Skip to main content

Exactly like You

https://medium.com/@patlaw/dont-be-me-de0fb8dc25dd#.xny9xp5hm

---

Love is

a call at 1130pm from the gentle incline underneath Serangoon
and a voice that replies "Ok" with barely a moment's hesitation.
You put down the phone immediately, but I hear your footsteps fly down the steps anyway.
When I drag my heavy bones past the gantry, up the escalator, and see the white of your car by the pavement,
my heart rests.
I don't need to remind myself to smile.

Love is

You holding my hand in the morning
My eyes barely open,
legs tucked beneath the sheets
lights seeping through the blinds -
Through my small slits I see you
praying for me
"God....
bless...
today...."
You speak too quietly,
or I am still in the midst of waking up from this dream.
these eyes of mine still not aware of your love.
This life of mine still taking you for granted.

Love is

You seating across from me and you are
crying
because I don't wanna love your god anymore
and you can't say anything to change that.
I say that I will take care of you and love you no matter,
for all my days and all of yours.
I will not forget you, not let you rot, not let you be forgotten, not let other things take priority over you, not let you feel unloved.
but you shake your head
no,
you don't want that you say,
you don't need that.
You just need me to...
do something I will never be able to,
and that breaks you.
And I've seen it,
I saw it at gong gong's funeral,
when his body burned
and you shouted
and I cried not for my grandfather,
but for you.



Love is

me going back to church
me believing in this god of yours
me fellowshipping with other lovers of this christ of yours
this benevolent perfect being
up in the sky
deep in our hearts
the morning glory
unmatched in all things

I can't give you these things,
so I can't love you.
I know what love you want,
I know how you want me to love you,

but I can't.

I can't.


I can't.


---

I dread the day
you leave me -
no longer a hand to hold
a person to sit across
a white car by the road
with your blinkers on,
reflecting through the dense night air

and my eyes get heavy
and my heart grows weak
and my body goes numb

and i want to tell you both how much i love you
and how much i want to just be like you
exactly like you

almost -

but i can't,

i can't and i won't
i'm stubborn,
i'm rude,
i'm naughty,
i'm a naughty boy

and i'm floating away
sliding backwards down the hill
and i can't go back up,
and i don't want to.

I don't want to.





Comments

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

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

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