The broken-hearted


 


After it broke,

I picked up the pieces

and folded up the corners of my heart,

creased the lines in well and sharp

and tucked it into a box

I shoved into the deepest, darkest hole

where light could never find.

It stayed there quiet and resigned

in a pool of its own tears,

willing the memories to evaporate

and regrets to dissolve.

And for years, it was fine.

Never mind the silverfish

darting in and out

eating the edges of the heart.

It was fine.

Never mind the days that moved one into another

into a year

and then a decade passed.

It was fine.

Never mind that no one knew

or cared to look for it at all.

It was fine.

There were enough hearts in the world

free, whole, and happy,

beating gently against another.

One heart less out there --

scarred, fragmented, and in pieces,

folded up in the dark 

with lines creased in well and sharp

-- was fine.


(A midnight poem in 10 minutes)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The last long farewell

Image
Thirty years after the pandemic swept through the country swiftly and cruelly, forcing a state of emergency on the whole of Malaysia and the evacuation of the entire population, I found myself back in Kuala Lumpur. It wasn’t the city I remembered from memory. That one had flash floods in the middle of the day after a heavy downpour, and horrible jams immediately thereafter. It had double-parkers, tailgaters, and very little sense of polite civility. That one was also warm, chaotic, colourful. The people were divided by politics and religion, but united on the streets and at dinner tables. It was imperfect, but it was home. At least for the first 25 years of my life. And now, here I was in KL. A very different KL than the one I had left in 2020. A new government, new leadership, new laws. Together with the rest of the Southeast Asian countries, it made up the Greater Indochina Confederation, a new world order after the fall of Asia during the pandemic, under the single rule of the Chin
Read more

The pickpocket

Image
  Macalister Road on a Sunday morning was the perfect spot. Big crowd, plenty of distractions, lots of tourists. The scent of musty old books reached my nostrils and its familiarity made me smile. Many of the old Indian Muslim vendors here were my friends. When I was small, they welcomed me into their shops and allowed me to choose a title from their towering stacks of second-hand books. I’d sit quietly in a corner to read page after page, escaping to worlds of fantasy, romance, and dreams, where life always seemed to be much better. But today, I wasn’t here for the books. Today, I was here to work. It was almost the end of the month, and Tok Pah had her grocery list ready. It wasn’t a long list since it’s just the two of us living in Lorong Maqbul for many years now—and for many years more, I was sure. At the very top, in big bold letters, she’d written tembakau. I grinned to myself thinking of her weakness for it. She never could part with her tobacco, or her snuffbox containing the
Read more

The ruins of Siem Reap

Image
It was a cool and quiet December morning and my guide, Han, and I were making our way to the east entrance of the Angkor Wat complex. He was ushering me past the local peddlers — young girls about eight years old, face full of grime, feet bare, hands persistently shoving cheap souvenirs towards me. They opened their mouths to trade their wares for some US dollars. In their voices, I heard the distinctive American accent, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the situation. That was among the many surprises Siem Reap tossed my way during the short three-day jaunt in this little city, whose atmosphere reminded me so much of Malaysia’s Langkawi island many decades ago. Though it seemed like a backwater village from the 1980s on first impressions, Siem Reap was clean and the people were gracious. Perhaps it was mirroring back the gigantic smiling faces of Buddha from the Bayon temple nearby. Our approach to the Angkor Wat complex took us along a red dirt path that threw up dust with
Read more