the air is stale,
like the taste of morning breath.
noises around me steadily lose their reality.
meaningful sounds all end up as silence.
the hush grows, deeper and deeper, like silt
on the bottom of the sea. i watch
as the layers pile
higher and higher.

the stench
of piled emotions, forced
mediocrity, of hands
on the analog clock
ticking past the surface of time.

unopened biscuit tins, rusted gold finishings
on closed bedroom doors.
blazing 2am desk lamps
instead of firecrackers.
keyboard clicks, coffee cup stains.

the air feels heavy, with glances
that never meet; sealed lips,
heavy airs, and hearts
that never hear each other.

the air is thick, and the thread -
holding us together,
holding me together,
so thin.

i used to be able to tell their thoughts
by the temperature. now, it reads
heavy. still.
like a rock on a riverbank.

and i let the waves wash over me,
just past the surface,
nothing deeper.

after all,
you can't increase nothingness.

call me twisted,
but i’ve always admired a certain degree of controversy.
complexity is a dangerous beauty, like a hurricane -
admired from afar,
deadly up close.

my biggest fear was always photocopiers.
monotonous carbon copies, binge feeding
on Christmas music
and cold commercialized coffee.
simplicity was schematic,
intricacy was ******.

with a quivering hand and downcast eyes,
i clothed myself in these layers.
gift-wrapped, with a ‘danger’ sign as a gift card,
i became an enigma to myself.
diamond rings came with dark clouds,
locks and keys gave way to gun shots and bullet wounds.

fairytales were never meant for the 3-d world.
none of us are “fated” for a happy ending.
riding off into the sunset only comes with
hard work and hard lessons.

yes, i may still be an overthinker.
i may still have more thoughts than i have time
to put them in.
mundane things are still transfigured into
tainted, disfigured imitations
of insecurity, agonising and mental mutilation.

but it does not have to be this way.

pick up a pair of 2-d glasses.
you don’t have to see the world in technicolor.
sometimes monochrome lenses
do tinge the world
in shades of nostalgia, clarity, and hope.

peel off those layers.
you may cry, but cry of catharsis.
it may sting, but salt always does.
wear simplicity as your sail,
rose-tinted with trust and a silent knowing.
you may realise that what you were always looking for
was always right beside you.

i want to live in a nunnery
and devote my life to something i will never understand.
at least i can just accept that i will never understand god
instead of trying to continually make sense of the world.
i envy those whose lives are one whole volume -
unabridged, and yet
still manage to fit from one cover to the other.
while the rest of us, full of breaks and pauses
and multiple volumes
that are either too tragic to print,
or too convoluted to put into words in the first place.
my life is a series of stops and gos,
of commas and semicolons.
infiltrated by question marks,
interspersed with the rare exclamation mark.
i'm just waiting for that full stop,
that 'the end' inked in your sweat that i
will never taste the salt of again.
i am tired of false starts,
of sputtering gas that fuel embers
and never really catch fire.
god only knows how many times i have burned
while trying to put out flames
that were never hot enough
to keep us going.

there are so many question marks and empty spaces in this world
that i wonder if they are ever meant to be filled.
the more i think about them, the more i am convinced
that they're not.
and i find that it doesn't matter,
because i'll never be whole myself.

here’s to lonely nights and resounding silence,
uplifting darkness and solitude abundant,
of wandering thoughts and imprisoned dreams;
when the night is a better companion than it normally seems.

here’s to the nights you spent crying in bed:
egged on by the monsters whispering in your head,
of nightmares dreamed once upon a time;
when nonsense was reason and chaos was rhyme.

here’s to the nights you felt so alone:
only company a mute, unringing phone
soaked with and made ruin with tears -
only voice on the other line was your head full of fears.

here’s to the night when the one stepped through the door:
unexpected surprise, footsteps patter on the floor,
two silhouettes like wayward trains meet.
bodies collapsing into one, admitting defeat.

