Friends, let's slowly build our sandcastles, and let's try to do it together.

lionessa leonette lyonine

"The Barbary lion (Panthera leo leo), also known as the Atlas lion or Nubian lion, is a subspecies of lion that became extinct in the wild or extinct in the 20th century. It is often considered the national emblem of Morocco/Marruecos/Maroc."

7 + 7 = 13

~~} Silence is all I need

Not dark yet

Leo Thirteen

(When Padma and I were rushing for a train ride somewhere in a small town in India, on a bumblebee black and yellow autorickshaw, kicking up dust clouds through town roads, I caught sight, in the distance, of Leo XIII Primary School)

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

Einstein

from Luca's quote bomb tonight

I like nonsense- it wakes up the brain cells

Dr Seuss

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Steel blue twilight in the world

And in my heart a timid star

Sara Teasdale

There's such an effort to try and explain people.

Tilda Swinton

I don't like standard beauty. There is no beauty without strangeness.

Karl Lagarfeld

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.

Dr Seuss

Interstellar Travel

There are wormholes in old books, the sky, an old musky jewellery box, bedtime stories, a song, a quote, a poem, a found photograph, a kiss (I wouldn't know though), the rain, the mail, going under the covers with toys. But will we ever know if there are mermaids and fishes (or unimaginable creatures) swirling and swimming in the underwater world of Ganymede? (warm currents, covered by a layer of ice, Ganymede, one of Jupiter's moons, looks like a glowing crystal ice ball you could suck on) And what if meteorites (pieces of rock from asteroids that fall onto earth) are actually of colours that we cannot perceive, imagine or know of. They are not actually grey. They may even Glow or do other things we cannot conceive, like glow/meld/morph/interlinked with new concepts. Oh how cosmology blows my mind. It's wonderful, it's coming, my rocket takes off in five days.

moon light years

I can't give you anything but the air between us

dust particles that float in the cosmos between us

little galaxies of uncertain age

galloping to disperse, suiciding towards black holes

to free the space between us

a gravity-free void

to free fall into

free fall orbit

we'll lead stellar lives

STELLAR LIVES

free falling eternity

for as long as the universe keeps expanding

multiplying into infinite alternate parallel universes

(alternate or parallel?)

to the point of no time

time out of mind

no return, no mime time,

no infinitive relativity-

deep breath into love lungs

a trillion moons fly by our bodies

the stars shine forever

Love is

my grandmother asking me what I want for breakfast every night;

when she watches me eat the nutritious steamed fish with ginger

that she cooked with her tubby belly sticking out at the flaming wok;

my father who doesn't give a hoot-ass about the art I make

picking me up from the mrt at 11.30pm in his pyjamas;

my mother, not giving up;

a real tight hug;

lunch at 12:15;

sitting close;

letting me use the toilet first;

sharing water;

packing lunch too;

a handwritten letter, sent by post;

a brush of the hair, pat on the head;

a rusty old accordion;

landing in India;

28-rupee thali eaten by hand;

phone call from home in another land;

delirium spice mixed by heart;

long silent train rides, crazy wal-mart;

magic marvellous masala chai;

sharing roadside pad thai

you had coffee I had soya bean

you have long hair I have short,

you are tall I am so tiny but we

confidently walk the dark streets side by side;

landing in changi airport and

going to the girl's toilet together;

waiting waiting waiting and then

going to the movies together;

sleeping over with the cousins;

the smell of dried flowers;

the fresh taste of mango;

the warmth of tangyuan;

the wholesome fragrance of nasi lemak rice;

when you tiao found dou jiang;

garage sales on sunday afternoons;

phlegm wriggling in the pavement;

an old hard scab;

a wrinkled veined hand;

a gloomy reservoir lake;

the talon of a black cawing crow;

droplets of nosebleed;

throwing chicken rice at the wall,

sweet sauce stain and red chilli brains;

terribly sleepless nights;

nearly a heart attack, angry blue blood;

the familiar smell of insect repellent;

rough tree bark outside my house;

rainbow suicides on sunny days;

playing pretend on rainy days;

pretending to love on empty nights;

a mime;

without time;

time out of mind;

fat juicy lemon-lime;

not needing to explain;

dangerous, poisonous, consuming;

simple, gentle, sweet, kind.

