write site

here, i post literature that i like. i may sometimes post things i write.

[safernarwhals]

H

I remember watching a video once, about repeating words enough times such that they stop making sense and become hieroglyphs

So I repeat: death, death, death, death death death death death death death death death death death death death death until my ears hollow out

but now death is a hieroglyph it’s the sound of beeping tubes sucking out the hollows into the “third bag”, nurse says.

mom says you were supposed to be baptised today “Easter Sunday, the Father’s revival.”

Things go unsaid.

[safernarwhals]

kyoto-osaka

i’m drinking coffee in my sleep everyone else is too used to being numb

mascara won’t dot train seats quiet has become a culture: nothing much to say

everyone wears clinical masks to keep from the frost to keep away from the germs. (we are sick with the age.)

the shinkansen nation fast forwards itself to 1Q84.

when the alcohol hits, i’ll be round the back.

[safernarwhals]

fingertip

history might not have been, had we known that failure was evitable and that we are not human.

[safernarwhals]

lifedrunk

i want to hand you your mother on a plate. i want to fold a piece of paper into a tree i want to pluck some mushrooms from a forest that doesn’t exist and then serve it to you with sparkly glitter twinkling like bad CG from that one Rihanna dance cover. i want an elephant in latex to jump several times i want a seal to clap and then begin tap dancing and some ladies from the 18th century to time travel and start a disco party in your mother’s houseware then i want to pour orange juice into a bowl and watch it bubble with elves.

[safernarwhals]

salt

run from the spinning pillars. we will turn into grey vortexes of swirling sea; crystalline beads

steady pace far from the citadel. there’s a globe on your left shoulder, you musn’t turn your head— you musn’t knock it off

don’t look back, sweetheart lest we turn into salt sliding down the walls.

[safernarwhals]

Maths

I. Everyone has their limits but that doesn’t really apply to you you’re in your prime.

II. It’s always difficult to integrate because integrating means having to differentiate yourself in relation to everyone else.

III. you fight for fair rights but it’s really an inequality because you’re worth more than that

IV. when your tan goes wrong cos the spray can forgot its limits it must be a sin

V. all the great things in life and your x can never be one. all you can ask is Y.

VI. They call Life a circle, but it’s more like an ellipse sometimes you’re left writhing from forgetting how to function.

[safernarwhals]

De-Nasserize

When you write a history essay, you have to write in the past tense because it’s done, over and all you can do is learn from the past mistakes of ancestors

but beauty’s in the detail, not the way white old men think of countries not in the way we remember the 1982 Lebanon War as defence

what about the little girl who wanted to fight or the little boy who left his dog at home (it’s only temporary, mantra mantra mantra) starstruck lovers divided by war

(i’ll be home before you know it sweetheart trust in The Lord)

family dinners during Yom Kippur God bless you, Holy, holy, holey. the rattatat tat of a little drummer boy.

the key takeaway of every essay: Don’t trust the British: they fuck everything up

[safernarwhals]

Elegy for Savvy D

I wished you had been a brat or that you had some pretty messed up morals, because praising you would just make it like your death made you an angel.

But darling, you always were, and the way you swore was always so gentle; it lacked punch. We always laughed you off.

You left us hanging I could be cliche, I guess, say you lived on in our hearts but you didn’t because if you did, we’d still be the same

and we’re not. We’re all just limping around, bodies distorted like Picasso redrew all of us placed us back on old canvases disfigured.

It was sad, because it was ironic, and I never wanted people to laugh at your Death. No one should be able to laugh you off because you were trying to live, visit “1001 Places To See Before You Die”. I don’t know how far you got, but you got to Flagstaff.

If you’d seen the article, you might have laughed too. Except I’d never heard you laugh. I’d always imagined it would be soft and tinkling.

If anything, at least I now know you were never a 47 year old paedophile.

[safernarwhals]

I Will Not Let You Scream.

I want to be there when the tide turns and swallows your shrieks

When he has played his last move and taken your king.

I want to be there when she has learnt to hold the rapier to the junction between your collarbones and vocal chord.

All’s fair in love and foul play.

[safernarwhals]

everyone can walk farther on their kneecaps

There is something strangely cathartic about smearing Elmer’s glue haphazardly onto paper stars and then accidentally glueing my fingertips together or dripping glue onto my knee

and then smooshing the gooey star into a pile of silvery glitter like little pointed disco balls hanging by strings overhead releasing little stars in a miniature meteor blizzard

the hand reaching to pluck them out of the seeping black galaxy is covered in a layer of metal

and the glitter that reaches my knee sticks like a cap bouncing light off in angles

later at night, when these prayer beds hit the floor I hope they shine through.

[safernarwhals]

aristocat

silver jewellery is beautiful as bullets, raining, screaming down

[safernarwhals]

Land Breeze

eight o’clock —

Ms. Ho, the physics teacher once said that in the day, the sea stores heat in its folds as it collects the sun in handfuls (the sea has bigger palms than us and in them, more lines that cross) to keep it warm at night. one day, she said, a young man is going to hold your hand, bring you to the beach and whisper, i brought you here for the sea breeze. but then you will reply that after the sun lowers itself below the sea, the sea must keep itself warm while the land learns to cools off, creating a convection current of air from the land to the sea to fill a void, causing a role reversal; a land breeze.

and you will have taught him something.

—is the perfect time for a stroll.

[safernarwhals]

Pixellated

I remember Saturday mornings before six, clambering and dominating the sofa as King of the World, reach for the remote to find rainbow pixels dotting my screen.

