:: Ode ::

You are not here, not here at all.
These are the dark men, the fallen men,
The common men:
the distant dead, who once walked,
Like you.

The 7th Month of the Chinese Lunar calander. The time of year where the wake of the moon wakes the dead. The time of year where black ash flies, and red candles flame and flare to the clang of rites. The time of year where education is lost, momentarily, to tradition, and where logic cannot rival spiritual reasoning. The time of year where the dead are resurrected by superstitions, and the living calls on the collective colony of deaths: dear deaths, distant deaths and deaths that are nameless, but understood.

But then, there's your name,
Three characters in script, in death:
Love may survive mortality,
But mortality ends in theft.
So we burn for you paper money,
Because we burn brighter still with loss.
Do you hear us calling? Do you hear us mourn?

Symbols. Universal characters without a curtain call: they play their roles in life as they would in death. Money. Bamboo paper, brushed with a vague slap of golden or silver paint in the middle, folded into shapes of old Chinese ingots. Bank notes, a vulgar replica of our normal currency, bearing the face of the King of Hell, colourful with meaning and value.

Riches. Houses, cars, clothes, credit cards―fashioned after what we know, so that even in the unknown dark of the after-life, we wouldn't need to suffer the poverty of want.

Love. My grandmother's face, illuminated by the ghastly glow of light as we watched the hungry flames rip through the bamboo papers, was soaked with sweet sadness. No more black coffees. No more bickering. No more of him, yet no less of him. 'Buy all the cigarettes and smoke all you want now, with this money,' she muttered. That was their brand of romance. Undeniably practical, yet inexplicably romantic. I felt tears, hot with the memory of him, of you, and you, of Les. All of the dead, my dead.

Your firm, final decay.
No more trumpets to wake you,
No more cancers to break you.
I remember your waxen face,
And how I cried to your sleeping fingers,
No longer allowed to smoke,
No longer lively with jokes.
And you, my other you:
your prematured death, my evil―
―cannot deliver―
I bought you sweets for your crib
Milk, too, but I forgot the bib:
Sorry, baby, your karmic song
Is my failure, is my wrong.

I bruised my knees kneeling. The chants hurt my ears, an invasion of alien spiritualism, gorging out my insides. Outside the temple, where the 7th Month rites for my grandfather were held, a sallow wind was blowing. There was music in the tuneless rhyme of the chants, and the Buddhist bell punctures to the crying of my―soul. No sun. The day fell like laggard spells, chalky and cold, and old with our sour cycles: life, death, moral, sinful, material, unembodied. Perhaps there is space yet for a spiritual epiphany. But for now, I absorbed the ashes of our traditions along with the ashes of time-burnt loves, and if I'm allowed one single prayer to an omni-god, please: let me be an instrument to those I love, and be useful. I've had my causes. Now, let me seek out the effects.

Be at peace, my loves.

:: Chants ::

Artisha Sutra, Verse 41.

"But without practice of the perfection of wisdom,
The obstructions will not come to an end."

'Buddhism,' says my mother, taking my hand in hers in an instinctive moment of motherly guidance as we neared the temple, 'it's not a religion.'

'Maybe not for you,' I reply, nodding to the throngs of people―young and old, men and women, trendy and dull, the wealthy in dress, the desolute in spirit, all of them, clutching joss sticks with eyes clenched shut, clasping hands with fervent prayers, shoving offerings with devoted desperation―who will not agree with my mother's academic understanding.

She pulls me gently towards a scattered group of elderly women, selling fresh flowers out of plastic buckets fastened on bicycles to random devotees―two dollars only miss, very fresh, can buy for Buddha! 'Religion is far too generic a word. It suggests―'

'Vulgarity of practice, a business-like approach: I pray, you answer. I buy a bunch of flowers, you give me hope that my wishes are heard.' I shrug. But my hand remain firm in hers―I may be a diametric in thought, but I'm no less a daughter in reality.

She ignores my answer. Her counter, instead: 'We'll buy the flowers from the oldest lady here―or one with the least customers.'

