me, I’ll just sit in a dark room until you’re done. I’ll just wait here, fermenting quietly, like fruiting mushrooms know they are erotic. the body of the mycelium drone. excellent meat substitute. gorging on decomposition. rotting fetters.

dolly parton and tim curry have both left the station known as the world and even though I always say I completely don’t understand celebrity culture, couldn’t understand the way idol worship happens, I am surprised to find myself quite devastated at their passing. but of course they did. my little seventeen-year-old heart rocked by the achingly beautiful, unabashed, evil, horny, perverted bisexual queerness of tim curry’s inhabiting of dr frank-n-furter in the rocky horror picture show, the quirking of an eyebrow that changed my life, a mesmer impossible to forget, the commitment to fishnets and glitter and smeared lipstick. I didn’t follow either of their careers closely, because, again, celebrity culture is alien to me, but I deeply respect that dolly parton seemed to be the most universally beloved woman, and she did it while being pro-vaccine and children’s literacy, while always giving of herself, while never cursing on stage but deeply proud of her tua neh neh energy, while basically being a cis female drag queen beloved of the queer trans misfits and the mainstream alike, while being funny and smart and unfailingly kind. what I’m trying to say is no one has done it like them since. and we can only hope to make art and mean it. and we can only hope to be unabashedly the freaks that we are while still holding fast to the thread of love. that’s all I believe in. that shamelessness and kindness will save us. and that there’s nothing more important than being an unapologetic little FREAK!

things I hate: white fluorescent overhead lights, persimmons, yams, adhesive plasters. thank you for being here, even though I haven’t written a single post all year. I started this blog to convince myself that words are cheap and it did do the job. prescribing writing for writing. but I’m always trying to be more unapologetic, even though sometimes I fail. in recent times I have felt small, like nothing I do matters. like my energy is flagging and stream-of-consciousness is all that I can manage. like five people would show up to my tiny tiny chapbook launch cum smut salon.

but fifty did.

Smut Salon cum Unclench Launch was a lovely success, if success means making back the amount I spent to do a super-secret private limited-edition print run, the sad story of which I told at the launch itself, that ended in my resorting to sucking cock to feel better about it all. when I tell you I was having a crisis about a pamphlet for a week.

I’m happy with what I got, even though technically, I have just committed a book crime.

I, and my good friend Lychee Bye who agreed to co-host the open-mic smut salon where we play my favourite party game, sharing stories of the times we did the nasty, held the launch at HOST bar (55A neil road) (w/ big thanks to Joei, who owns it, and who IMMEDIATELY texted me four months prior to ask WHEN I was launching the book once he got wind of it). I was just grateful to have a second launch in eight years. to have an excuse to read poetry that feels new and old at the same time, to talk people through the ledge of feeling like I want to self-publish, to read things written inside of the burning core of yearning and feel sated that the object of your yearning, back in 2016, is now sitting there in the audience, fully yours, listening to you tell them about him. I think I felt a bit of shame and uncertainty about wanting to make a new book launch, about poetry, about making people sit there listening to me read the things I have written. this is a completely new feeling to me, like being unsteady on roller blades. I must investigate where it comes from but I think I know. it is that feeling like you don’t deserve your time in the spotlight, so you go over to the corner and put your head between the shadows. and I think I have spent so much time pretending to embody thrilled joy while being inwardly traumatised that now when I am living in real joy everything seems muted. I feel like eroticism is a mushroom that has been trying its best to grow in the dark but that the vagaries demanded of my small body inflame it, intone it, best it, drench it with cortisol, dredge it through my glass. it is just what happens when you have a full-time job that makes you act like an adult human female five days a week in the fucking white fluorescent lights. needs must. I am always grateful for the much of the muchness that I have.

we will recalibrate, put out tentacles again, caress other people like we mean it. we must.

I have been thinking mildly about people who have chosen to stop talking to me. maybe we have outgrown each other, maybe I never knew you, truly; maybe it was too painful to see me happy elsewhere, then it became a habit, then it became a matter of fact. but we are all much too old, and it is much too late in the day, to mince around words and feelings. to imagine we can hypnotise ourselves into wanting something else. I can’t respect someone who cannot have a difficult conversation.

I had a very nourishing time at the Asia Creative Writing Programme Practitioners Day in July, and this was a pleasant surprise, because big literary events generally make me want to skulk in the corner. I have to talk to myself firmly before going to large social events to say ‘we are going to be RELAXED and make a choice to HAVE FUN today’. it is the curse of being an INTJ. I didn’t expect it to be so lovely. Pooja scaffolded a beautiful conversation about thoughtful editing vs self-censorship out of fear, the consequences of writing against expectation, and the permissions we give ourselves, and the risks we undertake willingly, knowingly, calculatedly—all questions that I turn over in my hands repeatedly. thinking about those things really set the tone for the rest of the day. listening to O Thiam Chin talk about how he self-published his book and felt that making it into the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore was the epitome of Making It, of legitimising your own worth as a Singaporean Literary Writer, really struck a chord with me. it’s been something I’ve been thinking a lot about—institutional recognition v. institutional disdain, and how you can afford yourself artistic merit without courting external markers of establishment validation.

I want to be thrilled to be making things again. I get so scared and feel like it’s too late for everything. but this is that deep loneliness; it’s especially like when I tell people I’m shy and retiring and they do not believe me. they are incredulous. but it’s just as my friend Jolene says—’she needs an in.’ I do need an in, whether the in is being introduced to someone or just myself forcing me to live amongst the humans. it is a dedicated choice to have a good time. never kill yourself.

other public appearances include being at the Esplanade Xchange for the show Last to Ripen, First to Rot, co-made with my cosmic witch sister Rua, who has also been having a scary time making things again. she sang to her father, who is no longer with us as well, and I cry every time. her words stay with me:

‘It is all right if I did not get / to see how tall and how big you got to get’ (Someday When I Am No Longer Here).

it makes me sick, that truncated future. because what is grief but unspent love. because what am I when I finish spooling out the golden thread until there is no more of it, the empty wooden reel in my hands, the rest of the labyrinth still to go. two scared and scary witches onstage with our musical octopus Phil.

pleasure remains important to me, as does emancipation. I want to dance in the sun again, not a metaphor, just a movement. I was I wanted to write about you but I didn’t know how. I wanted to write about you until it stopped mattering.

I leave you with an excerpt from Unclench—

I’ve never been threatened with
being hurled off a bridge before

saw a swan that was
more dirty
than white

and my soul responded
hard

You can get copies of Unclench from ME!

Email me or DM me. I’ll go to the post office even though I hate going to the post office.