We existed there—roving through time like the party boats adrift, whimpering away their last song. Rooted against every instinct, we stubbornly are, though even the river shivers under the midnight blue skin of space. I have stranded reason in the daylight, forgetting how the moon’s crescent cradles my secrets, nearly tipping them in your ear.
Courting this memory like a fool— a dream that evaporates upon waking, fraying more at the seams with every attempt at recollection. In a better world, I would transform into portal of truth, mapping the blueprints of this night in every way but the fabled fashion I desire.
Would I still remember your gaze, so arresting that it confounds mine? A fugitive, I leap from the cathedral to the city’s eye, then melt with the amber strokes under Blackfriars. Could I still let you draw my hair back to pick a misery, one that beckons softly and glistens tenderly, eager to trust like a lily from the earth?
As credulous as Gloucester, my fictions a solvent for my facts. The walls with which you say I banish you keep my brimming inkwells as still as the discontent of winter, yet they remain as leaden as the Thames below, Because when you say things like “The city was mine like never before”, I can’t help but raise my quill,
our trip to grenoble got cancelled because of a surge of omicron cases in the uk, so we decided to take a trip down to the historical town of hampton court, where the majestic hampton court palace stands. acquired and developed by king henry viii in the 1500s, the palace and its surroundings still carry the regal aura of his reign.
all pictures were taken with an olympus om-d e-m5 mark iii, and edited with my own lightroom presets.
letters in letters you left, loose embers frolicking in an innocuous upward twirl to: you, a glassblower on that flirtatious gallivant, breathing shapeless sand into golden honey. fun, fun and games. you roll me over like a dice
and then i am at once spellbound, whisked into a game i had always watched behind shoulders but never joined. mostly modest breaths shorten, breaths soften, till you inflate me like a proud mother’s chest.
for every reason i can find to hate you i have two more to love you instead; for every thankless task i droop foolishly like a homesick adult, one too tired to find the itch in my spirit, the psychosis that bursts like
an outpour of flames to bake my lips into a stretched smile. annealed, inside me every second of silence burns my walls into a crisp. shoved into an inferno, fished out as a pretty vase, a goblet, a chalice… crystallized into
picture-perfect perfection. the treasures of Murano.
of the sweltering Italian sunshine. of strange nights spent aching for more letters awash with love from: you, to: me of protests, shattered selves in the kiln, haunting still potsherds of a heart that saw it coming.
A poem about Lindo and Waverly Jong from The Joy Luck Club: A school assignment I stumbled upon while clearing up my Google Drive. Written when I was 14, supplemented with my own analysis (for once)!
happy phase 2 😉 finally crawling out of the cavern of my room to meet my favourite humans
ROLL 1 + 2 [JULY 2020]
Camera: Pentax IQZoom 90MC
Film: FUJICOLOR C200
being able to wander with great company, even with no objective or direction, has been such a wonderful experience that Covid made me think i might never get to come close to again this year.
for the first time, i used a roll of film over a few weeks instead for a single event. when i first saw the developed pictures, i was filled with so much warmth that i couldn’t stop smiling like an idiot. after all, these are the people i love the most.
The sunshine lets a spillage of secrets Fool me into thinking that this is yet another beginning of my life. The Sixth.
Having loved one too many You still stun me stiff like a million Medusas. I am both paralysed by love and its negation 一necessitation? Nevertheless,
You’ve got me, again, like a pest Dancing in the very fumes sent to kill it
Always mid-movement, limbs bent all the wrong ways, reeling my words back again To mix them like paint on my palate 一palette? Perhaps,
What tones could I Possibly contrive to cover everything ugly and grim about myself? Sinking my loved ones in shipwrecks, A gut that has never known nourishment,
To make you want to frame me up And kiss my rough edges and paste me on the roof of your bunk bed? I continue Mixing the acrylics as I wonder 一wander? Whatever.
Another Orphean temptation of departure splinters my will, and a ghastly silence trickles down the walls of the room we used to inhabit. Sabotage is a tradition.
Dying, am I, just dying To erase this fiction一friction一 Prediction, Of so many untold secrets I dread no one will want to keep for me.
so i wonder, where in the minute are we? through a fortress of masked faces, minds, never thought the world would leave me
here, i stand far yet stand not free washing my memories, bordered by lines wondering, where in the minute are we?
digits skyrocket, into a soundless reverie under the stars, a joss stick bleeds and blinds, I never thought the world would leave me
they hope a strange fate shows mercy, for tangled queues and questions to unwind. tell me, where in the minute are we?
cradled like a baby in the arms of the big city, secretly waiting and dreaming feel like crimes. never thought the world would leave me
maybe one day we will believe, not only see to have died once is to have lived two times still, answer us, where in the minute are we? never thought the world would leave me
I am wandering, haphazardly at best,
head full of helium and heartbeats running wild
to a hallucinatory rhythm.
History stares sternly at me,
its piercing gaze raising the hairs on
the back of my neck. I’ve
been here. The soles of my shoes
fit perfectly into the craters of footprints
left behind in the dirt.
Perhaps I’ve just walked
the entire planet to escape you,
only to return to where I had begun
at the end of my cyclical sojourn.
I wish I could tuck you away
into a password,
or a receipt crushed at the bottom of my purse.
But you are my white whale,
an oasis in a desert. Like a drowning fish,
you make me pull my own puppet strings,
even when I’d sworn to cut them short.
I’m drawn to you, hideously and fatuously,
like a wasp is to a beacon.
And on some days, some better ones, the clouds seem to
morph into the contours of your face,
and I laugh from the earth below
at how even the skies
have a little sense of humour.
precious 