"We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have.
The rest is the madness of art."
- Henry James

Good Tiding of the Week (and Semester)

I got into the honors program for my Literary Arts concentration!!! This means I'll be writing a thesis -- a chapbook of poetry, probably. So much excitement ! : ) Shall start squirreling ideas.

I'm going to be in New York again for the weekend -- woot. Looking at the Singapore civil service career fair -- not so woot. Ah well, always good to have a Proper excuse to have fun! : )

Working you out

I will write about why I, for lack of a better word, want, you. I want something from you. I don’t know what it is, if I knew maybe I could look elsewhere. But instead I call you, without feeling anything significant when I hear your voice. When we talk, there are silences, during which I wonder if I even have anything to say to you. You fill these silences with small rambling narratives about what you cooked for dinner, where you ordered your furniture online, how many hours you spent playing a computer game. I lie in bed looking at the clock and watch the second hand barely perceptible in the dark making its trusty, ticking round. I watch you on the other end, by your window, smoking the tenth cigarette of the day, laying down a winding path in the distance between us with cinder blocks of mundane details. I cannot see your face, and its expression as we talk. Or at least, I can see it laughing, I can see it smiling sometimes, but I cannot see it during the silences. I can only infer that since you do not let these silences lie long, nor do you put them and their possibility away for good, that you want something too. I wonder what time I should say I’m going to bed, and I decide initially that 30 minutes is a comfortable, generous enough duration. Somehow, somewhere along the way, I stop watching the second hand or the minute hand and the next time I look, it is two hours. At this point, I realize there is reluctance on my part to stop. The conversation does not reach any deeper into me, but the act of holding your voice to my ear does. As does speaking into yours. And I start to worry, that now you will be the one allotting a limit, and counting down. Except a part of me knows that, somehow, you won’t be the one to end it. And I always am the one who says goodbye first. But after that, a certain loss. There is an emptiness that recurs, when I no longer hear you speaking; the bridge between us no longer leads anywhere. The next day, I’m looking for a trail to take me to you, but I no longer know where you are. The more important thing is, I have no idea why I want to get to you.
Only one moment stands out: how kind you can sound. How gentle, how accepting. It is then that I can see your face, slightly frowned with concern, and those seconds are sunshine in a dusty room, saying it’s okay that you’re not spotless, dust is beautiful too.

Leaving Pokhara

Help is proffered but we give you the lightest ;
Small hands and thin backs cannot lift these , not
even musclemen goodwill.

Downstairs a seated row of adorable heads
Arms folded, clear ready eyes large with farewells
swallow our faces with smiling awareness.

Then, open bodies launched as greetings –
good (morning) bye Miss we will miss you ;
a garden decimated a frenzy for final gifts.

Hands are too small for this mountain so eagerly
made, you give us black plastic bags to bring
red, fuchsia, white, yellow away, and we feel the guilt

of stripping so suddenly and widely a rainbow.
Flowers will grow beautiful again, but these earnest offerings
will not last past today.

A final frame of metal gate doorway, within:
three short figures across in endless clamoring columns of black hair bobbing -
I try, but taxi window grime does not relent not even for last