Contemplations at Night

I sat by the window.
Perhaps I was waiting for the rain
That Gerontion died waiting,
In a dry season that provided inspiration for writing unfinished poems.
Without a muse, only lines and lines of agonising aspirations
Write themselves unabashedly on nothing.
There was no light again.
The beams from the jaded moon shone into the room,
Casting a vacant weariness upon Time and Memory,
Forlorn lovers in a space that has no room for them
Or reconsidered passion.
I thought I heard your footsteps;
It was just the rain pouring desolation upon endless sorrows.
My heart beat a thousand times your going away.
My afflictions stretched for miles and miles,
Under the scattered colours of the night.
How your gentle whisperings into her ear
Twisted daggers into my sides
And silenced my deepest cries for the absent presence
Among the shadowy linings.
You were right beside her playing a lovesong.
Your music I could no longer understand,
A medley of madness and confusion.
Our fates intertwined into a triangle of distorted edges
Along the contrived passages of unuttered desires,
Intensified by unanswered prayers.
Only teardrops and broken promises now remain.
When all love ends,
Waiting will only lengthen love's longings.
The skies began to darken on the edge of the desert
Our story ended where it first began:
In the room where Emptiness waited.

I taught him English.
He spoke of mirrors and empty glasses,
Things he had always wanted to break
Like promises and relationships.
Ours had no beginnings,
Neither endings.
We shall be contented,
Even though we can never write in the future tense
Nor in the past.
The serpent bites its tail
In a cosmos caught in angled revolutions.
How many verbs of immobilisation do I have to use?
The sands of time flow like blood,
Burying us in multiple narratives and divided visions.
The ancient tale tells nothing in its existential destiny.
Adam gave God a reason to live and have his being,
Eve was dead right from the beginning.
Time metaphors or mysterious rhymes,
We understand nothing.
Not knowing is a bliss
Yet when we don’t pursue,
Truth or otherwise,
Some things are lost into an eternity
That even Time cannot recover.
We can hold on to nothing.
He hates writing in the present tense.
For him, living is a thing lodged in the past.
One day, he threw a glass into the mirror
The ground was strewn with books, broken glass and a bruised psyche.
I walked the frail memories of estranged fellowship,
Picking up fragments of our separated ribs,
Yet I could not reach him.
Time spelt disparity,
An anti-clockwise phantasm,
The sea of glass and drowned destinations
Stood between us.
No spoken word (within a word) this time.
Genesis and other myths
Formed the beginning
And the end of every human history.
We await a future time that will never come.

Feeling kinda lost, and not knowing why. It's that 'feel like running from it all' experience. No more accountability, no more duties, no more hypocrisy, no more need to be cordial and cooperative and considerate, especially in front of people who do not deserve even an iota of goodwill. So much for loving the unlovable. Maybe only god can do that...it is difficult to compromise in the face of injustices.

The dissatisfaction increases each day, and I do not know when I might just blow it and at whom. It is a fettered heart that sits on a heavy spirit now and I am not quite sure where the first source of frustration or disdain came from. And there does not seem to be any respite that might come anytime soon. Everything looks bleak and dreary, like Thornfield in Jane Eyre after it has been set aflame by Bertha Mason in love and madness.

And I thought I was always above my circumstances, like some wonder woman ruling her life and universe with an iron fist. Feels like nothing except Prometheus, after he has stolen fire, in the face of Zeus having his liver nibbled away by the eagle each day, and his lifeforce slowly ebbing away. Yet there is nothing he can do to change his fortune, except to wait for death, or for Zeus to be destroyed.

What wishful thinking. My Zeus will not be destroyed, at least not by me, not now. I have learned to pick my battles wisely and understood that some people we should never fight or struggle against. Neither submit to, nor sleep in the same tent as an ally. A kinda Catch-22 situation.

I am still helpless and naked in my crucible of pain. Maybe there are some transcendental lessons to be learnt, maybe there are some (in)tangible weaknesses to be overcome...who knows? Why now? Why me?

But what was wrong with stealing fire to light up the world? And why should a tyrant, less than a man and in all ways fallible, be allowed to rule the world and terrorise those with noble intentions?

