#singpowrimo2016

[overcomingalexithymia]

Don’t Date The Girl Who Posts Facebook Poetry

Don't date the girl who posts Facebook poetry. You're just asking for it. Don't be charmed by her hipster-specced eyes and Lang Leav quotes. She will drag you to open mic nights where you will have to pretend you understand what the wankers are handwaving about. She will take you to BooksActually to pet cats and support local businesses. She will only eat organic greens and nut butter. She will be nuts, expect you to read her poetry about her exes and you will have to smile and ask when she will be publishing her anthology.

When you break up the world will know because her timeline will skyrocket with Sylvia Plath and The Best Of Janice Heng. You do not need to delete your Instagram selfies because on anniversaries (or whenever she feels like it especially in the middle of the night) she will repost them with Charles Bukowsk's and Sarah Kay’s words on loss. You can unfriend her but she will immortalise you, every April, with poetry of her own and Facebook feeds will echo her words on the shit you'd prefer to forget you did together if she decides to be nostalgic. Or if she decides to be vengeful they will know your worst habits (did you pick your nose around her? Did you ever fart in bed? Because this is how Facebook will know you now). Meanwhile you will go on oblivious while your friends can only look at you and think of what she wrote.

(overcomingalexithymia)

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Written for kicks for SingPoWriMo Day 28

[overcomingalexithymia]

Izanagi and Izanami

I buried her myself. I missed her so I went all the way down to Yoma to bring her back. But after I see how she is falling apart, I leave. How was I supposed to know that she would send an army after me?

I waited, even as I felt my skin crawl with maggots. My new neighbours laughed and said you would never want me again. I said of course not, you would never abandon me because you were my oniisan.

(overcomingalexithymia)

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SingPoWriMo 2016 Day 21

THE FAMILY PROMPT

Write a poem in two stanzas of no more than six lines each - one stanza from the perspective of a sister, and one answering / contrasting / differing stanza from the perspective of a brother. The lines may be of any length. 

#bonus1 - the poem is about their father  #bonus2 - their father is dead.  #bonus3 - BUT HE RISES FROM THE GRAVE IN THE THIRD STANZA.

[overcomingalexithymia]

how many times have i heard

that i did not love enough. love what i asked. it did not matter which they said. them god animals earth it is not enough until it is

too much so much that gaping they did not know what to do with it all. or sometimes it was me rolling over

after a kiss on the cheek he whispered in my ear that he loved me. that's chea - - ting i wanted to say because that's what i do too when i want them to say it so i smile and say me too as i rolled over

but it does not matter why or what they do. the result is the same.

(overcomingalexithymia)

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SingPoWriMo 2016 Day 20

Inspired by Ruth Tang's THE UNRIDDLER PROMPT:

Write a poem about your feelings. ‪#‎bonus1‬ no metaphors allowed ‪#‎bonus2‬ no similes either ‪#‎bonus3‬ everybody must understand what you are talking about

[overcomingalexithymia]

Nomenclature

When people ask, I tell them that my parents made it up, one of those fengshui things so that the characters matched my surname. It saves me the embarrassment of telling them that I don’t know the meaning of my own name, and I have forgotten how to use the Chinese dictionary. Even if I remembered how to I wouldn’t have been able to interpret the entry. With Google though I looked it up the other day, and finally saw the thought that went into it. It was a blessing, or a talisman - for strength, for courage, for luck - crafted even before I was born in hopes that it would see me through life.

王: Heaven, Man, and Earth lie together, and the Emperor stands in the middle, stretching upwards to reach them all. Or perhaps he doesn’t reach up, but down; a deity who resigns himself to the mundanity of the world so that we will prosper. I do not know if I am meant to be the emperor, or if I am to benefit from him.

玮: A study in contradictions. 韦 is leather: animal, soft, dead yet alive. But with the emperor animal metamorphoses into mineral: a kind of red jade. Green jade is cool, soothing, the stone for an artist’s creativity, but red jade is the warrior’s stone, blazing away all fear and doubt even as it soothes the skin.

祺: typical Chinese values, wishing for prosperity and luck for an unborn child; an acknowledgement perhaps, that hard work alone is never enough.

And despite this inky amulet, I constantly find that I am still making myself up. The wishes of my parents are not enough. I draw the shapes and strokes to fill in empty spaces, erasing parts when I feel they don’t fit. Sometimes they go easy. Other times they don’t.

(overcomingalexithymia)

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Written for Day 19 of SingPoWriMo 2016, #noprompt

[overcomingalexithymia]

I Suppose This Is What You Call Irony

The other day we found your honeymoon photos. At twenty-three you left your country for the first time: east, where the sun rises, and then east some more until you were west, to a land where they speak your language but not your tongue. I think about how I have spent my whole life running from you but how, at twenty-two, I had cried when I learnt that your past was not to be my future.

(overcomingalexithymia)

Tumblr | Instagram SinPoWriMo 2016 Day 16 Show us a photograph you have taken. Tell us what is happening. Or better yet—tell us something about your photograph that we can never know, simply by looking. Tell us in the form of an accompanying poem, in which text and image belong side by side, and inform one another’s reading.

Finally getting round to uploading the rest of my writing for SPWM, will be revising them in the upcoming months. 

[ikantsee]

SingPoWriMo ‘16 Day 30

I still dream and wait for the day my mind be woken by kiss and the grace of a slight breath, whispers in my face face the world head-on, come what may The glimpse of a smile, blessed by fey in pursuit of love, never give up the chase gestures of kindness, reminders that always lift up the spirits, with nothing to say. Now in the heat of the tropics and water body with struggle and fight with desire barking and screams of orders to fulfill tyranny leading my head to the slaughter only to rescind, to miser and mire first thing to do, is take the red pill.

---

Inspired by The Alarm Clock.

[ikantsee]

SingPoWriMo ‘16 Day 29

One, mostly mutilated, prompts with pain and torture porn. (1) A spiral of despondency and hospital stays (2) A shot of water with the juice of lemon (3) your mother's arms are no life-source (4)

Fucking don’t. (5) our fingers grow sore (6) like a boy nursing a sick bird. (7) and please don't call it discovery. (8) NB: In response to today’s prompt, which sucks balls and is the worst prompt on record. Sources: (1) https://www.facebook.com/groups/singpowrimo/permalink/976476795800905/ (2) https://www.facebook.com/groups/singpowrimo/permalink/776739662441287/ (3) https://www.facebook.com/groups/singpowrimo/permalink/970338323081419/ (4) https://www.facebook.com/groups/singpowrimo/permalink/773659232749330/ (5) https://www.facebook.com/groups/singpowrimo/permalink/987049371410314/ (6) https://www.facebook.com/groups/singpowrimo/permalink/986565078125410/ (7) https://www.facebook.com/groups/singpowrimo/permalink/987063604742224/ (8) https://www.facebook.com/groups/singpowrimo/permalink/986513954797189/

[ikantsee]

SingPoWriMo ‘16 Day 28

Casual twisting of the knob turning up the volume slight even in my heart I fought slivers of emotions; might I find reprieve in mindless banter dissolving tastes, umbrella term for all situations I encounter just having fun, don’t be a worm. They say it’s your interpretation sword on sword, one must give way it’s useless, save your inhibition unleash the beast, all night and day. But save my heart, this soon shall pass, lest it devolves into mere farce.