So I sat there, analysing and committing until Dora came on.

[safernarwhals]

Maps

long branches snaking between ink-splodged pages dividing into tributaries slithering around the paper in left-hand squiggles tiny geometrically open umbrellas

And every now and then, a small man and woman, side-by-side, Separated by a thin line.

[safernarwhals]

teeth

It’s spring, bound and trussed: Crumple it. The things we first scream across the earth got printed and plastered on the April breeze Raise your glass higher or fold it between the hiss of champagne bubbles

The bills blow by:  Toss it in the trash. But this blaze followed by flurries of ash hands you your  bodies of angels: puke dizzy razor blades a skyscraper soaring is a thing of the air up and away. if we all could fly

what a thing it would be, flights of stairs, an empty sky, Few know this kind of permanent glee: You can toss it something to puke. I’m sick of the burning kite winging toward the  flight of birds and the postman attaining everyone’s address in the sky. You are in the original shape

but to rise on air does not make you a bird. It’s true, a hurricane from the gut. Broken wire Death by fire of wind

Fire trucks persisting in May whether they’re sentenced to a pair of burning wings and always, bamboo frames wound with wire on every wall.

A free life is made of words Scissors’ v at each end.

Earthquake poem written a while back. Original poem was translated from Ouyang Jianghe's The Burning Kite 

[nebula-ofmind]

You are such a girl

Tonight was my first competitive slam—Young Adult Writers Perform (YAWP!) at Hwa Chong Junior College, and I’m really overwhelmed by getting individual first. I enjoyed the entire thing and all the performances so, so much, and it was just the most enjoyable experience to be in a place with so many poetry lovers (you should’ve seen the open mike round).

To my friends: you guys are so wonderful for coming down. Really. Your screaming was easily the best part of being announced at the end.

Also thanks so, so much to ELDDFS (English LIterature, Debate, Drama and Film Society) for the amazing slam. I’m sorry I’m an awkward dork so I didn’t give you guys the proper thank you, but you all are so great. 

Before this becomes an actual blog, here’s the first poem I performed. I also did From the Graph to the Asymptote, a little thing from a while back.

Videos to my performances here and here (thanks to weitian and peihan for filming!)

If you are ever ten years old and have a pink pencil case, do not hide it in your desk in shame. If you are ever eleven years old and have a cute skirt you like, wear it everywhere you go. Or if you are ever thirteen and dot your ‘i’s with hearts and sign your name with a flower, do not ever let go of that pen.

You are such a girl. You are such a girl in the way you take pride in having pretty hair, the way you fuss over wrinkled clothes, the way you never hesitate to slap a person in the face when they point out the weakness they see in your biology.

Or if you are ever thirteen and find face cream disgusting, tell your mother you find yourself beautiful anyway. If you are ever eleven and just like shorts, wear it everywhere you go. If you are ever ten years old and like football, accidentally kick the boy who tells you “no girls on the field”.

Go and arm-wrestle with the boy who pulls your ponytail, but when he rubs his wrist in pain, do not take your strength as a symbol for how you count as “one of the guys”. When you feel like taking ballet classes, do not take the pink tutus and the slim slippers as a symbol for the weakness of your sex; you are such a girl.

If you are ever nine years old, and understand the concept of graphs—how the figures fit in to spit out straight lines, but not how they box you in an unattractive body, do not tell yourself that one day, the curves you see on magazine covers will kick in and make you a girl. And when the curves kick in harder than you expected, do not believe that the lines on your stomach, mocking your skin in places you never knew existed—do not tell yourself that you are “too much” to be a girl. You are such a girl.

Because I spent my childhood blacklisting the colour pink, burying the Barbie dolls that I wanted to be, bathing myself in sweat so I would never be told I was “such a girl” when I said I was afraid of the hot sun, bathing myself in cold cream so my mother would never look at my face like she was afraid of the darkness of my atoms.

Because sometimes I still tuck away my fears under smiley faces and lock my anger in a drawer of apology, because if my emotional reaction gives you the key to undress my layers of insecurity to reduce me to “such a girl”, then I wish I’d told you that I am a dog-eared paperback, folded so many times that I can no longer tell where the creases end and the lines begin. There are a dozen notes in the margins trying to tell me how to change my plotline, but I was printed as a draft and the ink stains you see on these pages are where I stumble on my way to the back cover.

And I wish I hadn’t spent my childhood fighting off my girlhood, wish I hadn’t pretended I knew how to be better, spent all that time trying to be a boy. I wish it hadn’t taken me fourteen years to learn that being a girl is not a crime.

Know that you are more than a reflection of your sex, know that the white light that shines down on you does not make you a lab experiment of a child—you are made of seven different colours and so much more, and entropy means that—yes, you are and will always be a mess, but when the pink hits the blue and your mind is a sea of grey, know that all the colours scatter into even more shades, and you will never be shoved into the black or the white, and you are such a girl. You will always be such a girl the way your bedroom wall will always be whatever colour you want it to be.

[safernarwhals]

one of the best poetry slam performances i have had the privilege of watching live. an extremely wonderful and empowering poem on feminism. 

[safernarwhals]

Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward

Say to them, say to the down-keepers, the sun-slappers, the self-soilers, the harmony-hushers, "even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night." You will be right. For that is the hard home-run. Live not for battles won. Live not for the-end-of-the-song. Live in the along.

- Gwendolyn Brooks