harbor" a hoarse voice with the smell of the breath of the diseased. He rakes up the gear and drives off, another night in the city of life.

2006-10-23T20:54:00.000-07:00

choices in life, not like the road not taken
where road leads on to road
covered by undergrowth
It is flat
sometimes an illusion
freedom to choose
freedom not to choose
courage to go and not look back
to look back with curiousity
and wonder
not with anger nor a sigh
just a big foggy question mark
the future like that past
cannot be found
what is clear is only the present
the very spot of road lighted at our feet
like disney's Alice in wonderland
we constantly move from dot to dot
spot to spot
place to place
moment to moment
trying to make sense of this dream of a life
life of a dream
Not at sea
not that painful freedom of existence
No.
It is a peaceful concrete realization
of the present
just that is certain
nothing else.
So why fear what is ahead, what is lost.
We never lose, nor do we truly gain
but only what is already present
or already in existence
all that has past
is already a dream
and what is not yet present
a mirage
we are, however,
anchored

2006-10-15T08:17:00.000-07:00

I leaving.
I can't write.
It hurts too much
to think

2006-10-04T06:41:00.000-07:00

An indecision
between longing
stability
and to lose it all
on wings
detached
on far
Distance
and time
An impossibility
to reduce the self
watching it unravel
like a film
illogical flow
A concrete shadow
pulsing
with live
experiences and songs
melted into the very core
of the insubstantial
A whirl of colour
uncaptured sensations
The self
which
defies the four dimensional
Immaterial
yet palpable
shattered glasses
a million pieces
crawling together again and again
smashed
again
Glasses are unbrokened
Trees ungrowned
Rewind and forward
Like a nonsensencial ramble from the mind of an insane that life is just the causes and effects the gravity pulls the apple falls the train moves by the power of the engine that things go forward towards a recognizable ened that rain falls when the clouds become full trying to make sense of all the small parts closing our eyes to the totality because we will become blind go insane we try to see the moments to moments find God's hand in things explain reasons
explain the moments
broken down
A segment
the sum total
unadditionable
indivisible
the divine gapes at its beauty
the comdemned weeps at its unfanthomability
time moves backward
is stataionary
everymomentIam renewed
everymomentIam unborned
like a blankered screen
I-self is erased
I
unbroke silence
disproved my existence
confirmed the moment

2006-09-19T08:45:00.000-07:00

Leaving a place
you have grown attached to
is like a long term amnesia
Missing it before it is gone
A feeling of dislocation even before you pack up and leave
It is knowing that the city will change
its face always mutating
a layer of skin
which grows and moults and grows again
knowing you might miss those gaps
that after that time travel
you return to patch the gap
dig beneath the skin
To fill in the empty blanks
with memories, wrongly remembered
past, which never existed
imagined.

Uprooting is a common word
but it is never a total detachment
but a thin web like a spider's
attached to some part of your being
to some insignificant thing
which you might pick up again one day
by chance
The root stays only the leaf is
blown
to
fate knows where
precariously hanging on the edge
knowing that the next wind might take it off
to some great unknown
at that precise moment
it thinks of the city in past tense
Old
Home
Once upon a time
I forget

2006-09-05T01:35:00.000-07:00

Just finished reading Angela Carter's "The Infernal desire manchines of Dr Hoffman" and I feel propelled by an intense desire to respond to her tale. her tale of macabre, beauty, the absurd and colours which leap off some fantastical paintings looking for lodgings in some parts of your mind. Moulding and making itself into some part of my being. Which sometimes strike me as plastic, always waiting for new elements to fall into its glob and re-configure itself into some fantastical form of monstrosity or some great beauty but which always escapes scrutiny.

