~The Road Less Taken~

Saturday, January 31, 2009

as i was trying to consolidate my writings over the last few years i stumbled across this poem i wrote about 4 months ago.

as part of the writing workshop with yong shu hoong i attended. this piece was about having to connect 6 random words together. (my other piece from the same workshop can be found here.)

so forgive me if it seems rather construed, but i think it still holds meaning.

especially given the events in america in the last few months. not that i'm trying to reopen previously stitched wounds, but nobody can deny - the scars are still there.

Differences

It always happened every night.
Before I went to sleep
Grandma would come over to my bed
To talk about
Any thing everyone should know,
Every thing anyone should know –
Always, something.

This time it would be different –
And these differences exist,
Uneroded and prideful
By the passing
Of logic, feeling and time.

This time
She talked at length about
The pale ghastly actresses who stumbled across the silver screens
As if they were the most beautiful snow-skinned swan
As their soulful gray counterparts, ensnared in webs, watched;
The bank robbers in the multitude of comic strips
Always wearing black in their shady endeavours
Which bore no fruit in the whites of their moral superiors;
And the colour of the blood which coursed through all men
Regardless of the conflicting guises it ran under
And the pitiful minority of its colour-blind.
And as she spoke,
It seemed a light had dawned
Upon her shadowed face,
And as I could do nothing more respectful
Than look right at her
And its two small, pure circles of now-healed flesh,
Something deep within clicked.

And somewhere far away,
The clicking will go on,
Albeit for different causes –
But of course.
Differences have always existed.

Watching the slip of hallway light dissipate
As Grandma closed the door,
I sat up,
Enlightened in this darkness –
Tonight it had been
Something of the former.

i seem to like this idea of "the second voice" quite a bit. maybe i should research it more.

I stopped to rest at 12:20 AM

Two roads diverged,and I-
took the one less taken...