"I could never win this war without you," admitted one.
“oh baby, don’t you worry, our journey’s just begun,”
she whispered as she clutched his glove between two hands,
and together they traveled beyond the land.

the night is never forever and more.
so don’t keep looking down, stop kissing the floor.
look up at the sky for a moment and you’ll see,
a billion stars shining for the person you’ll be.

tell me, o lover, if you see me as junk
one that you can toss aside like some ******* ****
god ****** it, that’s how I’ve been feeling recently
and all I’ve been hearing are my returning pleas

bouncing off your ears, they ricochet
so please don’t blame me if I may
give up all hope, give up all love
extinguish between my palms the proverbial flame

that myths glorify, lovers worship,
fools surround, the burns of which, they keep
scars of their sacrifice cover their bodies
their faces, marred with anxiety and crease

but still, knees kissing the stone cold floor,
merciless, unrelenting, just as your core –
has done to me, stripped me to flesh and bone
as you condemn me to the fate of davy jones

heart ripped out, spilling flesh and blood
the altar they cake, our pasts they flood
arteries, veins, pulmonary, aorta
they are all crushed under the mortar

you wield under your hand, so very unconsciously
so please please please, oh lover
you do not know how much power you have, don’t you see
you will always mean the most to me.

your palms, they hold life and death --
the former, rekindled with the warmth of your breath,
the latter - soot after fast-fading embers
clouded with memories to be unremembered.

so
stay.
let our hearts be heard.
okay?
and maybe, just maybe – you could say
those three little words.

before they go away.

there is an irrepressible sadness within me, one that bubbles over the seams of my sanity. it seeps into my bones, weighing me down with corpulence. my flesh absorbs it, and I am turned into rough, dry papyrus; chapped lips, uneven nail tips ravaged with anxious teeth marks. it is a probable impossibility that i am able to pin down the cause of my sadness. it slips through the fingers of my consciousness like how whispers are lost through the branches of trees. I am trapped in a state of unknowing, shackled by the ropes of my own despondency. I try to pretend it isn't there, and that’s easy. but it nags. this sadness is static. it is a grey nothingness, nascent unreality that exists beneath a layer of painted realities. it is as erratic as sparks, as searing as fire. one that I can’t seem to quell.

i, my personality and being, is a curse; where the ability to feel emotion at its most acute becomes a need.

daddy screams and shouts, eyes burning with rage
mummy cries tears bitter with sage
brother is scared, eyes wide as moons
we all agree daddy has gone through menopause too soon

on our faces, we brush aside this sudden burst
"it's just nothing," we say, "he knows family comes first."
but the sight of him consumed is etched in the air
trapping the three of us in trauma's snare --

his eyes were livid, veins bulged from his neck
pulsing with the viscosity of a lava lake
he burned like blue fire, the kind that burns too hot
destroying everything around it, leaving death-clogged smog

i don't know why daddy is so angry today
till then, in our room, mummy brother and i will stay
i have never seen daddy so angered and flared
so distant with fury, so paralysingly mad

i fear for this family, i never have before this
this fear scares me, so i will make a list
i hope it will serve to place some of my fears
into linear thoughts, before it rains tears

first, daddy has always been holy and kind,
on his chest a cross, you would always find
but as he grows older, with hair turning grey,
with valley-deep wrinkles and memories gone astray,

he seems to forget, that i am human too
with his words, he beats me, beats me black and blue
criticisms and 'bad bad bad' ring through the house
if only he saw, he is the wolf that prowls

second, daddy had been a family man
the kind that spends a fortune flying us over land
but lately, he's just been out of touch and sight
sins queuing outside the door, waiting to enter at night

he seems to forget when i was a child
the cards i gave him, the way i made him smile
but i remember, when his hair was still black
in our family, love and warmth was never in lack

time, stop. return my daddy back to me.
stop this affair, i beg you; don't let age run free.
don't run through your fingers in his hair like that.
don't paint his hair grey, don't make it fall away.

give me the daddy my mummy met, back.