I have to smile. My mother's instictive kindness is the closest I know to perfect wisdom. She lives it, this kindness―it's like she inhales the general sense of misery and suffering in the pettiness around her, and breathes out sagely wit along with a strong, sated sense of charity.

We walk towards a bent old lady, hunched like a forgotten statue under her plastic umbrella. A September shower is starting, and the rain materialises in a shimmer of mist. 'Aunty, how much?' My mother asks kindly, gesturing to a lotus bud caped listlessly in a plastic sheet in her faded blue bucket.

The old lady grins, showing her gums and a row of decaying teeth. 'Aiyah, I follow the temple's idea. I tell people to pay what they think their offering is worth.' She says, her singsong Cantonese rising above the babel around us: the traffic, the chants, the people-sounds, the wind. Pollution cannot be louder than philanthrophy. There is something governing us all―I just don't know what it is, at the moment.

My mother laughs. Kindred spirits, I think. In my mother's shadow I'm quiet. Her strength of character and the beauty of her thoughts give me no reason to mar it with my lack. 'You're a wonderful student of Buddhism,' she declares, thrusting a five-dollar note to the old lady.

She hands the lotus to me. 'I bought this for you. You offer it.'

'So Buddhism is a philosophy,' I semi-declare, watching my mother's reaction, just as she's watching my actions (careful, don't trip, walk over here, don't let the smoke irritate your skin―).

A man comes close towards us, too close. Old enough to know better, but not old enough to hide his lust, he leers at me, lingering his greedy gaze over the lines of my body. I take very little offence at men who are so handicapped by their own lewd, lurid lusts―in my harsher moments I regard them as animals, and I have no challenge for them. Stare if you want. What can you do, you sad, sordid fuck?

But my mother glares at him, stepping just ahead of me, as though shielding me with her own maternal protectiveness. He turns away and trains his wanton eyes on another girl, much younger than myself, and I am forgotten.

I hear my mother sigh. Then, effortlessly connecting the last thought of our talk to the latest change of our currency, she says, 'The doors of a temple will always remain open. Therefore everyone here can be―religious. We can all light an incense and offer donations and break our necks bowing to the gods. But can we all be Buddhists, and practice its philosophy even in something as simple as knowing what to do, what to say, when to say?'

'Buddhism is a practice, then?' I ask, as we jostle up to the front of the temple, where the Great Gold Statue of Buddha stares with impassive peace, on its velvet stage, at its mortal audience below.

My mother watches the crowd―now rowdy and rude in their eagerness to their religious rights―push its way to the front and shakes her head.

'Life is the absolution, and death is the resolution. All that is in between is the practice.'

I reach out for her hand again, already missing the warmth of her fingers and the familiar beauty of her calloused palms. 'You haven't answered my question, Mother,'

We watch as a young mother told her little girl to snatch up the sweets placed at the altar 'so she can have more later'―without thought, without fault.

My mother wrinkles her nose with girlish disdain. And then, the teacher comes back, filling her eyes with the wisdom taught and practice learnt: 'Haven't I?'

:: Walking shadows ::

Jan―Cem's boy―turns twelve today.

He was ten when I knew him, but Jan's a bit of an old soul, the weight in his eyes often suggesting a wisdom that has been here a million times before―unsullied, but unsurprised. At ten, with a voice still bright with boyish timbre, he already seemed too old for life's passing. Infinitely polite, and filled with a strange, quiet grace that was almost princely, he took to his prescribed routines―school, homework, PS2 games, his mother's kisses and tempers, a holiday―like how a royalty would receive his subjects. Courteous, but distant.

'My perfect son,' Cem said, his own eyes heavy with pride as we watched Jan walk through the office doors over to us. It was appallingly beautiful: the very livingness of him. The way his face lit up with that slow, sweet smile. The leap of recognition, rising―hello daddy, hello Jean―in his eyes, a ferocious cloud. The deliberation of appropriate behaviour―should I hug my father while he's at work and maybe I would put a wrinkle in his shirt―and then the cheerful discarding―they hugged with affectionate practice, bodies slack, but arms taut with fierce sentiment.