Silence answered me in the midst of falling stars crashing into oblivion and I am still lost...

It was the same place
The world disappeared behind his gaze.
All of a sudden,
Time froze,
Love turned to water
In the garden of Eden,
Eve lost her Adam
And God hid himself from her.
Her prayers became the forbidden fruit that she must swallow.
It was an empty, formless universe.
They were separated by that desolate, unspeakable nothingness
The winds wept as the mountains moved away,
Unwilling to hear the tales of tragedy
That so often defined the existence of (wo)men
Memories crystallised into a string of teardrops
Blazing across the night sky.
His absolute silence and placid touch
When she tries to hold his hand
Speak the estranged language of togetherness.
His wandering heart leaves her wondering
Why her world is covered with yellow wallpaper still.
Yet at every point of origin their shadows meet.
She looks into the broken mirror
And sees him there,
And he still calls her by her name.
She knows she cannot give voice
To melancholic passions that yearn for him anymore.
Every wing of love and freedom is destined somewhere;
To love him is to let him go free
And watch him disappear in the crowds
Into the horizon where water turns to clouds.
She continues to dwell in the old place of misty icy daggers
His countenance she can no longer behold.

I did not forget that I wrote, as a debut for this blog, I had promised myself I would never do a blog, or if I did one, my first entry would most probably be my last. Well, almost. Fourteen entries later, I am still writing, and writing. It feels more like obeying some deeper metaphysical instincts, rather than writing as a means of holding out or caving in.

Talk about a love-loathe relationship with blogs, the natural fear of losing one's privacy juxtaposed with the need for connecting with kindred spirits who might understand without knowing and indulging in the myth of words and what they might do for someone who can no longer remember some of the most important words spoken to her. Time-battered and memory-forsaken soliloquies, I call them.

Yet there might be more, though I never thought I would find strength in the encouragement of strangers.

The cyber world is a strange space where the real meets the reel, and online stories, in my case, connect me to friends I have not yet known or loved. If sanity could really be kept in any sense, I'll keep all of it in these friendships which I now hold dear and reserve much gratitude towards.

Distance, real or imagined, is of no consequence. We might be half a world apart or drink tea of different brews or appreciate silence and music in myriad of ways, what matters is there is an unspoken language that holds our joys and loves, angst and pain together, like spells cast in words.

And for that I am grateful. Life has been gracious to a forlorn sojourner like me, one who has been trying to forget, some sorrows, some people, some storms, some dreams...

Not that I forgot what I needed to forget after reading the comments posted on my blog by total strangers, but it certainly made everything more bearable, knowing that someone out there understands. It certainly made a difference to someone who needed to know that she was still alive and had the strength to carry on, even though the temptation to give in to despair and disrepair was just as great.

I might never meet some of these angels who have visited my blogs, but thank you, thank you for simply being there when there was momentary darkness and gloom in this sea journey of life.

Maybe when time flows into a river,
The world will be without her lover.
Memories explode into fragments of desires,
The weary heart into its own abyss retires.
Poignant longings,
Unfulfilled yearnings
Reverberating through the walls of silence.
Crying is a form of penitence,
Not catharsis.
Nothing but innermost paralysis.
Unable to speak,
The word without a word,
The world without a word.
Moanings and groanings,
Lengthened thrills and drills,
Climaxing into hysterical shrills
And laughter of fear and pain
The sheets are tainted
With forgotten passions and desolation.
The lights go off.
This is the price of love
And fantasy.

It's been a heady week, filled with presentations and rehearsals. And I fell sick after that. What an icing for the cake!

Still, I have to finish marking some exam papers. Falling sick is a curse. In my case, it usually leaves behind a backlog as long as the Great Wall of China, with no final destination, which ever angle one looks at it.

There is no particular theme to this entry. I am just gonna randomly jot my scrambled thoughts down.

Kinda feel a little unsettled by some things that have taken place in the last few days. There're probably some misunderstandings, misgivings, and miscommunication going on in my interactions with people. Some, I feel very hurt by because the comments made were unjustified; others, I guess I was a little impatient. But if you ask me what I am gonna do with them...