Perhaps my love for fairy tales is part of the reason why I feel so drawn by Angela Carter's tale, or perhaps it is just the beauty and intensity of the world which she presented, offering it in a crystal cup, a dark ruby liquid which on drinking I feel drugged and slightly poisoned. Just with enough dosage to sting, and immobilize but not to kill, so her tale lives, propagates in some abandoned corner of the mind. A tiny spark which if it lands in a dry prairie would explode with all the dazzling colours of a firework exploding itself. Savage and unordered her imagination, aroused desires for such freedom from within. Without guardrails of the ordinary to guide the evolution of new stories, it seems a scary journey into the unknown. What form would the imagination take? To where would it stray? Her story of a man's journey does it not reflect her own journey as a writer into the wilderness, some unknown region, where many are too frightened to enter into for fear they would lose their way back? She plunges into the ocean. No, it is more accurate to say through mirrors. not the doorways through which one can safely return. Which was why Alice arrived at wonderland. It was not through a safe and sure doorway where one can see the other side clearly. But one which was blocked, only reflecting what is on this side but not the other. Dare I dive into the liquid mercury imitating a mirror? Quite thankfully, both Angela Carter and Alice returned from wonderland. But what if one got lost? For if we really think about it, it is merely by coincidences which Alice manages to escape from her dreamscape, and for Angela Carter it may be her skill as a writer and a person grounded in absolute reality. But the plunge is one way. It is not a walk through the mirror. It is a terrible dive, greater than even a leap of faith, down down down into a river of unconsciousness beyond the cold hard surface of the mirror.

2006-08-26T07:39:00.000-07:00

A head appeared in that hole in the sky. "Hello there" a voice said. The old man on the ground tried to see that face, but the light coming from that hole was too bright. Wanting to shield his eyes from the bright light, He tried to close his eyes. He wanted to lift a hand to try to ask for help. He wanted to speak but he couldn't find the strength. His voice box felt as if it had rusted from the years he spent in silence. He tried to mime his agony, his painful lonliness and the intolerable darkness he had been forced to endure because of his crime in a moment of folly. he looked up into the blinding light with all the sadness his heart could muster. His frozen muscles ached from the effort to express. Grief had become concrete, solid in his little cell. It was like the darkness around him, thick and deep like a liquid half solidified, caressing him with a seductive touch such that he could not totally find the determination to leave it once and for all. Abandon it and hope for something better. He had become attached to it, although he yearned for a freedom away from her presence. The new found ray of hope in the form of light and that voice full of life, full of something other than the darkness, the silence and the dampness lifted something dead inside of him. Raised it from the dead like a resurrection--only half sucessful.

"What are you doing here?" Oh my god, he thought, it is a child. A child, a young bud fresh with possibilities, imagination of the great beyond, so different from this chained old man anchored to his grief, mired in what he have already forgotten, burdened by a history no longer relevant. Only the deep sadness where hope could not penetrate. Help me he wanted to say. Save me, free me, love me. But nothing came. It was as if he had turned to stone, such that his tears could not flow. so the sadness is intact, nothing is subtracted from it to diminish it. So that he will always suffer it alone, suffer it all in its fullness.

"Are you still alive? can you move?"

"Here, give me your hand." The faceless voice stretched out a tiny hand.

The old man tried to stand, he wanted to touch it even if he could not be freed from his fate. Every atom in his being yearned for a contact with that embodiment of forgiveness, of another possibility, of a new beginning.

"Come on, don't be afraid, I won't hurt you."

His body had long become useless, his mind is half ravished, his heart... His heart searches for the soul which he had given up in despair. He is lost, he is abandoned. He had lost everything that meant anything to him-- flaking from his being like pieces of old skin which refuses to grow again. Swallowed by that darkness.

"Why are you scared of me? Quickly, take my hand or I will have to leave soon. I hear my mum calling me already." Quickly quickly.

Knowing that it was his one chance to redeem himself, to save his lost soul torn apart by the bitter years spent as despair's slave. He knew that if he could just reach the boy, he would be saved. He would cease his torturous existence. I felt his skin throbe. HIs finger tingled. Wait for me, he wanted to say.

