YELLOW

Tremors like low circles flicker round my eyes. If I had lived in the desert I would wish for different things. But I live not in the desert not in the forest not in the sea I live in the city where there are people and there are children and there are grown children and there are older persons and there are animals unlike those you find in the places without houses that are like the ones here like hard grey and coloured and glass paned windows the bigger your house is the more money you might have is this what we believe is right or is it mindless following of each other up and up going up ding the lift closes and I think it would be different if this was the forest but I have been to the forest and I have lived there for some time and I have found that the movies show their lives to be simpler and their ways to be more advanced than ours in the way that they are simpler and do not become jealous and competitive in the ways that we do but ah listen here they do they do they are just like us they are us us are they we are all the same in different places but we feel the same things different persons in different places are the same not the same very same nearly same different traits spread across yes we are all...

Maybe, if I speak, the fur of this world will flicker like ears.

HONG KONG YOUNG WRITER'S AWARD 2015: ENTRY

Strange density – the air is thick with voices. My chest is constricted, my heart is paused in rhythm and song is stopped in sense. There is a haze, and I am confused by the dimness above the grey...
Halt! Is there a lighter way to go? My hands fumble through my skin: I have been to the casinos, the memorial hall, the skyscrapers, the villages, the farms but oh! Not one is like this. Something grey enfolds me and I am boiling in the wind. The cars are flying past.
Here some years ago I lay in the sea, floating on the water cool and catching. It shone like the earliest times of the moon: dimmed by the stars beside, and like the vague gaze admist the purple sky...What stars are there to be seen now? And the wind was aloof – unaware, unknowing, untold of what was to come. Its change! Its demise – and how soon it came! A time cannot last so long until it is changed. The air is now tainted – it is foul and sunless, and the wind blows a cheerless blight at me, and I float – too aware of what is here and what is to come.
I think I have stopped breathing, but my heart remains alive...The fish swim towards a haven, but it is afar; away from me and me and me. Through my eyelids I see the village from whence I came – the wooden houses lined in chaos, the black hairs on my sister’s head covered by dust... The lands I walked on all are faint now. The once spry and pleasant is now overcome and claimed by this strange distant density, clouding our thinking, dyeing our due wonder and herding us into the sea...
I used to lie in this sea, with unbounded wonder crossing my eyes, waiting until the rainwater had filled my wooden pails. I would heft them on a stick – a stronger stick every day from the oak I planted a flower below every day. A gift for a gift...And I gave the oak a seed this time, because there are no more flowers around the Pearl River Delta...

I reach out, my fingers lacing round crumpled paper. Red words, red faces – all a blur in my eyes as my mind cries and tries to grasp a memory...But my heart remembers too much! I feel pain in this peace...There were brown doors and paths joined by grass yellow and green and almost insubstantial...
A light scent roams me now and I am quietly startled – I look at the haven. I try to see it. I can only see its outline, and I am crying under the water...It is glowing, and the trees are growing taller as I stare. My heart slows. Their roots are beating to the north...

no difference in the world / there is still hope in this grief

A man who fought, a man who longed

A man who sought; a man who wronged.

They all were trampled day and night

by terrors dark as death in sight.

What difference does is none in truth,

for victims die and victims lose.

the acts of the birds

they perch on our ears

stay with us for some time

they leave without a chirp

it breaks my heart

give me a signal

something to hold onto

i loved you once too

turn my hedges

stash my clothes

drink my weariness

your duty is not done

wave to me when you go away

i will wave to you

touch my pinky finger

never cross it

written listening to “dress up in you” and “i suppose that was a prayer”

rosa

What, she asked, is mad? I know you can crumble under it, but you can also float on it, I think. Am I mad? My heart hurts.

you are mad. said the crocodile. you are mad. his lips whispered. you are mad. he hissed at the bell on her throat. you are mad,

and he crumbled, like breadcrumbs, and she looked away. everyone she knew did that. they crumbled like her breakfast. it was weird, and unsettling, somehow. she always saw the colour slowly leave their cheeks...actually, most of them didn’t have colour in their cheeks anyways. she wasn’t really sure where the crocodile’s cheeks were. 

she placed his head on her lap, and stroked his face. he appeared to be dozing. his head was heavy. she moved it gently onto the sticky ocean floor, and rattled her chains. they didn’t loosen, and her wrists felt sore. she asked him to wake up. there was no sound, only bubbles. she frowned, frustrated. there was a drooping feeling in her chest, and she felt strangely out of breath. wait, what was breath? 

