The Days

My journalist friend told me he is always frightened of being thought as not an intellectual, so he uses the most specfic words to describe his experiences for his feature stories...words that you wont come across again half your life.

dam here dam there
damned here damned there
Be damned that's all

I so fear readers may not understand my writing, i use the simplest of words for my work, poems, prose or newspaper features.

the midnight bus leaves me
in the shadows
of a haunted house

there used to be haunted wooden house on stilts that cast long shadows onto the street as bus passed by. i used to drop off near here because it was near my house. my hair always stood on ends when i was here because of the menacing shadows. what was most strange was that you could see a flight of stairs at the rear between the stilts leading to the first floor. it was most eerie. the house was torn down two years ago.

the stairs looked frighteningly inviting, an oppresive emptiness full with the vibes of evil ever ready take into its fold the unsuspecting visitor.

i heard that people who slept in the house would find themselves outside the house. shadows ran here and there. according to beliefs when a haunted house is torn down, the evil goes with it because they fear sunlight. that's why sometimes people tear down the roofs of their houses when they know they are haunted.

i must say the house faced the intersection of three roads, two
divided by a road island from the opposite direction and the other
right in front.


bakun dam
a whole town wallow
in troubled waters

troubled times
gunung merapi and obama
each sounding louder


gunung merapi eruptions
for the first time the child
hears about krakatoa


It is technologically possible to devise a soul for a man if he is born without one. John looks to the future.

The following by Gert Sonderby:

A big question that's been asked time and again is "What is the nature of the soul?" We've found no material evidence of even its existence - but that doesn't necessarily make it nonexistent. After all, the vast majority of the interesting stuff in our brain is purely informational - signals going to and fro between nerve cells in that big lump of gray matter we do our thinking with. Well, I'm a software developer - for me it's easy to see the soul as, well, software of a kind. It's the system that our brains run on, that it does what it does by.

The way I see it, if there were a Creator he'd want us to achieve our fullest potential, to grow and become strong and wise, like any good parent wants for their children. He'd perhaps even want us to eclipse him. Perhaps in the way he once eclipsed his own creator? Who knows.

But I do know that a good parent teaches his or her child to grow to their fullest potential, to become all that they can be. Whether there is a creator or not is moot to the question: We should strive to become greater (in the true sense of the word) than we are

As such, anyone, or really any -thing- with significant brain activity can be said to have a soul. And what's more, theoretically, such a soul is transferrable - clone a new body, transfer the software (never interrupting its running) to the new one - and the person inhabiting the old body now inhabits the new. This gets highly interesting when you consider that a sufficiently advanced computer probably could run a soul as well... Or that you could potentially copy it into two bodies... Or perhaps even meld two versions of the same consciousness back together into one.

One thing is certain: The future will be a very interesting place.


the world is
a crystal ball
you can wish for anything


the old summer leaf
a gentle brittle grace
trailing the breeze

http://www.slideshare.net/kuronekosan/gce-o-level-2010-section-b-unseen-poemthose-layered-cakes-by-john-tiong-chung-hoo

gert:

ou can find schmucks everywhere. Religious of any stripe, non-religions, actively anti-religious. But there's good folk too. Saying that 'Islam does not respect' other religions is... shall we say using a somewhat broad brush. Sure some of the louder people involved are not too pleasant - but they're not the only ones, just the newsworthy ones.

Did you know that, for instance, a number of prominent American Islamic clerics issued a fatwa condemning attacks on the USA as harmful to fellow Muslims and against the will of God? That sort of thing you will never see in the news, right along with the many moderate and very sensible Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and atheists around. The ones you do see are the ones who shriek loudly and shrilly at one another, because -that's- newsworthy. For some reason.

the cat sleeping by the bus stop
it meows a world of loss when i pat it
two times on the head

the days are my morphine
have you anything against it?
i have been abusing myself

buddha's enlightenment
at the tree canopy
light dances with leaves

After disrupting all my morning sleep, chasing away the birds and bungling
my weekends the last three years, the 15 storey high class condominum behind ours is ready, spic and span, a enviable spacious living space that will soon be filled with people you see occupying the smart offices in and around Kuala Lumpur.

a smile that sends
the world reeling
mona lisa