Padang

People live side by side they sleep side by side they share bread and motorcycles and nasi. There is no space which exists by itself without others there to claim a part. You enter this city, you crave the people of this city, it absorbs you, it claims you. yOU don't own yourself, you don't own your skin, which becomes a thing, an attraction, a point of the conversation - kulit putih! cantik sekali! saya mau sy mau sy mau... - and like that we are spent we are not tourists but the spaces to be toured. Eye for an eye. Sharing breath and sweat and smoke and dua-ribu rupiah. Back of an angkot our hearts become one with the pulse of a loud and dirty tune or an Indonesian favourite. The heat cannot be deciphered as that arising from humidity or bodily warmth. People are the centre of gravity. The masses of them tell the story to be so. Our downfall. Our POTENTIAL. Our wishes to reach the highest point exists through people.
This is the crux.

The more taxed, the more used up, the more depleted, the more sapped of energy I am,
for sure,
for living here,
 ~ but  ~
the more I live,
the stronger I become,
the more I shall thrive, and
laugh at the end,
biting lip and
crazy like that with a
hardened shell of an eye
still soft on the inside.
Because
the more stressed, the more frustrated, more hindered, the greater the cage, the
greater the
b r e a k
from
this.
Suck all you want. :-)
(I'll just do something else.)

"abstinence is purity..."

I run from mother. My skin in the saturating rain is ever-more translucent. It loses its substance, and is no longer a thick, opaque white but now a faint, purple and blue revealing the blood vessels beneath like the skin and flesh of a snail. It is saturated, like paper, turning clear in the light and the rain, blending with the elements. Wind shakes the trees, making the gums slant like slashes on a manuscript, like people whose bodies are diminishing, above the sanded banks breaking and slipping. My reality is disintegrating. There is something else more real out there than me, and it is in the form of the huge sound of wind and storm.

Less is more. Abstinence is purity abstinence is purity. The memory of the personal doctrine ringing in the mind, the mind which is turning into a gradual pulp of mush and a slug-like thought. Mental constipation; the mind is clogged, or else no longer has the energy to push out thought. Nor does the rest of the body and yet I run.

She runs from mother. She runs from the hearty meals of meat dripping in oil, oil soaking the meat, its muscle-fibres, its bones, because she knows, she knows so well, you are what you eat. She knew she was addicted to the marrow, its hard-setting, blood-celled fats. The frontal lobes of the brain ached, they screamed, for nourishment, they wanted to think, they ached for it, and all they could think about was the ache for food and nothing more. It does not take alot to propel her light skeletal form. For some dilapidated reason she enjoys likening herself to a ghost... while suppressing, bitterly, that soon perhaps she will be one. Can't have it all, she spits, to herself. And she runs.

The muscles work, the blood is squeezed, pumped around the body to those places which are greying, greying from lack of oxygen, from lack of energy. It feels like a massage. The pressure of the wind squeezes her body as well, wringing her out. It feels good, this feeling of existence.

Nature crashes all around her; water is spitting from the sky. Leaves, knocked out of their branches by the splash, drop like pins to the road, on which she runs and runs.

It is so beautiful. The cool whip of air. The strength of wind. It returns her face to a substantive white, and widens her eyes to its wonder. Wind tears at the edges of her eyes and its coldness produces a thin line of lacrymal liquid. Beautiful wind. Beautiful trees. Beautiful and poisonous hunger. It is so beautiful she feels like screaming.

