THE FOLLOWING POEM WAS SELECTED IN WINGWORD POETRY PRIZE 2023 LONGLIST.
I think for too long, it has been us:
Writers and storytellers,who have stolen away the limelight of being ideal romantics to fall in
love with.
I, for one, have always wondered, what would it be like to date a fine artist?
My best friend tells me
Watch the way he sketches you
When he says that your morning face
Is like his breath of fresh air
Does he really mean it?
Can he draw you
Just the way you are
When the first rays of sunlight kiss your drowsy eyes?
Does he paint the locks of your hair,
Sitting unkempt and asymmetric about your face
Or does he hide away the dark circles underneath your eyes
Telling you that the hue matching them
Was too scarce for his palette
Ask yourself
Does he sketch you for you?
Or does he sketch you for him?
And in that moment,
I pause
I reflect,
And I respond,
“He sketches me for both of us”
Because on my worse days
He would tell me that my tears were like dew drops
They could breathe life into dying lillies
Even in the dead of winter
She grills me, further
What about the days when he was the dead winter?
What was that really like?
Ermm…can we skip to the good parts?
Me, sitting in his studio
While he would put on the final touches
And all I ever waited was
To see the sparkle in his eyes
Him running towards me,
‘How does it look’?,
‘It’s ..it’s beautiful’,
And in that moment
I saw his eyes turn hollow
Almost devoid of any emotion
I wished I had more than just clichéd adjectives to offer
To tell him what I saw
To tell him what I think he wanted the world to see
And the spaces where it felt missing
But even a writer’s vocabulary can sometimes fall short
When it comes to deciphering art
It wasn’t really my fault!
Poetry
Unlike Art
Didn’t beg you
To remember the past
Of wars
Of revolutions
Of the fall of empires
It reminded you
If it wanted to
In alliterations and repetitions
Poetry
Unlike Art
Could be written by anyone
By a soldier at the border
Writing the last verse of love for his beloved wife
By a child in an English class
Penning down words on a card for Mother’s Day
By a lover reeling from his heartbreak
Writing to heal himself
Poetry
Unlike Art
Didn’t have to be locked away
In museums and art galleries
Only to be honoured by the elite
Poetry
Unlike Art
Was written in language you and I could feel
Art just didn’t the speak the same dialects
Think about it,
For most us,
Art was about sketching mountains, rivers and grasslands
And when I saw that landscape painting
I didn’t know
If it was an artist being nostalgic about his countryside home
Or maybe,
Just a traveller seeking to fulfil wanderlust
But he scoffs at me
For being kiddish
Says,
I am comparing the grandeur of art
To my 5th grade paintings
Well,
When someone can paste a banana peel on a duct tape
And mount it on a wall
Selling it for millions of dollars
Was it really me being the child?
So he finally declares
That the next time I plan on visiting him,
I am no longer going to be a passive seeker of art
Says
I have given way too much to poetry
How do I confess
That my childhoods have been spent
In limericks, haikus and rhymes
My teenage in
Slams, mini sagas and free verse
And as an adult
I am still learning how to write
Sonnets, ballads, and saudades
And, I may have no energy
To choose between his charcoal and acrylics
To fit within greyscale or color
And maybe,
I want to be a passive seeker of someone else’s art
To be a speck of yellow in a dark blue sky
And for him to be the Van Gogh of my Starry Night
My friend cautions
Look closely at those bright orange orbs in his art
Swirling waves of ferocity and fury
I tell her
That’s him being dreamy, moody, and magical all at once
He’s quite a rare find
She warns
These are hidden signs of a tortured mind
Burning with indignation
I clarify
That when an artist loves
He pours himself
Passionately with vivacity
Expecting little in return
And when a man can pour himself for days on a blank canvas
Bending and twisting his strokes
Until the early hours of dawn
You know for a fact
That he will never ever get tired of loving you
He will love you
Passionately with vivacity
She intervenes
Passionately with vivacity
He will love you, perhaps, in extremes
Maybe, without understanding boundaries
Until the spaces between you have intertwined
And you are breathing each other’s air
As you cough the smell of cigar
Lying in bed with him
You realise
How everything’s
Covered in nicotine and tar
And you wonder
When did your own home become so stifling?
Was it every morning when you left for work
Reminding him to fix that goddamn leaking tap
And right now
In the middle of all your memories
You can still hear drops of water
Pitter-platter against the bathroom floor
Remember how he would laugh it away
Telling you that the sound of water
Was music to his ears
And there was rhythm and rhyme
In a leaking tap
I couldn’t see
Until one day, the faucet ran dry
And then came the storm
the screams
the clatter of pots
the smashingof glass
And I saw five years
Of memories spiral into ashes
A month later
I saw him coming back to me
This time,
He was genuinely sorry
Wrapping his fingers around mine
He whispered
That if the Japanese could join broken pieces of pottery
Mending it with liquid gold
Then my poetry and his art
Could fill in all the cracks and crevices
Between us
Maybe, they could
But I was too formed
To be broken
And mended all over again.
For I was now, bisque fire!