5.31

They say it shouldn’t be all. Yet every time I experience high school my heart twitches, “enough to make my Chinese calligraphy go wobbly on the page”[1].

Here’s the skeleton of life,

with its spine turned into a scale,

not a spectrum. Eyes walking on it,

every joint turning into a gear.

Every chapter number, every verb conjugation,

every species name: a bridge,

not sure where it shall lead.

Eyes nailing on me,

yet I shall never learn how to wear my flesh

properly, or even, which flesh to dress.

I feel my blood itchy, whenever

a gaze injects into my skin.

Have been weighed every day,

to witness how the absence of my heaviness

undulates the histogram of my past. 

A history being marked, forever fractured percentage,

euphemistic wound in my life,

for it’s just a number,

but a language universal enough

to offer everyone the right

to slice me open with a simple glance.

And I learnt to hold the knife,

ready to sculpture out a cross in my soul.

Here: font 12, times new roman,

printed on a thin sheet of paper at the end

of my adolescent year. Size A4,

not big enough to doodle an ocean on it,

but I’m also not good enough to sail.

Here: pajamas cuddled in a hump

on the wrong side of the bed,

Like crumpled scratch paper,

creases mimicking the scribbled-down formula of life.

and I hump into my dream, handwriting

choreographed into a maze,

every stroke a wall, a twist in direction,

not allowing any deliberate exist

for my tears

2022.5.31

 [1] Quoted from Algebraic fracture, poetry finalist for 2022 Write the World poetry and spoken word competition. The young poet from New Zealand talks about pressure in high school.