"Dissertation on the..." (I've forgotten)

While they are having some kind of party downstairs at Casa Subang, Heidi is having quite a bit of trouble sleeping, but then, she isn't trying to, anyway. Upon deciding that learning French while trying to study Marguerite Duras - that outlandish, yet oddly familiar thinker - for the exam on Monday, she discovers that there is a kind of... 'pointlessness', to be experienced, for sure, with any regimented study such as this. It is not because it is a University study program, no not at all, certainly not... it is because the program is now tapering at the end towards a specific outcome of learning, which, if it might be added, has been learnt and learnt before to the point of tedium. So what does little Heidelbergensis do at this crucial hour, prior to the exams?
She studies astrology. Not from the sky. Nothing as interesting as that. She studies it off the internet. She learns about what it means to be born in the year of the dragon, in the month designated for virgo, that illustrious and deceptive 'virgin' (pff!), and the characteristics which arise due to being ruled by the planet Mercury, and the element 'Earth'. See, these are all self-absorbed areas of interest, and she does not like to come across often as being prone to such narcissism, but, you see, there has arisen withion the past few months a series of 'identity crises'. She has either entirely lost what she once considered to be the essence of herself, or she has been expanded outward, to merge with her environment, to the point of self-loss. In any case, that pompous and self-interested wench, got down and dirty to some much-needed soul-searching... well, if she is to be any good for this upcoming internship, she needs to take care of herself after all. And, furthermore, the identity does tend to flail when one has been grabbed recently on the brassiere by a sexed-up pre-teen in her local neighbourhood. (Not to mention two-years'-worth of postmodern theories being rammed up the arse and anywhere else they will try to fit.) So she read up on herself, as it is indicated by the stars and/or suns (she didn't read that far into it) of the solar system, and she got to thinking that all people are, all they amount to, is a series of pre-determined hormone-combinations, which have delineated all forms of life according to moon-phases, planetary rotations, and probably the weather, since the beginning of life itself!
Then she wrote this. Her 'dissertation' (on Pluto-knows-what):
I want to be an English cavalier. I want to approach the world with a 'snooty' and pompous air, thus concealing my overbearing love for the world. (!)
I want to trammel my perfect leather boots through other people's shit, and then gasp, feigning abhorrence, while I am spat on.
I want to lapse into mock outrage, decidedly indignant upon having my pride burst. I want to revel in my own superciliousness, and use the word, without looking it up in the dictionary first...
and feign shock at others' hatred for me. I want to be simultaneously loved, and hated, as I make my militant way through daily situations. I want to declare my love for people with a 'natural' British accent.
I want to show outlandish facial expressions! I want to pretend that I care! I want to be consulted on artistic and literary matters as though i am some kind of expert! I need! (Alot. Of attention.)
I care about you, and me, and the state of the biosphere!
I want to be part of a group and possess it, through being the joker, the singer, the sweet sweet entertainer.
i want to delight in perfectionism the angst that is me, and narcissism.
I want the rotations of the world, the planets around the sun, the mood of the solar system, to MOVE ME! I have decided to forego for now the plucking of the hairs on my legs, in favour of self-control, and assertiveness because I am a 'modern woman'. (And because I have other, better things to do.) I have chosen to not change, to never change, because it is senseless trying to bend always to others' wills, and to others' wants. I wish to cease all desire for learning, and in that sense, achieve more and learn, absolutely, more, for that is where confidence and leadership becomes a part of the person. To try to learn is to assume that the world is unknown, and that nothing, not any thing in this world, can be incorporated into the mind to cultivate it. Trying to learn is the inhibiting factor, the breaker of the spirit of the being who tries to learn, for how is effective takeoff possible without a platform?
And thus, Heidelus becomes inaugurated into the world, once again, as an actual being with an identity. This time, it's chosen. This time... it's personal.
(12:13 AM, November 31st, 2009.)

new hot text!

Hey, if you want to see something new and straight from the head, check out transignifier, a hypertext novel, fresh, virginal, just out of grade school and puckering up for the break-in into the real world of scratch and sniff wrestling. It's on me. Click here to be directed to the homepage, from where you can navigate your path through transuniversal topics. Oh, and there's PictureS.

