Door shut. Silent afternoon. Mother, couch. Phone, charging, candy crushing comic reading quiet waiting. One call. No answer. Two calls. No answer. Please, come, sit down. Rare visitor appears again. He wraps his hands around fists. Bald brother standing unsteady voice trickling into phone. Answer muffled. Breakfast cold, voices unsteady, mother trickles within kitchen. Locked out. No context. I sit in silence. Shut afternoon. Quiet, rare. Couched calls, mother waiting. Cold. Cold. Cold. Cold.
Freewriting Explanation: Every day, Valen shall use 5 minutes to write completely unprompted and uninterrupted, letting the words lead the way. There is no end purpose to each piece, but rather, the pieces are allowed to develop naturally in their own way. The pieces are then uploaded without edits.
The flowers on my balcony bloom but shed their petals in a week. The floor is now an aftermath. I sweep up the shredded white and place them into the soil. I live so comfortably well that I only have to kill once in a while. An ant, a spider. A wayward fly. Tonight I will sleep without guilt. Tomorrow, I will wake fresh-eyed to find that the world has become the same awfulness it was last night. As angry, angry men sit tall in their highchairs of power, I will be here, eating breakfast alone in this house filled with sunlight. With each new day, I come closer and closer to accepting the reality that I cannot do anything. My words vanishing like smoke signals, nobody in miles around, a vise slowly chewing on my skull. I wake to a ocean drying itself up with a rag made of skin. I see a person walking backwards into the sea’s stomach. I think of my friends who I know have been worse off than me and remain so. This is the ugliest scene I have had to confess to recently, seeing myself in the murk of a lake but then finding their faces at the bottom of it. My own problems I drop one by one, watch them sink through the slit and mud, a small inconspicuous bubble, roughly the size of my voice, floating to the surface. Maybe there is heaven after all, but maybe God doesn’t exist. Does anyone else share this neurosis? Is it fair for me to be happy? Not sad? I feel so small and everything is just the right size to crush me. Crush me. I’m sitting alone on the bus right now, and everyone feels like an informant, watching this shuttle breeze through empty space, building after building fading away like eras. Maybe I need therapy. Maybe there isn’t any real good in this world except for what we can muster up. The spare change we’ve left in our pockets, sticking up for the little guys. Recently, I let him build a web in the corner of my room. I can clean it up, easily, but I let him make a home until it disappears. The only kindness I can afford him is that I will not be the one who does the killing.
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Usually I take 5 minutes, but I didn’t time this time around. I haven’t written any poetry for a while, and I still want to stick to freewriting, but I think I’ll make it less stressful for me by removing this self-imposed rule. I’ll just write until a decent base is done, then I can come back and work on it later.
These past few months, I have been busy with life and other things, but now I have some time to devote to writing again. I’ve barely written anything submission-worthy, so I need to get back into the swing of things.
This piece is inspired by some internet drama my friends got into recently. I can’t help but feel a bit powerless, so I finally had a source to write from – anger.
words scrawled on an unknown wall last names taken without context faces as smooth as a washboard mingling in a sea of cotton buds and in the air there is capitalism that quiet + usual summer bloom as we walk down the red carpet of suburbia and middle-class living and everyone is dressed and draped in a thick viscous layer of every conceivable form of advertisement I think I will buy a watch tomorrow just because I can and I will slowly continue to die at an astounding rate at the very least I’m taking you with me to Disneyland at some point everyone loves a copyright monopoly Love I don’t know where I’m going with any of this truth be told if the truth is ever told, anyway on my eyes white cartoon gloves I feel the crowd parting to point I am a clown I am a clown I am a clown Clown world clown world clown world Nobody is worth not laughing at and nobody is worth treating seriously as we all cram ourselves into the world’s smallest clown-car and gracefully careen ourselves off every cliff
Freewriting Explanation: Every day, Valen shall use 5 minutes to write completely unprompted and uninterrupted, letting the words lead the way. There is no end purpose to each piece, but rather, the pieces are allowed to develop naturally in their own way. The pieces are then uploaded without edits.
head empty no thoughts head on backwards eyes staring into the past like beams of light in a thick endless fog there’s so much anxiety my brain is wrapped within like bubble wrap I close the door and leave the house with my unhappy face on I close the door and dim the lights and take off my unhappy face to put on an even unhappier face I don’t have any reason for the things I do My being, like my anxiety, is a clusterfuck It’s like rolling 3 die when you’d rather roll 2 die It’s like stepping into dogshit in your own home and you don’t own a dog sometimes I just get really really angry I feel all my expressions scrunch up like a paper ball my shoulder’s arc slowly rising like a tide and my head is empty with no thoughts but some kind of unnamed anger of sorts some would call it sociopathy but they would not understand what that means some would call it anxiety but like me they’re an armchair therapist writing down patient notes on an imaginary clipboard in the plush white chamber of their straitjacket lives spent going 9 – 5 and then some more to build the wealth of somebody else who will never work a day in the whole of their lives as the entire planet becomes a hardboiled egg and evil men wearing average faces rise into power and all good is lost and I’m just here writing about something which doesn’t make money
Freewriting Explanation: Every day, Valen shall use 5 minutes to write completely unprompted and uninterrupted, letting the words lead the way. There is no end purpose to each piece, but rather, the pieces are allowed to develop naturally in their own way. The pieces are then uploaded without edits.
