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.
A half-finished bridge is a lure, a line to an unmarked haven. Hanging in midair, the eyes naturally complete the shape. Workers on the edge, melding the rebar, their helmets lit with the light of progress, process. I distract myself as we duck under them, our cab ducking in and out of snaking crowds, looking for the next exit. My family’s in the back-row, and in my memories this will be a different city, a new country. A junction can become a crossroads, a crosswalk becomes a scramble. Turning past a night market, its citizens bustling about, hustling their wares and going about their days, my mother says that actually this place is still so undeveloped compared to where we come from but I wonder if that was meant to indicate some kind of success of government policy or whether some sign of how this becomes the market of progress progress progress progress progress it is measured in dollars and cents it is measured in numbers and statistics rising arrow-like before the lurch towards God himself in the upper-right corner of the umpteenth bar graph I am tired of thinking of progress it would be nice if we could live for the sake of being alive and not for slaving our lives away paying off a degree or a loan that lets us qualify to slave our lives away I am almost back to the hotel now and I can sleep tonight forgetting all of this
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 sun must dip under the horizon like ducking under a gantry, breaking its way into a secured compound where the secret to all that makes up happiness can be found, or perhaps, where every past love has gone to die a slow burning as they grind their knees to dust on the cold uncaring linoleum floor of an unnamed factory pumping out name after name for some unspecified purpose
many things now exist without purpose or meaning just stationary in their spotlights on the stage of some higher power as they sit around waiting for the light to beam them up or slowly cook them alive
I am one of those things I am determined to be meaningless I do not need a Wikipedia page although it might be nice nobody needs a Wikipedia page just like nobody truly needs a suitcase full of twenty billion dollars how large a suitcase I don’t know possibly the size of 3000 olympic-sized swimming pools
I don’t need anything I mean I am alive I have a roof over my head and a love all to myself I am fed and clothed and warm I can enter a store and not have shifty eyes follow me but the entirety of human civilisation is built to emphasise and sharpen that pang of want want want to keep the gears turning blood sweat tears as lubricant for foreplay for the foreman to keep the machine going again, for some unnamed boss who earns more than everyone else without having lifted a finger and you will have people throw themselves onto the railroad spike of progress if only to say
there is nothing wrong with anything ever
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.
A week from now, the sea will bend itself back, pulling at the edges of continents and islands, tugging them together again with the slow patient touch of a long- loved grandfather. Yesterday, I dreamt about the long journey it would take to shorten this distance; in a snowy terminal, flanked by snaking briar trees naked for the winter, I could see you, lugging up one suitcase after another onto a sleeping, humming bus; I could see the slow burn of relocation, how each little gesture is but a larger step of moving on; I can see the rear view of the bus as that white world is left behind – oh how the bus will turn onto the interstate, and how the planes will take off forever and ever. I am imagining small conversation, a bustling airport, and you sitting in a cafe thinking about home, and maybe when you are done with your morning tea in the well of the teacup I’d be there in the dregs as though a vision, a sign.
slowly tugging them together again.
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.
There is a slack in the arm, where the elbow bends taut like a crane dipping its head into the water.
Its beak disappearing only to reeemerge filled with fish.
The way the scales must run, all slimy and cobblestone, down the tongue.
To cut to the point I am feeling like a felled tree the thud of timber muffled on my mattress and there, being no birds to fly off dramatically into the distance.
I wanted more from this life, I wanted suspense. I wanted dagger-throat romance, I wanted sea of green swimming-pool, bills plucked fresh with their faces still clean.
I wanted absurdity, I wanted freedom, and now all I have is peace, and a little quiet on the weekends, yet some wind in my chest is rifling through the papers, flipping the channels and water splashing like a prophecy onto the banks of man
I don’t know what it is I want but I never feel like I have it
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.