He pulls around in a wonky swerve, beating me to the corner. The window wound down, his face appears, beckons me over. He works so much his hands are melted to the steering wheel, skin splaying from fingers in a wheel-turning frenzy, all the time. Blackened tissue around his eyes from fighting the test of sleep and he's still going, covering more distance every day, more distance than the human body allows, in a part-broken taxi. The sound of the break shimmies, like it's messed up, shot to gravel, like it isn't there.


I've been thinking about religion alot. About how people use it to do what they want, its convenience in its meldability, the way you structure your interpretations. I'm an atheist. I cannot believe in God, I lack the imagination for it. I study religion, I study from an outsider's perspective, keeping it real. Keeping it within my safe and objective scientific lens. I study people from a scientific perspective.

'I believe in black magic,' he says, suddenly, turning to me and I feel a rush of black fogging the car. I see the yellow-whites of his eyes gleam golden in the momentary darkness, suddenly enlivened like coals with air blown over them to feed the fire within. Then he screws his lids, chuckles.

Susan's experience - part 1

Susan sank back into the plush couches and felt them swell up around her. When she fitted her chin into it, steam from the mug cupped in her hands seemed to catch on her cheeks nose and forehead. It was a pleasant and warm relief from the stiff harsh cold of the distilled air inside the lounge-room, its relentless freeze-over as callous, objectively scientific, arthritic, as - to Susan - a morgue. Stifling any chance of planning or any kind of meaningful activity. Utterly dead, sucking noise and light from the room. Even masturbation was out of the question.

With Jeffrey and Kyle out at the clubs tonight, and Mildred practically dead in the bath, senseless metal tunes grinding her into a somnambulent stupor, Susan was at a loss for either finding or developing her own erstwhile diversion to pass the time with.

Pictionary? Box eaten into cardboard tatters; no one to play with.
Television? Don't have one, flickshit. It was true. There was nothing left in the corner of the room where it used to sit, besides the short stack of bricks it used to sit on. Still, she wasn't regretting those text-books, the ones she had bought with the television money, cash-converters coming to the rip-rip-rip-off rescue.

Susan sighed quietly and nestled deeper into the couch, cold near to unbearable. It seemed to originate deep from within the floorboards, rising up steadily, and culminating in the icicling of a bogey, which now dangled from the tip of Susan's numb honker.
'What to do, what to do with this...' the rest of the sentence popping into her head like press-tuds, inauspicious: '...what to do with this cold misery?'
But then the striking of the clock clashes around the room, and Susan looks to, aghast, wondering when it was that any of them had actually bought a clock....


To be continued......

Murmur

Talking herself through the study session, she weaves layers into the room, room otherwise desolate. The sterile white fluorescence of lights keeps the few of us hunched, as though in private bubbles. Into our books, into silence. Chicks in eggs, separated from each other by shell, incubating.
But she talks.
I know she will be here until ten o'clock. Filling the space with a constant murmur, so comforting. So nourishing, comforting, coming through the egg shells like streams of talk from a mother. Like through umbilical cords.

I do not stare at her. I do not want to scare her. I only glance. Making sure of the identity, the identity behind the murmuring.

Then I take a longer draught. I savour that gulp of sight.
Sometimes she talks, eyes staring at the page. Lashes like blinkers, training her gaze.

Sometimes she talks, her head raised. Eyes trained somewhere over the tops of pages. Memorizing, the stream of talk still a constant.

Pouring herself into study like study is cups, like cups are there to catch her in. I see the subjects in the books catching in her mind like her mind is completely and utterly open, waiting, little hooks like hands in the walls.

All we hear is the lulling lisp of the tongue on the roof of the mouth, the moan of speech like a janitor's trolley at the other end of the corridor, ghosty and comforting.

She leaves, Early. People look around, awakened by the quiet. Then their heads go down, return to study.

dirt

I hold the pencil and it seems to grow in my hand as though it were made of cells, spontaneously regenerating. Alive.
It seems to grow, I seem to be able to make it grow, now, for there are so many things coming to the fore of my mind.

