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069 | a dialogue

I've been thinking.

Yeah? About what?

I want to write a book.

You got a lighter on you?

Uh—yeah. Here.

Thanks. God, I feel like living now. What kind of book?

I don't know. I just want to write something, like, nice. Something my great-great-great grandchildren will be able to read. You know.

Take a few pictures. Make a fucking scrapbook. That'll be something nice to leave behind.

Hey, I thought you liked books. What's your problem?

A book? You want to write a fucking book? What, you gonna throw away your job? Stay at home, sit in front of the computer, write a few words, get stuck, play minesweeper? Grow a beer belly, memorize the t.v. guide, agonize over the difference between then and than? Jesus Christ, I can't believe I'm hearing this from you. You hated writing.

Well, I'd think that I wouldn't have to quit my job to write a book, dude. I'd write as much as I could every day and take my time finishing it. It's not like there's a deadline. And I've learned that writing is—nice. Like, relaxing.

What, you think you're going to going to pound away on the keyboard for like, half an hour, an hour every day? You gonna publish the twenty-first century version of War and Peace when you're eighty?

Listen, just forget about it. S'not like I'm really serious about it. Just thought you'd be interested, you know? God.

No no, don't listen to me. I think you could write a real nice book. You got an idea?

Not really. Tossing around a few in my spare time.

Ah.

Mm. Uh, hey. What, like, happened? You used to love reading books! You'd search the library for the novels no one checked out and devour them overnight.

Get with the times, hey. Don't have the time to read through novels, especially the trash that comes out today. It's like a total waste of trees, you know? Every time I see newly released books I feel like weeping in a dark corner over the sheer amount of waste that occurred for the sake of the same old regurgitated shit.

Whoa, hey. Calm down!

It's all the same. How many different ways can you write about love? How many different kinds of love can you write? Writing over three hundred pages about teenagers who fall in love and then fall out of love in a week. The novels aren't gonna last that long, just like love. I remember high school we'd find a passage about sex in a novel and we'd blush and quickly turn the page. Maybe read it again later, when you're on your own. Sex sells, and it sells books.

Uh—

It's a fucking laugh. Fiction as a reflection of our society and culture. Have you gone to the bookstore lately? If it's not trash romance with sex and drama and affairs and broken hearts it's one of those long-winded novels with a plain protagonist and a series of inexplicable, unexpected events that blows away everything he or she thought they knew and forces him or her to seriously re-evaluate their life. And then critics and people with a bit of fame read it and have orgasms over its "subtle sensuality" and its "deep meaning" and the fucking message.

Hey—

There's always a fucking message. As if having a message that a thousand other books have reinforced means it's "deep". No, it fucking means that author has lived a little. But if it's not that it's the avant-garde shit with surreal situations and colloquial English and such stark portrayals of life it's like seedy pulp fiction. So fucking contrite. So fucking cliché, even when it's not—

Hey. You need to calm the fuck down!

—yeah. Okay. Sorry.

Jesus Christ, you sound like a fucking bitter professor. You okay?

Yeah. Really, sorry. It's just—so frustrating.

S'okay, I understand. So—you really haven't read, like, anything interesting these days?

Yeah. Not really.

Oh.

Yeah. Uh, I am reading something new, though. It's sort of boring, but—yeah. Romance on a prairie and all that.

Oh. I'm gonna guess it's, uh, one of those long-winded, uh, "sublime sensuality" kind of novels?

I think I said "subtle sensuality", and uh, yeah, sort of. It's—boring. Beautifully written, but sort of—really—boring.

Sucks to be you.

It's Canadian. I should have known.

Posted on Sep. 4th, 2008 at 03:26 pm | | leave a comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend

068 | korean standards

KOREAN STANDARDS OF BEAUTY;


Posted on Feb. 20th, 2008 at 05:15 pm | | leave a comment | 3 comments | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend

067

i. d r e a m e r
she
          likes to run
          , search for shell on
          distant seas
          . likes holding them up to her ears
          &trying to hear the waves,
          receding from the shore

          she guesses right,
          turns left and
          skips through the sand
          , holding out her hand like
          proud little sunbursts. "
          mother, look,
          " she says, "i am holding
          millions of little suns
          in my hands." too many planets
          around too little stars, she
          knows, each of them
          full of waves,
          crashing
          upon
          too many seashores,
          lonely and empty
          .

