Love in the time of dystopia

One does not enter into a pas de deux
To be suffocated by the garish smell of roses,
Haunted by the lamenting ghost of Petrarch,
Asphyxiated by the abhor able lies of fairy tales, or
Stifled by pledges of love that even
God is incapable of.

We are but mortals,
Plagued by the disease of incapacity,
Living among those
Living putrid lives, cowering behind
Facades, veneers, suffixes.
Adorned with various ornamentation of aggrandizement.
Brandishing pitchforks and bibles.
Sounding barbaric war cries of desperate psalms
Over the hills and the valleys

And yet we flood, parched, heat scorched basins in deserts,
Deaf to the echoes of yelps resonating from
A distant Babylon
A barbaric tumult.

You could have been the spectral orb that
Descended into the decrepit microcosm of my
Non-existence.
Such clairvoyance and astute discernment.

We talked
To the proximity of dawn
Deep conversations
Till the imminence of a new day.
Which beckoned us to our respective
Pigeon holes, miles away.

The mundane somehow dressed itself
Resplendent in couture gowns

But you know how they say,
It is always a placid, languid calm before a raging storm.

A thousand scars,
Festering wounds.
But some say decomposition is an innately beautiful thing.,
Perhaps it creates fertile soils
To sow the seeds of regeneration.
A baptism of fire.
Who would have thought that we would emerge
Scarred but unscathed.

I huddle,
In a fetal gnarl .
A silent-guilt ridden catharsis.
Apocalyptic Merapi.

All was white hot. All was chaos.
We’d both wish we were
Masters of the art of repression.

But we are happy now.
We put down our shotguns and bottles.

Indeed, purgatory is at our door steps.
One thousand years of a monochrome rapture,
Sucking the righteous into incandescent clouds.

But not you, not me.
I’d like us to be left behind, on this
Godforsaken wasteland,
To witness the epic destruction of Mother Earth.

Climbing trees, scaling canopies to have a glimpse of the world.
Crumbling, nevertheless.

We were born afraid,
Nourished by insects blood,
Birthed from gilded loins
Scars are collectibles,
Part of growing up and old.
A masquerade, a macabre parade.
Martyrs died sanctified but insane
We salute those who fell before us,
While we traverse from
Pigeon holes to panic rooms
Deck the nondescript mundane
With Bohemian crystal chandeliers
That could have fed a starving nation.

I remember stroking gilded roses with a shortness of breath.

There is something rather lyrical in the windows, reflecting light from monstrous cranes. I thought I saw Orion’s belt. I gulp the slush of frozen wine in the light emanating from the leftover tea lights we bought for our Sunday beach escapade to some man-made beach. A beach, a fabricated beach of reclaimed land and exquisite imported sand. A beach, nevertheless.

I remember the horizon laced and lined with the lights emanating from the lights of a thousand ships. If only the they had been mobilized and summoned by some legendary beauty by a jealous lover. Helen of Troy perhaps, with a beauty so ridiculous enough to move a thousand vessels. Oh Agamemnon, you foolish cuckold.

A sigh from the shortness of my breath extinguishes a tea light and I scramble to relight it with an adjacent candle only to be mildly scalded by molten wax.

I continue to scribble incessantly and ramble in a frenzied handwritten soliloquy. Reciting, with a pen, a monologue, nobody would bother to read. These pages might just end up feeding the famished flames. But to delete is an action of such convenience.

Slush wine melts from the heat of my tongue feeds my ataraxia. Bacchus, Epicurus, I
eschew all faith in an afterlife. This bottle fuels a fecund mind, orchestrated catharsis.

The sound of traffic, the scent of dried flowers. The waft of cigarette smoke. The dancing shadows from the gyrating flames are companionship tonight.

A night alone is like one hundred years of solitude.

Omnipresent Phantom

You, the omnipresent phantom,

transfigure into

the

Bleeding, scarred, azure sunrise,

Pebble lodged in my shoe,

Glint of the bohemian crystal vase converted into a pencil holder,

Sound waves resonating from the speakers hooked up to a device playing melancholic songs,

Reverberating heart throbs,

Photographs of white landscapes and alpenglow,

Zenith, the celestial sphere,

Marrow in the bones of my lunch,

Orbs I see after a dry spell,

Quivering heat wave over the parched tarred road,

Jubilation after a serendipity,

Therapeutic effects of the sound of running water,

Pungent aftertaste of medicine,

In the much anticipated earthen rain.



We will forever be antipodes, dwelling on the opposite sides of the earth

Syzygies in a perpetual orbital dance,

Careening and meandering around the moon.


