uneditted

whether this is/ was
a poor poem,
only by the 'if' that it
could've been far better,
it is hard to say;
because them words
they do oftentimes
fail
to complete/ fulfill/ rouse
that obtuse/ abstracted
satisfaction and
feeling of wholeness/
sufficiency.
Or so it seems.

this would normally be called "wasting time"

I believe that there was once a time in my past, when I didn't have to harbour nagging worries in the back of my head whilst I did something so unparticularly "irrelevant" or "useless", as it would be considered by today's common standard; and, if I correctly remember that time and what that liberty felt like, then I miss it.

we only see the aeroplanes.

Somewhere in the black recess,
deep in the darkness, 'hind a hill
far away, the sky glows ominously
red. A quiet night flame burns.
It violently jumps in mighty
spurts orange and malevolently greys
great billows. It is
a fire so wildly strong, so
consuming; somewhere out there is Hell
on Earth. Yet in spite o' its deathly glory -
its fearsome enorm'ty -
it's just another distant danger, lost,
far in the background, far
from the notice
of the passing people and the passing planes
and the smooth-running of life
as it is seen
from the viewing mall.

We were all meant to busily
shuffle through this port, anyway.

as bright as a button

People are pushy. But not everyone can be pushing at the same time, because we all want to go our way. So some people get pushed.

the pencil

A hand
At each end
Clasping
Moving in
Conflicting direction
Forcing a
Bend
Onto the resisting
Straigtness
It's stiffness
Refusing
And the tension
Builds,
Builds, building
Mounting dangerously
Silently on
 to the poor
Splint
That can
 not but eventually
Cringe and
Crack and
Painfully break
Into an
Unclean fracture
Right through the
Heart.

i dreamt bad dreams

In a bad dream, you can run. You can run and keep running, and sometimes, even fly. But because it is a dream, you can escape even the most painful and fatal of endings with one sudden, hard waking jerk.

Then again, upon full consciousness, you realize that you haven't actually avoided anything. You are still running, fleeing from the wild monsters that lurk in the night. They still chase. You still run. And because that awful nightmare had crossed realities, your semi-conscience waits for that cold bucket of truth to break you from somnambulance; but, holding an aftertaste of sensibility at the back of your tongue, you contemporaneously know it will never come.

that pretty girl

She had the life everybody wanted: Things always went her way; she had plenty of friends - beyond what she could ask for; she had a pleasant personality; people liked her; she did well in school; she never got in trouble; so on, so on the list goes. But life was like that for the beautiful, anyway. You were either born lucky or not. Life's like that.

She was one who was born lucky, being born beautiful. In fact, she was very very lucky, because she was wildlybeyondimagination gorgeous. It was natural that people often swooned in covet at that sight of her. They'd often cry, oh! how fortunate are you to be born so pretty, and oh! how fortunate are you to be born so pretty, then spend the next few seconds staring at her face and lament how damned they were to be been born ever so hideous: "Look at my nose! it's so flat and ugly; if only I had yours... if only..." except, it wasn't actually the nose that they cared about. And even if people never used her to criticize themselves, she'd still receive compliments aplenty; The words "stunning", "gorgeous", "pretty", "hot", "good-looking", "striking", "attractive", "exquisite" and other broadly synonymous adjectives were so often pinned and pasted to her name that it was hard to think of her as anything else.

But that was the problem, you see. Nobody thought of her as anything else. Nobody could, of course, because they had always busied themselves with admiring her immaculate glory. She was Beautiful, the perfect being, and everybody wanted to know her. But nobody wanted to know her. People simply glazed over her picture-worthy, Darly'd smiles and never really noticed that it was pained - that she was silently calling, pining, begging to be known as what she really was - an identity of her own, a feeling self - and not merely what she seemed to be. But... but you know what yourself. You know.

But you don't know. This was her true fate, unknown to the gazing eye, to be forever trapped behind that face. She could not escape it. She had the life everybody else wanted.

an epiphanic moment

So I was talking to an old friend about irritability. My irritability, rather. I don't know whether it is fair in any way to consider myself, wholly, as madly combustible or just simple short-fused, but I do grant the fact that I have my bad days and tetchy moments. More specifically, I thought I was aware of what annoyed me... My conclusion was that these petulant responses of mine were purely irrational, mostly due to the fact that I was able to rationalize why I shouldn't be agitated by the occurrence of X type of events while being annoyed by them all the same.

But then - all in a sudden one night - I had a big fat moment of revelation: I realized that my irritability was not that irrational after all. My theory is that another problem of mine, a long unresolved conflict, was the real reason behind it all. That problem was the first cause of frustration. It was borne of miscommunication, pride, distortions of expectations - the everyday household thing. This being unresolved for ever so long just made matters worse. It then came to a point where any subtle, unconscious reminder of the issue, or the nature of it thereof, would cause me to fluster. And just like this my two problems merged into one, as if they had secretly eloped and married to become one; or rather, one of my problems was doped, had one-night stand and conceived a condemned child, of which I only just found out about.

Mathematically speaking, one plus one wasn't equal to two, but one; now I have one less problem to resolve. This said, a better understanding of the problem at hand is only an understanding. Solving it would be the next obvious step to take. But how to go about doing that, I have not much of a clue left. I suppose I shall just sit under a random fruit tree for now and wait for more epiphanies to fall on my head.

we love singa-long.

The night sky sparkled. It was boom! boom! boom! and many colours in the air while many people sang those feelgood songs that transitioned from D to E major. They were one people, one nation; Majulah. Then it was more boom! and boom! again till it was dark and the air was spirited and everybody, in that one day, loved Singapore.

Queue in the credits.

warped people are we...

"Oh my - a boy in Thailand killed a taxi driver to emulate Grand Theft Auto?! Awesome. Now I have a good example of how violent games lead to violent behaviour in youth to use for my General Paper essays!"

disney says, "dream big."

Maybe I do not say it, but I dream a lot. And dreams not being dreams of fantasy and over-idealism, but of ambition, of what I know I am capable of, of things I think I love doing.

Think. I like thinking. It is ironic how thinking is an active verb. Ironic for me, because I am only passive when I think. But maybe that is the whole thrill of it all. I convince myself that I have the potential, the abilities to climb the clouds of dreams - just not that spur of confidence, or, that moment of unthinking gut. Then I can console myself with the thought that I was always the something-else manqué - the somehow someone somewhere else I could have been, but just that I chose not to, because... Because nothing. The academics call it Opportunity Cost, I think.

my ramble.

Is my downfall
Truly of my youth
And my youth alone?
That I should folly
And blind myself
With self-centeredness;
That I should have
No care for no one;
That I am lousy scum,
Delinquetic and rebellious,
Just because...
I'm not yet thirty and shy?
Nay - I don't always
Trust the good measure
Of those proclaiming t'be
"Wisened by age," you,
Ramblers of truths.