‘Young literary men in KL’

They might be writing somewhere in a dark room. The keys on their laptops only half-lit from the glow of the monitors.  

They might be writing. They should be writing.

“Who is going to listen to all these words in my head?”

Ideas, ideas, what do you do with all these ideas?

“You analyse too much”

Do they have a life inside of my head, does that make them real? 

“What is wrong with you?”

shut up

There wasn’t any space left for them to speak, so they left the hall. They didn’t write to rule, they thought originality was worth a shot, but they were wrong. Why don’t they just follow? 

“Can you write it so that it says something like this:....”

Literary young men is a concept, a fine shorthand, for the idealised male that no one really wants. As pc as diversity and multiculturalism. 

Do you get what it really means? 

It’s chaos and disruption and doubt and fickleness and weight.

Give it up, give it up

pictures from KL

in a fit of artiness, I rented Fellini’s Roma from the library. Too high brow for me unfortunately, with its streaming sequences of Rome alternating between the past and the 1970s. I couldn’t find a plot to latch on but I managed to watch it anyway, gently dragged by the luscious depictions of food, people, and places of Roma throughout the 20th century.

Would a ‘KL’ work?

The city may not have the millennia of history and culture, nor a moniker not ascribed to it by some government hack.

Yet it has character.

It is rough and restless, and fertile for the generations of people who have flocked to live between its two rivers.

KL is a city where people pray on hot tarmac on Fridays because there’s no space inside the mosque, next to a gushing, filthy, ghost of a river, which really is a giant drain with declarations of love sprayed on its sides.

A city where everyone wants a car so they can all complain of the years of life lost waiting out traffic jams on roads which are marginally safer than driving blind by a little bit.

A city where people yap the night away complaining about how poor they are next to severely sunburnt  foreign workers painting lines on the road.

A city filled with godly symbols, sounds, and names, a reason perhaps for the distaste of man-made laws.

A beautiful city that breathes and thrives through all its mud