poem
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Walking down the city boardwalk I am in pursuit of a greater evening. It is a miracle and a privilege to be alive and doing nothing at all. I commiserate and I conversate with the crowds of nobody relevant. Sometimes I let words unentangle their tongues in my pockets. My hands are at home there
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God was a carpenter because I don’t know any carpenters. That is a way to start a prayer,in the same way it is to end one. Sometimes in the middle of crossing the road I stop to think of the luminal space between God and pavement. Consider: God as pavement.Consider: God as atheist. I am
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Absolutely chuffed to say that two of my poems, “Kingfisher” and “Forest Clearing Meditation”, have been published in The Galway Review. You can read them here: https://thegalwayreview.com/2019/09/15/valen-lim-two-poems/
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Staring down the clock to divine meaning from the intersection of clock hands. Hands on top of hands, layers upon layers of intimacy stacked like a half-shuffled deck of cards. Is it any wonder why we personify Time? But why is Time a father? Time has never given us pause. Time is a mother, time
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Anything to keep the faucet going, anything to keep that great big hamster-wheel of the heart spinforever, anything to be a poem.I realise that my life has been a series of fortunate events andseveral turns of phrase, like the turnstile of the station nearest to my first heartbreak. Hark, it’s9pm and I’m dirty and unwashedand
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We went in on a dare, so of course we’d be half-alive by the end of it.A dare is a half-suspended heart beat. The drum, out of place. A falling out of line. There is so much you can do before someone else will want to nip it in the bud. Ah, a cliche. See,
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I am challenging myself to engage in form. To fit in this self-construct -ed mold, the oneI’ve inherited frommy father, and hisfather before him,to swallow, become. And then I break out like I’m on the verge of insanity. And then I break out like I have no family to care about. In an episode of
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There are two ways of looking at every situation. Let’s call them A and B. If they were people, they’d be David and Peter. Or, as I remind myself to degender that ambiguous jellyfish of the mind, let’s call them Valen and Valen. Valen is the type of person who walks down the street every
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Writing is a ritual for me nowadays. I don’t do it unless I have to, but I do it every day. I get into something nice, I put on music. I draw the shades. I sit in a comfortable position, and I pull out the blank page. The blank page is a canvas for this
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Smoking away in the stairwell I put the still-warm weapon into my mouth again. Pull, catch and release like an angler, the smoke trail a tangled lure. Dissipating into the intersection of moonlight and wind, the breeze rolling in like a policeman waiting to catch us. For what? We haven’t done anything wrong. We’re just
ugly stage 