The words are blooming like graphite flowers on the page. Now in that empty space between sleeping and waking. free like a rock floating around in the Universe. And so I can write. I can remember.

I remember it like it was a dream.

Mother. Lying in the dirt. Wilfully mourning a bloody bundle. Wilfully mourning, rubbing the apertures of the bloody baby-sized bundle with an enriching humble dirt, so warm from the sun, so brown. Merging minerals, elements, with the not-quite daughter. Rejuvenation from the outer of the womb.

She is not repulsed. I understand that she wants to reclaim her.

My sister.

I can understand that she wants to reclaim her, for I remember wanting her too, but she was never ours to begin with. She left us before she came to us.

Mother. Approaching me. I see that she is approaching me, bringing with her a small piece of gelatinous flesh, dripped with red like a flower losing its petals. She goes quiet, her sobs and harsher, more animal cries dropping to a calm inner cry.
Her eyes stare. They are glass balls. Her eyes stare ahead. And then she brings a wobbling but perfect piece of flesh to her face. I think to myself right then that she will rub it against her face like she does with soft leaves when she walks amongst nature.
She brings the flesh to her face, testing it. on the point of her tongue. Testing it.
She tests it, earnestly, like probing with her tongue.

I quiver, externally, body vibrating. I quiver, whimper, 'you're eating my sister. Earnestly.'

She howls. A wolf will howl at night. This was the middle of the day, mother and son out on the green prickly lawn surrounded by gum trees like a fence. This was more urgent than time would ever permit, and so she howls, without the presence of the dark and the full moon.
She howls and her teeth stick out of her red and bloated face, face as emotive and decorated as a baboon's. She sees young Adrian standing there, she sees me watching her like she is a scene. 'I've imbibed her,' she says, 'but I don't feel her.' And her throat is choking on tears and foetus, choking, pipes clogging and choking, and she still gets out the words: 'you try'.

That Adrian of the past is a lot more 'normal'. Or so you could say. He hasn't had time to reflect on this incident, he hasn't had time to develop. You could say he is waiting for this experience to happen to him and change him forever.
He stands there, a bodily image of a child. He stands there, and does nothing but stand. Sometimes doing nothing means doing something more than doing something.

Her fish's eyes, they fix on me. Cold and fixed like fish's eyes. Cold and blue, and not sad, not pained. Cold and fixed, complementing the red background of her face, blue and fishy and swooping down upon me, sweeping towards me like a multitude of pens, their graphite nibs irascible, petulant, and stabbing the page as my own does, now, in haste. They say that fish are not sentient in the way that humans are, or not in the same way, not in the way that we would ever understand. And they will never understand us.

Cold and fixed and unrelenting, superglued to the bodily image of me.
My face and hair become painted with the blood of a piece of my sister, as mother's arm reaches out and daubs me desperately. Her breath is hot and smells of the iron of blood, like the smell of money, of fish. She lifts her arms to push the foetal 'cake' into my mouth and the rasp of her past-shaven underarms grates on my vision as though she were rubbing her underarms on my eyeballs. Clutching me by the hair, the shirt, my arms, she shakes wetness, tears saliva and blood, onto me.

I feel like i am the spattered drops i have on me, now. Torn apart and not whole. I have become my sister, but I do not think right then to tell her. I do not think right then to stop her.

It is emotion. It is mixed and raw emotion, as raw and infused with potential, as a barrel of yeast and sugar. This is what I wanted, right? To relive this?

To be able to write?

Act

In my velvet mahogany seat, and I am surrounded left and right by other spectators. No one sits in front. No one sits in front because I am in the front, the front row, so close that I am blessed, by the light spattering of their spit.

The actors' spit. I can see the grease and sweat balling on their foreheads, bubbling to the fore from behind their beautiful and thick makeup, which they wear like second skins. Dressage for the face.

They rejoice, in their feathers and their magenta-and-lime suits, and look at us as much in the front as we look up at them.

