Sunday, October 28, 2012

Dearest Singapore

This is most serious
Stuff, truant
To an authority
No government supplies.

This is where putative, obstreperous,
thick, petulant, topoi, cover, etiology,
occlude, gams, algolagnia, and
Debauch are words
You don't think about
Too much.

This is the part I tell
Something about you
Being an assassin
Because your swift crazy clean
Marauding roads are front
To a thankful just beheading
(Hang them people who misconstrue
A statistic of monarchies)

Hang them
Before a public. Misuse everything
Foucault has
Said about loving
I have
Not read him. Great depths
Are only for
A church. You cannot misfire.
Your shots are blank and tact as black
Marble baby eye.
Tie knots to doors by railways
To remind them you're there
Not as a machine. No cry
Is enough to detour a silent shiver
All technologies have led you
To consider. Earphones
Are phalanx,

Real? It is I
Who is not.


Dearest Singapore I
Letter by letter take
You for granted
As complete thankless tectonic
Flat issues of day.
I take my supper, slice
My eye and die in your sun-
Less blues. Cosmopolitan
Teams: hard work!

Pay me thousands
Of tax-free tax and real equities.
Pay me with senile dogs
Who can no longer be
At my beck and call?
Pay me with cats
Who have done their full neglect
Of my feeding? Trade my decay
With your casual flirts of new rugs


Trade my international
With local sundials, deducible income,
stocks and theory games.


Dearest Singapore why
Have you not forsaken
My wanting?
Why have you 
told yourself to endure
The weight every capital levies? To buy
Myself is commodity
I cannot wont, too. Two is not a number
That's still true.







Dearest Singapore, this is the part
I
Type something trite
To offset the previous
Intention of writing
Subtle brilliant takes on how
You appear glad
but gray

This is the part
I say something
Like, "But no! You can also be
A structure of gay dailies.
You are stabilized by-
Product of a beheading
Nobody needs."





It is fodder
And ravage that dictates. We kill
One, we clean more. Two masks in halloweens cost, boo hoo hoo Who doesn't pay for hullabaloo?"


















So why not dearest Singapore, why
Not learn from/for
Deadly dead lilies,
live sarcophagi, the math
of Beth, wraiths of wrath,
The alphabet?









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Posted by Richard J.A. at 10:56:00 PM | | Comments

Sunday, December 25, 2011

Smoking

There are three ways to do this.
First, we meet. Second, you weep
Then we make out and delay a sleep

The third is a series.
You wake up and see if I'm there
Or if I'm not where you should go.
Then there's a dinner of steak
and I remember how far
the edge of this sea
from where you are
and I picture a day without you
and forget it is
before I ignite a cigarette
that shouldn't be lit.
Your body fills my thoughts,
your mouth mine.
I think of kissing your eyes
in the middle of a sea
I do not own, like you now,
unreachable by smoke

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Saturday, October 22, 2011

Homage To Their Meaning


I've never seen you stammer
songs
There's no minding whatever
someone
left out in a story

What part of past isn't given
To crying? To what debt
Shall I burden the pen?

In crime there's witness
To nothing. To no one 
I play my piano now

Someone's sitting's a love for fat
Someone's standing sobers the flat
 Our body's sweat. Everything's wet
Everybody's somebody's
Person to forget

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Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Movement and Distance

[Distance] is the basis of all measurement of length. -A. Einstein

My moon resembles a wagon, its books contain
Music you need to die twice to hear
A window of arrows will stun you. A brave life
Shall be shamed by my very scent

Your face shall be halved. It shall share
Not one of its slats to armoring trolls
Your taken souls shall question
How it never stood up with me. Then we'll listen
To its attempt to sway me back to a hand
I know is more strict than time.

But then we settle, the dregs keeping you from day
Then you brush away your hair, silent and stolid
Like wet kitten dunning a mother for milk

Then you move, sew, drink and watch
Then I wrap, make, quiver and fall

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Friday, October 07, 2011

When People Are Asleep

This city's engineers are asleep and live in mountains.
Some of them do not know how to spell beige.
Some are not looked upon. Some can't see the man
wearing nothing, pulling dark sewage out of a world
He's probably not an engineer. We can be sure,
too, that many of them have green eyes
or plainly, eyes that see the color red
Eyes that caught mine when I'm in the mood to judge
Eyes that don't notice there's a dead baby on the streets
Eyes that wince when I blame no one for a dead cat
Eyes that are colorless or, like in dreams, gray
Some eyes differ from what I think eyes should be
Some are lonely-looking, but never frail
Some, thoughtful, but believe that everything is in twos.

