NaPoWriMo Day 21: I:Eye

i

eye:

all in the seeing

all in the choice

and i choose

not to dwell on i:

my discontent

my wants

my keeping up with never-ending jones

but to see with the eye

beyond the i:

to be the change

instead of mere talk

to be the voice

where there is none

to diminish i

so the eye

can find needs

so my hands

can fulfil them.

NaPoWriMo Day 20: Standards

I stifle in the corset of words
Society has created for me
Nipping in the waist
Of my behaviour, creating
A long line, an elegant silhouette
Shaping my perception like an hourglass:

Proper. Ladylike.
Tall. Beautiful. Slim.
Successful. Smart. Sexy.

Words, bolstered by steel bones
Of societal expectations
Unrealistic as carefully Photoshopped images:
A manufactured standard
Designed to control
To keep us in ignorance
Of the liberating power of being ourselves
And not giving a damn.

NaPoWriMo Day 19: Secrets

Four years of silence
Watching the girls
With graceful limbs
Articulate features
Revolve like constellations
Around your world
And I, an asteroid 
Caught in your gravity
Praying you would catch me
In freefall.

NaPoWriMo Day 18: My Grandmother In The Last Stages

Why.
I can’t even try
To understand. It isn’t fair.
To say otherwise would be a lie. 

Stay. 
Even though I pray
That all will be well, I know too soon
Inevitably, you will fade away.

There.
Delicate as air
I hold your comb, as you once did mine
Drawing it through your snow-white hair.

NaPoWriMo Day 17: Intimacy

peel me

like a new-boiled egg

like birch bark for a whip

like a grape from its skin

until my thoughts are laid bare

an onion stripped of layers

an artichoke heart plucked clean

NaPoWriMo Day 16: Reclaiming No

As girls we’re taught to fear it

To believe that the root of all evil

Lies in saying: No

No this is not right

No I will not submit

No you will not have power over me

No no no no cries the woman who wishes

For a life of her own

And tongues wag and old wives condemn

Calling her rebel, calling her faithless.

Like a mantra we tell our children

Yes. Always, say yes.

Yes until the bottom of your well runs dry

Yes until blood flows and bones shatter

Yes until nothing remains

But a dried-out husk.

We tell ourselves that to say yes

Is to be virtuous

Not knowing that No is power:

Power to create negative space

To push away distractions

To regroup, to grow in the darkness

Like a germinating seed

That to reclaim the power of No

Is to begin to blossom and live.

NaPoWriMo Day 15: The Gift

She greets me with a quick smile

Bright as a sparrow’s eye.

Her taxi-driver husband

Unable to make my pickup today

Has, with rare kindness

Recruited her help.

Her name is Rosemary, her voice

Lilting and laughing, her chequered shirt

Yellow as  sunshine.

Her friend Joan, coffee-skinned and trendy

Wears pragmatism and sunglasses

Like antique pearls.

Around one mobile wrist

Her Pandora bracelet overflows with charms:

Statue of Liberty, a ship

A green glass bead

Glowing like an idol’s eye.

They banter, these two, with the ease

Of old friends, comfortable

As soft flannel pajamas

On a cold night.

No awkwardness, not even with strangers

Their conversation invites, even welcomes

Drawing me in.

Their gift of intimacy, their benediction of kindness

Stays with me long after the afternoon ends.

Having received, it is now my turn

To freely give.

NaPoWriMo Day 14: Elegy

For Robin, in memory of Shane Gibson

Earth and air.

Earth, warm and bold

In each smile

Each goofball moment.

No airs, no pretence

None needed.

Air. Aire. Music

Soaring like air to the heights

And beyond

Virtuoso skill

Drawing life, love, breath

From taut strings.

Troubled Apollo, crafting beauty

From the ashes of your pain

Who knew that your song

Would be silenced so soon.

Lay your weary head down

Upon your strings.

Earth and air:

From grief, from brokenness

Your memory rises from the pyre

From the fire

Like a phoenix, evergreen.

NaPoWriMo Day 13: War Song For Teachers

This is a song for the children

For the broken

For the ones who always hear

You are not good enough

In subtext, in words, in actions.

You are not the sum

Of anyone’s thoughts.

You are not defined by your mistakes

But by your actions and reactions

Your future is more resilient

Than one bad grade.

I will not give up on you.

Success and failure do not define

The sum total of who you are

And will be.

Fail when you try

Fall when you learn

But stand up and try again.

