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)!
1,538 Degrees
Tag: prose
Million Medusas
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.
Unless you, you
You could cope一nope?
Fat hope.
Virus Villanelle
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
White Whale
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.
a eulogy for a dreamy sunday afternoon
i. sunlight seeping in borrows a rosy hue from tinted window glass, dancing off your tousled hair.
ii. the stereo murmurs a dull synth-pop tune to colour the silence, inside the lines.
iii. buildings we pass melt into a nondescript blur, like abstractions of ink on a drenched book.
iv. the weight of my baggage surrenders to the one tugging at my chest. i know i am not half-dreaming.
v. there’s only so much i can read from the back of your neck, like newspapers shrouded by the dark of morning.
iv. you mean so many things to me, things no tongue could explain. not even to myself.
iii. this silence amidst noise is killing me. i would rather burst into a rhapsodic wail, out of tune.
ii. this moment will not yield to captivity. like a firefly in a jar, the only glow i see is put out by the last breath of a dying dream.
i. heart and soul, mind and soul, maybe it’s time to let this firefly go?
precious 