if i could say words
  the way i meant them
i would have no need to speak

  but if my words meant nothing
you would not be here listening

come to me

on nights when
the glass yawns empty-mouthed
and life batters you with weary fists

on nights when
you feel trapped
without purpose, without meaning,
an insignificant twinkle

before the streets rush up at you
come to me at once
let me share your silence

on nights when
none of this happens
curled up between a book and a drink

before the rooster shrieks
come to me again
let me share your pleasure

Cat things!

So, I created a new blog with random strips featuring the two cat things, updated whenever I feel like drawing a new one. It looks like this idea won't go away very soon, and I may as well stop filling this blog with dozens of pictures.

Link here: http://cat-things-lalala.blogspot.com/

Song Lyrics?

I wander through the city's heat
past lazy trams and cliffs of glass
I wonder why you left these streets
left me here to live in the past

Come back to me, and let me
paint your fingers red and gold
They're Chinese colours of luck
They're wordless colours of love

The cold Hong Kong rain turns to mud
all the memories we thought were art
The ugly red cabs are its blood
I stand at the docks, at its heart

Come back to me, and let me
paint your fingers red and gold
They're Chinese colours of luck
They're wordless colours of love

The sea wind brings me Hong Kong
dust and salt and fish and oil
It blows on your face too right now
It's a fine day for your ship to sail.



Suggest song name plis.

Can one merely observe, and not react?

Riders on the Storm

An image that's been floating around in my head for a while now. I wish I could have done it justice, but there's only so much I could do on a combination of a photo editor and powerpoint. I must get hold of Photoshop or something soon.

A passage from American Gods by Neil Gaiman

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr. Ibis in his perfect copperplate handwriting.
That is the tale; the rest is detail.

There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. Look - here is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends: he is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as best as he can. So, efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showers - many people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes when they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews. There will be life, they assure themselves, after the showers. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy as the earth is cleansed of its pests.

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There’s not a chance you’d mistake one for another, after a minute’s close inspection), but still unique.
Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With individual stories, the statistics become people — but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies’ own myriad squirming children?
We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.

And the simple truth is this: There was a girl and her uncle sold her.

Yes this is intended to make people go pick up the book. Or anything else Gaiman, actually. And think.

Sonata

http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=84wiSBP42Fw

I came across a short film by Ryan McDougal on youtube, and I could not resist setting words to it.

i walk the streets under the moon
to let the darkness conceal
my confusion. i stop by
your window again, and i
gaze in at your pure beauty
and your warmth. you torment
my soul in the agony of
the meek who never inherit
even the dust in my palm. you're
a golden bird on a silver branch
inches away from my fingertips
i'm afraid to stretch out and
hold you in my hand i'm afraid
you'll fly away and i'll never
see you again. footsteps crunch
past beyond my vision and i wonder
what it would feel like with
you by my side. i wish
i had something more to offer
than this timid little rose but
its red is the red in my veins
calling out my love my pains
all the things i should say
but cannot. time trickles by
shadows melt beneath streetlamps
and yet i wait. should i take
this chance should i leap
can i fly... i turn to walk away
but i cannot run from you.
now it's my hand on your doorknob
and your song on my lips.

back again on the streets
hair plastered to our scalps
it's a rainy evening this time
with you it's always easy
easy laughs an easy silence
as we splash through the puddles
hand in hand
like we've been doing this forever
in fact maybe we have
drenched in lovesongs and mud
you can splatter me now with the
fragrance of newly-washed earth
because I tickled your ribs but then
you're laughing anyway
we stop for hot chai somewhere
and rag the vendor under his umbrella
then the neon lights up the lanes
the stormclouds look sullen now
tired now quieter softer perhaps
the madcap dash in the rain is done
we move on through the crowd
looking for some trees some dark
letting the drizzle wash away
all the spaces that fell between us

Keepsakes

I met her on the corner of the parking lot.
She looked like a beautiful bellydancer with
one of those exotic foreign names like
Entiesca or Meraille or Serane or Betsy,
you know what I mean.
Trippy high heels and long red dress
high collar and long hem
with a flash of riding boot peeking through.
She had a cigar in her lips
a sneer in her body
a bruise on the thigh I never saw.
When she saw me, she laughed
then she threw her ring to me.
I'm going to die someday, she said
and baby you'll never see me again
so I want you to have a keepsake.
I turned the ring over in my palm
a cheap gaudy bauble a dime a dozen;
what am I to do with this, I demanded.
She laughed again louder boreder
kid, toss it to another passerby
continue the spiral
flush it down the drain
wear it on your finger
all the same to me.
Seems like there ain't much in life
that's not the same as that ring.
She left me staring at her butt
swinging down the cracked old sidewalk
heels tapping out the years sadly.
She was right; I never did see her again
maybe she died maybe she cried
maybe she found another ring
for the old one's buried beneath a rosebush
guess she was right about that one too.