ALIEN LANDSCAPE
Author : NHJ
MSN: crescent_cage@hotmail.com
email : spherickey@gmail.com
Other Blogsites
MRH
Yeoks
Airina
Iskandar
PostSecret
echoncyllan
Before Gargoyle
One Million Footnotes
Read My Poetry.
Playing:
Between the Bars (Elliott Smith Cover) by Metric
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
something sinister is brewing.
it started when my eyes refused to see the tangible.
constantly fixed to a distant future, scouring for possible hitch-hikers. i dreamt of my daughter. apocalypse dreams are no longer surprising but my daughter? my clever mimicking daughter with wispy hair and laughter like rainstorms. what is there not to be scared of in the world? give me one thing. just one. i try hard not to be when i hear whispers. shh.. the future. it doesn't.. it doesn't exist.
darting in paranoia on the landscape. having long talks with fat African women in colourful garb, flying down a hill on a skateboard with feet, playing with Nuri, sleeping beside a crackling fire or just running. running with my own two feet, with a horse, with children, with Nuri sometimes. i don't like being on the landscape sometimes because i know i would never want anyone to see it. it is important to understand.
those books i drown in. creatures other minds manifested whom i fall in love with dozens of times. the wonderful thing is, they don't love me back and it's ok. the belligerent minotaurs, brave Timothy who i want so much to be like, Bastian and Atreyu and Falkor, the wizards of Ark, silver gold and bronze dragons of Krynn, kenders, the magnificent Africans of Okri's tales, Sophie and Socrates, Peter Pan, oh so many more and Sturm. dear dear Sturm Brightblade. he would be scornful of who i am and that's ok. it rarely isn't.
if forced to acknowledge the tangible, i would peer at it through the reflection from F's eyes. there is no greater magician on this earth other than the one you love. of course there is also the kaleidoscope F got me. kaleidoscopes are funny and wonderful. i never go anywhere without it.
with my mind always wandering many planes, playing many personalities, everything is so conflicted. everything in tangles, emotions undecided. there are voices that have been hissing from the darker corners of the mind, which i have been desperate in convincing myself that they are not part of who i am. all the things that they whisper; blasphemous unholy filthy evil things. it makes my head jerk involuntarily, trying to shake them off. i worry that one day it would jerk so violently that i break my neck.
i don't know their origin and each day i get more frightened thinking perhaps i birthed those voices, i gave them their black souls, i fuel their burning hatred. is that why people look at me so contemptously? what stories have my eyes betrayed? these voices. i am in agony of their conquest. i tire of them as if they fed on me for more ideas for their horrible hisses that render me near hysterical.
they make me loathe myself. they are like broiling thunderheads rumbling in from an unknown source, blocking out the sky. i can't see anything but the blackness of who i am.
even with F gushing at me and proclaiming how beautiful and expressive i am, i only see the poison clouding his vision and reason or the kindness of his big wonderfully bottomless eyes. what troubles me is that even if he tasted and heard the evil that is the murk and filth of these errant voices, he would still love me as ever. i hope his devotion won't one day be his undoing. what is a wonderful magical boy like him doing with such a black person like me. rhetorical; i don't want or need or appreciate an answer.
i wish i could say that he, that foolish lovely boy, is the one keeping me sane.
[29 April 2005, Friday]
i banished most of those villainous slugs only with God's help. there are still few lingering. i know now where they come from. but i am too ashamed to write it down here. certain flaws are garish and possess a distinctive stink that can be detected a continent away. this is not one of them. this one is gray and black, swirling and discreet. it is slime dripping mutely to form a restless sea of guilt and self-hatred. it is the scum that colour my tears black and unworthy.
Posted by NHJ 4/27/2005 07:57:00 pm
Saturday, April 23, 2005
the creaks and slices
F told me today that the earth-bound trees aren't what they seem at all; that they are the wings of the earth. one day, earth will just fly away. from what i wonder? certainly not from us. you can't fly away from a disease. but i can already see it in my mind. those branches will creak and grow and slice the air. creaks and the sound of slicing tree-wings across the globe. if the earth do fly away, of course no one would notice. we hardly feel the spin.
but nonetheless. under the precise thin intricate shadows of the trees towering our pathway as we walk, F and i spread our arms (featherless and non-membranous) and flap silently and laughingly. and i would look into those eyes and fall in love all over again. happy moments.
then later in the day i pointed out a dirty yellow dove to him. its head was framed by concrete structures. we became sad. because we thought all doves are white.
as our day came to an end, we couldn't do anything but watch the yellow dove waddle away. so i seek solace in his eyes and love him yet again.
but it doesn't feel like he knows. because my hands were always in my pockets.
