Strings of words have come into my head
that are almost like psalms about you.
If you knew, you’d probably laugh.
It’s funny isn’t it?
If the people who made decrees were wise,
you would be canonised -
Saint Toni;
In my dyslexia, i wrote Satin Toni -
maybe you would have preferred that more.
I keep bumping into moments when I wished you were around
There are so many questions still;
So many moments when I am shaky, and lazy,
and I knew that if only I could have 5 minutes
with your voice on the telephone
pressed close to my ears,
or a quick chat next to the photocopy machine,
or the time that it takes for rings from sweaty glass mugs
to stain the table
as you weave your stories into parables;
Everything will make sense again,
the fire will have new light, my small feet
ready for fight, for flight,
It might even be called hope.
There are so many things that you
would have been proud of;
So many changes that maybe,
you wouldn’t be surprised at,
since you always knew the might of seeds.
I keep bumping into moments when I wished you were around.
Today there is a meeting that you would have gone for,
where I would go, with two-thirds of the reason
being just to catch up with you, have a huge hug with you.
But I will still be there. And so will you.
In so many ways.
Every single person you have spent time with,
have you in them.
Like magic. Or witchcraft.
Or common sense.
It’s been a year, and I still keep bumping into you.
It makes me smile.
And it makes me sad.
It makes me write weird psalms about you in my head.
It makes me breakdance with hope and ache.
Miss you Toni. Miss you a lot.
i can’t remember the first time i met you. it seems as though you have always been present, with a huge breathtaking hug and a smile that just knocks all doubts away. how can the world begin to spell the loss of you? i just saw a video in tribute to you. and you are there, speaking, your voice sounding just like how it always is, strong, questioning, challenging, always with a hint of a laugh underneath. i cannot remember the sound of your laughter, and that really hurts me.
do you know just how much you are loved? do you know how beautiful you are, in your presence, in your life, in everything that you do and touch and see? you are like the heart of a ripple, imperceptible and humble in your constant agitation of complacency. and we have not yet seen the end of those ripples you have caused. change upon change. awakening upon awakening. you inspire.
everytime i have the chance of having a conversation with you, i leave a fuller person. did you know you do that to people? you make me feel with earth under my feet, you make me think with the tireless spinning of webs inside my head, forming question marks that are sparked by fire, pushing me to act, however small my hands and feet, they can move and make and break and create. after each conversation, you make me believe that.
when i was drowning myself in a sea full of guilt and inadequacy, for not doing more, for not giving more, you were always so light and honest in your appreciation, all scales fall away and dissolve into resolve. it doesn’t matter. what matters is everything that is, and everything that could possibly be. humility. you teach me humility.
and you have opened me to a kind of love i did not realise is possible. without lines, without trade, without spaces. you are so wise. you are so sharp. you dance in the waves of cheeky laughter. you are truly, someone the world was not prepared to deserve. and is not prepared to lose.
there is an absence that a century of grieving could not shadow the form of exactly how deep, how much we have lost. all i know is i miss you so much. an insensible craving that cannot begin to grasp the fact that you are gone. with love toni. you are a magical blessing.
orchestra
i saw monochromatic women and men
slowly take their seat
and place their instruments in varying
gestures of affection
on their laps;
with wind and strokes and pauses
the murmuring begins.
i closed my eyes and let
the keening colours swim inside me in
slipping streams of yearning;
a cup of silence lets the girl in gold
stride in
then her violin
sings.
the man in his coat gesticulates
as wildly as the flecks of sweat that
flies across the space between us
like a graceful ballerina
committing suicide.
or so i imagined.
how did the music know
when to bow
and when to show
a centre of attention?
what instinct do the leaves possess
to huddle when it’s time to flower?
or is it merely a kind of wisdom
to adhere, sometimes,
to a manic stick that’s wielded?
++++++++
rahmat harun stole the show on friday night when on top of his usual, magical grasp of the malay language in rhythm and taste, he lit up a self-confessed “balut” on stage. he recited 2 poems, read an open letter to benjamin zephaniah and even sang a leonard cohen song — despite having being forbidden by the one who forbids forbidding. either way, he was in top form.
the first piece was about the multiple denial of identities that might be (have been?) labelled on himself. aku bukan… xyz. the only thing he confesses to being is a “bangsat”, which he gleefully invites everyone present to name him as so. i’ve always thought bangsat was a bastard or asshole or something similar. but checking my little MPH dwibahasa dickie, apparently, it means “vagrant”. i don’t know if this is meant to be a cleaned up version for the populasi.
anyway.
his letter was on the spot. mocking the colonial traces of bejamin zephaniah’s presence (a UK performance poet brought to KL by the british council), and stitching a relational version of malaysian reality through the various laws and surveillance practices when it comes to smoking ganja. afterwhich, he casually lights up what looks like a reefer (i sat right in front and sniffed like crazy, but couldn’t smell the weed though) and read a poem about smoking up.