We examine their bodies, their screw-up faces and expressions, their magnificant voices which burst forth, in auditorial blooms, and we find it disconcerting, that they can look at us, stare at us, perhaps more than we can look at them for any period of time, almost like we are the real ones on show, we are just as capable of feeling intimidated and that the construction of the stage is nothing more than that - a construct.

Staring at someone is like staring at someone with your guts. Pushing through your skin, visceral, the kind of thing that we tend to keep to ourselves, the kind of thing we tend to keep on the inside. But they stare, they stare with such confidence, and they do not feel ashamed.

Cinderella in a dream, a dream in cinderella

Weaving a large arc through the air with my index finger, I disrupt the curtain.
That people behind the curtain can see this disruption, is obvious. I hear them talking about the curtain and the way it is moving, the way there must be someone behind there.

They are so slow in finding me.

I try to stand straight, try to not move the curtain, so that my existence will just be, what it is, behind the curtain, and not exposed furthermore.

I chased a butterfly behind here. I think it was in my mind.

I saw it flying, spreading its wings, not with a usually-repugnant weakness - so characteristic of fellow 'flutter-bys' - those childish, flitting phantoms - but with the strength, the muscle, of a bird. I guess it gave me hope, here behind this curtain.

And now they're giggling. A posse of people, genders indeterminate at this stage, like my own, ethereal because of their being on the other side of the curtain. Unknown.
Genders indeterminate, giggling, threatening, wanting to pull me from behind the curtain, pull me, a person, a person who only wants to chase butterflies and not grow up and not have to go hunting for a prince. (Or princess... but in their society, they haven't come across that situation before.)

Just when I am beginning to feel accustomed to the dark of the space enshrouded by this curtain, the curtain parts, lets in light, and I see that it is actually a harsh red of woven red thread, splitting the comforting black. A reptilian, feathered hand slithers in - red in a reflection of the curtain - and an image as sharp as murder comes to mind as it snatches. Snatches for a person, a person behind the curtain, snatching for me. Nails affix to my shirt, and nails clutch at the folds of my belly, scratching for something human, scratching for what I know I can't give, clasping around me, my flesh, my hair.

Suddenly I am in the light. It is like being evacuated prematurely from the womb. I look up at my tormentors, my friends, my people wanting to find me a mate. So that I do not have to be alone. So that I do not have to remain uncontrolled. They are looking for a prince for me, to 'help' me out from behind my curtain.
They are each masked, with feathers, glue, and a white-speckling paint. Masquerade. Concealing their identities, conveniently. They cannot be real, or real in themselves, because they strive to find complementarity in people, others, like fleshy mirrors. They are not naked, as I am, having been drawn from Curtain, prematurely.They do not react to this obscure nakedness, they just measure it with their judgment, their rulers, their perceptive and observant eyes. They actually hold measuring tape around me and do the equations, calculating the likelihood of my beauty.

Conclusion: this will not do. I am not good enough.
I have to go back behind the curtain, I should, but they need me to fill this space, they need the marriages to ensue, so that everyone can live 'happily ever after'. Only I know.

That deep down they're jealous of my nakedness.

I am dabbed, viciously, with a surplus of glue. Handfuls of feathers find their way to my eyebrows, my neck, chest, legs, and reptilian, feathered hands, go into a frenzy, like chickens pecking for the last morsel of grain.

'You'll look passable', they say, they chant. (They have ways of chanting in unison; the meaning of this chorus I am not privy to.) They laugh, they giggle, speaking at me, teeth flashing red and white like poisonous insects, hovering all around me.

The masquerade ball, does not exist for me as it does for every other person there. In a dream-like illogicality I close my eyes, and nothing exists, any longer. Nothing exists but butterflies behind my eyelids, flashing like the after-images of lights. I squeeze my eyes so tight, I can feel and hear and see the purple blood pushing through the vessels of my eyelids. I hold my eyes so tight I think I will stop seeing.