Wait...

"Who are you talking to? There is no one there. Johnny, stop playing these games, it scares me." Mother says. She closes the box her son loves to look into and talk into. I am going to throw this away she says to herself. Tomorrow. She makes a mental note.

Johnny thinks to himself, he still refuses to talk to me, maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow.

The old man sees the light go out, the hole closes from the sky. He springs up from his nightmare. He is dreaming of this boy again. He is dreaming of hope again. It will happen again every night and he will fail, always at the last minute. He will tell the boy how much he loves him tomorrow, Sail away from his little cell tomorrow. Tomorrow.

2006-08-13T06:49:00.000-07:00

A writer's block is like a...........Urgh!
Disgust.
A writer's block is like a........
a....
a....
Frustration
a.....
Nothing comes
Nothin means much
That voice in my head is silent
staring at me with
accusing eyes
stony stares
half dead
I wait.
I bait it with smiles, questions
I try to make a conversation like:
A writer's block is like a? (can you continue for me?)
A writer's block is like a what?
unyeilding.
Talk to me, talk to me.
A writer's block is like a.......

2006-07-28T08:34:00.000-07:00

Look into that sea of white
buttons, white socks
anonymous faces
masked curiousity, a bundle of questions
about life, changes, pimples
sweaty P.E shirts
sticky water coolers
teen-hood
unbelievably X-file-ish
Standing in front
pretending
I have it all together
I've been through this
I know more than you do
A silly farce
of insecurities
knowing that I have still not changed
uncertain
do I have it right?
Wanting to make them question
but find myself only equipped to provide answers
trying to emphasize our difference
our distance
but discovering
we're still at the same point
on exactly the same side

2006-07-16T01:03:00.000-07:00

He mumbled a prayer, trembled, felt his hair stand on ends. He dabbed the cold sweat forming around his brow with a wrinkled handkerchief. Oh God, he has sinned. 'Father forgive our sins and deliver us from evil.' He sat in his room, hearing the clock's nervous ticks as it circles itself again and again. The Tv flashed its eerie greenish glow. On screen footages from the site of a plane crash were showing torn metal pieces twisted into grosteque sculptures bearing blood, tears, screams and flesh of the victims of the crash. The news reporter on scene was describing the carnage, faces of distraught family members were flashed to millions of families across the world. Many sitting concerned in front of the televsion, others heard of the terrible news and looked up from whatever they were doing and for a moment shared the grief of the family members desperate for news of their loved ones. It was a terrible accident, the plane had lost control when the tail end came apart in flight causing it to spin out of control and crash onto the moutains below. No one survived from the crash. All 359 passengers on board were killed in the crash.
-------

He had always been a wonderful employee, Mr G loved him as he loved most of his staff. He was always punctual at the factory, he had been there for nearly twenty years now. Their company was a small one, they made small metal parts, not just your average screws, nuts and bolts but tiny minute metal exact parts for all kinds of mechanisms, they were a small firm but very professional nonetheless. Clock makers, aerospace firms cars, buses, bridges has parts produced by them. They always had their inside jokes on the things the average people did not know. Things they drive in, walk on and fly in had a tiny part which had passed through their hands. They knew their importance to the world in this small way. They prodcued millions of these tiny screws every year which were dispersed around the world to become an intimate part of people's lives. People sneer in general when these workers tell them their job. They make screws and bolts. What most forget is the role these tiny artefacts play in the bigger scheme of things. They, a group of unsung heroes were proud of their job.

