Tong Wei has realised that HC students are, in essence, undoubtedly normal people after all - they are atill ceaselessly amused by macabre sexual fantasies, they are all pornography-loving, lecherous individuals at heart. Ian's revelation tt Keith's virginal looking hamsters are in reality agents of porn.This set Tong Wei off waxing lyrical about the libido of today's youths.
Tong Wei is also greatly impressed with poem by Dawn Lim from the next class:
appropriate days and impossible nights
shiva god
of destruction
and wrath i will walk barefoot over fire
to you, body smeared
with ash, hands washed
by their blood self-sacrifice my cry
to you to destroy
the flesh, distill the spirit
from the broken slate
of my body where i will rewrite
this new testament of faith so you find
in me the paradox of our land, where destruction
is a form of creation seeing
is believing the resurrected truth as we
hold up flags that cover
the bareness of the walls beneath,
the bareness of discoloured skin.
*
a temple that reverberates with a multitude of noises intrusion
of too many sounds assaulting one
another : heavy
scent of jasmine flowers dancing in air piquant
with tumeric that descends like orange pollen dust
upon hair evening
prayer call from the nearby mosque, sonorous
and low, entering with a breeze that disconcerts
the gods, stirs
the strings of mango leaves – they fall
like the plaintive chant of a priest trying to relight
candles in the dark
sound dis con
nected sound dislocated prayer interjected prayer
interrupted a teak cage,
bright, red
structure the shape
of a pomegranate on the other end of the street
where a bird is singing chi chi chi, sharp
and shrill, over
the distant
churchbells on the first sunday
of the month, laughing in naïve
optimism to the discordant clatter of cowbells
over the gopuram where a woman kneels, whispers diffusing
into the midday heat god hear
our prayers god hear our prayers god hear
our prayers through our temple’s
porous walls the wail
of a little girl squirming in a sari 1 yard and a quarter
too long tracking the dust
from the road outside onto the floor where an old man
in a white dhotti is washing his feet and face, each drop
of water catching the sunlight like splinters of a mirror
*
to my land besieged
by the vision of itself
it will stagger towards, step
by bitter step when you have reached
that point of no return, remember –
tell me the shape
of your face as you see how i must
see it: i will assimilate it
into mine, following your steps a blind
prophet, making my pilgrimmage barefoot
towards the realms of the gods
and hearing nothing
on the edge of this epiphany, except
the sound of my jagged breathing
*
there are appropriate
hot days with good weather
when we visit sri nananana temples with maps and printouts
while sipping vending machine coke
by postcard stands
and impossible nights, crisp
with rain that veils
the slumber of gods
a net,
filtering
the luminescence of the city:
bad luck.
this is where i want
to stand alone, holding
nothing but the imagined
darkness where there are only
prayers with no words: their verses
the silence held in broken hands.
:: dawn lim
Tong Wei finds this piece of literary gem deserving a mention on her blog, and resolves to start her own portfolio so that she can apply to be enrolled in the Creative Arts Programme (CAP). Mandatory to include diff styles of writing, preferably genre-specific in the categories of prose, poetry, plays and novels.
It is highly impossible that Tong Wei will be able to crank out 10 stunning works of art within the next month, therefore, Tong Wei has to start firing away immediately. Sadly, Tong Wei is suffering from sever writer's block, but she of high morality refuses to plagarise anybody's work. However, she also feels that the sharing of work would/should not be compromising her saintly principles.