the anchor is gilded with gold, set with silver.
made from the ship's own husk,
manufactured to glide with the frame,
sailing as one over the sea,
braving the storm as a singular essence.
but,
look -- observe the layers of gold
that have settled, rubies and emeralds
adorn. and the ship
is weighed down.

i stretch my hand out over the hull.
the sea tastes more bitter than salty,
more rancid than relentless.
once when the moon was still blue,
and dolphins still sang,
my mother told me
that voyages are made err wind, err sea.
she did not say err anchor, the one
she had made me.

this morning, as the sun rose,
i fell into the ocean.
i swam to its depths
i ran my tongue
over the anchor's hooked end, its pointed arch
drawing a drop of beaded blood from my lip,
trailing red.
the gold no longer tasted coppery, only
my blood did.
it tasted of prettied practicality,
soured security and
sedated success --
detritus the ship had picked up
on its voyage.

i tried to scrape them off with my nails,
but my nails came off.
i tried to bite them off with my teeth,
but my teeth cracked.
the ship is stuck.
and so am i.

tonight, i will dream.
i will dream of my
extended tails and jeweled fins,
embellished with diamonds.
they will cut through
the anchor's chains, threaded with strands of
jaded words and loft.
they will cut through them just as easily
as the ship will knife through the water
once it is freed.
slowly, at first, softly unsure; but after,
with lethal agility
that cuts.
it will cut through the water just as a scream slices silence,
grinding metal against salt,
kneading wood through air.

land will be reached:
the ship docks,
and i
can learn
to breathe again.

this feeling of emptiness,
this state of being,
isn’t a conflict between feeling dead and alive.
it’s more an ethereal, metaphysical
sensation of not really being here.

in the past two years I’ve changed identities more often
than I have had the chance to find out whether the mould fits.
I’m adaptable, for sure.
disciplining my thoughts and personalities
towards serving productive ends.
I know how to give people the me they want -
the happy, loving, family me;
the productive, efficient, smart me;
the me that’s gotten her **** together;
the me who has her life in order.
but I feel amorphous.
shapeless.
less and less
anthropomorphic.

less and less
concretely human.

as I focus on the tangible accomplishments,
on numbers and approving looks.
as I condition myself in a certain way
to succeed, I feel like I’m losing
something concretely human.
an element of constancy
in my personality, a key indicator of
concrete humanness.
it’s not that I’m spineless -
I know how
the world values the opinionated, the fiercely independent.
I just feel

faceless.

shapeless. no identity. no humanness.
no concrete indicator that
I’m actually here, in the real world.
that me existing as me - whoever she is -
counts for something.

skeleton voices calling with hollowed echoes
bounce against the insides of my ears --
I kneel propped up on bruised knees
smothered by the tear-stained floor
hands clasped together in a silent plea
emptied eyes cast skyward
silently worshipping a wealth of nothingness;
grey clouds
embracing the sun.

if i could see your soul,
i would tell it to look upon itself in the reflection of a lake,
the kind that shimmers clandestine blue
from the tears of the waterfall and the love-lost.

if i could sense your soul,
i would feel it in the light that bounces off;
the rainbows bounce off the water
as they come into contact with both the light and the wet,
the way the sun and the sea kiss every dawn and dusk.

if i could speak to your soul,
i would tell it not that it is beautiful, even though it is.
for god knows how overused that word is, how many lips has ushered its accent.
i would tell it, that it is
rich.
the wealth of owning
layers upon layers of
shimmers and shines
of tangibles and tangibles,
of the flavours i taste,
and the textures i touch.

if i could taste your soul,
it wouldn't taste salty from tears,
or sweet from tainted melancholy and forgotten memories.
it would taste clear,
fresh;
freshwater that starts from the back of the throat
whose healing touch leaks,
leaving flowers to bloom in all the places
it has traced, and in all the nooks
it has graced.
the cave just under your collarbone,
the crook of your neck,
the curve of your hip;
treasures.

if i could touch your soul,
it would feel
warm, like a fire glowing
in its hearth.

