Boon Lay

Everyday, he’d walk towards the sunset
and back.

Between the walls of zinc
that separates the building
and the built, scaffolding
Perched,
Precarious.

Between the nation’s arteries
Ballooned
With tar.
Even-paced Tembusu
Transplanted
From here to there;
Migrants in their own right.

The reluctant stop-light.
The by-the-way of money
and
making the world go round.

This place is purgatory.

Yet, the southern sky burns the night;
ember for cocoa-stenched dreams.

Everyday, he’d walk towards the sunset
and back.

“When it’s dark, only memories remain.”

20/12/2011

I grew up with people telling me that the world's my oyster. But looking at all these CVs, I'm very much just drowning in a sea of mediocrity, aren't I?

21 years with nothing to show.

It's tiring to see others living the life I thought I'd have if maybe I just put in that bit more effort. The more I think about it, the more it becomes apparent that very little separates fame from anonymity. It must just be something chronic that I always find myself flailing in the latter.

Something chronic.

Tedium and delayed gratification//

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
(A Transcendentalist crackpot and phony who insisted on going back to flint and steel when he had a matchbox in his pocket.)


A cold November night.
Another year will pass.
Where did you find yourself this time?

Because Sigur Ros is on loop//

This is what I want.

I'm not too sure what "this"
really is. It could be the warm glow
of the desk lamp
or the distant calming screech
of crickets.

Or it could simply be the fact
that I'm immediately,
really, truly alone.

Well, at least til
the roommate bursts
through that door with his
flamboyannt
tales of things
far removed from
the "this" and now.

For quite a long time now,
I do find myself
like an outsider. A social destitute
of sorts, thrown out in the
cold,
tropical
storm.

I pass by closed
doors and, as best I can,
catch whiffs of baked breads
that I can never imagine to taste.

That knocking on the window
you thought you heard?
That's my attempts at drawing
your attention,
away
from your hearth and conversations
of nothings and everythings.

You failed to hear me,
and I failed,
terribly,
to get out of this
desolate,
isolate
storm.

Or maybe I don't want to be heard.

Because it is in this
recluse
that I truly hear the one
that ought to be heard;

Myself,

for so long is it subdued
that I scant recognise when I heard.

Have you heard yours?

I'll run up and down the street screaming at the top of my lungs, waving my hands in the air, because clearly, I don't care. Peer out your windows at this one-Man commotion. I hear Me and oh how great that sounds.


I like how the "enter" key can help turn bad prose to even worse poetry. ^^

A tragic tale of all that's yet to come//

I'll devise the best disguise
A brand new look and take them by surprise
They'll never guess what's not inside

I'll express myself with ease
With confidence and character complete
With fingers crossed they'll talk to me

But I get carried away with every page
and every fantasy
The deeper the wound, the harder I swoon
and wish that that was me

So much to say but no words to convey
The loneliness building with each passing day
But I'm getting used to it, you have to get used to it.

//

A full day before my first day of school, oh the excitement.

The Boy Named Crow

"Everyone of us is losing something precious to us." he says after the phone stops ringing. "Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where i imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in the library. And to understand the workings or our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library."

Another Place//

"Another place, another life, another book,
we go on without a return ticket, on the trail
of the vanished song, the elusive lines unlocking
a whole library of meaning, our lives shelved
in comprehensive order, for us who will arrive
clothed in dust and dusk, to sit at the appointed desks
and pore over the pages, search out the thread
stringing together all arrivals and departures
which our hands will tell, over and over,
as if in prayer, as if in peace."

Boey Kim Cheng