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Saturday, September 03, 2011

A Poem For Our Security Personnel

This is a poetry written for a security guard.
Of course it involves guns, failed marriages and supper.
It will try to look into the introspection required of the guards who form pleats to their pants.
It has something to do with walking and how much easier life would be if it is
a job essential.

Guards who can't sit down on duty shall be tackled.
Their mothers' story of how they've borne a child who sits
for not a minute while on duty just to secure a room full of gamblers
that none of them bet less than they should, shall also be covered.

But these are not the essentials of this poem.
These are not even given facts for facts require deferring
and clearly there's no deferring among guards who can't be bothered
to be asked of their opinion on money and stocks.

This poem shall mention about the guards' eyes, their chapped
lips, their bent muscles where water cascades when they take a bath
and all the preparation required to not be invited
by the moon nor the sound of an absent female
to pull a trigger down their soft thirsty mouth.

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Monday, January 03, 2011

Iced

How come you have iced mocha but not iced chocolate
If you serve only the genuine, the only one I tolerate?

Are you trying to say I'm poor
Which isn't what exactly I'm not aiming for

But not the one I'd like you to show me now
Unless of course you tell me to kiss you's how

I should see the end of days sitting here alone
Watching people listen to their books

To refuse to listen to people today
And start asking if I might not as well be just stone.

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Friday, December 31, 2010

People Give Up

Photo of Masha Novoselova by Peter Gehrke

He starts to take out the piece of printed paper place mat from the fast food place he could barely stand staying in for the muzak that if you're a bit inclined to thinking everything's easily conspirational, you would've thought it's subsidized by a corporate bureau solely commissioned to discourage introspective thought, and immediately writes the first thing that comes out of his mind that he could rip off easily a story from, so he might for once in a very long time finish a story he could a bit care about enough not to throw away. Oddly enough the first story he thinks of begins with the muzak that blares out of this bistro's stereo system but which he tries to veer away slightly unabated from but not without the kind of effortlessness you notice of people being nostalgic of pebbles because right now he is thinking of the story about the girl again.

This one right here is fairly not wanting a necessary strained effort you are required to give when, say, lining up in a grocery queue to purchase champagne, in order to be read by the right market focus audience. It is not easily fit into the simply lazy and uninspired category he's been loyal to fit all his women in to demonstrate how you couldn't get out of your concept of anything that matters to you. How you can't resist to write about it long and clear enough not to throw it away again or if you do you still can find the courage to pick it up or even remember in the first place you've written something even about it being more than just metaphor. But you write this quick enough you no longer worry about why you shouldn't be writing about it, if that's possible within the realm of what you think is time.

But this one's fresh. Acrid even. Misty if you will, in certain respects such as you're actually holding her hand or your shoulder's by her cheek under the current and draft of the aftermath of just mere threat of rain.

But there's no rain when he met this girl in the story we're probably no longer able to digress from without a single bit of threat that it's just sadly mainly trying to just go back to when you never even got bothered to write about it anywhere, anyhow, anytime.

This girl, as a foremost to a bigger albeit not better scene, starts it by responding to his question with "What?"

The question being was: Is This The Part I'm Supposed To Say Hello.

"Come Again?" being the follow-up message. With which he continued with, "See, if you're there and about to do something as unusual as asking a street kid to come with you and I was just there standing, sipping lemon iced tea with mini-cookies staring at the whole filed of the rotunda and then sometimes laugh at this man's attempt to sell us cigarettes, what with his dirt-laden hands that clearly wouldn't be a hindrance to people who might think of buying some sticks from him even out of pity, if I may be allowed to be blunt and slightly awkwardly trying to be clever about it. And then you're there, a few steps away from me, wearing something I just gave up expecting people to wear in a weather like this, with that smile and this move with your hands and the natural awkward state obligatory for those who have seen these kids the first time. And then I could no longer help it but at the same time couldn't exactly pull off the game of putting some sort of real sexual exit out of the exactingly calculated and almost arabesque-like brilliance of the beautiful ratiocination that why bother when everyone might just have AIDS or, worse, want kids? People give up. So that's why I'm preferring to play the role the answer for which might easily be found in one mere question of where and when exactly should I say hello."

"Hello?"
"Yes, the simplest hello."
"To me?"
"It would be weird if it isnt."
"Well either way it is."
"You mean weird?"
"What else could it be."
"Why?"
"What do you mean why?"
"What do you mean what do you mean why?"

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Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Cardigan or Sleet

The talking horse and the sad girl
and the village under the sea

descend like stars in a land of long evenings
and radically different vegetables
and a flex is run from our hearts
into the hearts of those who do not know
the meaning of the words

cardigan or sleet

-Mark Haddon, The Talking Horse and The Sad Girl

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