Wonderland

I used to have the same fever dreams over and over again; an endless dream sequence set in a place like wonderland.

There, people walk around in a stupor with half-smiles on their faces. They talk about how the sun is shining so brightly, or compliment the precise diamond-like shape of raindrops but when asked about their names or who they are, they fall silent.

You are walking in the middle of a crowd of people; suddenly you stop, turn around and there's no one around you at all. You're standing in a narrow hallway and you can see no end to it. You put one foot ahead of another because there's really nothing else you can do.

She looks at me, her face utterly devoid of emotion and holds out her palm to me. WE'RE ALL MAD HERE, written in faded black ink. She continues licking the ink on her translucent skin.

There's a mirror in front of me and I see you in it; or rather, you see me. And I realize that we're the same person after all. And all the people walking in circles, with their zombie-smiles and their apparent lack of sound minds are more clones of me.

Then the dream would start all over again.

Dear You,

There was once a girl who spent so much time building castles and worlds and perennial universes;
her arms are islands and her feet are mountains.
The wind is her breath and the ocean her blood but at the same time, she is the island and the mountain, the wind and the ocean.
She is not here, or there, or anywhere but she is everywhere.

She spent nights trying to find her voice. She had it once, long, long ago. But the only memory she had of it is vague and unintelligible; she couldn't even recognize it.
So now she goes around knocking from mouth to mouth, trying to retrieve her lost voice.

She's a dreamer but such a strong one. Hurricanes that would leave her devastated come and go. New hearts are drawn over old, smudged and crossed out ones.
Torn seams and lost faith are stitched back onto her soul.
Her teardrops are the infinitesimal stars in the sky. She who dreamed and dream still of love.

On Feelings

I would like to write a book solely on feelings. I want to document and categorize every feeling known to man. I want to untangle the intricate and complex feelings and translate them into words. I want to catch the stray ghosts of feelings and inject into them a magic chemical that would make them solid and preserve them in formaldehyde. I want to tape them in my scrapbook of feelings and label every one of them. Then I will be named Prof. of Feeltology and win a Nobel prize for my amazing discovery.

Love is A Sticky Mess

My tongue is leaden with
particles of you,
and my soul weary;
I love you
but I love you
no more.

I am more

ghost

than solid flesh. I

roam the piceous concourse of

your murky mind too long,

too often.
And I saw

Your shriveled bones.

I love you

but I'm suffocating. 

You crowd my lips 

and you clot

in the pores of my 

withering skin. 

You disgust me,

but I love you

and I love you still. 

We're Monsters Together

I am not the princess and you are not the prince. You are the vicious, snarling dragon and I am the effulgent scales on your reptilian body. I am the thorny spikes undulating along your spine, the all-consuming fire you breathe.

We'll kill princes and princesses and kings and queens. We'll eat armor-clad soldiers by the legion and burn castles of steel and stone. We'll fly the night sky and rule the world.

We are monsters together, you and I.

19th of March

I want to be able to walk alone. I want to be the girl who pirouettes on the thin line of Loneliness, singing softly to herself in the reverberating echo of emptiness. I want the air to be filled with only particles of me: my breath, my scent, my heartbeat, my essence. I want to be alone and yet I am too afraid that if I were truly solitary, I would cease to be a person altogether.

B is For

B is for Blue Balloons.
For Breaking Bones, Bloated Bodies,
and Ballerinas.
Breathing in sharply, I can't help
But feel the sudden ache in my left
Breast. I imagine my heart
Blistering, Black Blood collects in the sacs of pus like
Bells of hell. And,
Bruised, Bleeding, Between Breaths,
I
Blacked out.

Armand:

You said you like my dress, because it's so long and so red and it goes on forever. It's an amaranthine river that flows from the blades of my shoulder to the ground. The scarlet train pools around my feet like blood. Or ketchup.

You said you like my skin. Milky white and luminescent behind the crimson silk. Touch it then, I whisper. Trace it with your finger but be gentle, and soft. My skin is so thin it will break at the slightest pressure, and the red would come out of me, and I will die. Trust me, darling, I'll die.

The Masked Girl

It has become a routine that has to be done daily - a ritual, almost. She stands in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror with a basin of water in one hand and a small towel in another. She forces herself to look into the mirror and suppresses the disgust and utter horror as she wets the towel and dabs at her face (if it can still pass as a face).

The softness of the towel on her skin is delicious. Slowly, gently and with a deftness that could only hint at regularity, she removes the flakes of skin from her purulent flesh. The pinkish, raw sinewy muscles on her face contracts when she opens her mouth. The foul-smelling pus that flows down her throat is carefully cleaned.

She lifts up a rubber mask from her dresser and puts it on, careful to secure the edges. Make-up is applied to make her face more realistic, more natural. At best, she looked as though she had had a bad plastic surgery, at worst the bleeding is too heavy to put on a fake face at all. She looks at herself proudly, admiring the face that her own hands had produced.

He wouldn't recognize her now. No, she had been beautiful once and he had been the devil. If she had known better she wouldn't have made the deal with him but he had been so charming, so alluring. Let me love you and let me be with you and I'll give you anything. Anything. Well, he did. He let her love him and let her be with him and he wanted her face.

But you know what they say, a deal's a deal and he got her goddamned face. She hopes he does it justice. Pretty faces are hard to come by, after all.

Caravaggio

I only started to really like Caravaggio when I was 15, having read this amazing book by David Hewson - The Garden of Evil. And since then, I've been a faithful admirer. =)

Judith Beheading Holofernes

David and Goliath

Amor Victorious

Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy

I have to say, his rendition of David and Goliath is one of my favorites. In fact, it's only second to Gustave Dore's.