(after Marylyn Tan’s ‘re: origin story / ARCHETYPAL EVIL’)
Being immortal is being
sated about being salted
in cycles – day and night
the pry and shut of eyes.
Once, Ah Kong was young
and fleshed out, peachy
with beginnings. A fool,
not knowing that fruiting
is the end, or figurative –
how time is tried, tested
as a painter being tired
of the biggest canvas.
Not the cosmos, but in
housing a weary start.
*Ah Kong: Romanization of the Chinese noun “阿公”, meaning Grandfather.
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.
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.
(for Ella)
Poor Betelgeuse; Swollen with health
although dead for centuries.
One day the Milky Way will be torn
like spilled milk.
What is left, is endless space.
What is right, is the natural decay.
What is wrong, is that I am still waiting.
In the grand schemata, you are words in this stanza. In your grand scheme, there is nothing so cosmic like the flings on your strings. If I were flung carelessly like a star across light-years it would be the pinnacle of a civilization. Most don’t go this far however, although you did. You went beyond the end of this piece. Outside the observable universe. Leaving the interior dark. I still shine, casting shadows over what you did.
The Sea of Fecundity is acne from an eternity of puberty. The dark side is always covered by hair. Acne erupts in a forest, unseen. There is no face without hair. There were phases without hair. They still insist on long hair being a phase. Being new was supposed to be the absence of a phase. Being new is being unable to face having no face. Especially without hair. Gibbous curls shift in an eclipse of a hundred years and everyone watches. An oblique profile. Picture it. Eclipses are a return to hiding. To be full of courage for one night a month only. To phase out every other day. To be up every night. To return to light pollution as home. To smile or frown without eyes to see yourself. To see eternity as a phase.
When the city is too small
for the heart, a walk in a bar is
travelling the horizon of the moon.
Each crater a landmark of progress
but in the same shade that is
unreliable since you circumvented
twice. If craters were large enough to
contain our warmth the universe
compensates by echoing loneliness –
Still, no one can hear the moaning
or the smell the alcohol that clogs
the futility of memory, the taste of
names that spill off your glass onto
the lunar soil. The next civilization
will question the evidence, likewise
aching for why aren’t there more.
An empty room jostling with space,
lit by the city and the stars.
Brubeck and his quartet taking five
minutes of contemplation,
thoughts freeing thoughts
to construct using constraints.
Fingers glinting under moonlight
like your bones against darkness,
solace rewriting time signatures
from metronome interiors.
Midnight transcended,
smiles escape windows
to become light pollution.
Walls will reverberate
emotions singing in the shower.
Silence returns as a lover,
whispering sweet nothings,
listening to how
you are static.
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.
Lune L. 