:: Ornamental ::

Our turbo-charged Audi thundered across the Northsouth highway from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, our tyres stirring up angry dust devils as we volleyed across the asphalt. Dark-bellied clouds billowed across the sky, casting a halo of casket grey across the emerald plantations lining the sides of the highway. Random stabs of sunlight pierced through the brume, rebels against the impending rain. It wasn't an afternoon painted with postcard perfection, but it was flawed in the beautiful, unpredictable way only nature can.

I was happy.

I stepped airily on the accelerator and imagined the guttural power of the engine growling like a restless animal, a metal beast unleashed. AC dozed uneasily beside me. She had handed over the wheel to me in sisterly hesitance―I have yet to prove myself as a capable driver, and I'm prone to careless spells that could rile the calm of most experienced drivers. But the drive was long and the traffic was kinder than AC remembered, so midway to KL, I slipped into the driver's seat and couldn't help my impish smile as I felt the surge of power gunning from the engine.

It felt more like a holiday than a roadtrip for business. I felt freedom with the diaphanous fingers of a spoilt child. I felt it in the speed of my car as it ate up the highway with a mechanical appetite. I felt it in the rattle of the wind against our charging chariot. I felt it in the undecided way the clouds were blustering across the pale. I felt freedom like I never had before.

I was happy, even if this happiness was an emotional white elephant, intricate but inconsequential, an ornamental moment within the moments. It was a private flash of mindless cheer, a trifling, two-bit high―not exactly something to eulogise, but it was an evanescence of bliss that made me glad to be alive.

Small things, always the small things―while I clamour for a bigger satisfaction out of this thing called life and even as I cling to the various pillars and paragons of ideas and ideals, I've learnt how to angle for small joys. Good company, good cars, good caipirinias, good chocolates―and together with like-minded humour, poetic conversations and gracious insights, these are the Botox injections to the wretched wrinkles to life, temporarily paralysing my various aches and discontentment, smoothing out the folds pinched out by my―your―harried happenstance.

'We're here,' I told AC later, as the rolling plantations eased into the concrete jungle of KL's cosmopolitan city.

But we never really are, we never truly arrive, as the limbo suspended between time and space is the crux of life, a kinetic kernel that propels us between the good, the bad, and the great grey sitting on a power keg.

Are you happy?

:: Lines ::

Because I Searched

Because there is no guardian, no lament grand,
There will be no sadness, madness, in my hand.
I searched your palm lines, so I understand,
How your sonorous beauty is my fireband.

Because there is no claimant, no bid to win,
There will be no panacea to clean my skin;
I searched your cavity, that stagnant din,
And what common miracle should shield my sin!

Because there is no reverie, no pious creed,
There will be no sapor score to ease my need.
I searched your sleepsong, in my bias greed,
But I found nothing in our tarnished deed.

Because there is no worth, no value, none at all,
There should be no euphoria, no sly enthrall.
I searched your blankness, a nirvana call,
And there is an echo, a truth, in your footfall.

But because I search, I am cursed and cursed to trial,
You are a tension, of my meek denial.
All that I feel, I seal, in this vicious vial,
A capsule in space, to your pace, in my sundial.

:: Requiem ::

When

When the sky breaks, blue on blue,
And makes way for my azure song,
I smile but for the darkening,
Of my matyrdom, my wrong.

I may never wake,
From the wrath and care of sleep;
In light of this satin scar,
That is pain and gain on par!

You may never be,
More or less a day undimmed:
My crimson prose and azure song,
My facade of strength unseamed―

Unable to be weak,
Unwilling to be strong:
When the sky breaks, blue on blue.

***

Hope

A thousand and one nights of curious glitter,
Weaving gentle rage inside my stories.
My Arabian prince, you are my dreamscape sitter,
Poison my wine and their dahlia glories.

A solemn rushing of breathing, beating whim,
Salutes to a chasm of thoughtless tort;
My bridge to a war against you and him,
Is stringed and whipped to wind in cruel retort.

A private wake, now, to my homeless lover,
Can you hear the pipes and their velvet notes?
When time can break on stones and not go slower,
Then love can be our fidel antidotes.

:: Memoirs ::

Sleeping Sonnet

My love is dead and will not return.
The kingly butterfly has flown its last,
Now with feelers feeble and pollen-burn;

My love is dead and will not return.
The hundred minutes of a hundred years,
Wear the veil of the months in tears unlearn,

My love is dead and will not return.
The jolt of your skin on mine in sweet respite,
The splintering time that has cracked despite―

My love is dead and will not return.
The poet is a beggar whose art is sin,
The beggar is a story that should not begin―

My love is dead and will not return.

***

Tonight

The streets tonight are old,
Dark with the tar of separations.

The shadows tonight are cold,
Deep in the bruise of affirmations.

The youth tonight is sold,
Bought by the truth of desperations.

The heart tonight is gold,
Sunk by the weight of defamations.

The thoughts tonight are told,
Spoken to the priest of desolations.

The words tonight are bold,
Printed on the page of devastations.

This night tonight―not mine to hold,
Song to be sung―verse of culminations,
This night tonight.

***

I am your ghostwriter. In the memoirs of your memories I will stay, and in the moments between the moments I will go.