aborted tongue.

while attempting to do my weekly room clearance [the weekly felicia thing], i came across last year's organizer, which attempted to categorize my disjointed thoughts into separable days and months. then i came across a snippet of writing (edited), which i was quite pleasantly surprised to find. it's like finding money in your jeans pocket. it smacks of a political-something, like i had a gripe against society, which is now lost, me being the apathetic/contented/disinterested/bribed singaporean:

(.aborted tongue)

the nation speaks.
thrown together,
like ingredients onto a pizza crust
surprised at each other.

cast into the scorching oven
of war and battle, melted memory
gluing us in place.

how we struggled to form speech, to burst
through our swollen, pregnant, long-accustomed
muteness-
speech, the question marks left hanging
that tilted sideways
and hooked together the
fragments of us.

but all we could stutter in naive lisp
was a half-
tongue, a conjoined hybrid
of languages-
singlish.
that was all we had,
all there was to remove,
and they did it.

one successful campaign,
like the stop-at-two birth controls;
but babies unborn are
they are babies dead.
dead are
aborted into a wasteland of the Nation's rejects
like unfinished sentences where meaning once-survived

their uncried screams, unfalling tears, unspent kicks
adding to the jumble of a (struggling) unbloodied birth.

-

on the long journey home from east to west after the planetshakers concert, i got a chance to talk to aaron and amos. they asked if i was 21 or 22 years old, i said 20.
'wow. ok.'

'why? how old do i look?' (fine, shoot myself in the foot. question to avoid, if in doubt.)

'uh.. about 26 or something. or 24.' - aaron.
'you DIE.'

hahaha. TWENTY-SIX!