The trouble began when Mr G suffered a minor stroke and passed on his whole business to his son. Now, the son was an ivy league student, born with more than a silver spoon in his mouth; he had a whole silver ware enough for ten course meals. Everything in life came easy for him such that he had no empathy nor sympathy for needs, weaknesses and mistakes. He was one of those blessed few who had everything yet because of their gifts had a deep sense of cruelty etched onto their beings. He had never failed, and he did not expect other people to fail him. He thought the workers coarse, uneducated and ignorant. He had no appreciation for the bloke jokes they loved to share at work, nor their flexible work schedule. His university education taught him efficiency, management, production quotas, time tables, all in shades of grey , cold and rigid like the tables and digits he was familiar with. First came the factory bells to keep workers on time, then came mechanisation, new workers and then the 'damned' restructuring. The valued old workers suddenly found themselves old men with no education kept on in the company only for old time's sake and was made to feel exactly that way about their presence in the workplace where they had sweated day after day for more than twenty years of their lives.

------

The idea came when Old Chang got drunk. He had in his giddy state raised the idea for resistance and rebellion. If, he had declared standing on the table at the pub, they could not shock and awe in retaliation, they can always revenge themselves by carrying out subtle sabotages. First, the bell at the factory malfunctioned for mysterious reasons. Next, machines started breaking down giving the young Mr G, eager to prove his worth and assert his status, headaches. They started exchanging secretive glances at lunch, and good jokes on their new mission at their after work drinks. Mr G junior was not in the dark in regards to the series of unfortunate incidents in his factories. A cold war was silently declared in the factory. Pay cuts started happening. Hints of dismissal, lengthened work hours were his response to the sabotages.

Sometimes, unhappiness can drive a man to do things he normally would never even imagine himself to, causing him to betray his own principles, cloud his vision blind him with frustration. That was the day, one of the new workers had mistakenly produced a batch of screws short in length by a minute degree. He had spotted the mistake but in a fit of anger and a feeling of justified outrage, he had let the batch pass him by unstopped. He remembered a distinct feeling of sweet revenge, a satisfaction of getting even. He had since then clean forgotten the incident, the event was lost in a jumble of memory like a small stone sunken into oblivion in the depth of his mind.

Then, by chance he had switched on the television to see the scene of distraught and tragic loss of human lives and desperate relatives looking for loved ones on the fatal flight. His deed in that moment of rage resurfaced from the deep dark corner of his mind. He thought of the possibility of the tragedies his act might have wrought or is waiting to bear fruit somewhere, under cars and people's feet, as screws holding lives together and how that short degree would make the difference between life and death. How one of the screws might have found its way onto the flight he was seeing on television, how misery had a mysterious connection between all people of the world. He wept bitter tears and cried to the heavens for a sign of forgiveness. Somewhere else millions of miles away, a woman is crying for her lost son, asking the heavens for an explanation of her grief. Sorrow found a community miles away each in his isolated bitterness. Those suffering searched in desperation for a sign that they were not alone, but the night was silent except for the suffocated tears.

2006-07-06T01:18:00.000-07:00

The boy put on his school uniform, slowly wore his white school socks, ate his breakfast reluctantly, was ushered out of the house by his maid. Today is his examination--History. His worst subject and the one he was least interested in. Hated, if he was permitted to use that word. He stomped to the lift lobby, praying intensely for the lift to malfunction. At 4th storey, the lift stopped. He grinned. Only to have it wiped off when the door opened to let in his neighbor--an irritant his age, from his school. A smarty-pants who always rejoiced in running into him just to compare results or show off about boring facts he read from science magazines. He was not in the mood to socialize, so he pretended to look at his history book.

Merciful silence and then the lift door opens. Out filed the two.

"I feel very well prepared for today's history paper. If I get an A, my parents will get me a genuine lab kit with a real microscope."

"Good for you." He strolls off.

"You don't seem very prepared. You will probably get a C again. So sad. If I ever get a C, I don't think I can live with the humiliation."

"For your information, I am not planning to turn up for the exam today."

"Like real, you are always all talk only. I would love to see how you're going to miss the exam and still get away with it."

"You just watch."

The two boys carried on walking, neither of them talked.