Posted by NHJ 4/23/2005 11:53:00 pm
Monday, April 18, 2005
Pan
seletar was surprisingly intangible and surreal despite the distant squeals of minahs and mats fishing for sick water-dwellers. all that linked me to that place were F's intermittent chatter, the cool of trees and the patient rain. i sat by the edge of the water with him and whistled a wail from a carefully chosen blade of grass; my grandmother taught me that long ago. the wail was a trembling highnote, heavy with woe. you cannot imagine it unless you heard it yourself. i felt like Pan himself, blowing on my blade and occasionally touching my thigh, almost expecting fur. there we were, a couple of Pan-like satyrs, wailing across the waters to the satellite dishes across. i saw those gigantic abominations turn sadly to us, i did. they transmitted our spell all over the world. all needless transmissions ceased and were replaced by our soft piercing grass-wails. doubt many heard it.
Posted by NHJ 4/18/2005 08:58:00 pm
Friday, April 15, 2005
i dreamt of Revealer again after so long. we were kids again. him still smelly as earth, messy hair and wild eyes behind flimsy spectacles. like orbs of untame magic being kept behind a matchstick cage. still it kept them in, amazingly. the boy Revealer. soft, with wild cold eyes of hard gold. there were runes in the way he looked at me. runes of comfort spells, scrubbing my guilt off. then he held out his hand, waiting for me to give him his smile back.
Posted by NHJ 4/15/2005 07:45:00 pm
Thursday, April 14, 2005
Nuri
i dreamed all the way through the time meant for studying quantitative analysis. QA bores me rigid. i went to visit Nuri, my little girl-giant. with hair as deep as the deepest blue and eyes like broken pieces of opal and sapphire. with eyebrows like strips of clouds, eyelashes like snowflakes carefully torn apart. feet as brown as earth. when she stands still, you can't see her.
Posted by NHJ 4/14/2005 06:13:00 pm
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
i am 19 this August and it is time to prepare for my death. perhaps only now have i seen clearly my position on earth. an average of 60 to 70 year lifespan. surely this timeframe doesn't represent human life and the whole point of being human? i for one am a believer of the immortality of human souls. meaning what comes after death is undoubtedly eternity. it is absurd to think death is an absolute end. i think our scope of thought and our capability to consider the possibility of infinity says it all. i don't believe that thoughts, ideas and imagination are merely conjectures. they are branches that sprout from the seed of truth.
this 60 to 70 years are all the certainty i have compared to endlessness, which is simply not enough. i will die and then all of humanity will follow. then Time dies. is it too arrogant to believe Time exists to chronicle humanity's existence? i am afraid. what should i fear?
do our mind have an edge? where imagination fail to comb further because of a bottomless fall towards the ultimate truth? if so, perhaps then the universe might have an edge? but why can numbers go to infinity and not the stars and blue?
i don't know.
60 to 70 years. a trial period.
Posted by NHJ 4/13/2005 08:26:00 pm
Saturday, April 09, 2005
eye to purse, eye to purse
i have memories of banging my head on the table. vivid throbs of pain. but i cry because the pain disappears before even one grain of sand can drip through that hole in infinity where time was born. a fraction of a second. harsh whispers of "it didn't happen". and i keep tears in my purse like coins. i am shamelessly generous with them. they are also aspirins for this guilt. i suck on them one by one and more just stream out and harden.
the grains of sand keep trickling and there is no movement but of my hand, from eye to mouth, eye to mouth, purse to mouth, eye to purse, eye to purse and eye to purse.
Posted by NHJ 4/09/2005 10:17:00 pm
it is not enough that i have destroyed myself, that i let tears ebb from eyes instead of from the nib of my pen, that i let my words run wild by talking into empty spaces, by constructing stolen architecture, that i salivate words away in my senility instead of screaming them into constructs. now i eat poets. breakfast lunch dinner supper. i crunch chew and belch with ink dribbling down my chin. i close my eyes and weep as my nails scratch words that do not belong to me. i imbibe secret images from blessed eyes, savouring the dead juices and battled off warrior muses. and i bleed. i bleed and bleed and bleed and felt no shame.
today i ate my lover's heart. it was more than just ink. oh God it was more than ink... there were colours, colours without names, loot from a thousand worlds, pulsating raw emotion and the pounding... the pounding of such beauty. streams of phantom ships, swirls of tears that God decided to turn into stars. it all exploded inside of me and i am empty. i am so big. so empty. i am so sorry... oh i am so sorry...
my hands have moulded into my face and this mask of flesh will protect you. from my greed, from my hate. please wake up. please please please wake up... i need the world. and i need you.