nice.
after the show, he literally left his mark by scrawling all over the walls in central market some rantings about forbidden to forbid and more love notes to benji.
i guess if you’re looking for “artists”, then don’t expect them to take boundaries too seriously 
then benjamin came on. and he surprised me by performing stuff that was almost all political in some way (and good on him, making lots of references to ganja along the way;)). i didn’t think too much of his poems, but his performance was awesome. the beats and rhythm of his stuff was actually quite similar to rahmat’s, which was odd, and got me thinking in various strange rasta directions. anyway, he was witty, his humour cheeky, his intentions earnest. one of the poems i liked most from that was:
White Comedy
(from ‘Propa Propaganda’)
“I waz whitemailed
By a white witch,
Wid white magic
An white lies,
Branded by a white sheep
I slaved as a whitesmith
Near a white spot
Where I suffered whitewater fever.
Whitelisted as a whiteleg
I waz in de white book
As a master of white art,
It waz like white death.
People called me white jack
Some hailed me as a white wog,
So I joined de white watch
Trained as a white guard
Lived off the white economy.
Caught and beaten by de whiteshirts
I waz condemned to a white mass,
Don’t worry,
I shall be writing to de Black House.
really got my mind flipping like when i was watched babel. thinking about where i am positioned in that discourse. strangely, nowhere. which got me thinking about racism in general. and the kind of annoyance i sometimes feel when racism as a violation only seem to apply when it comes to black/white. actually, the epicentre still lies on the white.
++++++++
supernova
such brilliance, it pierces the heart
of my eye;
i feel myself pulled to your
Excellence.
how could i question
the bringer of light,
the breather of life,
the blessed anchor of relevance?
i find myself hoping
to be drawn to your edges
so my hues can shimmer
as your shadow.
at least if i am marked as
black
as middle eastern
as muslim
as oriental
as japanese
as russian
as a threat of terrorism
or nuclear weapon
or simply a victim of mass exploitation
that you could save,
then i can have a name
that will echo.
even if mispronounced.
i found malay taxi drivers in cape town,
chinese lesbians marching in london,
burmese organic celery sellers in bangsar;
they appear like a magic trick
and i am left breathless;
under-prepared by Hollywood, Bollywood and Al-Jazeera.
supernova.
when will you implode?
and will you take me with you?
++++++++
then it was poetry slam at sek san’s impossibly beautiful space on jalan tempinis. singapore vs malaysia. gosh, however will it turn out? heh. there were a few awesome things: the space, the fact that lots of people came to watch/hear poetry, lots of people doing poetry, hearing some new decent stuff , and best of all, poetry hooliganism.
it basically works like this. after some individual and collective performances by a few people, the slam starts. and there’s a pool of poets reading their stuff, and a panel of judges giving their score at the end of each recitation. poets get eliminated until there’s 3 left standing for a final round to decide which comes first.
i think i might have expected something like chow sing chi’s lawyer show, where there’s lots of witty rhymes in response to each other spluttering spontaneously in the air. but it was prepared stuff, not really speaking to each other. so i’ve heard some of the local ones before.
there is a difference between poetry to be performed, and poetry to be chewed on at each reading. or maybe it’s just a different texture of appreciation. i wouldn’t know. i guess it might be a little like shakespeare’s stuff, where it works differently when performed and read (or even filmed). anyway, it seems like doggerels and limmericks are good for performance, humour works like a charm, and sex, as usual, sells. but then sex also, as usual, has varying degrees of resonance.
thick stuff can’t really be performed i think. it’s going to be hard to perform emily dickinson’s stuff no? but on the other hand, symzborska might work. maybe it depends on the performer, the space, the audience.
there was also a lot of suspicious singing or humming of tunes going on in this performance poetry thing, or at least at the slam. it worked for the travelogue thing done by the trio, but was ingratiatingly irritating by the solo-ists. i guess music and words crafted for tempo and rhyme is quite close to each other. i could see both benjamin’s and rahmat’s stuff work as spinal chords of songs. but humming? hmm
part of the rules is that audiences get to snap their fingers if they get bored, and stamp their feet if it gets really boring. so we did. a herd of hooligans at the back, clicking our fingers, booing the judges, calling for mutiny… it was fun! it was really good sport of the poets to not be ruffled by the crowd, and take it in stride. it must be awful, having your creations disrupted by an audibly unappreciative audience. it would kill any sense of self-confidence (for me at least). so i have deep respect for the bravado, the humour and the confidence it takes to go on stage and be assessed by a bunch of idiots.
heh.
i loved the fact that poetry hooliganism could happen. with so much vanilla and nursery school caution in the air, a jibe can do so much.