if i could smell your soul,
it would smell like you,
like
home.

and there was a feeling -
a glowing in her chest,
a blooming nurtured by music,
an energy lulled by rest.

it moves through all things,
this pervading catharsis -
you may find it in the cracks,
or the things on your list.

as for her, she found it
on a road to nowhere -
one of a million infinites,
too heavy for her to bear.

she could no longer move the thing,
for hindered by her own weight was she.
she held in her chest a heavy heart,
dry heaving her way to her heaven to be.

and that was when she realized,
as the wind lifted her chin -
infinite is only as big as infinite is,
until infinite comes crashing in.

"what's left of me then?"
she sighed to herself.
and then the wind whispered, humble and true.
"what's left of you is still the very you."

"you may be the girl who has never won
after staring cruel despair in the face.
you may be on a million roads to nowhere,
but this is just the start of your race."

"the you who your mother cradled in her breast,
the you who looks at the world with wonder,
the you with color in her eyes and flowers in her smile,
who thinks light can be both a question mark and an answer."

a smile slowly began to set on her face,
subtly at first, then shining through her skin.
she no longer feared and fed on anxiety;
she felt stronger than she'd ever been.

soon she let go of what was no longer there,
and slowly she learnt to no longer despair.
with an open mind and a heart so true,
she began her journey into the blue.

your absence hits me like a hit and run,
a car that keeps barreling on until it falls off a cliff.
the last time the sun rose was the last time you kissed me,
yet I am still left breathless.
I think
it was you
who has taken my breath away.
I love you so recklessly,
so recklessly,
that the next air I taste will be the salty kind that hangs off a cliff.
how long have I been peeling my nails off with rocks, barely holding on
when I have already grown wings
from loving you?

falling is a funny thing.
one can never shake off the loneliness of having
whistling air as
the only voice
begging you to stop the fall.
I have grown so used to the feel of your hands
cushioning my back
that I have forgotten how the clouds feel
below my feet.
I have forgotten how it feels
to be the only one in this world.

I am more lost than sunshine in a cemetery,
more emotionless than the gravestones.

a few days seem like forever.
soon you look back
and you can’t remember how long ago it was
when you last saw your reflection
make eye contact.

I am trapped in limbo, a paradise
for unknown to live unfettered,
and unfed.

the idea of judgment day is as easy to collect
as a scream in a glass jar.

heaven or hell
light or dark
lost or time
blank or known
loved or invisible
alive or barely living
or just black dead

"the world will end not with a bang, but with a whimper."

i say,
the world,
will end in war --
when man's greed becomes flames under his touch,
and he can no longer keep it in the palm of his hand.
for human hands were never meant to hold the weight of disasters,
and neither were they made to hold a gun or a blade.

i say,
the world,
will end in battle --
when land turns against land,
brother against brother,
for ideas would run thicker than blood,
though nothing could rival blood's flowing abundance.

i say,
the world,
will end in victory.
when the only salvation is a purge, though the hammer will not fall under the touch of man, for he is too self-preserving;
but under the pull of the earth.

when she takes matters into her two palms, polarized and unpretty.
she will rip herself into pieces,
she will tear herself from the core,
she will burn in her own flames.

but she,
she will emerge victorious over her own children.
she will cleanse herself, she will be made pure again.
she will rise from the red waters of her own shredded veins,
and she will eat men like air.

she will be reborn.
she will win.

but

i don't want your advice about hanging in there
i don't want to hear about how i should wait for the rest of my life to begin
i don't want to hear about what should give me light
i don't want to hear about the struggles of valuable lessons or the triumph of hope

i don't want empty promises or vacant encouragements
i don't want your moral high horse or veiled condescension

i want to hear your honest opinions
i want to hear your soul cry out in protest
about how you're drowning your sorrows
about how your brain feels like a worn out sponge
and your heart an old wrung rag

i want to hear how you're close to giving up
i want to hear how you're burning out
i want to hear how coffee makes you shake
i want to hear how you need pills to sleep
i want to hear how the thoughts of your future scare you more than your past ever did

i want to hear all your fears.

