Ulalala...Today last day Of Schooling..Neh Neh..Boo Boo..Shake ga Boo..kakakakka..iam So happy !! Wakakaka..no need suffer at school for a week.It's Kinda relax for me.. Oh Yea,I Cut My hair this afternoon !! Hehehe..I Wish i can take photo of my brand new hair..Hehehehe..Wakakakka..Tomorrow Morning i will go PangKor with Family & Back on Sunday Evening.I Think i will Miss my darling badly..Huh..Wuu..='((..Dear,U Must take care alright...Muckss.Mucks Always... Okie lar,wana watch tv jor...bb

I still think of him, you know. He's still on that pedestal. He's the one who set the standard. He's the one who made everything elusive and everything possible.

I was seventeen. He was nineteen -- and engaged.

We worked together at a summer camp. We never kissed ... we just held each other a lot and spent almost all our free time together.

We once snuck out from our respective cabins to meet each other at the stables, where we huddled on a hay bale and watched the lightning, talking for hours until the day began to creep up.

He never knew what I felt and I could never tell him -- or maybe he did know. He didn't want to get married but even so, it couldn't be helped. Even as impossible as it would have been, I wonder now if maybe he was waiting for me to say something to interfere with the inertia of his life.

It's the little things that I remember even now -- things that come back to me at the spurring of music or the scent of the perfume I wore then. Bits and pieces of events ... running through the underbrush with the smell of wet earth everywhere ... playing hide and seek ... the taunting and the teasing Big Tits and the caring and the flood of emotions.

I do still love him in the most innocent and ageless of ways. He will always be nineteen chasing me through the woods before pinning me playfully to a post, his face just inches away. Time will not mar him in my memory.

He's married now. I heard they have a child. I hope he's finally adjusted and okay with being married.

Sometimes I wish it were me.

I'd like to see him just once more. A last dance of sorts. But it's probably better that I leave sleeping ghosts in their graves.

I miss him every day I breathe.

 

I didn't expect to find it. But there it was. She had written me a letter.

Hesitant to pick it up from the kitchen counter, I stared at it for a minute or two. I don't remember what I was thinking. But when I finally did pick it up, curiosity took hold and I ran upstairs, closed the bedroom door and realized my heart was now in my throat.

Opening the letter, I found the gold chain I had given to her in love.

I gave her the chain just before we were forced to part. We had attended university together for four months, but eventually she had to leave. I remember holding her at the airport, feeling her tears, gently kissing her, losing myself in her deep brown eyes and later that night taking comfort in hearing her voice, though she was now thousands of miles away.

When it began, I don't think either one of us were looking for anything. Though part of me dreamed of someone.

She lived upstairs from me in the house where I was boarding. And since I had a car, she came along to the grocery store with me. I helped fill her cart as she wasn't sure what to buy, living away from home for the first time. We laughed.

She and I began spending more time together. We went on runs together, shared hot chocolate, opened our hearts to one another, talked into the late evenings and early mornings.

One time, she fell asleep in my arms. I held on tight.

For the first time in my life, I could see into the heart of another. She was the only one I wanted to be with. We were inseparable.

That winter, apart from one another, was tough. We wrote countless love letters back and forth, sharing every little detail of our days. I could still see into her heart. I held on tight, and so did she.

But that summer, we began to drift apart. I started to think she wasn't holding on as tightly to us as I was. Truth is, when I think about it now, she probably did the best she could. But her heart was closing to me.

I continued holding on tight.

And one night later that year, on the phone, she told me it was over.

I walked aimlessly through the streets for days, eventually finding myself at the bus station, buying a ticket to go see her. She was now only a couple of hours away, having transferred to a university closer to my own, only a two hour bus ride away.

It would be another ten hours in the bus terminal and hardly a wink of sleep for me, after realizing she was out of town. No place to stay, a bus bench was my bed that night.

I did see her that morning. Her hug was cool, her heart was half-open, and we agreed to give our love, or what was left of it, a chance. Perhaps she just didn't know how to end it. I felt like I was begging, like I was holding on tighter than ever, forcing her to hold on against her will.

Her next visit was the end. She stayed at my place, told me the brutal truth. Silence. Denial. She cried. I held her the next morning, though I knew she didn't want me to.

Oh, the gold chain ... I returned it to her. She had written in the brief letter that she didn't deserve to keep it. This hurt because I had given it to her in love.

I'm glad to have been invited into her heart.

It took a while but I later realized she was not my soulmate ... who, by the way, was worth the wait.

Poetry as means of reform?
Just got another copy of The Poet's Notebook last night, and flipped through the Charles Simic section to find this quote:

"Like many others, I grew up in an age which preached liberty and built slave camps. Consequently, reformers of all varieties terrify me. I only need to be told I'm being served a new, improved, low-fat baked ham, and I gag."

That reminded a couple years ago when I first read it -- and still reminds me -- of poets who invoke 'reform' as a result of their poetic practice (see my Burt quote a few days back), especially when in its meaning the poems themselves often have nothing to do with reform. The notion of poetry -- or being creative or artistic for that matter -- as in itself a political act used to be a great idea to me, one that I'd bring up all the time. It seems just too cozy of an idea to me now.

Now, when poets preach reform by creating some commentative sideline to a poetry in which the poet promises reform as a result of reading the poem -- and I'm speaking of a reform of any kind, as I think Simic is, political, artistic, poetic -- it makes me gag. My Bullshit Detector goes off. I realize as I write this I'm interchanging reform and politics, commentary and poetry, and that's perhaps why my argument is so splenetic and faulty. But when there's a promise of any kind in a poem that cannot be accomplished with the speech act right there, it's as elusive as a puffball in spring. And when it's a reform alluded to outside the poem, it's trickery at its worst. It is a dictator promising bread, or a union leader taking bribes. It's a fraud.

And yet there's this consensus-building side of me that says to settle down, that this is what puts gas in so-and-so's poem's engine, and whatever gets someone to make better art of write a better poem is fair play. And that makes sense to me. So I can read the poems, no problem.

But what work it is for the reader to ignore that reformer's commentary! Such generosity on the reader's part from which the poet draws and even exploits! The ignorance of good will on the reader's part! It occurs to me that this generosity tires the reader down, wears them down, and basically, through attrition, leads to some readers to use coping mechanisms, adopting the way crowds ignore a politician's bullhorn or a screaming head on Fox News -- it's that same.

Poetry is at its best when ruled over by a stiff hand and an extreme, often violent ideology. And the physical world, more often than not, suffers from that same stiff hand, that same extreme and violent ideology. A poet, when drawing a straight line from the physical to the poetry worlds, betrays the space in between and gets in the reader's way.

So if there is such a thing as poetic liberation, poetic reform, I'd be curious to find out what it is. I sound so arch here, diva-like; I know poetry can reform, but reform through the poem, in the poem, in its words. I mean here, I guess, of actually handing over the legislature to those unacknowledged legislators. We like to talk about it, invoke it, again and again, that bit about unacknowledged legislators. I don't like most legislators, but I for one would not want poets legislating. Poets can't even run reading series! So if it means some parallel, some violent conversation of pure ideology to the poet, that promises a new improved egg, me and Simic will be gagging. If it means the poems making things happen in the readers' mind, without jump-starting the process, count me in.