Analogous to a shapeless, formless, ever morphing


You are now,

A verisimilitude, a semblance

Incubus

Spirit
Spirit of the moonlight and fatigue
Rise from the shady shadows
Like dust from the rubble
You wander in the cadavers of silky arms
And legs
Sprinkling you potent aphrodisiacs as you go
To Fulfill your virginal craving
Descend onto me, you mist entrances me,
Lifts me into the smoke filled air
Filling me up in one wispy orgasmic gush
Cold like the Artic
Gripping, like dry ice on wet skin
You're nimble, malleable as you
Plough through me, fill me up with your deep hunger
Swallow it whole
Devour in one bite
Your willing host, your pleasurable slave
My lids are not shut as you hoist the umbilicus of the child
Whose resin oozes, lumps of mutation
You stitched yourself onto my limbs
Child of the elusive shadows

Limbo

Love,

Who dangled you between my skin and
What defied gravity and put you in between this sleek blade?
Who would have foraged into such a God Forsaken place,
Who'd walk into such a bleak land alone and unarmed?
Did you see lush greenery in my cyclops eyes?
Did you see us becoming like
Midnight cloaking a sultry bay
We angels kiss and exchange souls
and through cyclop eyes penetrating our souls
You saw the good in me
And into your arms, i resign in euphoria
Hold onto me
Even if i stop breathing,
Just like how i'll linger by you
If you should
Lose yourself
Or lose your way

Dear MIA

I'm the lone stone in this dank cave
A pagan awaiting her feared deity
I'd offer thee my daily offerings
Deck the walls with crimson roses
polished the jagged limestones to mirror gleam
And fend off Lady Moon's intruding pallor
Why do you still let me bleed?
Every time i make this worship
Pierce my throat with a lancet
Bloody mouth! Bloodied Towels

Dear MIA,

This is all for you

The million pilgrims, they await outside
With blood trickling down their mouths, necks, garments.

Shall i let them hordes in?
Into your lonely temple?

I'm lonely expelled.
Why do you answer my prayers so passively, so implicitly?

MIA, my silent God, my dumb deity, you're corroding my being.

Your indifference, Your nonchalance, Your wanton sigh

Between the Glass Windows

The mannequin behind the glossy glass window, is
Stiff with rigor mortis.
Perfection in plastic, plastic restricts
Rigged, ram rod, eyes a fixation.
Alas! She is but dead!
But forced into a fate worse than death.
Beneath her pristine, prim, plaster cast,
Lived a staggering, star-gazing,
Dewy-eyed dreamer.
Mind, foamy as a Tsunami’s crest,
Eyes with the glimmer of Aurora Burealis.

Forces of indefatigable power could not avoid,
Splitting open new veins, rust-red, exposed.
Raw like red meat on a butcher’s hook.
They had hot molten plaster to
Seal the wounds and gushing arteries.
Like fresh cement over a criminals grave.
Crystallized, her silent scream

The mannequin behind the glass window.
With chiseled jaws and Dionysian bliss.
Isn’t she enviable?
Her torment is absurd to the vagabond,
Leaning and peering into that glass window.
Jealousy erupts and envy corrupts.

Though movable limbs and fertile womb.
She shares this universal despair.
But bounded by a plaster of a different kind.

Different plaster to numb different minds.

1) Weltanschauung

1) Weltanschauung

Naked, pink and huddled
With the milky, moist smell of birth.
Journeyed from ethereal to cradle,
From dreamscape to landscape.

Then, you, cradle snatched,
To a vault, entombed to ultimate Thule.
To darkened woods and faded parchments.
Became the foam on waves ebbing on
Melancholic shores.
Out of space,
Out of time,
Into a distant phantomine.

And I,
A toppled vase, a tramp,
An Eidolon, formless, white-robed ghoul,
Encamped in an ill womb.
Waiting, like a statue, greened by the salty wind.
A floatsome bobbing on a shoreless sea.
New wounds and lonely old scars, and
Still death intertwined.

I longed for a stasis shattering reply,
But intoxicated by a strange nepenthe,
So vanished you into my labyrinthine mind.

Two decades forth,
You rattled at my door,
Jolted memory,
Like stars of dizziness,
A fiery morning in my desolate winter.

Like two grains of sans on a common shore,
Reborn infants to newly weds.
You emerged from your tomb, and I from the ill womb.