i want to know that in all of mine,
**i'm not alone.

we’re merely strangers
disguised as a family.
four cornerstones
propping up the dinner table --
a doll house
when seen through a telescope, though
the peachy porcelain pillars are tarnished by
the cracks at their corners.
“perfect family” shines in neon lettering on the threshold.
it looms over us, frantically peppering the conversation
long gone stale.
it stings my eyes,
and burns my tongue
to speak.
my teeth are plastic,
my fingers plasticine,
pieced together carelessly
a millennia ago,
when warmth still existed in the spaces between us.
now, we are cloaked in our own despondencies,
eyes staring not at each other,
but through.
we float past each other
as ghosts;
though I’m the only one
who hears the echoes.

wide-eyed, with daisies in my hair
and my mother’s heels
two sizes too big for me;
with an apron for a shield
and crayons for swords,
I stood at the crossroads.
there, I met the man in velvet black.
he beckoned me over with a gloved finger,
whispered in my ear a promise.
I held his hand,
he wrapped his arm around my shoulder,
and we walked onto the road.
his voice was the melody,
screeching the accompaniment.
the spotlight,
a white
purer than the sun.

you did to me what autumn does to spring;
now we stay as dead as winter,
as silent as night.
your touch has left carnage,
your letters, fresh wounds.
and I, am decaying into a dead tree --
still standing,
but not breathing.
**I am emptied of all life.

“I miss you,” she said, her voice laden with longing.
sifting through syllables and filtering fiction, she sought her belonging.
flesh and bones and layers of love between her palms,
emptied chests of memories and hand-written celebratory psalms.

they flew to the fire under her hand, listen as they crackle and burn –
mercilessly licked by the tongues of time, as hourglasses overturned.
piles of sand scattered on the ground, indents of fingertips lay –
echoes of a touch once lingered, but then lost their way.

a kiss shared here trapped in this corner, a smoldering gaze there.
a heart shattered upon this stone, a one last wistful stare.
and now added to the list of lost things, upon the floor is she;
eyes open wide, hazel and bright, though nothing more she sees.

the doctors came in a hurry, like vultures to their prey –
a blistering of white coats, sterile scents and gray.
her report was released a few days later, spat out by some machine;
the details told everything, the crime scene bleached and clean.

“a useless heart,” the report said, “was the cause of her
falling down to the ground, lifeless; broken and dead.”

“one missing finger where a ring had snapped off under duress,
a haemorrhage in the brain from sheer insurmountable stress,
four broken blood vessels leading to the heart.
curious is that the heart never worked from the start.”

“deceased is she: a shell, long gone and cast away.
date of death undetermined, it was certainly not today.
rotted away was the heart, long before she bled.
it had long stopped beating; she was already dead.”

my footsteps emit echoes,
they bounce off the black horizon and ricochet back to my ears.
i have long since learnt to treat them
with the same disdain i treat
the damp edges of my eyes
my own thoughts have become mockery
against me. i walk down the pier.
floorboards creak below, unable to hold the weight
of both me
and the demons
that cling onto my back.
my shadow is not one of a lone silhouette.
it is of two, me
and my ghost.

i am not sure
which i am.

the dust that line the boardwalks
no longer disturb me.
i have long since clothed myself
in loneliness. though it's warm,
it sinks.
it is only when i feel the rush of another's pulse
the heat off skin,
that my heart starts beating again -
flames engulfing defibrillators,
and i am suspended in a hot air balloon.

there are no winters in my life,
there is only blistering heat
and dampening warmth.
i can't say when all the coldness had seeped out of me,
for i never stopped caring
about myself.
i believe that
i care too much.

now, i find myself drawn
more to the darkness looming
from the lighthouse up ahead, invaded by
shadows after its shimmering fortress
of fireflies and candles
had been burnt down
by its own heat.

the pier reminds me of my thoughts,
discarded and clothed in dust.
leading to nothing but
a shambled shell of a building
burned to ashes by its own light,
crumbling to pieces,
dismembered fragments
lost in the ocean.