'My perfect son,' Cem said again, and I thought, on his behalf: this. This has come out of Filiz, and of me: a summary of our lust and habit, our love and boredom. This is the result of all the tragedy and comedy of fucking, of the nameless, guileless places marriage had put us into―this. Jan, my perfect son, you've been hauled from the knit of our genes to become the tapestry of my existence.

And I felt an instinctive warmth in my eyes, wet with my natural melancholy and the memory of my abortion.

And perhaps,wet with a strange, child-like jealousy that I never had a father who thought that the only criteria to perfection was to have been his.

***

I would give anything for you to be proud of me. I have never loved another person with the same amount of desperation as I have you: with equal amounts of disdain and respect, of scorn and admiration, of fear and compassion. Don't let the neglect of your youth become the acid of your age, eating away all that is good and all that can be courageous.

That's all I ask.

:: Charity ::

Apologue

Another swansong lover, fades quietly to black.
Another dial tone dead, another phone line slack.
Another May, another June, another waxwing moon:
'Stay, baby stay: I'll be coming back here soon.'

'It's sweet, when we meet, but now it's getting tough,
It's my wish, I'm selfish; for you that's not enough.
You're perfect, in retrospect, yet fate plays us for a fool:
We've lost respect, there's no prospect―longing can be cruel.'

Another ending, another round: should we beg for clemency?
Another bending, my logic sound: love for love of urgency.
Another kiss, sweet kiss, that lingers on in fond fool's hope―
'Do not fall, do not call―and only then can our hunger cope―'

'Age is not a fitting gauge; it will not stop our scarlet crime.
You claim you're old―no longer bold―no longer friends with time,
It's a poor cliché, I hear you say, to hold my youth to blame.
And yet you want―and truth is blunt―there's no denying our shame.'

Another choice, another voice, another search to strategise.
No moral poise, no quick rejoice, I wait for fate to penalise.
I will not break, I will not take, what is never mine to keep.
I will not speak, of you as weak, for what is shallow can be deep.

'I cannot give, you must not love,' you say again with quick reserve.
Did my eyes go dull―is my heart now null―is my smile still rich with verve?
'Don't ascertain, I can entertain, and I'm not so quick to pain.
In your embrace, I am full of grace; for you I'm a painted smiling face.'

:: Rust ::

Last Light

Yesterday I was a scarlet daughter,
Today I return to pale.
Yesterday's truth was lamb to slaughter,
Today's light regains its hale.

Old lines come from young hands stained,
No perfume can swiftly sweeten,
New marks bruise an old sin strained,
No balm can save the beaten.

Each time I hold you I hold decay,
Each time we meet it's rot we find.
But as we have seen now yesterday,
Our weakness merely claims us blind.

Those who love me resort to blame,
Those who see sense seek to save.
Those who want me hates your name,
She who owns you makes you crave―

―Love? Ah, the loose, languid label,
Yet in your harmony I needed none,
Not love, not romance―all that Juliet babel,
Who cares for eternity―we cannot afford one.

So I surrender, no question, as you'd say:
This pain is already veteran soul.
I bring to-morrow our tender yesterday,
And bleed for last light's broken whole.

:: Hightail ::

This morning dawned quick and quiet, and filled with foolish cliches. Everything was the same: the way my alarm burned through the fog of sleep, the way the water was always too cold on first spray, the way my ancient hair dryer spluttered to its searing start. And yet everything was different. My heart sang and tumbled in turns. My eyes were bright, almost calescent with light, even before my mascara had the time to do its job. My fingered worked nimbly, studiously, on my face, my hair, my body―and why not. I was meeting―him.

The traffic flowed to the rhythm of Sunday ease. I caught the blank expressions of other drivers on the road and felt a childish, unreasonable sense of smugness―I'm the happy one here. You, you and you. Off to―where? Church? A family gathering? To run some plebian errands? Ha! I'm happier than any of you. Because I'm going to meet―him.

The sky wore the guise of summer, yet I knew nothing could rival the blue in his eyes. I smoothed the wrinkle out of my skirt as I got off the cab. But nothing could soothe the throb and throe of my wretched heart, because I was meeting―him.

