March 2013
2 posts
Long Lunch
Noodles coagulate
Unable to disentangle
From the choking mass
Gathering in my throat.
Syllables unutterable
All that I cannot hear
Resenting quavers
Startling the bar.
Nothing worse
Than the insincerity of silence
Dinner of the unspeaking
Orders cut off in mid air -
Your fingers aren’t grasping
My throat, and still I am strangled
By these swollen threads
Of your heart,...
Ode to a nightingale (and to work)
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.
February 2013
4 posts
Play acting
Isabella guessed the word that Giles had not spoken. Well, was it wrong if he was that word? Why judge each other? Do we know each other? Not here, not now. But somewhere, this cloud, this crust, this doubt, this dust-
About Time
In the time it took to hold my breath
and slip under the bathwater
– to hear the blood-thud in the veins,
for me to rise to the surface –
my parents had died,
the house had been sold and now
was being demolished around me,
wall by wall, with a ball and chain.
I swim one length underwater,
pulling myself up on the other side, gasping,
to find my marriage over,
my daughters...
Words
Out of us all
That make rhymes,
Will you choose
Sometimes –
As the winds use
A crack in the wall
Or a drain,
Their joy or their pain
To whistle through –
Choose me,
You English words?
I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
Precious as gold,
As poppies and corn,
Or an old cloak:
Sweet as our birds
To the ear,
As the burnet rose
In the heat
Of Midsummer:
Strange as...
4 tags
Road Cycling
No longer the barbaric yawp from the rooftop -
Just the silent celebration, in small and measured spoonfuls
Packed carefully against your tightening chest, as you
Perch precariously on the arc of two wheels
That perpetually spin beyond your will.
January 2013
1 post
The Eagle
He holds the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
December 2012
4 posts
Remembering
Crickets and pools
Sing memory songs of you.
Not even poets have measured, how much the heart...
In case I ever were to forget - my love for you is beyond circumstance and regret.
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
– T.S Eliot, “The Waste Land”
“A relationship is like a shark- it has to keep moving forward, or it will die.”
– Woody Allen
November 2012
1 post
3 tags
Dark Light
Twelve moons past,
We had squeezed past brown men like toothpaste
Unelegantly discovered ourselves by the edge of the sidewalk
The garish red and purple lights casting an electric pall on your brown face
You brought me to the god that you worshipped
Only after something good had transpired - retroactive thanks
Her many hands clenching the air and the whispers of her devotees
Twisting...
October 2012
6 posts
5 tags
Too Good To Be True
My mind grown soft from too much Internet usage… Whether on my laptop with its glowing piece of violated fruit on the lid, or the awful little slab I’ve made the mistake of entrusting with my phone calls and, more and more, my higher faculties. Plato’s slab. It is the last metaphor.
Irony
The greatest economic disaster of all time was caused by the most data-oriented sector of our society. Wall Street didn’t fail because it had too few quants; it had too many.
2 tags
6 tags
Statistics is like a bikini - it's what it's...
am learning the language of numbers, and i remain convinced that they tell more lies than words do.
12 tags
WatchOne of the most poignant videos I’ve ever seen, capturing the steel and fragility of the human spirit and the beloved works of our hands.
September 2012
1 post
As F1 Weekend Approaches
What do you do at the F1?
You drink expensive water,
And drink expensive beer.
And then you walk around
With small plugs in your ear.
August 2012
11 posts
What I feel this morning
Alexithymia - the absence of words to describe emotional states.
2 tags
2 tags
“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”
– Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand
4 tags
2 tags
“Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love”
– Graham Greene
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
– Frank Zappa
“But, O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another...”
– Shakespeare, As You Like It
5 tags
1 tag
What a difference a month makes
waiting at the airport.
the arrival.
the hug.
the overspilling teacup of joy.
the eyes.
too many smiles.
the finger holding, touching and not touching.
our first kiss, the world moving under our feet.
-
the news telling.
the numerous nods.
the knowing across the table.
-
the secret, charging at us with knives.
the hour of doubt, sitting in the empty and hollow cathedral.
the...
5 tags
Mortality at the Coffee Shop
[We're sitting in a coffeeshop, the distracting clink of silver spoons against porcelain cups, chatter from the next table drifting upwards and catching in the fan, that cuts up the syllables and scatters them across the airy sunlit room, "chs" and "ahs" punctuating the atmosphere.]
C: I admire your optimism. It's the sort you have when you're in your twenties.
A: [a little anxious] You mean it goes away when you turn thirty?
C: Certainly, as sure as the sun sets, your horizons start to dip and narrow as you get older. You start becoming conscious of your... mortality.
A: [refusing to believe] Your mortality? How would ten years make any sort of difference?