I am my own castle; head to the blooming clouds, roots to the wet damp soil.

beautiful bag of old flowers

'my heart will stay yours until the day I die

even tomorrow in other's arms'

(dear you-know-who, like the smile?)

Tweets from Yoko (I used to wonder why Yoko would subscribe to technology like tweeting, then I visited and found out that the way she tweets is wonderful and spreads something out there like ripples):

Watch the sun until it comes into your body and stays as a tiny sun. It will keep your face shining even in the coldest of winter.

Imagine a cloud slowly going across the sky and back. Send a postcard to your friend.

Look at a star in the sky not as something unreachable but as a planet you would visit one day.

Tell us when you first noticed the sky. Tell us when you first thought that the sky was beautiful.

The sky was the only constant factor in my life, which kept changing with the speed of light and lightening.

All my life, I have been in love with the sky. Even when everything was falling apart around me, the sky was always there for me.

As I told myself then, I could never give up on life as long as the sky was there.

The Abduction of Amelia Earhart

I don't know much about her except for

'Adventure is worthwhile in itself'

but the moment I set eyes on

Collage by Joana Coccarelli

I knew it must have been.

Tonight I lay alone in the baby pool looking up at the salmon-smokey clouds in the night sky through artifically planted coconut trees in my auntie's housing estate, my ears were submerged in the pool so everything felt like a vacuum and I was somewhere else. Slowly I realised there was a ringing tone in the baby pool. Brrrrr...........brrrrr.............I sat up into the real world and looked around. There was no one else. Then I let my ears in again, they got filled up, and there it was, somewhere in the depths of the 0.6m pool......Brrrrr...........brrrr.................was it Amelia calling from outer space?

Then I got up and sat extremely still and my goosepimple legs were hugely magnified in the water and didn't seem like mine. Little bubbles were sprinkled all over my belly. They are like pearls you can't touch because they keep running away, you can't even feel their surface. But you can flick them up and they fly to the surface, like parachutes going the other way. I stared at the tiles with my eyes so close to the water it felt like my eyes were seeing that way by themselves, and the grimy turquoise tiles were like the surface of an alien planet with distorted proportions and no weather, and luminescent waves of light floated across the surface like gentle dancing, and I stared harder and it was like a miniscule Amelia was climbing the tiles which were steps from another angle, climbing endless grimy turquoise steps in an other-land that wasn't peaceful or bad but just. And then it was time to go home.

My love, she speaks like silence

Saigon, please wait for me.

You have selected a departure date that is in the past.

'Spit your oranges into this basin!'

'I am falling off the castle! Hallllp!'

'Spit, SPIT!!!!!!!'

'I don't understand why we are not in the swimming pool?'

'Why did I ever fall in love with you? Too many oranges! Madness bloody manic madness stupid craze everyday from bloody pips and orange peels and orange-coloured faeces'

'Let's dive off the castle and forget about oranges forever'

'WHY CAN'T YOU EAT LEMONS INSTEAD'

Kristin's Dream In November

I went thru the turnstyle to the party
In the risqué penthouse that was not
A penthouse, I followed people but maybe
They weren't people, it was ethical
To follow them over the edges of the balloons
Until we found some tapsons to eat, heartily
We indulged & found the right move in relation
To the movements of the lion's mouth, the mouth
Which counted all who entered & left waywardly
Haphazardly the immigrant sphere where
Frozen petals fell behind the red curtain
So slowly they woke me like a knock on door #7
Behind which I'm dreaming
& trying to tango remorselessly


Bernadette Mayer

*

After eight hours of sitting in an air-conditioned room in front of a computer analysing forms, papers and proposals, I get home and am eager for a hot bath but before that I like to stand naked admiring myself in the huge toilet mirror, under the orange light that casts eyelash shadows of black-spikes under my eyes, and thaw.

Jeanette, Oranges are not the only fruit

"As it is, I can't settle. I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed. That is why they are unfit for romantic love. There are exceptions and I hope they are happy."


