Perfume that cries down your neck for you,
lipstick that will be erased without another’s.
Alcohol like water pools in your washroom,
contact lenses where no one gazes the color.
Dresses are a second skin to hug yourself,
shoes tread on pain to keep you on the ground.
Brush to sweep a face that reminisces bygones,
smartphone to illuminate organ spaces within.
Blues that fade into a solo tapping finger,
nights lost to a loss of words from searching.
I am in the ice, leaning against Ray Charles’
piano. The keys are monochrome and sharp,
within them a vacuum I must cross to
allow you to hear his fingers, the ones that
help me forget loneliness. He died before Voyager 1
found her courage to enter termination shock;
I told her that it was okay, your memory of Earth
golden among elder stars that have forgotten their
records. Like them, I have thrashed papyri to vinyls
to DNA storages to unlearn love, just to hear your
pulsar in my direction, a dense heartbeat in static.
Billions of years in songs of our destined galaxies,
but this coma eclipses my instruments to see the
creases of your slumber in the fabric of space-time.
Love is the entire Universe between pixels, where
i’ll miss you by millions of light years, just to find myself.
Mom claims she forgot, two decades without
touching a chopping board. But it’s still drying
up against the wall after being washed.
“Just buy frozen ones,” I pled, waking this morning
instead to find ingredients and flour painting the table,
filling the wrinkles of her hands. Eternal summers give us
less reason to handwash, too much like wringing sweat, but
the swept-back hair exposing her slick forehead is from
her habit of forgetting things and taking the long way.
It is the skins. Every fold pressed in has her going
back and forth. She loads in water chestnuts, mushrooms,
diced meat and the last of her morning. She serves them
in soup hot as the afternoon, still fresher than the memory when
I last had them at ten – it was night then, same ingredients
on a moldy board with fewer scars than her in Dad’s old house.
At least she remembers the recipe, and doesn’t need to return there.
Never really liked Apples, since most of what I had
were sour, and the taste of Father forcing me
to slice apples for an entire family. He told everyone to
take a slice before they did. If the family could be brought
together by a blood red fruit, surely the peeler that took a
chunk of my skin can tell the pain it took to my Father. I
gave up and ate a couple like Snow White did with hers,
juice running down my arms that I had to go to the bathroom
thrice each apple and I collapsed on the bed, still convinced
that Father was trying to poison me with his teachings.
January 64th. The stubble on my chin has been growing for T minus one
decade. February still has 45 days in a month where strangers want my hair
shortened to compensate for the long days; Every second given is a hormonal pill
losing effectiveness. Every day a wedding dress tears if I wore it in my head. Every
day marriage to me is eating fast food and passing it out without gaining nutrients. Every
day love becomes a beer that hammers me into blacking out from all that pain. One day
I might wash my skin out once I am done with clearing my makeup. On the 89th
I stare at this laptop screen. By the 93rd day of the week I am bingeing on illusions of
myself dragging my limp figure from the shore, squeezing every acupoint with salvaged warmth.
Scandinavian fixtures and the Space Age interior;
The brushed steel and pale wood will be delivered
tomorrow. Outside, an uncle sweep the ashes from red
altars the point blankness of an aircon light – Their rooms
are dim even in the morning; The primary school child squints
and divines their future. The primary school child might
dream of white teak tables and bleached walls and realize
how empty the visions of people in the past were. Everyone
forgets decor is still delivered by the laborious and not machines,
because machines do not pray for a windfall. Whether tomorrow
comes or not, they will struggle to light joss sticks with the light of smart screens,
decide on whether praying to altars or asking Google is the more efficient approach.
She is comfortable on a bar stool that
was as leathery as the night dragging on her
nerves, and proceeds to order Baijiu from the
bartender thinking the red giants that were her ancestors
would twinkle and breathe in a thousand
years of culture, a main sequence of events
that led to her listening to Jazz on a metal stool
in the first place. Her vape is filled with cherries
and longing for uncertainty, an icy metal rocket
where she daydreams in time dilation, oblivious
to neon signs and looming asian flush, the
heat inherited from her heritage in the heavens,
built for low tolerance, high cholesterol and
a passionate sigh for teasing streetlamps. The
music plays, bass guitar strings stolen from a
Guzheng, and she weeps like the mist on a
mountain road to enlightenment.
Fever from the haze of headlamps; Every
point of light is an orb making its own statement;
All beers consumed on the table drool in languish,
some are lolled on the floor like their drinkers. But the
flushing ones are fainting into the next step – Plateaued on
sex but work is another type of alcohol that also causes you to
faint regularly, even when under the glare of cities your flesh
throbs to the pendulum of your heartbeat on overdrive. You
become chaste with loneliness instead and you cannot bear to
smell arms and fabric and the smoke of the corridors. You return
to a home too quiet that you can hear your fears, the glamor of the orbs
coalescing into a single point of exhaustion.
Use LRT tracks as shelter, where the
underside is always dry, a canopy for your
wonder from above and recording stares
in the number of raindrops on tarmac. If
we disappear it still joins the sky, daring
foliage to return being greater than civilization,
and the red chairs of coffeeshops bloom with creepers
creeping and growing and enticing symbiosis since only
we had the chance to marry our creations. A Koel changes
a song to one that no one can imitate but no one is present
either, so it cranes a neck towards summer showers – Towards
the shadows cast from stone Gods that record and
narrate the passing eons in the day; Sundials to the
awe of the living.
There were still sunsets in 2006 and
the radio still required a listening ear. Cars
honking at futures, no one expecting a flyover or
construction workers seeing the brunt of society in
the midday sun. If there were things to think about there
was always geometry, and the heavens appeared after the
sunset to educate movement by hide-and-seek, despite
light pollution giving constellations no respite. I watched above
and the workers did too, the bleeding clouds injured from city vices
too old for children. If the future was a red-black apocalypse there was still
pop-punk then, to make friends with the static from bad reception, all
before the buildings engulf us into a universe without sunsets, one
that forgets how child angst has the clarity of distant night flights.
Lune L. 
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