Like tempting eve,
I, a ripe berry,
Craving to be plucked and consumed.
Settling on your warm lip,
Dark night juice nestled within you

‘Untitled THX 36473’

‘Untitled THX 36473’

The streets are ablaze with the cawing of the birds.
A cacophony of crows and jack hammers crushing, convince me I am in Megiddo.
I whisper silent, hoping to be heard.
A fleeting sentence floating on wisps in the air.

These dire times have proved to bring out the best in me.
The ticking second hands, the melting ice, the fan rustling.
With my lover beside me.
And the omnipotence of the innate fear of the unknown.

I fall, arms drawn, pistol flashes and whizzing bullets down to their last.
Scarlet threads asphyxiate me; Entangled, dangling from the tree like strange fruit.
I seek comfort in the ambiguity of silhouettes.
Illuminated by the blinding lights glaring at me from behind.

Flicker, flitter, flutter, trickle.
My blood is dripping on your nipple.
I dread the day, photographs turned sepia.
Devoured and ravished by silverfish.

Regression, oppression, suppression, progression.
Who sings the songs that know the aching of my heart?
Will someone please circumcise the encasing crust and lift the wooden shutters that blind out the Sun?
They say these barren wastelands will never have a home but I lift my arms to shelter what I do not know.

How I long for fertile fields that sprout spring flowers that feed on our dead soldiers.
That sway and dance playful in the summer’s breeze.
Decisions or fate? That decide which side of the fence, the ripe apple falls upon.
The birds will still call in this maddening heat, with one less swallow who really did sing.

I am teetering on the tight rope between obscurity and obscurity.
A circus. A spectacle. A freak show.
Of what shall come and what must go.
For the yesterdays or for tomorrow.

Please accept this love medley presented in my weather beaten palms.
A potpourri, a motley crue, an amalgamation of nothing new.
I begin to wonder if you already know.
That I know you will always be this bold.




collaboration with my precious star
xoxo

For we are incandescent stars circling different orbits

On a reclining bed, ceiling gazing
A pillow beneath my head
Perfecting my spinal disfigurement

If I wore a Guy Fawkes mask to sleep
Will it induce the sleep paralysis I’ve yearned for?
I want to dream of derailing trains,
Weep upon an Aurora Borealis
Lust for my profane love,
And watch a nebula disintegrate into
The nothingness of a pitch black hole.

Here, there is no shelter from the rain and the pain
Of errant skull shattering hail stones of no mercy.
All I need is for you to
Talk to me, ravish me, lynch me
And spit in my face.
As you scourge me,

For ye, For all our shared deeper conversations:
With Love


Fettered, manacled, hung from chains.

Or will self flagellation be a more alluring option?

Please build me a hollow home in a dark, dank chamber.
A hermit who can hurt no one but myself

For we are incandescent stars circling different orbits
Perhaps someday we will meet, greet ,
Then crash and burn

The spectacle
The Mise en Scene
The Sublime

Collaboration is a coping/defence mechanism

shit will always gravitate towards the fan
if you get in its way you will just get shit your your face
so let it be let it be let it be let it be

Life is like a box
When you open it
you find
a dead frog

Rainbows in the Basement

The Sacred and the Profane

The dichotomy of the sacred and the profane is not equated to notions of good/evil or strictly defined by the canons of taste. Interpreted in the context of its existance, the grotesque and the sublime are interchangable, the lines of which distinguish them blur as we speak.

To fill the vacuum between the polar opposites of high brow/low brow, haute and basse.

The bane of bad graffiti is salvaged by the picturesque medely of moss, mould, peeling paint and shattered windows - the odd displacement of objects and entities culminates into a symphonious melody that piques and provokes.

To practice such artistic "dualism" is to break through the ritual mind - like a bulldozer

Painting Dorian Gray

Checkered tartan skies, tapestries of rainbows and
Sequin constellations lace a beckoning frothing storm.
Fading into fields of Sicilian brocades, ecclesiastical vestments
And ethereal forests under blankets of silvery incense.
Painted Salvation mountains disintegrate into
Formaldehyde oceans, cellophane fishes and adobe reefs.

When confronted with the silence,
Reply with a haiku,

Singing,
God is beautiful,
Sometimes.

Bloated salmon carcasses float on lavender scented bubble bath rapids,
Splay legged nymphomaniacs bloom from its fertile banks.
Plastic forests with chrome undergrowths
Go up in smoke in the peak of an Australian summer,
Thirsty for the sound of rain like a Stockhausen dreamscape
We thrive in this celestial planet of amorous twilight.

A sweet leitmotif plays on as
Angels play hide and seek,

Singing,
Heaven is a utopian
Ideal.




Auschwitz-Birkenau, Christmas Eve '07




















Photographs taken on various my nomadic escapades.