ii. c r e a t o r
she
          lets sand slip through
          her wicked fingers
          , making tiny hills rise and widen,
          a grin on her face
          as she imagines a castle of her
          own dimensions

          the waves come too
          close, too close
          and she hurries, reaching
          anxiously for the next bucketful of
          sand, sticking the shells
          she collected only
          moments earlier onto the walls.
          she says, "you shall be
          windows, and you shall be
          spots of sunlight on the gate,
          " as she presses them onto
          towers
          after towers after towers
          . she manages a triumphant
          shout before a wave,
          too dark and too wild,
          conquers her world in just
          three seconds too long,
          ending something beautiful
          before it's had a change
          to be, and her shells
          are taken back into the sea, back to
          where they began, lively
          and wonderful
          .

iii. d a u g h t e r
she
          doesn't let go of
          her mother's hands as
          they walk back home together,
          s l o w l y and
          through the longest stretches
          of beach shores, leaving behind a trail
          of empty footsteps,
          hopeful and wanting to be
          filled
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Posted on Nov. 25th, 2007 at 05:21 pm | | leave a comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend

066 | 100 words, in double

Tarrega, he laughs, father of modern guitar, and too soon he's playing, pressing patterns into the strings that last for only the moment the note is born. The lines of his face tremble like the strings beneath his fingers, pulled taut across the length of the guitar. His unchecked, passionate expression is axiomatic, and so, it seems, is the eventual tangle of his fingers – the cacophonous interruption. The audience is held in suspension as they wait for the verdict to give them a suitable reaction, and he answers them with a laugh. Alcohol, he says, it must be the wine.
100 words.

-
 
Tarrega, he laughs, father of modern guitar, and too soon he's playing, pressing patterns into the strings that last for only the moment the notes are born. The lines of his face tremble like the strings beneath his fingers, pulled taut across the guitar. His unchecked, passionate expression is axiomatic, and so is the eventual tangle of his fingers – the cacophonous interruption. The audience is held in suspension as they wait for the verdict to give them a suitable reaction, and he answers them with a laugh, though it falters in the presentation. He says, it must be the wine.
100 words. 


english assignment, 2007.
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Posted on Nov. 18th, 2007 at 04:00 am | | leave a comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend

065



they've weathered dating (19 years old when they first met, and he asked her out; she declined, she was already dating someone, but, she added with a slow-once over, if i wasn't i would've), break ups (three years, and they were a little tired; if you hate my mother so much why don't we end it? said he, and she said if you're so nonchalant about it, maybe we should! and that was that), marriage, first child then second babies (she's precious, he cooed; she has your eyes, she smiled), and now they're left to stumble through old age together, left withered with trembling hands that still when phone calls come (how are you? they ask together, and sometimes it's their oldest child, their son, calling from work that has him located in london, telling them about his new girlfriend and how he wants to bring her home for the holidays, and sometimes it's their daughter, whining about how her dorm is full of stuck-up seniors that go drinking every friday night. other times it's the bank, telemarketers, representatives from the church just down the road from them, and occasionally friends).

they've lived together, twenty-four-seven-fifty-two weeks of the year, enduring hospital visits (for both them and their children), in-laws and friends that intrude in designated private times more often than not, and it's been long enough that they're each other's secret keepers, the only one in the world with knowledge of their beauty spots, with enough details about the habits that define each other to write novels and academic essays discussing the psychological reasonings of habits in length.

now they experience aging, up close and personal, and for them it's harder to accept the fault of the other than it is for them to accept the failings of their own body. the time of growing up has passed, but the time of growing apart has come, it seems; he eats leftovers for dinner alone, in between tutoring sessions with teenagers too precocious for their own good, watching american news on the television and thinking about tomorrow morning and his morning walks, while she sighs through books of sudoku and litters their bed with eraser droppings when she's not washing the dishes or vacuuming or folding clothes with a closed, pensive look creasing her face with submissive lines.

this is the way their life will play out for the coming nine years, until death comes with brittle fingers to close other their throats: sharing bedspace at night, waking up at the morning and observing sagging flesh where there used to be firm muscles, eating meals together and huddling around a telephone on weekend nights to listen to the sound of their children's voices. this is the way old age will end them; disjointed, meaningless, complete enough.
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Posted on Oct. 31st, 2007 at 07:52 pm | | leave a comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend

064


Free Burma!



in burma, the monks are marching. the pain of the broken lives, the horror of dreams torn open and trampled upon, left wounded and bleeding, all this they have seen with eyes deeper than scars. the multitude of lives they cannot vocalize by words alone, they cannot express through gestures of tongues, wrapped around a language lost yet familiar to them.

so they march. stand against an aspect of humanity (humanity, not evil - because more than anyone they know what it is they want to escape; they've spent days and days and years (a lifetime) with the knowledge of their humanity) with only the silence of their bodies and the softness of their faces, unfortunately and so beautifully human.

in burma, the monks are dying.
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Posted on Oct. 4th, 2007 at 02:59 am | | leave a comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend

063

your slumber -
    is   d e e p
upon my sleeves.
rather than disturb you from sleep
i will
             cut
my                    sleeves
and leave you
   with
          a
sheath
             of embroidered fabric.


