Writing by Guest Writer Sheryl Tung
Photos by Fatin Iesa
It Is Written
It is hardly difficult to envision a lone cut figure in the angular light in the wee hours of the morning - the infant rays of dawn cleaving to the curved back like a sleeping cub, frail in its contouring of a dark landscape where the hollow shape of a girl presses silently out of its mould. Like a soft lump of clay, blackened in its very centre, its very core; like the pit of an apple that carries a black seed in its womb. She sits in front of the light; her opaque skin lets nothing through. She is a rising silhouette that keeps in time with the rhythm of her fingers in the dead room, the sleeping clock rusting, staccato beats, tap-tap-tap. The keys catch the delicate tandems of her mind and move, in waves engulfing her thoughts and washing up words, marooning letters on a blank slate with other letters, forcing companionship, fostering love.
One must remember the emptiness of the black plastered room containing the morning air - the faint veil of mist, of a dark untouched flower preserving its bloom. There is nothing vaguely stirring in this time; the vacant tranquility of unawakened souls folded deep in heavy blankets, a solemn hibernation for the dead night, the wet unborn morning. There is only a soft uneven marching of a beat to an unsung key, the moving of fingers. One must realise all this while she sits in a cave where the dark creature of self lies, and gets acquainted with its foreignness, the small object of queer familiarity who hides its face in mysteries, protecting its seed. She patiently draws the fine strands from its body, one by one, uncovering its face. It is a process that makes her wince, like a gentle pinch of salt. She places them under the omniscient eye and ponders for a while, analyzing her own alienness, every detached piece of self, curious. Then her fingers press the keys.
These thin black strands release themselves into an island of letters, like an expiration from unintelligible forms of darkness to the concrete manifestation of a sign. As she sits they swim in leathery trickles from the unknown depths of self through her opaque, dusty skin, to their end. There they attempt at co-mingling, at fitting themselves snugly in the cleavage of meaning not as mysteries but as solid entities, as small seeds to be watered. Black seeds sowed on a white Earth in rows and columns and walls, growing into an organic fortress of life waiting to be penetrated. Soon they will grow shoots. Then their leaves will be harvested and read. She will pour her black centre into ink and the morning light will gradually illuminate her crouching figure, and one will notice how exquisitely blue her eyes are, and how definably sad.
Say Something
If you tell me
Words are all we say to each other
In the stuffy classroom, or in the open
Gridded quad where we chart letters;
How these ideas flit forth like a hummingbird
With invisible wings, bouncing on shrill
Discourse or frilly gossips in the morning
Brilliance, the exuberance of young champions
Of an eastern wind;
If you sit me down to tell me
Words are all we ever knew, not as the poet who
Draws his world in a single strand
Of rough beauty of the branch, but as the dusty
Face of a chalk-consuming blackboard; the student
Stands in trepidation in light of what he knows
And what he has heard in the square, and
Funnels them into circling blocks of logic
Constructed for the old schoolyard, where
Words creak from inside the bent hinges of
Education, a knobby-jointed house, and attempt
To root itself in the soil of a surrounding landscape,
These words are not those above
The sky where the old catapult cannot
Aim for, and modern apps slide in
Opposite direction towards another anticipated future.
All those metaphysical understandings move further
Into an incomprehensible verse
We no longer pen. If you tell me
These words are the things we eat and live for,
They are not the Eucharist.
They are not those words that cut the
Tongue, that I stare blankly back into
