Five in the morning force-feeding Photoshop for Dummies into my head – by making a layer duplicate we can apply only the adjustments we want and discard the rest by changing layer modes. Multiply adds darkness while screen does opposite. Overlay lies between multiply and screen and is more subtle. soft light increases contrasts of extreme shades and is a weaker version of hard light. Hard light is a stronger version of overlay. Hard light increases saturation and reveals textures in underlying layer. Hard light like the midday sun upon the jetty, heat waves rolling off the tarmac and our bodies. You counted beads of sweat off my nose and I had your lap because the seat scorched my thighs.
Lovers
trembling madness and light
I WANT TO SPEAK. INTO YOUR MOUTH.
Auntie may stopped to mingle, pulling Joe close by his neck – I’ve never known anyone to look so irrepressibly adorable while seemingly on the verge of tears. Dirk + Jinesh met Sheena + me for dinner after their Mandarin class. The NEA copped a cool two hundred from Nana and I EACH for narcotic dumping. Joe visited post-dinner. Sheena brought a stillborn chick from Science class for scrutiny. Jinesh had ginger tea which was a surprising bouquet of tartness. I remember laughter, catching kisses at the corners of our eyes, footsies, the familiar Newton hustle and sambal kangkong in the sublime pocket of time before the last bus leaves. Joy is such a touch-and-go affair isn’t it? A world apart from today ; stubbornly foolish, foolishly hopeful as I am, I am not used to letting go. There is a nagging feeling somewhere in my chest, somewhere off centre, slightly to the left.
TECHNICOLOUR MALADY
Rummaged for colours. Quadra-hue dresses. I laid out bottles and tubes of paints in ascending spectrums, grouped colour pencils by chroma and mused the gaudy Impressionist renaissance – Matisse, Monet, Sisley, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat. Then I opened my windows and leaned into the wind, trying to catch the rain with its rainbow prisms of refracted light. It is of no use; a particularly pervasive cast of tan fills my consciousness most adamantly, a beat between sienna and ochre. It is the colour of your skin.
It’s all about the ending with you, isn’t it.
All about waning, things dying, finished, days sputtering into messy dusks.
I don’t think you can even look at winter without feeling melancholy with its inevitable end in melting fire, destruction and roses.
You even hover around me where I end; the tips of my fingers,
The corners of my mouth, where my hip bone juts out.
You are a perpetual mourner, looking always at beginnings ended,
Fading sunlight, moans drifting into soft sighs. When you let me go
I’m never certain you will ever drape your arms around me this way again.
You breathe me in as if that air, that piece of me you take inside you,
Has such a limited life.
You smell me as if I am new, as if i am bounded, complete, an island.
You weave goodbye with every breath.On the way here you were laughing with me, I prattled on
I told you stories, felt your fingers between mine.
Do you know
you have the most beautiful laugh I’ve ever heard,
the most beautiful murmur against my ear, a voice like lust, like trust, like love.
You stroked my palm with your thumb and I felt the heat of you rise into my face.
But somehow between there and here I lost you.
Long ago I gave up trying to pinpoint the phrase, word, topic, expression, name, idea, belief;
I gave up trying to find the exact semi-tone pitch my voice reaches that makes you turn away from me.– In Dialogia ; ivy blossom and libertine
HEART TOOK A ROADTRIP
Tim left on yesterday and I remember Sheena’s remedy for tears – “It’s flawed multi-tasking. You can’t cry on a cigarette baby; smoke the hours it takes you to stop.” but leaning upon the window sill with Jinesh on the line and Tim on the mind, I discovered that you can puff, laugh and sob like your life depended on it at the same time.
2007
- Christmas was a riot, plenty of regulars present meant alcohol all around and midnight shift was a breeze. Ritz and Bobby got wind of how much j’adore their matching chains and left the pair for me as a Christmas gift, which was of course broken by the end of the night.
- A debauched mess, me, rushing to the bar hollering “DOM PERIGNON! I NEED A BOTTLE OF DEEPEE PLEASE! DOM PERIGNON, JOHNNY!!!”, a trail of order chits, credit cards and tips in my wake. Then, as I pivot wildly, welding the champagne like a truncheon, my fiery centrifugal momentum is halted by a hand on my chins. A vision of God’s gift comes into sight, smouldering ; Jack is in the club!
- Thence I suffered my first emotional upheaval of 2007. Look, I cannot help it if my feelings are wired directly to my eyes and Jack is the poster child for beauty so effusive it should be outlawed.
- Thank you for blowing my mind again.
2.45AM
there we were, sitting quietly on the edge of the world, and no one could see us.