C: [considers A for a moment, and thinks about how he might convince this stubborn young thing] Take sports, for instance. I stopped playing football two years ago, after I tore my ankle ligaments. The doctor said that I was wearing the wrong sort of cleats for the turf, which really meant that I was kicking around in high heels. [incredulous, which A shares, particularly because it is virtually impossible to imagine the lean and wiry C being in any way effeminate] You begin to be aware of your limits, there's only so far you can go, so much you're prepared to do. You begin thinking of your responsibilities, the people whom you'd like to think depend on you so entirely that they too might die if you selfishly waste your life away.
[A clutches on to her teh tarik mug the whole time while C speaks, her hands betray some nervousness as she thinks about what he says]
A: Why would anyone wish to have any sense of their limits?
C: Because it keeps us safe, generally. Which is not a bad thing. You give up some of the thrill, in exchange for many more years.
A: It is hard to imagine such a life...
C: But to be honest, my epiphany came from somewhere else. [he looks at A, who's staring down at her tea, fighting herself] I collect books, I buy them everytime I enter a bookstore... It's like an addiction, but one which I gladly feed. Back in my house I have these huge bookcases, they've now grown so large I need a ladder to get to the top. Books spilling out of their ears, pages pressed impossibly tight against each other, from every period, every genre. And one day I stood there staring at them, staring back at me. And that's when I realised - forget about the books in the bookstore. I will never be able to finish reading every book on my shelf before I die.
[A looks up from her mug of tea and glances at him in recognition]
C: I will never be able to read all of them before I die. That is what I learnt, at thirty.
July 2012
2 posts
9 tags
Stuff of a Legend
SPEECH BY PS (FOREIGN AFFAIRS) BILAHARI KAUSIKAN AT RAFFLES INSTITUTION’S 189TH FOUNDER’S DAY ON 21 JULY 2012 (SATURDAY) AT 9 AM AT ALBERT HONG HALL, RAFFLES INSTITUTION
1 When your Principal, in a reckless act of folly, asked me to be Guest-of-Honour at this 189th Founder’s Day, my first instinct was to do us both a favour and refuse. But I hesitated and in an instant was lost. The...
2 tags
So she came to tell me that,
What is the difference, between a broken heart, and one that has frozen over?
June 2012
4 posts
2 tags
Paining
Not the wind that howls
But the creak of the unused door -
Unhinged hysteria through the panels shrieking
While the mouse hides under, musing.
The small twitch of the eyebrow
of the lover cheating -
Gives away more than the spitting curses
of the sober youth raging.
Hand, unable to reach across
the dinner table -
Travels distances more vast
than the nomad...
3 tags
$trategic KPI + %Synergy% = Love
Hilarious! Approved, pls.
pls-revert:
by Mary-Jane Leo (*edit: published in Ceriph 4, available at BooksActually, Kinokuniya, and GRAPHEME zine lab. Thanks good people who reblogged with this info!)
Mary was lonely and needed
a Partner with the same
>!> Strategic Thrusts <!<
in life- that is, she wanted a love
who liked rainy days and cloudwatching
adventures in spain...
12 tags
May 2012
3 posts
Sangria
At the end of what had been a beautiful but beastly relationship, it takes a while to make sense of the fall out. One dreams of big party BBQs, deep fried crab cakes, his face in the crowd, looking but not looking.
Whichever way you think about it, there is no turning back. Your heart would do all kinds of gymnastics to untwist itself, sprain even, just for a whiff of what used to be. Sweaty...
2 tags
Musings on what would have been the first...
(-of a rather psychotic relationship.)
Perhaps-
If I hadn’t mucked up,
We might be married.
Today we would be in Ikea,
Picking out pre-fabricated kitchen shelves,
These pieces that make us whole.
Perhaps-
We might have been happy.
I have no measurement of certainty-
But sitting here in bed, alone,
I’m still sure, that even without
The trappings of the
modern married...
2 tags
Wordle! →
April 2012
10 posts
Novels and their worth
The value of a novel is not limited to its depiction of emotions and people akin to those in our own life; it stretches to an ability to describe these far better than we would have been able, to put a finger on perceptions that we recognize as our own, but could not have formulated on our own.
Words of the Wise by Dr Seuss
You have brains in your head,
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose
2 tags
Plain English
Teacher - Knowledge Navigator
Window Cleaner - Vision Clearance Engineer
Garbage Collector - Garbologist
Travel Agent - Destination Counsellor
Ticket Inspector - Revenue Protection Officer
Insanity
These blue steel bars
that keep me in,
and the walls that are stained
by my secret shame,
cannot keep
out the real
torment- earworms that
wriggle unfettered,
sucking on the flesh
of my mind- repeating
I am incapable
of living, and must,
like a mollusc, lie
here inert, insensible,
infantile.
Such sweetness there is
on the skin
of the unfree.
But it shall be
as limp shrimp is...
3 tags
Power of the Nudge →
Stop yelling! Google turns to nudging to influence desired eating behaviours
1 tag
1 tag
March 2012
8 posts