I pushed the revolving doors and stepped into the hotel, into my escape, and into his welcoming arms. I wasn't meeting him anymore. I'd met him, and this moment, this very instant―he was flesh and blood and familiar scent in my embrace, and the relieved, rowdy laughter of a hungry lover erupted with unbridled luxury.

'My favourite Robot,' he said, smiling, blue eyes bright.

'And how many do you have?' I teased, feeling the breathlessness of devious excitment claiming me whole.

He laughed and took my hand―our fingers laced together with seasoned symmetry. And then, with that wide-eyed, almost boyish, seriousness that I'd come to―love―: 'I am not the sort with a collection plan.' Into my ear, with intimate decisiveness: 'I only care for the top quality.'

Our shared laughter drowned out the crass cliché of the situation. My heart was his, as was my space, and he could do whatever he wanted with it.

***

I couldn't stop playing with his hands. I ran random fingers over the lines of his palm, skirting the surface of his nails, sliding tender touches along his wrists and tracing invisible patterns on his knuckles. You see, I had a sudden liberty to―him, and like the teenage rebel with a fuck-the-curfew attitude, I abused my liberty with unscrupulous victory.

His eyes caught the light of the room, and in their gentle paleness I see particles of my own reflection. The curve of my shoulder, the flare of my smile, the nick of pain buried in between all that energy between us.

All that energy, all that tension, all the clichés.

Now exercised, now dissipated, now unimportant.

I locked my fingers with his and turned my face to his for a kiss. How simple, this liberty. And how sordid. Guilt can be my sedative later―now let me return to the chafe of my unchaste indulgence. Now, let me, let him, let us, be.

***

Time is a malaise for forbidden loves and disgraced lovers. I know the night that followed this day―in fact, the days that will follow this day―will bear the travail of my trespass. If he'd said, 'I'm not worth it,' I would have torn myself out of his embrace along with my heart―whatever that's left of it―and ran. But he merely held me and kissed me and loved me, and when time did its Cinderella call, the compassionate sorrow flooded the blue in his eyes with practice, and then he very quietly said, 'I do not ask you the questions with which I do not want the answers.'

If he were a lesser man that would have been vicious.

If I were any more of a woman that would have been poison.

But because I'm a robot to his passion and pragmatic programming, I returned his smile and his sentiment: 'Then you have answered all my questions which I do not want.'

:: Blindside ::

A Ballad

It's one of those days: ruined lunches and clumsy skies.
The coffee is bitter; my illicit loves have turned me sour.
And I think―fate is playing me for a ball, my muses dour―
My phone shrieks with disapppointment, its buttons full of lies.

My pen makes illegal markings, on papers and papers dull;
The skyline disarticulates―alien aces in a full house deck―
False beacons for my corporate sailor, ending in cruel shipwreck.
Boredom is catching: a bane, a disease, a waiting, a blindside lull.

The sun is a secret little queen today, grown tired in its crown:
'I am pregnant, maybe', says my friend, her eye plainly bright―
I can feel her two heartbeats, and see her felicitous light.
I hug her in comrade joy, even though my womb is quiet now.

I watch an old man shuffle by, nails yellowed by years and nicotine,
An old lady dies, her wisdom dies along with her and a careworn heart:
I'm beginning to think, that love is fraud and fraud is tragic art.
The old man turns, the same sun burns, and my thoughts far from clean.

What words. I chafe. You save. My hero in a wandering stead, spearing
The random mortal enemies that came, clamouring for truth and vent,
On my useless armour, their blood, my lust, we cannot circumvent.
You call now. I tremble, I smile, I quiver with vice, logic―disappearing.

I could go on. But I don't.

:: Colloquim ::

Again, A Dying

Again, a dying,
Cold in a midnight moment,
Unclouded, spent of logic
―in casual torment―
Every beat on poisoned asphalt, I seek in kind;
Your name jogs gamely, in the snakepit of my mind.