 I will teach you to believe in yourself

That there is nothing you cannot achieve

Through discipline, teamwork, and perseverance.

I will not let you give yourself excuses

I will not allow you to blame others

For your shortcomings.

This is both war song and love song:

I will fight to break those words

On loop in your psyche:
Failure, stupid, useless, ugly

I will not measure you with these standards

But by the yardstick of your capacity.

I will stretch your horizons and show you

Worlds beyond, for you to explore. 

NaPoWriMo Day 12: To The Person Who Stole My Shoes

May your feet rot in everlasting agony.
May gout strike you and keep you prone
And may your liver sicken with unknown cancers
And give up mysteriously on you.
May your hair drop and your eyes blear with cataract
And may your thieving, greedy hands 
Thicken with arthritis and atrophy in two weeks.
May you never know a month’s wage or even a day’s pay
Because no employer will keep you for longer.
May everything you care about
Be taken from you and may you be destitute
For the rest of your mean, useless life.
May nothing you set your hands to prosper
And may everything you touch wither and be destroyed.
May every traffic light turn red for you
In your worst hurry
And may diarrhoea strike you in the middle of a 4-hour jam
With no lavatory in sight.
May roaches infest your house and mice your kitchen
May your children be devoured by snakes.
May your blood vessels burst and give you aneurysm
And may you not reach hospital in time to prevent brain damage.
May your skin crawl with the pain of shingles
And may you find no rest nor cure.
Be stricken with terminal illness, and be unable to die.
Be humiliated, and unable to defend yourself.
Be cuckolded, time and time over, in public
May pain and suffering strike you over and over again
May you be paralyzed and unable to move
And may you have not a single moment's peace or relief
For the rest of your blighted, unsightly, unproductive life.

NaPoWriMo Day 11: Drawn Threads

A tiny snip. The careful separation 
Of warp and weft.
Drawing out threads, meticulous 
As a weaver bird crafting its nest.
With needle and thread
Fashion patterns from negative space -
Intimate, delicate, lovely.

Teach me to endure:
To see each hardship and pain
As a drawing forth of threads
Making space in the close fabric of a life
To exhale – to breathe –
To create from its sparseness
Transcendent beauty.

NaPoWriMo Day 10: Challenge To A Self-Styled Indiana Jones

Archaeology: the study of human activity

Through clues and artifacts

Left behind from the past

A puzzle to interpret

A key to understanding.

Excavate me

Like a geological strata

Like an archaeological dig.

The clues are there to interpret

The artifacts open for understanding.

NaPoWriMo Day 9: The Secret Life Of Phone Booths

Note: I know I read a poem ages ago about levitating phone booths, and I cannot for the life of me find it anywhere online - the book's in my hometown. So, apologies to the poet whose name I can't remember - this is a fond tribute, not a rip-off because I have very fond memories of that particular poem.

The secret lives of phone booths are complicated.

They stand, solitary street confessionals

Inviting telephone confidences.

Unwilling eavesdroppers of conversation

Each graffiti mark has its tale:

Marz luvs Joolz. Call Me xx-xxx

U sounded like coordin8s 2 avoid were an invitation 2 bed

Down with taxes! right next to Have more sex, it’s free.

Phone booths hold the weight of the world

Within their cramped, four-walled confines.

Close, heavy air laden with secrets

Claustrophobic with anxiety and sweat

The rank odour of dead dreams and stale food

An insistent, insidious permeation.

Such gravity is hard to carry.

Last night I heard a phone booth whispering to another

Through the telephone line:

A soft, dull patter like the rustle of directory pages.

They stopped politely when I made my call

Coins dropping through the slot like cheap marbles.

When I finished, I heard them resume

Before I put the receiver down.

When I exited, I swear I saw my phone booth float

Two inches off the ground, then lift off quietly

Into the air where another phone booth waited

A silhouette against the crescent moon.

But in the morning, it was back in its place

Solid, unmoving, a perfectly ordinary phone booth

On a perfectly ordinary day.

NaPoWriMo Day 8: Love Letter To A Girl

At eleven you might have showed promise of height
But genetics defeated you.
By thirteen you sat at the front 
Of the classroom again.
Awkward, sharp-tongued gypsy with just vocabulary for defence
You built book castles in the air
With thoughts for companions.
At sixteen the whole world knew you'd never attract the boys.
Too many angles. Too outspoken.
Too self-sufficient to be easily charmed.
Too much the lone traveller on uncommon paths.
You buried your pain in words
In letters to a man-boy who'd break your heart in college
Though in hind sight, it was inevitable.
Back then your rage moved mountains
Fuelled by wounds that had no voice
Save through paper and keyboards and online games.

