www.lydiarahman.com

Poetry Arsenal

It is said that the pen bleeds what the mind and heart cannot simultaneously articulate.

Here are a few of Lydia Rahman’s recent favourite works, simply because they bleed so profusely an articulation of intensity deep in the realm of her heart and mind…

Gone Flat
It’s gone flat, this coke
Thick and unwelcome on the tongue
Cold but not like a fresh can would quench
I could drink it,
But it doesn’t taste so good anymore
Should I keep it back in the refrigerator
And hope someone someday comes along to drink it all up
Someone who like flat cokes
Someone who hasn’t had cokes in a long time
I mean, even flat cokes deserve to be drunk.
Or should I just pour it down the drain
And say goodbye
Cos it’s gone flat, this coke…

14 June 2007

A Chance Meeting

I saw the love of my daddy’s life today
At a bus-stop
And I thought hey, she looks familiar
In a flash her eyes flashed with some very contained shell-shockedness
Very well contained, come to think of it now
While I horsed around with my friend
Oblivious
She inched as far away as she could
While the corners of those eyes stole
Glances, moments, flashbacks
When she first alighted at the stop, we naturally stared
And I thought, there’s a pretty cool girl
That gait, the proud chin-angle, the funky glasses, the pursed full lips
The dog tag…
And when she stared I saw that unique beauty
And I understand why
And when she stared…
I’m a cute ACS kid, I know
But not so cute for a stranger to stare as such
With such simmering hurt and yearning
Reaching out with no hands
And I remember my mother
When she showed us the photos
Telling us we should spit on her if ever our stars crossed
And I understand
As I squint and strain
To see that familiar name on her dog-tag
My last, still
After all these years.

And I understand her love.

11 June 2007

This frustration

Ocrusty eyes
You run a thousand miles
And reneged on your smile
At my simple hello
Like I was triple six
come to break your sticks
You the supposed lamb so meek

BUT oh you’re Lamb Chop on The Nanny
oh under that sock so much precociousness
and oh so black a hole
that oh consumes as it breaks and drags along
as it oh drawls in incomprehensible accents

BUT would anyone believe
because you are but a sock
with big black innocent eyes
and a sad smile
and some butt…ons.

And so I return as chained and bound to you,
as the song goes
Sometimes I have dreams I’m your hero
as much as those are nightmares too

BUT sometimes all I fear is that you’ll never understand me.

5 June 2007

You blow me away

Soupkitchenmaster,
You fed me your pork special from your kitchen
And black pudding of a creature with no neck,
no drainage of uric acidic blood— oh but blood is the food of Life!
So in ignorance and hunger I was grateful
With every coil, coil coil…
I laughed along at your banging on the ebonies under the guise of genius
I listened to your sermons, nodded and smiled
For I have been there, and because I respect you

Energised I became and thus returned
to honour your Charity,
for more of that sparkling wit that blows me away
Between asides I was fed more and more rope
I did not notice you throwing the matzah my friends handed you
But as I thanked you(for what), I said
Here, have some Halal soup I made now that I’m back on my feet

Then the strings snapped, out of the blue
First strangled by the rope, I was hit on the head
By suffocation in such an open field of wild flowers
I took not three but four nails,
more than your Glory ever took
The fourth deep left,
and out bled my love in violent streams you washed your hands in
You aim your gun of intransigence,
Your Yeriho 941,
And oh, you blow me away.

9 May 2007

A Cruel Great Wall

Tonight, what a desert I come house to
Lay me down in dust
Or embalm me like the Chairman
But awake, awake I remain
Staring blankly at the blank screen
The screen so cold and now so cold;
From screen I float to thoughts…
Where I smell blood
From my raw soles
From walking 3 months along the entire Great Wall
And yet the Great Wall doesn’t favour me
Because I do not eat its rocks.
If only I could reach into the screen and feel the Great Wall
Even if only to say:
Here’s a set of Tintin coasters,
For when you have your 12 apostles over.

5 May 2007

Disoriented rantings in the middle of trying to finish some exam
If today was cleft asunder
My 62 hours of straight awaking
Would mean no matter
My 35 pages 11 thousand fifty five words
Would rise to ashes
My half-finished 5000 words
Would be a joke
For you and me and a God named boo
To laugh at up there
And laugh at ourselves we will.

And that perfect saga seed this morn I found
The one that slipped from my hands
Disappeared into some oblivious drain

I will find again.

13 April 2007
2:13pm

For The Good Girls

She was a good girl
Father sobbed, teary-eyed
There is no disguising the pride

Crazy bitch
They whispered, wide-eyed
There is no disguising.

And she who lay there with a half-crooked
Spent blood-smile
Was propped by six-winged angels and cherubs
Long forgotten, dead by no choice
Once white babies of sin
Products of rupiah transactions
And cheats they call Singaporeans

The Batam military policeman
Who has his nightly share for free
Waves the crowd on
Nothing to see
Nothing indeed.