No speck of sentiment
In my throat, not this death,
Death was long ago,
Hand on heartbeat heart on breath.
Love, my love, is a wicked minority god―
Cares not for votes, cares less for praise―victims of fraud―

And your eternal need to save
―Me!―with your cape, My Clark, my Bruce,
Your cartooned caress, your puzzling shape;
I send wreath upon wreath of apologies, a funeral march,
Trumpeting the gravestone of memories, your forbidden touch.

Again, a dying,
A sucking scion, half-lying―
Tonight.

***

Twelfth

I fell out of love, and that's my story's dull ending,
Flatter than old champagne, and duller than the grave;
Take my rock curtsey now, break off strains of this love song,
And smash the guitar. Baby, baby, there's nothing to save.

Love makes us dogs, whining at cloistered closet doors,
We puzzle ourselves―why we complicate things so?
I once let you enter, a powerless master, leashed
How we petted each other―fetch, darling, go―

Don't get sentimental, or I will end up playing
An ancient melodrama: calling on the empty deific love,
"Forever, and ever" we say, and hope for an echo
But there is nothing―no returns―from silence above.

Return to your box, your previous declarations:
"I love you, I love you"―what little words, what durable life―
Now recalled in mockery, in my loveless hereafter,
Like a tattoo being skinned off, with sores and blisters rife.

We should have listened to the goddamned love songs,
We should have looked to wilted flowers or the quiet sky:
All warning us fuckwits passing off as lovers, saying
The grander the hope, doll, the fatter the lie.

So, now twelfth night, and I am Romeo's whore,
My story is done and you've opened the door,
To love your new Juliet while I rebuild my Rome,
May we be pardoned, may we learn, for having loved before.

***

Plea

My father had a dangerous youth, one of those
that makes childhood seem like cancer.
Age is the witch-doctor, beseeching with prose,
and he is defenseless. Remains uncured, until today.

I remember his fists, and that ornate ring he wore,
on the fourth finger like a king. An emperor dethroned,
he barked madly at his slaves: my life, his wife, a chore.
So we quietly love him. As families do, in the movies.

He is an odd scholar, learned but common, fierce
in his knightly quest for perfection. He flashes his anger
like the head of John the Baptist, his words pierce
through our vague vests. Do you know we drown.

The witch-doctor has a peculiar cry, makes one vain.
He confronts mortality with obedient hands―no fight―
So he limps, crippled by an unseen Excalibre, slain
but not quite dead. My phantom king, my father, the rebel.

***

Monday Monologue

You pity me, I think.
That I may bleed poetry from my veins,
but I am unable to love your mortal kiss.
So we touch glasses, and drink.

In a well-dressed dream, I have killed you―
But you rose again, like a curious mirage.
Your beautiful neck, an early canvas of Picasso,
Drawn too late, old too soon, but I knew.

I'm beginning to wonder.
If all our lines are tranposed; a shared furor,
that gets reincarnated like a dead sparrow,
Lines we purge and plunder.

So we say the same things twice,
And watch the words stagger about, as though
they have been clobbered on the jaw.
The murder of beauty, for some, is a dainty vice.

And he says, rather sullenly, he does not
understand. And I blink in relish, an enigma
at last, somewhat like a Russian poet,
Or a soldier limping with footrot.

Who cares about being your queen,
she has to be as mute as marble;
My noisy insides would lynch me of my crown.
Who cares, what I mean.

Even I pity me.
Repeat once more, with idiot effect:
Pity the pitiless, unloved by love.
Thank you for your Monday sympathy.

:: Castigate ::

Beast

You love, and leaving is not your business,
The blot of shame is another episode lost.
Like a madonna unseen, a virgin hope unseamed,
I guard your hopelessness like a common beggar.

What torments, now, is the beast of want,
Who has discarded honour long before this hour:
It only screams with a vagrant tongue, its wanting,
A prophet cold on the slippery side of faith.

I feel - the leathery scratch of claws - all its questions,
Why should you care for my poor prologue?
What is the decayed, the declared, the diseased
In your timid troubles bitterly spoken?

You live, and dying is not your business,
You kiss your own dark hands, I cannot, anymore:
Because my nails have torn themselves off
In bid to liquidate love's warm blood.

