1
I feel a split in my tongue. I remember the first snake I saw; I know I once felt alive.
 
   2
The city is as perfect as the mind when it is a picture.
 
   3
Thai Noodles is my favorite fusion: I make it less spicy: I talk to my tongue: my body is a hundred compartments.
 
   4
A family affair: husband, his wife, husband's children. They like eating and how verbal they are about it: their soup talks to strangers. The wife tells her kids to chew the food as slow as cows do. The husband nods and kisses his precious daughters. The wife remains silent, ambivalent: I hear no words from her to him: a kiss is the fierceness of destruction to adult lives. 
 
   5
The sea, the orange sun, and a troubled man in an accidental gathering.
 
   6
A woman becomes a woman when her 3-week boyfriend says: "I want to marry you." Her pulse is the mesmerized noise of the irate universe. 
 
   7
What time is it? Bodies are in dispersal the way letters always reach their destinations, a step outside the self: waiting is the most prosaic choice.
 
   8
A man attempts to kiss, without an assuring gusto, his bored girlfriend to mark his omnipotent difference. He glares divinely at lanky effete teenage boys passing them. Homophobia: what you fear is within what you are.
 
   9
To acquiesce is to let open the possibility of dignity. I'm waiting for the waitress, a migrant worker, to serve me my last order, natural water, one without ice or alcohol, just ordinary fluid.
 
   10
Two young boys walking like lovers in a passage to the altar: who is the lover? who is loved?
 
   11
I open my scarred leather wallet, very manly: 100 Singaporean dollar, dozens of rupiah that fairly meant a decent meal (that is with a beer), 1000 yen, and a picture that slipped from the face of a man exactly ten years ago.
 
   12
I want to know why a granule of sand can never be the sand.
 
   13
A woman two tables away speaks to another with a voice the sound of reprimand, "I just lost my fetus." Exhausted, she looks incredibly happy.
 
   14
I'm seeing the man. I'm smudging the city with my warm breath. 
 
   15
How old is the sea? The waves, they appear as episodic senescence as waiting.
 
   16
My mother had nine months to change her life; I had 90 days. Perhaps, the madness of transformation is biological.
 
   17
This is 21st century: no music is so fixed. Transculture: what you hear is what you get.
 
   18
There is a svelte man writing along the shore I'm eager to ask what he writes about, what he thinks in the time of writing, what is his writing for, what makes him continue writing, what makes him stop: The Statue of Sea Whisperers.
 
   19
I have already forgotten the snake. I can only touch the spectral keloid. The last thing I recall is it was showing its furious tongue the way waves appear before the feet 123 months ago.
 
   20
The waitress comes back, pleased, her oily face shines like silver: "what is your last order?"
 
   21
What is bought must be consumed: spiritual solitude—the feeling of death—is priceless.
 
   22
I'm leaving the scene with heavy takeaways: empty pebbles, small coins larger than my thumbnail, and a paper bag, faded brown, full of his remembered promises. The city is the heart of my memory, a big cross in a map.
 
   23
"I love feeling the rhythm of other people's lives. It's like travelling." (Banana Yoshimoto)
 
   24
The night is lovely: the best way to prove this is to calculate abandonment. 
 
   25
My house has a medium door the width of two medium people passing at the same time. I painted it too bright, orange as the sun, so as not to be seen as impasse: I can open it for you: you can open it to see I'm still here: it is not really closed, not yet.