"The unknowness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met. If you want to find the circumference of an oil drop, you can use lycopodium powder. That's what I will find. A tub of lycopodium powder, and I will sprinkle it on to my needs and find out how large they are. Then when I meet someone I can write up the experiment and show them what they have to take on. Except they might have a growth rate I can't measure, or they might mutate, or even disappear. One thing I am certain of, I do not want to be betrayed, but that's quite hard to say, casually, at the beginning of a relationship. It's not a word people use very often, which confuses me, because there are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, and then being on somebody else's."

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.

Oranges are not the only fruit, Jeanette Winterson

“Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that will never be again. And what do we teach our children? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, your clever fingers, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must work, we must all work, to make the world worthy of its children.”

Picasso

Rusty John Lemon Snare

Drawings and words from an alternate universe

lemongrass clouds: My Star, Him

Scent is a symbolic of flourish and intangible happiness

How many words can you rearrange your name into?

Thonburi

Kanchanaburi

Ginje XI

You like fish?

I LOVE YOU

I'm not saying I love you

I won't say I'll be true
There's a crimson bird flying
when I go down on you


Ballad of the Broken Seas




I think he used to like my mother.

Now she is married to the only man she has eyes for and they have children. So does he, but once.

What hard eggs.

Spellbound

The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow.
And the storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing dear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.

Emily Brontë

Now it seems to me some fine things have been laid upon your table

But you only want the things

you can't get.

If reality is constructed in the mind and life is only as we perceive it, then if given a chance would you want to be put in a sleep forever where your mind can dream whatever it wants to, construct worlds, greece, spain, oceans, even outer space, beyond the milky way, even back in time, kampongs and medieval castles; could you agree and accept that as reality, knowing flesh-and-blood life could never give you that? Could the lover from the dream become REAL like the blood and bones lover standing before you who is, equally, a perception?

What stops ye?

Waking up everyday without reporting to someone, not spending the day in an air-conditioned room, using the day thinking and making things, but most of all

the world of adventures, places, rides, strangers, corners, oceans, fields.

I suppose I'm stubborn and seem mad, but I only feel sane thinking this way.

What does it mean to Make a Living?

I suppose, ironically, one has to work for freedom, towards being more free.

She comes down from Yellow Mountain
On a dark, flat land she rides
On a pony she named Wildfire
With a whirlwind by her side
On a cold Nebraska night

She ran calling Wildfire

ode to no one

my cartwheels are never straight
for the dust inside my bones
pollute my young boy's frame
make my rosy little cheeks
the rouge of an old grand gran;
happy laugh lines are wrinkles
lying against plump pillows
on moonlit nights with crickets
outside the cracking wood windows
lying with soft feet crossed
can't sleep or weep
dreaming of cartwheels
and circus crowds
the marvellous blue-yellow tent
sticky slippery lollies
and steaming caramel corn.
i do cartwheels for you, my sweet
handstands tumbles somersaults
just to get to your dark hole
my love is a cartwheel
strong and free and flying hair
green grass to cirrus skies
to lie with you in a caravan
how grand we'd be
for no one to see
just me and my ruby ring
you and your hohner rust
forever young
forever old.

Do you think to kill me?

There's no flesh and blood within this cloak to kill. There is only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.

-V for Vendetta

*

A new year, and I've never felt more different. I don't know what it is. Wake up every weekday to do something that does not make me happy, wait for the next fulltime job with hope but a large dose of cynicism, brewing plans in the cauldron of my mind, butterflies in my stomach from possibilities, clinging onto old but always fresh fantasies of greece, spain, japan, and magic, more than ever, understanding more about the world and the un-world and myself and what I am to become, thinking of all my plans, plans, plans of which some may never bubble and some will. And the first meal of the year was The Elvis. It's going to be a good year.

*

I haven't slept well in three weeks, and am hardly allowed access to dreamland. Listening to MR. CHILDREN's 深海 restores some hope in men. One hardly meets them but I do everyday. The fruit uncle downstairs who has no favourite fruit.

Dive into the big blue sea!

Why is it so hard to find a sea around here to dive into?

Why don't we have a deep dark wood?

And John, because I can't ask my Mummy or Papa, why can't we lie down somewhere at night and look at the stars?

Lastly, what is the meaning of breasts and pubic hair?