:: Letters ::

I.

I dreamt of you the other night. We were in a room―one of those white-washed cubicles, with its alabaster walls closing in, ugly in its clinical perfection. We sat adjacent to a row of doors―four or five of them, I don't remember exactly―cut equally apart. The doors gape like waiting mouths; we couldn't see beyond them. Everything was bathed in a strange glow that was neither bright nor dark, and I was―scared. I felt like a seditious amputee, where my body has been ripped from my mind, and I had nothing left but a deepening sense of imposture. The hyperkinetics of memory―you and your death―pulsed with the strange light. I could not speak.

You got up and started to pace. You were wearing the smart grey suit we cremated you in; there is a bulge in your breast pocket I know to be your cigarettes. I call you my Marlboro Man, even though you'd switched to Salems years before the cancer struck and took you away. I noticed you were barefooted. Are you cold, I wanted to ask―

'Why don't you go?' You asked me suddenly.

I sat at the edge of my seat with child-like obstinancy: no no no no. I don't know the way. My mind speaks, but my voice lost its ability to perorate. I tried to smile at you, but I didn't dare to touch you, because your head started to share the strange shimmer of the room, and I was afraid that if I reached out, you would implode or disintegrate and I would wake up to the reality of your death, like I do all the time, every time, since last February―

'Stupid child,' you chided with your sarcastic affection. You chuckled―I remember that chuckle of yours, so rapt with amusement, always at the edge of disingenuity, always infectious. Always there, before. 'Get going, or we'll be late.'

Where are we going? I implored with my eyes. My phantom voice floats, a dreamy essence, like traffic fumes or the trace of D's perfume―will you come with me?

'You know, it really doesn't matter which one you go into,' you said in a tone that was reticent with love. 'We all have to go.'

I wish you could come (back, I added).

But then you only smiled, and then you finally reached out: not for me, but for the light dancing like mad heretics around us. And then the room dimmed to the whine of a familiar siren, one that I at first thought to be the machine measuring your dying heart beat, but then consciousness took over with the robotic realisation that my alarm was going off, and the chimera call of my grandfather was no more than a dream.


II.

You, and the same, bored, tightmouthed smile of acknowledgement. It's been too long. What right do you have to give me that same knowing smile, as though you've been here, all along, witnessing the history of deadlines and living scars thundering blood beneath my skin? Perhaps you were inwardly amused by my past schoolgirl folly, and how it had all come undone. Perhaps you didn't know what else to do, my tragic teacher, other than to pry your pale, pallid lips apart for that ghost of a grin, your eyes safely hidden behind your glasses, as we brushed past each other once again. Perhaps.

We'll always be strangers, now. But your noir nihilism had been so attractive, so enticing in its narcissistic novelty, I know the best parts of you will always be familiar to me.

Well then. Perhaps next time, I'd say hello.

III.

Dedication

Unreturned, my love:
I no longer care if it rains in Paris.
Or if the ash of your lonely cigarette,
is staining the sleeve of your favourite book.

Unrequited, my love:
Your reproachful eyes, I sense a gleam,
A widowed, beaten look, in which
lies a teasing desperation.

Unbecoming, my love:
Do you lack my capacity to suffer?
Do you mind our shabby passions, that
Sweat freely, like crude pores of deception.

Unrestrained, my love:
I often hear my inner coward whining,
Pining for the impulse to die quiet and quaint,
Because your mouth is not on mine.

Unfulfilled, my love:
I discard the defeated profile of
Truth, which is no longer important.
Our fruitless longing brings a furtive rain.

:: Downpour ::

Secret Heart

Hear my scarlet sisters
Sing.
Notes like secret drumbeats,
Light and dark in turns,
Sing.
Teasing, like an early kiss
From a latent lover, late
Sing.

Reduced to tiny fires,
The sunshafts wild and wilful,
Sing.
Through the fingered veins,
The listless hearts
Of my scarlet sisters,
Sing.

Blanketed joy, unkempt steps,
A plethora of rising rhythm,
Sing.
A crimsom choir,
Sisters scarlet with needled nerves
Sing,
Sing.