I wish I could feel emotion as a singularity.
just one, intense emotion,
one engulfing thought devouring all of my being.
one singular, unitary, simple drive.
powerful.
as a black hole devours all particles of any existence,
even light itself.

they say that if you stood on the edge of one,
hovering at the point of no return,
time becomes as simple as space.
the universe is no longer a mystery.
the Big Bang as quiet as
that abandoned swing on the playground.
space and time are but children,
gravity that kid who
forgot his lunchbox.

no subjective meanings,
no in-betweens,
no emotions.

sometimes I wish I could see
my thoughts as binary,
or my memories as morse.
sometimes I wish I could understand
that we are nothing but the sum of our parts,
the outcome of a spectacular binding
of cell to cell:
a container of molecules.
that sadness is a school brawl between chemicals,
happiness an accidental firework
set off by a wayward alchemist.
all irregularities, as explained by
human error.

but the only thing human about an error
is the error itself;
the most fragile thing about a human
is his humanity;
the closest we can ever be to God
is on the verge of our own ruin.

weightlessness is only felt
halfway off a building,
freedom only gained
halfway away from home,
love only experienced
as one half of a broken heart.

there is no light without darkness,
no warmth without the cold,
no way to experience things
two at a time.
we will always exist in paradoxes,
as one or the other.
as a singularity.

the only place we can be God is
right here -- on the event horizon,
the point of no return.

i do not think i failed to see the end come,
i merely feared it.
and yet
i still write about it -
the way a prophet writes voraciously about the inevitable,
never living it out. and now,
the paper feels more bitter than gourd,
the pen sharper than knife,
my thoughts pinching at my brain.
i feel hopelessly ambivalent,
distraughtly confused,
achingly wistful.

there's no words for your
absence; an unfeeling ache
that traps me sorry.

am i too flawed to love,
or are you just unable to love me?

i do not know what to think.
it used to be a lack of breathing that came with a lack of feeling
just as night succeeds day
just as the thunder precedes lightning.
now, i just write -
thinking this act of releasing could relieve all the pain.
but it can't.

for a prophet never feels the pain of his people until they live out his spoken truth;
so my brain never feels the pain of the heart
*until it has been broken.

Solitary, lie-back moments; of being in the coziest of places surrounded by the most mundane yet magical. Melancholy has a way of tinging itself with those little nuances of memory, and those little nuances of memory tinge themselves with shades of bittersweet and sad recollection over time. Silent reckonings, simplistically suppressing thoughts - all huge contradictions to the slow, natural motion of letting the waves wash over you.

Is this emotional maturity? Is this a step forward? Life is always full of too many intricacies to tell for sure.

The familiar scents of tearstains and revulsion being punctuated by the occasional flicker of light ahead; pain and perseverance, hope and the promise of heaven.

We are so full of contradictions - concrete, grounded beings yet with so many abstractions and complexities in our heads. A constant grapple, a relentless cycle. Coming back to places of washed up memories has this effect on you; but you pull through, you plough through quicksands, you pick up the small rationalities that have gone astray, and you move forward like you’ve always been doing before. It’s the only thing we know how to do.

Walk on our own, on our own two feet.

And pray that whatever knocks us down, will never be enough to sink us.

time ticks quickly
          its insistence echoes through my bones

dates mean as much to me
          as raised voices do

and both whizz past in a blur
         the way cars do on a highway
                   because that's all i am, a kid playing in traffic.

i am no more a child than the girl i was ten years ago
         i have, in fact, shrunk.

i have been crushed upon being released,
         wrangled by the wind before i can begin to take flight.

the most enduring thing society has led me to think is that
         i am simply incapable of living.

i am a sad impersonation of the sun -
         shining so brightly for others, though inside,
                  
                   *i am lethal vacuum.