  ♥
and then you will know it is love.
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Posted on Oct. 1st, 2007 at 09:08 pm | | leave a comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend

062 | utopia/dystopia



utopia/dystopia
2514 words.
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Posted on Sep. 26th, 2007 at 08:19 pm | | leave a comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend

061

it's you reading a story that clicks, a story that screams at you, "you could never write like this", a story that makes your heart ache with both the beauty and your inability to follow along in the shadow of the pen that inked it into the world. it's you curling in on yourself in the bed, huddling under your covers even though you're eighteen years old and it's midsummer and five thousand degrees outside, celcius. it's you walking down unfamiliar streets, jostled at all sides by strangers and potential acquaintances alike, pushed to your limit by a million eyes looking through you. it's you encountering a barrage of words you can't recognize, words whose definitions exceed your capability of learning, of understanding. it's you realizing you can't solve the complex math problem that looked so fucking easy when you first glimpsed at the test paper, that all your years of education were wasted by your impatience and wandering mind.

it's staring out the window, wondering why the world that displays itself so openly with its lights and sharp angles is locked to you, closed to your trembling touch and curious nose and close perusal, beyond the limits of your imagination. it's listening to that one song over and over again, your mp3 player displaying its flashing battery sign for a few minutes before blanking out, your ears ringing from the force of the melody. it's throwing glances over to your alarm clock, hating the way the early morning passes both too slowly for your liking and too fast for your sanity, hating the way the colon flashes, vivid and silent.

it's the world, it's the people, it's the multitudes of horrors you've never witnessed but heard of instead, it's the state of the earth you see around you, it's the trash and the shit and the pieces of lives littering the ground, it's the thought of love creeping into your heart like an old, aged poison.

it's you, you, you.

you can't stop crying, can't stop the fearful repetition of tears, hot and heavy, burning trails on your cheeks. your eyes scream, your lips become useless and deaf, your ears close. it's you, it's you, it's you. it's your heart, breaking.
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Posted on Aug. 7th, 2007 at 02:42 am | | leave a comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend

060 | optional

there is always more than one option available for you to choose from:

a. you die. life goes on. once barren trees bloom with leaves and burst into flowers, joyful yet silent, as beautiful and mysterious as they've always been, during, before and after your life. there are no overflowing tears of sorrow and passing-on; there are no quiet revelations as people face their day without you as if they are angels with their wings torn asunder, your absense only too gaping.

b. you die, and people cheer, your passing on a subtle victory on their part. when the lid on your casket closes, enclosing you in an unwanted eternity, the people mutter about you in the washrooms, fixing their makeup and adjusting their bra straps under their silky black dresses. such a strange girl she was, they mumble to each other, keeping their lips still as much as possible as they smear bright-red lipstick over their plumped-up lips. she was horrible to me, you know? they whisper, i feel so bad saying it, but i'm sort of glad she's gone, you know? she was so cold towards me, and everything she did was awkward and just -- bad. not the good way, you know? and there's nothing you can do but lie there, cold and breathless as the words pass over you, like the waves passing over rounded pebbles.

c. you die; tears bleed out of people like rain presses through the dense foliage of trees in a rainforest. the day is perverse with an aura of sorrow, and all the actions in the world seem sluggish, a tribute of mourning towards your cause. for all their tears, though, there comes no soft rains; you remain useless, only a buried memory.

d. you die, and the whole world calls your name into the heavens. your funeral procession is long and unstarved of people; it stretches on for days and nights, and even the stars weep with them. newspapers, magazines, t.v. shows - they all speak of you highly, glorifying your life and death in a manner befitting queens in the prime of their reign. you will be missed, they say, without your presence things will never be the same, they say. they're right; things never remain the same. still life drags on, mindlessly and endlessly.

e. you die, and time stops. your world does not exist anymore, and that is all that matters anymore.
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Posted on Mar. 28th, 2007 at 09:44 pm | | leave a comment | 1 comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend

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