But it is another curtain.

Clock. Strikes 'twelve'. Home is barren. A once-peopled landscape rots in destitution, and rots with a peacefulness I know will not last. They will return, and there will be more masquerade balls. I haven't found my prince. And, as they say, I haven't found my validity in this world, validity in the reflection of another's eyes. According to them: I have not discovered that I am human.

Ezra Pound.
I like the name.
I don't know why.
It could be a girl, and a boy, both poured into the one person. A mixed-gender pancake. A fictional character who hasn't yet been shoved into an identity or a plot; the seams of his/her confines remain unstitched.
My Ezra Pound.
A pseudonym for an anonymous writer, who writes from the perspective of both a man and a woman, equally well, a social degenerate, and a skilled superior, a primally organic being, as well as a prude, and a vegetable.

My name, is Ezra Pound.
I don't know if it is a good thing or an interesting thing.

I am not here to confess anything at all. I just have a disorder. That's it. An identity disorder. I am different things to different people. Depending on their needs. Needs which come crawling out of their heads, and are shadowy behind the irises of their eyes, transportable through their pupils. I don't think I am the only one who can see them.

Wants come to all people like inevitable dreams, touching you softly in the night like clouds' fingers on the heads of mountains. They haunt you when you wake, they make you thirsty for their fulfilment. They make you thirsty for water, too, should you resort to panting in anticipation of the fulfilment of your dreams.

If you're silent, people talk. The space lets them open their mouths, gives them room to enter into the air around them their needs, their wants. No one who is alone will sit there and stare, relaxed, doing nothing. They feel uncomfortable, because they see in full bloom their wants, spiralling open to meet and fill the vacant spaces like flowers facing the growing sun. They play with papers, read, write, talk, concentrate on their food, fiddle with their watch, and examine the clogged pores in their forearms.

The boy. Ezra Pound asked the boy, Josiah, to write his own piece.
On the manuscript, methodically, he wrote the notes out c, d, e, f, g, g, g, f, e, d, c, c, c. He is correct in where he puts the notes on the staff, making a small mound out of crotchets.
We talk about the other students, flirting with life. I make the lessons into so much more than centred around black and white keys, naturals and sharps; I like to teach people about the spaces between the tones.
'Promise you won't tell,' Josiah says, 'but me and Emily are in love.'
A child, confessing to an adult. Magic.

I like to suck on other people's dreams.
'That's fantastic,' I say, my eyes blooming wide like flowers to the sun.

bus

He sits before me. Head twisted, directed left. His clothing is the colour, the texture, of old paper, greyed in the creases and cracks, fibrous to the touch. Large earlobes, he has, they say that earlobes keep growing when the substance behind them has ceased to grow, when the growth of the bones has slowed to a halt. When a person must continue to live with what they have, skin starting to deviate, sagging outward, for want of something else.
His head is twisted to what is behind the glass of the window, and the afternoon sun pierces his translucent iris, revealing an outer layer of light blue, surrounding the warm brown inner layer, like a strongly-brewed straight tea.

I swear I've seen him before.
Slicing fruit, depositing portions into short plastic bags, his stall vying for attention next to the mamak places which are bunched up around the corner. I've seen him before, he slices, he dices, he stares ahead, but he doesn't see the people, he sees his thoughts, his boredom, and the milky haze of the sky which slows all work in the afternoon and inspires nostalgia.

His papery clothes shake like sheets around his thin frame as he steps off the bus, into the dusk.

the shrivel of the tongue, insistent puckering of the tastebuds, and running streams of water-saliva, the drops of acid giving pleasure to the tongue. its like pleasurable madness. There are some after-bile shocks, where convulsions confuse the body and put it in that state, the space between pleasure and pain. you take it, again and again, its like being ravaged, it's like dying, its like being born, but you do it, and you don't know why you do. Validity, self-confirmation. that we do exist. that we can feel.