These writings are my sharing moments. There is a lot I want to express through creative writing but I dont have the time to work diligently on them, so here they are, in their rough forms:
an old piece resurrected
Borderlines
I am tiptoeing on the fine line taut between my two ears. Curled many rounds over the ridge of each ear the line is tight, is firm. I pull the line every so often to check its pitch, the sound that will reveal that no bit is slacking, that all, is fine-tuned. Taut. Firm. Tight. Where cacophony is shrill and distracting, one needs to be sound, I say. Check not once but twice and maybe…right when I wake up right before I fall asleep adjust the sound so that the quality the tightness the firmness is bearable.
Tight firm taut, sound fine
My father crossed lines younger than him at age 17. Barely 7 years old at that time, the fine line drawn between the dissected British Siamese-twin states Was tended to everyday, drawn so unyieldingly that it had a pitch so high and shrill that my father ran away with hands cupped over ears to escape the piercing chorus of “Bumiputra!”, “Malaysia for Malays!”, straight into the jungles of Brunei to participate in the workforce erecting white-washed buildings on brown earth.
As the Malaysian anthem accompanied the hoisting of a new flag into the age of Negaraku, while the Singaporean anthem rang above marching army men rehearsing training commands taught by allied Israeli forces to herald in the Majulah Singapura, their earsplitting echoes reverberated through my life in jolting outbursts.
*
The Buddha said that birth, death, old age and illness are of life. The first noble truth that Life is suffering, we must sit with to realize that
all that doesn’t change is change itself and
clinging on, is pain.
Yet when he crossed over from life into death,
and 4 weeks after I celebrate her delivery of life from what did not exist till 9 months before,
the fine taut line between life and death vibrated at high frequencies, bouncing off the walls of my skull: dulling my senses with the incessant reminder of its presence.
Lines in two dimensions do not reflect potential to form circles.
Moist finger pad running on thin round rims of wine glasses can make clear sounds with beginnings trailing into ends trailing
*
The past few days I have seen flashes of moments caressing her. I would like to clasp her hand in mine. I imagine running my fingertips on the parched spots of her skin, moisture sucked dry by the thirsty winter air. I imagine her feeling my thumb damp with lotion pressed on the flabby flesh of her arm, rubbing firmly on the hints of muscles lying beneath and knowing that tension in her body is evaporating as my thumb moves in circular motion on her skin.
These nights, I am readjusting the line drawn between my ears.
Where cacophony is shrill and distracting, loose lines leave less chance for snapping.
*
10.23.2010
Letter to my Grandmother Dear Grandma,
You named my father "Ah Kaw"
You called him a dog so that the spirits will not recognize, smell or hear his humanity.
You humiliated him to love him,
shamed him to secure him
reduced him to canine instincts to buy time for his humanity to flourish.
My father renamed himself "Green Dragon"
to raise his hands up to the sky, to float, to mark his
evolution from 4 pawed-animal to 2 feet, 2 handed homosapien
His renaming was defiant. His renaming was his recognition of his humanness.
His dignity that does not wish to be confined to statures merely
1 feet above the groveling ground, to
raise above being called "A Dog"
My father named me "Pretty Yellow Colt"
A miniature horse.
He wished I would run a thousand miles, quick,
like lightning quick to
penetrate between the seams of hefty bricks to surpass the weights
crumbling down toward me, to survive
He wished me speediness to skip the stages of life he went through, to
leap from birth to adulthood
unfazed. unscarred. untarnished.
But today I work close to the ground.
Today my daily labor requires that I squat, bend my legs to reach only 1 feet off the ground
I clean, I scrub but I do not grovel. I lift
weights with my strong body,
unafraid of earthliness, of bodiliness
Tomorrow, I will wake early to go to work.
I am a pretty yellow colt but I do not run fast.
I choose not to skip the steps
I trust my muscles to reach as low to the ground, and raise as high to the clouds.
I am fearless of the dog, or of the green dragon.
I refuse to counterpose them to one another. I refuse
to destroy the dog in distant illusions of the green dragon.
**
10.07.2010
Work memoir 1
Work memoir 1
I dress you everyday,
feed you,
change your diapers and
everyday feels the same till
one day,
you die.
I speak with you everyday
as if you understand my words and my accent
and perhaps you do,
though your face does not register
And if you do, maybe you'd
think I was a silly boygirl
I see pictures of you
outside your bedroom door,
from 20, 30, maybe 40 years past
and wonder if old age
really makes the most drastic makeovers,
irreversible.
I wonder how your streets looked like,
how you walked home from a day's work
after a nasty customer interaction.
I construct your history through my
textbook knowledge of your era
I ask you questions that you nod to, or
make sounds to acknowledge that
further
encourage my imagination of your past.
So now, I can put names to
your family members I never knew, and
will never know because
they don't come visit you when I am on shift
Your old age doesnt hide your feelings
I know when your eyes light up
when those crinkled lips twist up sideways
gently, slightly, into a grin
As stone faced as old age has made you
You reveal these glimpses of
what makes you and I the same and
you,
a reminder of
what I,
may become.
