One Saturday Morning

I went to Ang Mo Kio on a Saturday morning and found a clown sitting by the post boxes in the void deck. He had a baby sparrow feather in his woolly winter hat, curly salt-and-pepper hair, and a thousand-colourful-mirrors shirt complemented with a wacky black-and-white-smileys tie. On his feet he wore black Crocs and from his bag out stuck a pair of cheap plastic clubs wrapped in aluminum foil (from NTUC?). What are you doing? I asked. I'm waiting, he said. And then he whistled Tian Mi Mi, ending vibrato style. That was nice, I said. You're welcome, he said. Is the aluminum foil from NTUC? I asked. No, he replied, it's from Sheng Siong; they have an offer on aluminum foil every second tuesday of the fifth month of the zodiac year of the rabbit. Oh yes, I recalled, my grandmother once told me that.I invited him for tea at the kopitiam but he said, I only drink kopi-o or teh-o. Me and those like me  are lactose-intolerant. Oh, I thought, this is the most important thing I learnt this weekend. When I went back to work on Monday, I decided to be lactose-intolerant too so that I could be more like him and those like him. After 33 days, my boss fired me for non-conforming behavior.My gynaecologist gave me some good advice so I went to Mongolia and became the first vegetable farmer there. All my smiling meat-eater neighbours came to buy my kang kong and sweet potato leaves and learnt from me. I made sambal kang kong and became the richest vegetable farmer in Mongolia. One day, I was sitting in my ger tent knitting a turquoise scarf when I heard someone whistling Tian Mi Mi outside. It was a hot day and the infinite grasses looked thirsty. I parted the cream-coloured cloth and there stood the clown from the Ang Mo Kio void deck. He looked exactly the same but carried a huge lemon-yellow backpack that looked like it could have made 500 glasses of lemonade that hot day. What are you doing? I asked. I'm waiting, he said. For what? I asked. I think I'm ready to start a life here with the infinite grasses and the blooming clouds, he said. Okay, I said, we can do this together. Okay, he said. We went in and chomped on celery slathered with American peanut butter dotted with Chinese raisins. It started to drizzle outside. We smiled at one another and I shared with him the secret of growing kang kong in Mongolian weather.

friday the thirteenth two thousand and two

I am 25. If I don't live to a hundred, more than a quarter of my life has passed. I have morphed from a brat who loved sitting in an armchair after dinner reading storybooks; to an awkward teenager who adored the beatles, read up about 'hippies', and was an encyclopedia of oldies; to a human clown with a secret, floating on a cloud, pierced intermittently by acid rain, faithfully drinking liquid chlorophyll every morning before a fruit blend. Gee, maybe soon it will be time for a voyage to the moon. Did you know it wasn't real? The publicity, the facts, the people sitting in front of their TV screens believing in magic. This shows that magic doesn't quite take place like that because people in power are almost always bad; that real magic is not an old-time magician with his trickery props, his heavily-eye-lined red-lipped classic beauty and his jangly alibaba pants, slicing her in two, nor is it in smoky potions or elusive alchemy because we cannot touch what has passed for too long (though I can touch the sixties because it wasn't far too long ago), but real magic is in asking people if they want to come to the moon with you, warm thin thosai on a rainy day served by a waiter whose shirt has lost its button at the belly, holding the hand of someone you love and not thinking exhaustively about Other Things, a bird drinking nectar from magenta flowers after a drizzle, the clouds moving slowly across the sky. If you ask me what all these moments add up to, I don't quite know right now. But if you trust in the moment and let it be (whether you are being interrogated by your boss -who is boss?- or whether you cannot get up in the morning, anything that creates bile in your pink belly that once had nothing in it, nothing but breastmilk, now it is full of shit) you might find that everything is lighter, and you can breathe easier. And then some things don't matter so much anymore. And the things that matter, you work hard to keep and improve. Voltaire said, choose to be happy. I suppose the reply from the dark is yes, Yes. That was the word that took John to Yoko, or Yoko to John. (though now, he is in the sky and Lucy -Yoko- is down in new york city living in an apartment overlooking his mosaic memorial) I saw this written on the table of someone in office who sits near the pantry:

After the final no comes a yes. And on that yes the future of the world hangs.

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