Who you are

Let the emotions come out,
let the tears drop to the floor,
scream until your lungs ache,
scream until you know who you are.

Black, white and colour

As I slogged in my lab today, I just realised -

My art is in charcoal - black and white.
The colour of my composite materials - black and white.
The people of my resident country - black and white.

What's a colourful person like me doing here?

Which reminds me of a black man's poem I read somewhere:

When I born, I black,

When I grow up, I black,

When I go in sun, I black,

When I cold, I black,

When I scared, I black,

When I sick, I black,

And when I die, I still black.

You white folks....

When you born, you pink,

When you grow up, you white,

When you go in sun, you red,

When you cold, you blue,

When you scared, you yellow,

When you sick, you green,

When you bruised, you purple,

And when you die, you gray.

So who you calling colored folks???

The forgotten beauty of tranquility and empty spaces

Aug 9, Saturday, 10.30pm: I finished my lab work and sat under a flagpole at the empty parking lot beside the football stadium, waiting for my friend to pick me up in his car and go back to my cozy home. I was getting anxious, because that was primarily a black people area and there was absolutely nobody around. Slowly I gazed upward at the deep blue sky and I felt my nerves tingling. I contemplated, was it really the fear of black people making me anxious? No. It was merely the vastness of the empty space and the absence of sound. We've become so habituated to walls, noise and people (most being noisy walls), that we get the jitters and our imagination runs wild. We always need some company, some room, some talk, some music, just about anything to hang on to. Our restless souls have forgotten the blissful peace within.
How would it be like to stand at this tip of northern Russia and stare at the outstretched emptiness in front of me? Heh, I would rather have this void in front of me than in me.

_ _ _

Enslaved by three walls,
The fourth a barrier in my way.
And break it I must,
Leaving behind a hollowness,
Sighs and screams...
Begging to be free,
But free I am.

Free is my mind.

-Teen Deewarein (2003)