August 4, 2012

Into the Night

9:00 pm
You forged those words with the heat of your rage
I opened my mouth to retaliate
But found my troops frozen in my throat’s cage
Held captive by my silence, stalemate

The space between us was a no man’s land
Where words became empty shell casings
Fell, as their force flied on at your command
Sending me into a night that thus sings


10:03 pm
I stood in front of the doorway
The wooden frame, a line,
Separating this painting to the one in my eyes
And as I took a step forward, it all became one
One where the lapis sky still had hints of the day
Making me chase down the remaining sunset
Which I can never capture except in these words
Words drawn from the same darkness of night
I draped myself with this night, wrapping my wounds,
And I found myself wandering into a world
Where light had gone to sleep


11:33 pm
My pupils grew as they drink in the dark
Learning of hidden angles never before seen
There I saw, a man beneath a tree in the park

Disheveled, I silently questioned his hygiene
He wobbled like a wooden chair with a worn leg
Leaned against the bark before falling to the green

I would’ve passed him by if not for his pitiful peg
He looked at me and beckoned me closer for words
“Just give me a couple stars of your night,” he beg-

“Gedanken experiment we will play in thirds.”
Despite the wandering hands of his reek reaching up my nostril
I stayed for the slight wisdom in the words of drunkards

He began the story in a grand way like a minstrel
Plucking away at the lines of his hands
Soon I was enveloped in his words’ tendril

He did well to cater to my curious demands
As he spoke on about the lines of his life
Of how he was given no lifelines by this waste land

He attacked the lesser chances with bitter strife
But it’s so easy to fall prey, so easy to fall prey
To emptiness, when at your throat is society’s knife

His eyes grew reflective and I watched as a shard break away
Cutting a streak down his dirty cheek; he said they’re not tears,
But alcohol overflowing to sanitize his wounds that have turned gray

Why do we leer and sneer when his plight is too, our fears?
This is our stench wafting gently into the sweet air of the night
I closed my eyes and saw the same darkness all these years


12:00 am
It’s the prelude of a new night

I closed my eyes and saw the same darkness all these years

I opened my eyes and found the world the same sight

Except for the street lights that illuminated the silhouette trees

My eyes followed the black branches up to the sky

Where the artist drew them fading into each other seamlessly


1:00 am
The moon was quietly floating among stars
Sighing gently in the dead of night,
Bringing about the quavering tides 

Tonight I took the time to observe it intently
There I saw a rabbit hopping along the craters of a man’s face
Bringing medicine to quell the moon’s sighs

A cassia tree stood stoically on its surface
I watched as a woodcutter with a scythe
With a Sisyphus task of cutting it down

Then there was Chang’e, whose expression I could not read,
Whose story we will never truly know
And I wondered if she misses the solid ground of Earth

I hopped along the dark pavement
Next to a tree whose roots held onto life
Longer than I have lived

I walked up and touched its rough skin
Carved by years and lovers’ markings
And it will be the only one in time that remembers


2:00 am
I was walking towards the city lights
The wind brought with it a strange coldness
My skin raised goose bumps to try to slow it down 
The artificial lights teasingly touched the back of my neck
Sending a horrible shiver down my spine, afraid,
I saw sharp shadows trying to crawl out of dark alleyways
Lurking and luring the naïve into its possessive embrace 


3:04 am
There was something in the air
As the wolf howled at the sighing moon
Calling the night creatures out to play
They crawled out gleefully from under the rocks,
Some late night bars, and from behind those words

It was too late for me to take cover
As my shadow crisped in the light
They approached me, their shadows engulfing mine,
Their ghoulish smiles evoking pessimism,
Such darkness, as they sank into my pupils

Searching and prying for hidden sights
Suddenly my fears were awakened
As ghosts made themselves consciously present
My subconscious flooded with sweat and tears,
And suppressed memories of ache and failures

