Skip to main content

Transit: City Hall

I fear that

I'm not delicate enough to do tragedies
My hands too rough to make art
The soul too fragile to handle truth
These eyes too dry to cry

My laughter is less,
My smile worth nothing

I've not read enough,
Written far too little
My words are good enough to make you move
My voice too soft to be heard
Too loud to be truly heard

This story I tell is too personal, and that no one would care. No one will care, because why would they?

A B for lit and a B for theatre
Judged by people who judge for a living

Who am I to dispute that?
How could I?

Too personal again, not watched enough films, can't edit, can't write, improvement? - not enough.
Never enough.
These, I say, are lies: I carry the lies I learn from others, from my hallowed past.
Jesus tells me that I'm good, and that I will be good.
I believe him a waste of time, but his message isn't.
His message isn't. 

Lies I tell
Myself.

Lies I tell others, right through them,
While my beating heart leaps to escape its chamber.




And I am inadequate, I make a wrongful assumption that I will never improve. My minds drifts again to the problem of food, usually placed on the table. I think of everyone who I believe is better than I am. The line is longer everyday. I am afraid and unsure of my resolution, no matter how strong it is: I am on the edge choosing survival or death. And all of this
All of this is survival.

All of it.

All survival, how can I let it be. How to stop thinking? How to, how to go back to a time of waste and silence.
Those days of haze and malaise. From bed to floor to bed to floor to bed to floor.

My grandfather is dying and I reject time with him.

Time.



I was dying. Nat, I was dying.
Nat!

I am dying!

Nat! Nat!




Time.

Promise me this,
I will try my best,
I will not step off the edge.

Look for the colours,
Everyday, look for the colours.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thematic Summary of The Star by H.G. Wells

H.G. Well’s wrote The Star in 1897, but apocalyptic/disaster fiction had already existed for thousands of years. Well, the authors didn’t think they were writing fiction, but nevertheless, they were still writing speculative ‘non-fiction’. A quick Wikipedia look-up on Google will tell you that hundreds of seers have prophesized the end of mankind. Unfortunately, fortunately, they have all been wrong! Yet, these countless predictions prove a point about our very own human nature: many of us have fetishized the ‘end of the world’. Christians call it the rapture. Vikings called it Ragnarok. Others called it the Apocalypse. All these stories about our eventual end on this earth have a common thread: there is some greater reason for our end to occur – most of the time, it involves the triumph of good over evil. This is where The Star differs in its narrative. Instead of focusing on some grand narrative of good gods achieving a final victory over the forces of evil, it sticks to d...
3 comments
Read more

Thematic summary of When It Changed by Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ’ When It Changed centers on a human society made entirely up of women on a planet called ‘Whileaway’. The human colony is void of men because of a plague that occurred thirty generations ago. The females that remained after the plagued managed to survive without the males by a process that sees the merging of ova. This allowed women to reproduced with women, taking away the need for penetrative reproduction and thereby making redundant the role of men in the human reproductive cycle. The story begins when four Russian astronauts arrive on Whileaway. All four of them are male, which makes them the first 4 men that have set foot on the planet in hundreds of years. Their arrival has a profound effect on the women they meet, and we see this effect from the perspective of Janet, a thirty-four-year-old woman that is married to Katy, with whom she has three children. Upon meeting the four men, Janet is immediately taken aback by their physical size – “They are bigger than we ar...
Post a Comment
Read more

Inheritance [Balli Kaur Jaswal]

I really shouldn't attempt to write this... as if this were an assignment due on Monday. It isn't, so I shall not.  Two days - it took me this to finish my first SingLit novel, as far as I can recall.  It was about a family who goes through tough times. This family was Sikh. This family was Singaporean. This family felt, for a few heart-wrenching seconds, like my own.  Dalveer and Harbeer have three children: Gurdev, Narain, and Amrit. Karam is Harbeer's nephew, but he doesn't get to be a narrator in the story, so, screw him. Also, he's an asshole.  We see their story unfold over a period of twenty years - this is paralleled by Singapore's own growth as a nation. We see the effects of rapid industrialisation on the nascent city state, and we begin to identify some of the more... unspoken problems faced by its people. In its endeavour to grow, advance, burgeon -- people, genuinely good people, are left behind. In our  struggle for success, the few am...
Post a Comment
Read more