Well, nothing. Never believed in explaining anything. Those incidents of which I was the one at fault, I have already made restitution. Hence my conscience is clear.

I realise I have to practise what I preach. We all must stay true to ourselves. There should be no compromise or the need to apologise for the one who is hurt or disappointed. It has been, and will always remain thus, regardless of rank or race, though I have no idea why people would not hesitate to strike daggers into another's heart of kindess. Maybe the world doesn't go round anymore. Maybe I am just going round in circles loving and caring for hearts that have fossilized. Well, guess it doesn't matter anymore. Friendships and loveships are made in heaven and secured on earth. Sometimes we must learn to let go.

I realise the kids in my form class are gonna graduate very soon. I am slowly losing them to Time and the days we spend together will become mere memories, never to return. Well, they won't read this, but I know I am gonna miss them. Time can create physical barriers by decreeing that people move on and be separated by space but it cannot take away one's passions. Nothing consumes me now, except knowing that in the days that follow, all will be well within their souls and that I might be there to support them in whatever way I can. It doesn't matter what others say about them, in my heart, they are God's kids and I love them, just as they are.

I hope they do well. Well, I know they will do well.

It is still difficult to forget, especially when every object and sound around me brings with them his presence and all memories shared since time between us began.

Yet that time between us now flows gently and painfully along the river of forgetfulness. I sometimes wonder how he is and if our past can be restored, just like when people pour sand back into the hourglass and then naively inverting the vessel back into its original position to turn back time. Nothing but an exercise in futility. For us, I believe right from the start, even the beginning has, almost insouciantly, declared its refusal to journey towards any end or ending.

This was his favourite song and one that he asked me to translate:

Forgotten Memories

The one who is beckoning at the window,
The one whose hands are playing upon the strings.
A time forgotten,
Bit by bit, the passions return to the heart.
The rains fall gently
Unceasingly, it makes its presence felt by the window.
Silence consumes me
As I keep reminiscing about the past.
The one who is beckoning at the window,
The one whose hands are playing upon the strings,
The past keeps replaying in my mind.
I remember the moments of joyful bliss
As each scene replays itself in the sea of remembrance.

But now it reads like a sad story that I have translated and can relate to like a page out of my personal diary, yet can interpret no more.

Can anyone tell me how memories can be forgotten?

For all the people who matter

Without You

Night is incomplete without Day

The flowers die without sunshine,
The sheep loses its way without the shepherd,
The valley disappears without the mountains,
The land cracks open without the rain.

The writer dies without words,
The verses lose their coherence without the poet,
The story digresses without the plot,
The world degenerates without knowledge.

The heart dies without love,
The mind loses itself without imagination,
The soul dissipates without virtues,
The spirit comes undone without faith.

I take too long to say this:
Life loses its meaning without you.

Sometimes I can't help wondering why there is so much hostility and ill will in the world. From petty tiffs between lovers to full-scale wars between nations and genocidal terrorism between life and madness, aren't we spending too much time and resources fighting each other? And over what?

Sovereignty, pride, wealth, religion, or race? Out of spite, envy, jealousy, pain, disappointment, anger, disdain, or simply the sadistic pleasure of seeing another suffer without reprieve or respite?

Death is the great leveller and all will cease to be important vision or motivation once the worms of mortality begin the act of returning to the earth that which has lived on borrowed time.

Who has the right to take away life, when he did not give life? Who has the right to pronounce judgment, when only the perfect can cast the first stone? Why should anyone bear grudges? God has blotted out our transgressions and remembers our sins no more. How can anyone dole out criticism in heaps when his own life is in need of betterment and altruistic adjustments?

That which lies beneath the skin flows through all mankind. Therefore, no one is superior or subordinated, neither through adhering to warped statistics and crooked yardsticks or attaining some achieved or ascribed status which is self-defeating and ridiculous in its hollow stature.

And the ultimate pathos? If we had spent the same amount of time living and letting live and loving our neighbour as ourselves, and learning to forgive even when the bruises still tingle in the raw nerves, wouldn't paradise be right here and there would be no need for a second or third coming? But we continue to be each other's hell and terrorise and murder every atom of flesh that was created for life and not for death.