December 2011
30 posts
1 tag
you hum, hummingbird and whisper through trees; you flit and fly amongst golden sun.
3 tags
Bleeding Ink
I do not like the idea of “bleeding” ink, “bleeding” words. We have a finite amount of blood in our body. Our hearts pump the same amount of blood every day through our veins and arteries. Some of it is oxygenated. Some of it is not. Some of it is weak. Some of it is iron-deficient. No matter what it is or what problems it has, it’s still all we’ve got and we...
1 tag
the horizon.
I went down to the beach in my sixth summer. I remember looking up at the sky, and bounding from the car to the sparkling sand. I couldn’t comprehend how vivid everything was. My mother had made me wear my blue rash vest and my purple spotted hat - sun smart, you see. I lay on the sand for a while and made myself sand castles. I built six. I stared up at the sky and wondered if the blue went...
1 tag
I was convinced he was a boy. I spent nights wondering if he would be Sam, or Dan. Would he be tall with blonde hair and blue eyes, like him? Or would he be medium height, dark hair and brooding eyes? Was I romanticising him? Would I get on with him? My whole life would be derailed from that one moment, but there was no way I couldn’t have wanted him. He came from two fucked up people, but...
3 tags
We are all writers.
What makes a writer - who knows? We all write differently, we all change our habits in between the masses. I write while listening to Sigur Ros. You might write while listening to Katy Perry for all I know. You might think your writing is brilliant. You might think you can’t write at all. But I say it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how we write or what we write. It...
2 tags
how a soul dies.
Aching tendons collapse within soft wrists at your violent touch.
I never had a chance.
As soon as you grabbed my butterfly fingers and snapped them
one by one,
I was dead.
Your soul was, too.
5 tags
norwegian wood.
She held my hand as we wandered through the undergrowth. The trees looked dark and menacing, dead leaves crunching under foot. I heard an owl in the distance, and wondered what it was still doing awake in the middle of the day. “We flew all this way to see a goddamned forest?” I muttered, half to myself. “It’s not a forest, it’s a wood!” she threw back at me. She turned around suddenly and pushed...
5 tags
my bones are nothingness, an original piece, read...
3 tags
the motorcycle diaries.
Perhaps I will find a motorcycle lying by the road. It would be rusting, I think, the iron corroding, the workmanship shoddy. The leather seat would be wearing away, hard and uncomfortable to sit on. But I would fall in love with it. I would take it home, and spend the money I had saved for my medical career on fixing it up. Mama looked at me askew, and Papa raged in front of my sisters and my...
2 tags
my bones are nothingness.
Noche,
I write from the mountains.
I have taken yellowing parchment from my tattered backpack, and a pen I found lying on the road in that last town we stopped at. The world is far older than I realised. Everywhere I go, I see men dying and women crying. I see women dying, and men crying.
The houses are falling down. No one cares enough to see them stand upright. I have hated every town I have...
1 tag
I woke up and everything burned.
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When we were driving home, I saw an old man sitting on a dirty wooden bench in the city. I was full of udon noodle soup and laughter with my parents. I held a book in my hand and I was content. I looked out the window, and I could not look away. He wore a black blazer jacket with a white button up shirt underneath, but it had a tomato sauce stain and it was faded and I could imagine the...
4 tags
Reconciliation
The wind howled in this frost-bitten place she found herself in. She didn’t know the name. She had just found a map in her letter-box that day, with directions in red pen on yellowing parchment, leading to a giant x. All very dramatic. She didn’t have a doubt as to what was waiting for her there, in this neutral country. She called it Switzerland in her head. It wasn’t...
4 tags
How to Read
Read ten books at once, and breathe different walks of life. Recite quotes to strangers you have never met before, and watch them look at you with widened eyes and raised eyebrows. They’ll hurry away, thinking you some homeless person, high on drugs, and you’ll laugh and pity them. The more obscure the quote, the better. Instead of your room being strewn with clothes and makeup and...
2 tags
I am made of starlight. Can you not hear the thumping? That is not my heartbeat, that is not you, that is the galaxy within my chest. I am made of starlight— slice me open, and watch me burn.
6 tags
Gulls on fire/Marriages of naught
Hayden and I decided to go on a collaboration adventure, and this is what we came up with. We each wrote fifteen lines of approximately fifteen words, completely separately, forged of streams of consciousness. We did not speak about our meanings and interpretations. At the end, we shared our works with each other, and each of us have then melded these works into one, keeping the original order of...
