A ‘nice’ man is:
a nice man is…
“A nice man is”
(a nice man is)
…a nice man is,
a nice man is.
Category Archives: Language
Murphy’s Law for Interstellar Fissures
One night, I swallowed a planet.
Two moons later, a wrong word
shifted a wormhole via bad praxis.
Using language as a fork for soup:
these tears I stippled on my cheeks
where they should be rolling down.
Another night of failed application.
When you deconstruct my apologies
in a black hole, all sentiment is lost
like the wormhole above. Speaking,
when I cannot hear myself in space.
It’s not like you heard, or replied.
Swallow
Words she took out of my mouth,
she wrote a poem; Found the moon.
I take back what I said about her:
You Gorgon, with a bite you created
the Crescent. If that is not beauty,
there is still the phrase about phases:
On your face, figurative expressions-
All frightening the cores of stars,
showering praise as I cried the night.
A lump in my throat turned to stone.
Which was hard. Difficult to love.
Love too difficult, gravity too easy.
Freefall
There is no place for love
where it falls, autumn leaves
without winter to catch it.
I moved to a place, reminded
of you. Something that falls
is not necessarily caught.
To be in space, nowhere still
a place. Action and consequence
falling into place, where I cannot.
Clementi Ave 1
(CW: Suicide References)
The school fence divided a past –
the road between Nan Hua and
NUSH being syllables of us in
tenses. Outside the fence was
bubble tea, and the rest of a future
without it. She walked me to the station.
Before, someone jumped, landing dull.
My heart did flutter on both occasions –
it too, wanted a sky without gravity.
Both times, emotions sank like pearls.
In this timeline, movement was loss:
there went the bubble tea shop, too,
when I moved in to queue. Waiting.
To meet her just to forget her later.
Everyone will forget who jumped, too,
and how I climbed the fence, still
running between syllables, and away.
REPERCUSSIONS TO THE SUNK COST FALLACY OF BEING IN AWE
Dreaming of the depths I knew
my name: a left radical sharing
what’s inside the Chinese rain.
Much deeper, was the universe
in a stroke. Haemorrhaging left
galaxies. Blake’s Tyger left alone.
Like Medusa, sculpted in their prime
and indivisible. The Artist measures
them in the thunderstorm, struck alive
via negativa into a vignette. At Marina
I shot the horizon a glance. It drank a
cordial distance, swallowing the deep
again, killing a star. We let that sink
for millennia, carving marble into shatters.
Writer’s Trap
I found a poem so clichéd it was painful.
Proceeded to use a bandage. Left it where
I dropped it. Clichéd is now a pun for hurt.
It is eye-catching like how Fool’s Gold is an
idiom. By association it is a mousetrap topped
with a slice of cheese. The cheese has holes in it.
I am not actually a mouse. I like metaphors to the
extent of breaking my fingers for them. Wrapped them
in this piece, applied pressure to stop the bleeding.
Found clichés abound under the sun even though
it is nighttime now. No outer space references here.
Just filler in inner spaces without the negativity.
Wall of Text
Every word in here is exhausted. I am writing
in notepad since I cannot write on walls. Wall
is tired and does not want to be written on. Notepad
is tired and resists, being, written, on. There is repetition
since writing is tiring. There is, and will be elaborations
since writing is tiring. Wall and Notepad are not friends
because they are tired. Wall and Notepad are not friends
because they are empty. Wall and Notepad are not friends
because of repetition. Wall and Notepad are not friends
by association, by correlation, by elaboration, by repetition.
They are ions in this poem. They form its literal structure.
They show that I am tired, while Notepad has finally succumbed.
Not every word in here is exhausted, and a wall writes itself.
4-Room Flat
Four variations of lights on
four fingers to type
four stanzas by
four a.m.
Three found sentences
Three syllables in a row
Three unfound haikus
Two; Walls; A ceiling; A door; A window; A floor;
Two walls: Third’s a partition. Fourth’s being read:
“A pair of flats, removed from my doorstep.”
Gangsa Is Raining
(with apologies to Iain Lim’s ‘There’s A Fire In Bangkit’)
Afternoon there was rain,
but without a space for grammar.
Does grammar require space?
The kind between fonts,
an interstellar whiteness.
“Isthisanongrammar,
isthisanonstanza.”
Ser-ifs and sans are the same.
Like how rain is a tick-er, the trans-it-ions of
a puddle sentence, into a puddle stanza.
Who writes Gangsa without a name?
Who writes without a space?
“Torrentingrain,
torrentofrefrain,
torrentwithoutsiderestrain.”
Lune L. 