she closed her eyes then, not because she felt happy, or tired, or even because she wanted to, but because she had to. there was a sort of darkness closing in around her, and it sounded like Elijah, stroking her cheeks and kissing her forehead. he swam gaily round her, his eyes brighter than she remembered, hiw face sharper and more beautiful than her own. not that she had ever seen her own face. how did anyone look at themselves? where could they do it? she wondered if you could see yourself in the sun, if the reflection would cast back into your eyes so that you could gaze at your own appearance. hmm. she would try that one day. 

familiar faces appeared all round her: there was Charlotte perched on the crocodile’s tail, her hair flying everywhere in the water; Jex with his golden mane, his red eyebrows and tired eyebags; Naryn and an ice cream cone, and her ruined flowers, and blueberry eyes; Arias, hunched, with his young eyes, and denim shirt, tucked in, unbuttoned at the top, his gray lattice scarf hanging loose around his neck and his hair swaying to the beat of a music she could not hear. it all occurred to her, in one final second, that they were all people she had never spoken to, only seen and thought beautiful. not that she had, of course, even spoken to anyone. she had, of course, written notes, signed, and read lips, but in all honesty, she wished she had a voice. it was probably hidden somewhere in her. perhaps that was why they were all here, to help her get it out, so that she could use it.

THE WIDE BLUE YONDER

a driven blade into the hearts of the softening,

tongues stretching to taste the pall

disrupts a seclusion from accord.

bow and sing and smirk and wave,

there is no happier time than the blue hour;

taste the pie upon lips of hippo blessed wealth;

the possibility of something remarkable lies still,

lest you spark it! light it!

flames will tenderly caress your minds,

and thoughts with flattering will coax you:

live, live and die – but live first, and survive.

flourish, frisk, flutter, beside this frolic sky,

the wide blue yonder will take you, love you –

perhaps you will see Him.

RANGE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoZhgxKY3I8

With closed eyes, an unemployed writer drops and catches seventy dollars. Is this in her mind, or really happening? She sees a housepainter, who looks at her. The housepainter opens, and closes her mouth. The writer drops the seventy dollars, and this time, does not catch it. It falls to the floor. She walks away, whilst the housepainter looks towards the sky. The housepainter, barefoot, steps on and crushes the seventy dollars.

Further along the route the writer walks upon, there is a bodyguard. The housepainter has disappeared, as has the writer. 

As the writer walks by her, the bodyguard opens, then closes her mouth. The writer senses this, and looks to her right. With her hands curled up into the shape of a gun, she shoots the bodyguard. The bodyguard is shot, and begins to laugh manically. The writer again looks to the right. Is she awake, or is this ALL in her mind? The bodyguard has disappeared.

Now the bodyguard appears, falls to the floor, and from her pocket takes out the seventy dollars the housepainter previously stepped on. The bodyguard has disappeared again, and the writer continues along, away from both the housepainter and bodyguard.

The housepainter appears, and she throws the seventy dollars to her right, and shakes her head. With both the housepainter and bodyguard behind her, the writer stops, looks in front and beyond her, then looks behind. She looks forward one last time.

The housepainter looks away from the writer, and walks back to where the writer’s path began, where the housepainter stepped on the seventy dollars. The housepainter does not wait for the writer, and seems to expect her to follow, to take this cue.

The writer looks back, towards the housepainter, and follows her. She does not continue on her path, instead, she returns to where she had already been. Is she repeating her actions, or simply returning to what she walked away from?

The housepainter stops when they reach the area this film began at. There is a younger girl, a child,  unmoving, her right arm outstretched. The housepainter turns to face the writer, who has now arrived. Hesitantly, the writer takes the child’s hand into hers.

The child falls to the floor, and behind her, the bodyguard rises from the floor. The writer is surprised, and cautious.

The bodyguard drops the seventy dollars onto the child. The writer looks at her, drops her outstretched arm, and the housepainter points her hand-gun at the bodyguard. The writer puts a hand up to stop her. The housepainter laughs manically, as the bodyguard did.

The bodyguard opens her mouth, and the housepainter closes her eyes, drops her outstretched arm and the gun, and falls to the floor. She has disappeared; only the coat can be seen on the floor. The bodyguard, looking at the writer, opens her mouth. The writer, looking towards the floor, and the child, opens her mouth. The bodyguard closes her mouth. The writer closes her mouth tightly.

NOTES

• the right side of anything, to me, has symbolised for a long time: God, goodness and Heaven, with the left symbolising the Devil and Hell
• the characters' occupations are not significantly relevant to the main story!
• 7 is a lucky number in my core family, hence the 70 dollars