Wrote this poem while listening to this ethereal mix on Youtube…
Tear down those walls of my room
the frame of my bed, my chair, my desk
Tear down those concrete
those sidewalk and benches
Strip this civilized world bare
bare and naked and wild and free
Strip away my pretense, my confines,
my name
Until I am nothing
nothing but my desire
reality hangs loose
while words hang heavy
the air is filled with eyes
and no man is free
Her world revolved around perfection,
balanced on top of her surreptitious efforts
to avoid annihilation. Too many mouths to feed, too many
demands, too many dead-ends, too many what-if’s,
too many if-only’s—she was burdened by a meta-awareness
that reverberated through the sully caves
of her battered soul. She lied to herself to survive,
questioned every little detail of her life,
examined everything with fanatical care
and predicted, enacted every possible predicament
in her pretty little head for she was scared
by the things she thought she knew.
.
Should she fail,
the universe would shatter, a glass castle besieged
by an army of ghosts, and people’s faces
would darken, a darkness that she gravely feared,
would fall. There would be no redemption, only perdition.
Her very heart, held wholesome and beating
by this pitiful fragility, pumped wearily against
her mellow ribcage, in the shadows. To not care
meant to tread on thorny roads, to move mountains
with her bare hands, to drink a river dry with spoon.
.
Yet she heard it; she heard it constantly: step into
the light. Embrace the sun. She yearned for it. Yearned
for that light that would set her free—and one day she was saved—
saved her from the claws that were
etched in her flesh and she watched the chains around her
feet come undone and joy come pouring through the chasm of
darkness, a shower of golden energies, an ever-shining
rain that cleansed her anew, and made her see
the beauty, the perfection of imperfections and herself.
A world where nothing mattered and everything mattered and
she doesn’t give a damn because she is who she is. She
doesn’t care if she fails or if she makes a fool of herself,
because aren’t we all fools when we think we look like fools,
because aren’t we all human when we try to be above and beyond,
because aren’t we already the best of who we are
if we simply just be.
I was a perfectionist, and perhaps I still am. You have no idea how difficult life is when you’re a perfectionist. But recently, I’ve changed. Why should I care? Why do I care? There are too many things I can’t control in life and I don’t want to be just merely surviving, I want to be living. I’m not scared anymore. I’m free.
(Image retrieved from http://cache1.asset-cache.net/xc/97373078.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=F5B5107058D53DF5FF89AE983C48AA1B3A56F68AF5D839EDE9C50252630454A8)
My scarf is stained with the canary’s blood.
Its wings flutter directly above.
A deafening song about melancholy.
I begin to run.
My heart tangles, the muscles contract,
I am breathless with pain.
I’m angry at myself.
My eyes, so pathetically shallow, limited, one-dimensional
Can only see half of the world.
I hate myself because
I have forgotten to turn around.
I have remained
Frozen
On the ground.
.
The beautiful canary bird
Its deranged joy dancing off its open cage
A door it sees.
The silence around, surrounds,
Is a deep sin.
Watching its departure
The shining feathers, shine and shine
Flashing a deafening song of
Freedom.
.
The beautiful canary bird will not return.
Its master’s cold hands, the careless release
A life of imprisonment and its
Blind surrender to the greedy eagle’s claw.
Falling, falling towards
The point where light meets darkness
A tear in its eyes
Falling, falling a bloody fall
Slowly, and slowly
It falls.
.
By Kim T. (translated from a Chinese poem I’ve written earlier today)
I sit on the couch, tired and spent
Like a shrivelled potato
My skin peeling off
Getting mushy
Tiny cannibal sprouts spurt out between my toes
Kind of itchy, but don’t really hurt
Not yet, anyway
.
My eyes sink deep into my sockets
The darkening shade renders me a panda goddess
I raise my hand to speak
And on the other end of the living room
Another me
Me Number Two
Throws the chalk at me and screams
“NO! YOU MAY NOT SPEAK!”
.
She then throws my midterm papers at me
They are all due this month
Flinging those annoying deadlines at my face
Using a deadly slingshot
She slaps my face and tells me
How many things I haven’t done
“YOU LAZY BUM! YOU DIDN’T DO ANYTHING TODAY!”
She says there’s something wrong with me.
.
Why can’t I get things done?
.
“I think I will take a break now.”
.
“NO!!!!!!” she screams again and
Pulls out her crystal ball
Her secret weapon
The future
She points towards the foggy centre
And asks me what I see
.
“A foggy centre,” I say.
.
“NO!” she screams. “You are failing your exams,
And you are handing in things late
You’re disappointing your parents,
Who paid all your tuition and housing fees
Because you suck so much at life
And you lie on your bed
Tossing and turning
Flapping like a slowly dying fish
Unable to sleep
Because you are SUCH A FAILURE.”
.
Frustrated, I say to Me Number Two,
“No, I’m not.”
“YES YOU ARE.”
.
She picks up those exam paper, essay outlines
And all that matters
Shoves them up my mouth
Making me eat them
I hear her malicious laugh.
.
“GET OFF ME!”
This time, I am the one screaming.
.
She staggers backwards, and stares at me in horror.
.
“PLEASE DON’T KILL ME!”
.
I pick up the things that matter
Exams and outlines and homework assignments
All those stress and disappointments and anger
Shape them into a paper sword
And stab the other me in the stomach.
.
“PLEASE DON’T KILL ME!”
.
The paper sword touches her stomach
But does not penetrate
She winces in pain
But it’s a paper sword
What harm does it do?
.
“Shut up, me.”
.
Me Number Two collapses onto the floor
And looks up at me
Into my eyes.
.
“It’s okay. It’s no big deal.”
.
She stares at me and weeps.
.
“It’ll be okay la! You silly perfectionist.”
She sighs. I smile.
And then, she says,
“Shut up, me.”
.
And both me and the Other Me
Are at last, at peace.
Pieces of future, like seeds
Of a dandelion
Caught in the wind that has once
Been the air beneath a butterfly’s wing
.
At night, I dream of cocoons
Of feathers fighting to wield a storm
Of grey-furred bears waking up in snow
Of dazzling fireworks melting into the blinking stars
Of car honks wrapped in a horse’s gallop
Of children growing old, their bodies curling up
Turning into wrinkled babies
.
I dream of time, intertwined
With our heartbeats
Severed at the sound of life ceasing
The infinite ticking, disappears when we
No longer hear
.
Only listen
To the immense, beautiful silence of
This universe shifting, slowly
The sound of our bodies changing form
The moment when we are everything
When we no longer have to become
But are.
By K.T.
As I awake in a dream I see
silence, calmly sedated into a
wordless rhythm. Perhaps
none of this is happening.
The very muscle of my eyes hums
With an impulse; to open, to fathom,
but the world is tampered by fools.
Therefore my left eyelid fossilizes,
As my smile crystallizes.
.
While I stay awake, I stumble
into the woods. My toes submerge
into a society of poisoned mushrooms.
They shine with a kind of darkness
that makes the tree bark rot
with elegance. Dying, just like my skin
that’s been prickling to shed.
Forever tempted, to become part of
A non-existent wonderland;
a place where the air I breathe
is no longer mechanical,
but you never know.
.
I fall back into the nightmares. As of
now, the disturbing sun sizzles
on my withered lips, forcing them to part,
forcing out broken syllables
from my broken heart. Plumbing
dignity out of my stomach—
but never my pain. I
am too greedy to be satisfied.
.
So as I sleep, soundly and bewilderingly,
I wish I was never born.
Somewhere Nowhere in My Kingdom 