In the dark of a summer's night you wrestle with loss
Future balanced on the point of a kitchen knife.

Little one, I reach through the glass of two decades
Hand on your ghostly shoulder to tell you:
Your world did not end.
Your heart will break a thousand times more
Before you find your footing
But the past will not drown you.
You will make mistakes
The darkness will come again, many times
But you will fight, and you will live to sing the survivor's tale
Like lilacs in a dead land, your roots will go deep.

I will tell you, future to past:
Forgive your failures. Love yourself
A little more.
This is not the end, child with the face of my girlhood
It is only a colon.
In the end of this, is your beginning:
You fade into me, and I become you.

NaPoWriMo Day 7: Resurrection

Yesterday's pain will not dictate today.
One step forward culminates
Several backward steps past
The past does not hold the present
In its death grip.

Rise soldier, from the ashes.
Stand.
From the embers of grief and pain
Blaze forth in pure fire.

NaPoWriMo Day 6: Frozen

Easier to thread a camel 
Through the eye of a needle
Than to believe this too shall pass.

Easier to break diamonds barehanded
Than to thread me
Through the eye of your heart.

NaPoWriMo Day 5: The Dame to the Dude

Tell me something I don’t know.

Tell me that you love me, and maybe

Just maybe, I’ll believe you.

Marry me a little – oh, I’d marry you

A whole lot more than just a little

If you’d let me.

I’ve been too late since birth:

It’s a chronic disease.

Too late for pageants

Too late for sports

Too late for love

And too late for you.

(That last is what sticks most.)

High-octane dame on a two-bit cylinder

You’ll crash and burn, they say.

Well I crashed into you long ago

And I’m still burning.

You had me at Prufrock’s table

You, and those sharp grey eyes.

(I’m denying all this if you see it.)

NaPoWriMo Day 4: For Brian

April is indeed the cruelest month.
How times flies - two years almost to the day
You left us so suddenly.
Perhaps we could have loved each other if we tried -
Solitude is hard to break for lone souls
In hindsight, there was wisdom in our 'no'.
Perhaps I could have been kinder
Perhaps I could have tried harder
To breach the distance.
Perhaps
Perhaps
Perhaps.
But time heals all things, even regrets
And April, however cruel
Remains bittersweet - a rosemary wreath.
Forgive me, corazon, for lost time.
I wait in my dreams for you to rise
A forgotten angel with tattered wings.
Here are my hands, outstretched
Holding this last kiss for you.

NaPoWriMo Day 3: Jalur Gemilang

Note: Jalur Gemilang, or Glorious Stripes, is a name of honour we use for our Malaysian flag.

Unstitch me this flag
Where colour is creed
And coconuts in a bomoh's hand
Weigh more than Justice
On a scale.

Unstitch me these lines
Dissecting this land
Where divisions of skin
Count more than conscience
And social need.

Redraw the boundaries of What Is and What Should Be -
Truth is a hard mistress but Lies
Decay the soul.

Break the ground with brittle promises
Suppress the brutal honesty you fear
But weeds, so tenacious, will grow through cracks:
Let the truth rise from the least of these
Let our flag fly -
Undivided by colour or creed
United by this common coat of scars.

NaPoWriMo Day 2: The University Choir Before Its Debut

Dwarfed by space and silence they stand

A flock of colourful sparrows, fluttering doubts

Flitting over each expression.

Can we pull this off? their stances ask

The space surrounding them

Electric with nerves.

Skitter-shy as colts, they wait

Champing at the bit as the music begins

Then the drop of the beat and they transform:

No longer sparrows but nightingales

Soaring on wings of song.

NaPoWriMo Day 1: Victorian Wedding Portrait

I hadn't actually even considered doing NaPoWriMo, or National Poetry Writing Month, not until a good friend posted the link and drew my attention to it. 30 days of poetry is a lot of commitment, and I was quite sure I wouldn't have the time.

With a few insanely busy upcoming months, including 3 classes and a whole lot of work-related projects, it would have been the height of folly to even think of merrily joining in.

So I did.


Victorian Wedding Portrait

The camera loves her but she does not love it back

Profile solemn, black bird wings of hair

Tamed by gauze and pearls.

Grave as a novitiate she sits

A comma in a sentence

Uneasy in her white dress, pale and still

A fresh-faced vanilla orchid

On the cusp of blooming.