Nothing more than a girl who saw a documentary
On innocence for sale
Of children turning tricks for
The Singapore men, the white men, the dirty men
The black vomits of inhumanity

In a parallel life the children would have been
in MGS, SCGS, even neighbourhood schools
Playing netball, soccer,
Pranks on teachers
Laughing like children do.

Today she took one of those ferries
Like a king of the world
Ignoring the eyeballing black vomits
The ferry was full
Struck a match
Three hundred dickheads exploded to smithereens

And she lay a shell, smiling.

5 March, 2007

Stupid People

So we once, twice, painted the mountains
Every colour of the rainbow
Poked at the gizzards of Life
While I scoffed at store-bought women
And prided in my rhinestone cowgirlness
We once, twice, walked with no end in mind
Other than the hindrance of old. cold.
The dark didn’t bother us
For we walked into the night full of immortality in our breasts
Laughing like children
Bursting like fireworks
And when we settled deep in serenity
Within 4 walls
We nudged the whirrs of passion and compassion
Of colourful artificial images
On my laptop screen
And wonder why so many stupid people fall.

6 Aug 2006
(Yellowstone National Park)

Gods and Heroes
Once we were gods and heroes
We planted a fire in our hearts
But then I now realise
It should have been obvious to me!
I could never bury a fire
Where bridges cannot be burnt
With the fiercest of conflagrations.
That I cannot burn it,
I must learn to tame it
And hope that it will someday burn something else

Or someone.
24 Jul 2006
(Yellowstone National Park)

Remember To Remember

Remember those years
When colour didn’t matter
When awkward teeth clanged
In starbursts of Forever
Promising a someday of marriage
Atop a treehouse of completeness

Remember the day
When you sold me my happiest
When we’d tease and we’d play
In all ifs explored
And the maybes rolled by day
Where the buts never mattered
Lay ignored til it’s time to go?

Remember today
When I keel in letting go
When I, proud in my Forever,
Say goodbye to all remembrances
In a bittersweet starburst
To lay and ignore today.
21 July 2006
(Yellowstone National Park)

Todays

Today is today til yesterday
For a cavernous void is so until
You peel it away
Til tomorrow comes and takes it away
With a redness of thunder
Or a bout of horseplay
Or the words of a lover
Come and sweep you away
With the joy of another
In the early noon’s dusk
That settles the today
Of yesterday
21 June 2006
(Yellowstone National Park)

audience

My audience of one
Tell me where have you been
I try to listen to make you stay
You though, could not hear
Unforgiven
But unforgotten

My audience of one
Hear you not those amorous whispers
In the colours of the pages
Out of the void of my heart
My audience of one
I tell you the truth
And I tell you again
You are all of one
Even though you don’t understand
My lonesome repertoire

My audience of one
Why do you not speak
Of the moon and the stars
Of the future tense
And now so tense
My audience of one I only need to fight the nights
When the spotlight falls on me
And I see in my audience
none.

2 Feb 2006

Beat and Whirr in Complete Synchrony

Not a thousand Honeys will abate the passion
Not one hundred years will we live in oblivion
In isolation, love carves its niche in the cranium of the heart
Where the heart of the mind and the mind of the heart
Beat and whirr in complete synchrony
Like you. and me.
As though we were meant to be
For I want nothing less
For we shall not lose
Cannot lose
But if there must be a loser, let it be me
Not her, not you, not them
For I will toss and turn on brimstone otherwise
Not that I wouldn’t otherwise…

And I will walk the nights of solitude
With the ribcage of a Scottish warrior
And pretend the canvas was never drawn on
And make merry with the gazillions of sky-inhabitants
And whirr and beat in a complete synchrony of steps
Because I ____ you so.

10 Nov 2005

Who Will Stop Mad Garden Worship

Who will stop mad garden worship
But blow beneath bare life like a delicate rock
What of my thousand raw screams
And of always being drunk on rain milk blood
Recall the black fall
Cry away my void
Why show with white whisper
When you lick the lust of red eternity Honey?

22 Mar 2005

A Show At The Theatre

In this theatre the Clock’s second hand
Ticks deafeningly.
In this theatre we don’t clap and cheer
As the show unfolds.
Oh no… everything’s perfect
The plot ever so dramatic—
Good against evil (Though we are often confused which is which),
The acteurs ever so slick—
A president Fool here, his Poodle there,
Sycophantic heads of tiny states
Ever- obliging at the promise of scraps
From the table.
Blood on the stage floor for visual effects
And for audio effects the cry of millions
Across The Other Faction—
The cry for stoppage.
But the show must go on,
Says swashbuckling imperialist President Fool.
The dramatic irony lost,
The audience don’t hear his aside:
“In this zero-sum game my obscene obsession
Our victory is to help you wash your tainted oil
With blood. And more blood. And even your blood.”
What scripted finesse, what debonair foolery;
Yet a marvellous show, nonetheless
In this theatre of war.

18 Mar 2003
(Shortly before the Coalition’s campaign started)