1 tag
Men as Writers
Men.
Hard planes, hard words, hard hearts.
They work,— fix cars, fix women— and earn money. Breadwinners. They are the sturdy platform upon which the world stands.
They would have us believe that they are unemotional, that they are above tears, above love, above.
Unless that man is—
a writer.
A man as a writer, feels hard, falls hard, writes hard.
They live fast and hard,...
1 tag
One Word
I am one word in a never ending story. This narrative has more words than any you’ve ever known.
Six billion nine hundred and thirty one million nine hundred and forty nine thousand and sixty eight words.
The editor, the writer, he scans his words with intent, deleting and adding, to and fro— purpose unexplained.
One day, he will reach perfection. But today, I simply understand
...
2 tags
1 tag
You threw my grandmother’s china against the wall last night. That’s okay. You were angry. She bought it in China, the porcelain still gleaming white, even after all those years. Now it lies in shards in the garbage bin, waiting for men with failed dreams and large hopes to pick it up on a Thursday morning. I knelt into the broken pieces, and it sliced my knees up. I bled into the...
3 tags
I am the underlying heartbeat of the rhythmical world, and with my pointed finger, I spin the earth. It’s as though I’m balancing a basketball on my nail, and I watch the planets orbit, and wait until they splash. I play the tiny apes within the world, and stroke their heads and feed them with spiritual promises. I love them, but they do not love me. With this, I am content.
2 tags
I am smashed porcelain. I am black snow, and I am...
2 tags
Sylvia, My Butterfly Friend
Dear Sylvia Plath,
I anaesthetised a butterfly today.
Oh yes. I caught it in a net I wove myself, string made of gossamer lies and fragile tomorrows, and I wound it round and round. I made butterfly-net, and I named it after you.
I went out into Tomorrow Land. I had to sail there from my neighbour’s house. It was a long walk from mine to hers; the pavement seared my flesh feet. I am charcoal now,...
1 tag
King of Shadowland
King of Shadowland, won’t you take my Shadow hand? I have not flesh to burn, nor milk to churn.
I see your glittering cat-eyes, chatoyant and lying. Tapetum lucidum is a foreign concept to all but the French but even I, the so-deemed rodent, see the dead virgin at your unholy, claw-like feet.
I killed a bird for...
1 tag
Your Body, The Church
I made your heart a Church where I could gather, pray, sit and reflect. The reverend blessed me with the anointing of your beating blood.
You watched from outside and condemned me, with blackened eyes. When I entered those wooden double-doors, you excommunicated me from your mind.
I curl up, cocoon, chrysalis and wait for you— realise, Lord, realise I love the sacrilegious.
1 tag
I underestimate the beauty in your life. I cannot see the poetry in the way you clasp your coffee cup, the faintest lipstick smudge on its porcelain edges. I don’t notice how young fingers tap around the handle, like a spider, reaching long and wide. You’re creating a web throughout your day, gossamer strings of conversation and of emotion connecting you from moment to moment. I hear...
1 tag
I destroyed worlds, today. I thought I was creating them. Angels sang behind and around me, in a language I was yet to understand. What confused me was that the Devil sung with them, and his fire-demons blew their trumpets and their saxophones, and the angels played their flutes and God conducted.
I didn’t know I was just another clarinet, my heart just another beating drum. I was played...
3 tags
“Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they’re also what tear...”
– Haruki Murakami
3 tags
Sakura
Hands are clasped in a way that reminds me of a flower. Fold, unfold, in all the whispers of the wind with the promise of tomorrow.
Cherry red lips have made the Sakura spiteful, jealous, wanting. Straight black hair is a warning to the witches— beauty and darkness go hand in hand.
I wish for the heaving of sighs and the susurration of souls, and I pray to the Lord
for deliverance.
November 2011
34 posts
1 tag
Drowning
She met him three times before they were married, and she felt like she was drowning in every single one.
The first time, it was raining. It was everything expected, it was trite, it was cliche. The heavens had opened up, God was angry, whatever idioms for rain you can think of. She waved goodbye to the bartender, and still decked out in her little black barmaid apron, she ducked out into the...
1 tag
First and Last
He wrote his first poem when he was eighty-nine. He wrote it in the dying breaths of his dying wife, painting the images along the fogging hospital window with her burning fever and burning soul.
She wrote her first story when she was three. She told her mumma ‘bout the princess and the unicorn, but it really turned out to be a prince, and they kissed. They lived happily ever after, and so...