Despair stepped forth and took my wet face in its hands
Lifting so I could stare at him eye to eye
I shuddered involuntarily and was overwhelmed
By his drumming of my heart beat
That my tears became black ink

I was so close to drowning in those words
So close to giving up the lines of my hand
And surrendering to his command of the night
Until an infant’s cry pierced through his haunting stare,
Shaking me from this living nightmare


4:29 am
I sat on the ground a good while
Trying to recollect my senses
As the wisps of the past started to dissipate
Though the uncanny darkness still remained
My hands were balled up so tightly,
My finger nails were imprinted in my palm
Crescent smiles, those smiles still dwelled,
The shadows lingered, into the night


5:24 am
I was blanketed beneath a dark gray sky
A shade the artist painstakingly mixed

My footsteps echoed softly
On the pavement of a different gray

Bloodshot eyes and tightened lips
I looked down at my hands tinted by the night

Half wounded by the night’s excursions
Half fatigued by the weight of these words

So I was dangling off of these lines
To keep myself from crumbling


6:31 am
The night retracted its fingers
Releasing its grasp of the world
I watched the shadows shrink
Slowly
The painting blooming into colours
Things that had been lying as stones
Now stirring awake and amnesic


7:05 am
Day breaks


7:14 am
Tick-tock


7:22 am
These words


7:32 am
Tick-tock


7:40 am
Ink from the night


7:55 am
Still


8:00 am
The sun swept over the land
Where night once dominated
Sending shadows into frenzy

The sky had licked an orange lollipop,
Watching the people beneath
Hurrying like ants, going nowhere

The moon faded away with its sighs
Replaced by song birds with their wordless songs
But I could still see with my constricted pupils

For sleep has not made me blind
Nor could I forget
The traces of the night



9:10 am
It was time for me to go back to us
Retracing every step and every word
Still afraid and unsure of our status
Our hearts red dark, too proud to step forward

We both reached for the door knob at the same time
Life’s cyclical way, written in this rhyme,

Written into the night.

Entry for this year's competition... Proud of this one too. Can you catch all the devices I've used? 
October 4th, 2012: So I was reading through my previous competitive entry and realized that perhaps I should try and explain this one a little more than I had. 

The main inspiration for this poem is the idea of circularity, which I tried to express with time and with the journey that the protagonist goes on in the story. The most difficult part of writing this was my wanting to be witty with when each section should start. The first section started at 9pm. The next section started at 10:03pm because it took me 63 words to write the first section. To put it differently, each word stands for a minute. But it's hard to keep that consistent since sometimes I need more words to express what I want to say. So sometimes, it is the number of characters, the number of lines that are equivalent to each passing minute (it is consistent IN each section, but differs by sections). I had originally wanted to do a 24-hour cycle instead of the 12-hour one that I wrote, but I felt that half a day was sufficient for me to dictate the 180-degree change that the character went through, while at the same time, maintaining that circularity. (...Or it might've been that I didn't have enough time to do 24 sections. :P)

In order to tie the beginning to the end, the first section is one half of a sonnet (the first two quatrains) and the last section is the remaining (the third quatrain and the couplet). It started out with a fight between lovers and ends with the reconciliation. Because as I have said previously, love is always the reason, the life of poetry. It's a foundation that I cannot shake in my writing. 

It might've been Donne's influence on me (since I took a seminar on his work), that I felt compelled for my work to self-reflect. The artist, the ink, all these self-referrals are my desire of wanting the reader to realize that I am sitting here writing this poem, literally, into the night. And that I am borrowing from the night's elements to write this, hence the emphasis (repetition) of "into the night," and the darkness from where I borrow my ink. And yes, it's true that I wrote this poem into the night, haha. I wrote the fears of the night, I wrote of my own experiences of the night, albeit minorly changed to make it more, relevant. I also wanted there to be parallels between the character, the reader, and the poet, so that as I write, as the story starts, as the reader reads, we're all in it together. So yes. This is why I wrote what I wrote.