Ecstatic to announce that I’ve been awarded Third Place in English Poetry for the Golden Point Award, 2019.
The Golden Point Award is Singapore’s premier creative writing competition for Short Story and Poetry in the nation’s four official languages: English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil. Established by the National Arts Council since 1993, the national literary writing competition is a significant platform for discovering new writers whose works exhibit literary merit and encouraging literary expression in Singapore.
A ball on a table, my thoughts unspool and drape off the edge, sentences unravelling their silk as my words break formation, their knees buckling under the weight of yet another period. I am constantly catching up to the kite-strings of my own tongue, and all its struggles against the walls of its cell. Apostrophe, apostrophe. Nothing makes sense anymore and it is nothing people care about. My tongue is tied into a noose. I am sat in a room forever watching myself say the wrong thing over and over again until I can no longer remember what it is to be right. Thoughts rattling in the chamber of skull, how all I can say are but meaningless now in the totality of every word that has ever been uttered, every sentence said in a courtroom, every I love you I love you I love you quickly extinguished between the neighbouring firework of two world wars, and perhaps a third, and how every word sounds like defeat if you’re willing to let yourself be, and I want so badly to wrest control over this language and ride it into the sunset my anxiety’s lasso twirling, twirling
Freewriting Explanation: Every day, Valen shall use 5 minutes to write completely unprompted and uninterrupted, letting the words lead the way. There is no end purpose to each piece, but rather, the pieces are allowed to develop naturally in their own way. The pieces are then uploaded without edits.
What have you done to me I demand an explanation What have you done to me
I am here having a heart attack over the smallest of minutiae like an entire story clumped as a comma
I am no longer alone in the living room of my head thoughts of you pack themselves to the ceiling and spread themselves from wall to wall
I am watching a video loop itself over and over again as though practicing how to write a name on the curvature of my ribcage
I don’t want to be horrible but it was a video of you
That reminds me a friend once asked me what the secret to my writing was and warned me, for some reason, that becoming happy would stymie the stream and block it off entirely like a clot in a vein like joy would become fatal
Frankly, I didn’t like her poetry that much It was alright, all things considered But not something I’d read a book of So I wonder if she was speaking from personal experience or she was merely trying to be ominous like a witch from a Shakespearean play who’s wandered her way into Wilde
I will gather all my things sweep clean the dusty desk where I write and go back, again and again and start over anew and find the hidden waterfall tucked away amongst the leaves of an overgrown jungle where the sunlight hits the water just right and there are birds, always, chirping somewhere
for now I will partake (allow myself) in this feast of sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet
Freewriting Explanation: Every day, Valen shall use 5 minutes to write completely unprompted and uninterrupted, letting the words lead the way. There is no end purpose to each piece, but rather, the pieces are allowed to develop naturally in their own way. The pieces are then uploaded without edits.
In a room with the curtains drawn a single ray of sunlight scans the parallel lines of bodies on the floor.
It is a weekend, because when else do we associate with love, that ugly landlord, without feeling the urge to break away, tearing away from the scene with the work of an unsteady hand?
There are a few moments of focus where the camera zooms in to rest its tired eye on some act of little significance; a hand behind the back of the head, soft crooning in the background.
I lend the space in my head to imagination. I have lost the link to poetry. Severed and blocked at the same time, I find myself unfurling.
I do not know what to write about without some further prodding. What works? What doesn’t?
I’d rather lend myself to matters in physicality; not words but swords, edges of finger-tips and the reward of sweat after a long day’s work toiling away at making something that, like poetry, will be worth remembering and sometimes that is okay and sometimes that is alright but I would be lying if I said I didn’t miss poetry
Freewriting Explanation: Every day, Valen shall use 5 minutes to write completely unprompted and uninterrupted, letting the words lead the way. There is no end purpose to each piece, but rather, the pieces are allowed to develop naturally in their own way. The pieces are then uploaded without edits.
Apologies for the long hiatus, was busy with school.
Sorry about the half-hung phone calls, the beeps’ chain a single car on the highway in the valley under dial-tone stars. Sorry for the minute gap between your mouth and my ear. Sorry that I have been such a hypocrite, that my love has turned out to be so apologetic, an abashed schoolboy out alone in the corridor, his thoughts rattling the lockers, rapping on every window. Sorry that my love is the second hand’s waltz in the middle of this glassy hall. My love is the one that never feels complete, constantly a step more up the winding stair. Sorry my love is a seed waiting for the death of snow. Sorry we don’t have power to decide what lives and what grows. My love is so small in the face of everything else, and too big to fit quietly inside my chest pocket. I am sorry that I don’t know how to express this sentiment other than through half-forgotten letters I’ve stuffed throughout the house, hoping you will chance upon them. But soon, I will be with you again, and it’s like everything is possible, and the phones redial themselves, and the car drives backwards out of the desert, and the stars blend back into the sky, and the children are playing in the yard, and I am at the top of the stairs now, and it is quiet, so quiet here, save for the small rosary I keep under my tongue – I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you – my mouth. Your ear. Nobody else in the hall.
Freewriting Explanation: Every day, Valen shall use 5 minutes to write completely unprompted and uninterrupted, letting the words lead the way. There is no end purpose to each piece, but rather, the pieces are allowed to develop naturally in their own way. The pieces are then uploaded without edits.