Posted by NHJ 4/09/2005 09:25:00 pm
the boy is a sprite.
i have to go back to writing. posting entries in denial here is just not enough. i close my eyes and even then read my eyelids like parchment. cramming my head with foolish information for the examinations just makes it even worse. useless words just twist and spread like vines across the page. i hate institutions that use up this much paper. and it is even more hateful when people scoff at my insisting to recycle paper. can't hardly blame them though. they don't have trees falling and thumping upon their hearts. like nature's wardrums. wouldn't be nice to sit upon a branch of a walking tree? like in Lord of the Rings with the Ents. mr Tolkien must've the same wardrums in him as i do.
the computer is infected with spyware and there is no access to launchcast. lack of music makes me edgy. silence is not necessary when i am not dangerously angry. empty spaces is unnerving. walls need to be covered, white blanks need to be written on, ignorance needs to be punished. isn't emptiness just so Painful? thank God for filling all that dark blue with stars. my limbs will be tangled in perpetual writhing if the stars go out.
of course, here in Marsiling there are no stars to be seen. but when you look out of the window, there are those sky-scratchers. erected so sturdily like tent poles to keep the sky from falling on us. they get higher and higher and the sky gets further and further. and i am here. at the top. the sky pressing down on my head with its great cloud palms. ah perhaps that is what mimes are pushing at after all. the sky. the greed. are mimes employed by the government to keep the sky that far off?
i love the name of my hometown. Marsiling. isn't it beautiful? better than Dover definitely. what a harsh hurtful name. it sounds like a dove-hunter. and better than the Bedok. now that sounds like somekind of a choke. apt though.
Marsiling is a beautiful name.
my ears rang again. they are straining from the music and F's loud voice. i wonder sometimes if he is a banshee. with those large watery eyes of his, the loud voice and the detached child-likeness. so very like the uncaring banshee. but i am not fooled. that boy is no banshee. he is a sprite. that explains his absurd, annoying love for the whole wide pretty world. that crazy boy loves without hope.
or maybe this dreadful dull ache is me loving through him.
good thing i'm in love with him. because i won't be able to stand him otherwise.
Posted by NHJ 4/09/2005 12:10:00 am
Monday, April 04, 2005
them who hate the sun.
i have a friend who is a sunflower. she is beckoning to me from afar.
but my navel cord is not long enough to go to her field. a mere kite above the gray.
i came to know her through a poem i wrote, 'Bloodied Sunflowers'. i saw her among the thousands in the field, all creations of my muse. though there wasn't anything distinctive about her i loved her instantly.
i came to think that this was all pretty narcissistic, to fall in love with a flower of my own poetry. i like to think the muse for the poem was simply a letter from her. a telepathic telegram where i played the poet-machine.
the sunflower come to me in dreams so i might lie among them and converse in dreamcode. it is always either during sunset or at night. i believe sunflowers foolishly think the sun to be a redundancy.
even in dreams her kind were unable to speak nor sign. the wind is her translator. the soft-souled elemental would tickle her and make her dance out her words. just like a child.
once she told me to stay. don't wake up, she said. talk me through eternity.
the next time, i asked her to come with me. in a pot. i didn't know why she got so angry. her giant golden head shook menacingly and her leaves trembled in the wind. i am a flower, she said in the end.
i chew on sunflower seeds a lot. it is like collecting a friend's tears to harden and suck on like a toffee because her sorrow tastes so sweet. i will try stop eating sunflower seeds.
Menetha calls me Kuachi sometimes.
i offered to take Menetha to the moon once. on old Catstrip. she hadn't really took up the offer. perhaps she thought i didn't really know the moon. perhaps she thought it was just my way of cheering her up with fanciful words and images. i'm afraid Madam Moon won't even look at me now. do you know what it's like to have the moon turn her face away from you?
i'm sorry sunflower. my navel cord is far too short. i haven't the courage to cut it yet. no one has ever done it before.
what would you do? would you pull out your roots and run to me?
i guess we'll just have to settle with just dreams.
Posted by NHJ 4/04/2005 11:40:00 pm