They were nearing the school. In the distance they can see the flock of students in white, concentrated near the school gate, slowly filing into their own lines. Teachers were starting to gather at the parade square.

The school now loomed huge in front of them just across the road. After crossing the street they would be in school, Smarty sneered.

He turned to make a sarcastic remark only to see the other boy taking a deep breath and then stepping off the curb into the oncoming traffic.

Multiple cars honked, tires screamed, Chaos.

2006-07-02T23:15:00.000-07:00

IT is a tragedy. She had liked him the first time she saw him. He grew to like her after some time. He passed her by. She kept looking out for him. This is the kind of story in real life. The kind of romance story most people are familiar with in REAL life—where nothing much happens really, because of all kinds of factors. Bad timing, assumptions that everything is just a phase, that you don’t really fall in love at first sight like in the movies, that you cannot find that one just by looking into each others’ eyes, the list goes on. For all kinds of reasons, romance novel sells because these things don’t happen in real life. But the biggest reason, probably, is cowardice. Afraid to take a chance, afraid that the other person will think it foolish. Afraid to be wrong. That is the tragic love story I am about to tell you. It is generally agreed that ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is most tragic of all love stories. But that is only because everyone is too afraid to look at their own lives and see all those sad stories—much sadder than Romeo and Juliet because, so much could have, might have, would have happened, IF ONLY.
------

He died for her. She killed herself because life would be unbearable without him. The reason why they are generally agreed to be the most tragic couple is because of people’s reluctance to face up the grim reality of the sad business called ‘love’. In fact, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is the happiest ending a love story can possibly have. Most fairy tales which end with “and they lived happily ever after” are at best incomplete. They lived happily ever after, EXCEPT for those occasional quarrels, threats of divorce and times when they hate each other so bad, they wondered why they got together in the first place. Other than all those tears, anguish, disappointment, insecurities, they “lived happily ever after”. And it is never ever stated how long happily ever after lasted. They lived happily ever after for one week before they….
Luckily for both Romeo and Juliet they had not yet gotten to that stage where their love is put to the real test, much worse off than any parental objection they might ever face.
-------

But I side track, I was going to tell the saddest love story possible. It is not a ‘Romeo and Juliet scenario which happens once in a million. And in Douglas Adam term’s it is so improbable that a certain William Shakespeare wrote it into a play which became universally declared the saddest love story the world can ever behold. Even the famous improbability drive would have some trouble with this. The saddest love story which I am about to tell, would bring even Shakespeare to shame for staging such a falsity and cheating the whole world over and over again for centuries.
-------

The saddest love story involves an ordinary girl, any generic guy, a random chance provided by fate for them to meet, biological chemistry: enough to get them thinking about each other all the time, and the rest has to do with being human. Our pride, our fears, our hesitance, our fantasies, our desires, our everything else. Fate is too often maligned or (worse off) being made scapegoat. The following might provide a certain measure of discomfort, but if you do feel affected it is all perfectly normal.

“Dear Aunt Agony,

I have liked this boy since I was 13, but he does not know. He treats me as his friend and I am afraid to express my true feelings after all these years. I think of him all the time. I just wish things could have turned out differently. I am so sad.”

“Dear Diary,
I saw him again. I will be graduating soon, so we might never meet each other again.”

“Congratulations on your wedding day, to my best friend (I do so envy the bride) Don’t forget me. If you ever need help I’ll always be around.”

Most are even simpler.

The story is just a blank. Possibilities missed and chances lost. Too insignificant to become a true regret, yet, still leaving a certain wistfulness. Of things we wished we could have done to make the ending different. OR choices we are sometimes force to make without certainty. Like being led blindfolded to a chasm and asked to make that leap of faith.

To jump over the moon.

That Romeo and Juliet do not have to come to that leap and have consumed themselves in their destructive love is their fortune. Most of us mere mortals still need a moment of insanity and a steadfast belief to make things happen for better or for worse.