This intangible medium through which to express oneself is hard for me to comprehend, for we are getting more and more distant from our words and more uninformed about what they mean to the people we don't know who read them, and a butterfly's beating wing begins the chain reaction, and a woman drops a coffee cup, a man stops to tie his shoelaces, they don't make eye contact even though they would have been married in 6 months had they not been consumed by the rushes and concerns that propel them forward in the trajectory of their life, and a husband says to his new husband on their wedding night, "you knew it was me, didn't you?" because they were always best friends and there had been girls, but they both knew, and then an elderly widower visits his wife's grave on her birthday, Valentine's Day, Christmas Day, Good Sunday, St Patrick's Day, and every other Saturday afternoon, whether it's sunshine or pouring rain, and somewhere in the back alleys of Hong Kong a younger couple are both still very much alive and in pursuit of a balloon that they accidentally let go of, drifting away from their grasp just out of reach as they run after it, and there's a hiccup heard at the back of a classroom, and a leaky faucet goes another day without being fixed, and my poems contain themselves within my thoughts, within my chest, when I don't trust them on my tongue but they sometimes spill their way onto a page. I know they won't make a ripple in the world even as powerful as the beating wings of a frail moth, but my words are the best of me. They are all I've got to communicate to the world at least a small portion of what hides beneath the veneer of my face and dresses, under my skin and even below the level of my awareness. This little book doesn't need a table of contents to make me feel content with it. Even half-written and unfinished, unfulfilled, it is hopeful, and that translates to me as happy; my life is after all unfinished, there's so much left to write, and so much of it won't have been conceived of in time to include in this volume. The poems it does include, however, follow no pattern or theme. They were written between my ages of 19 and 25. They don't follow one structure or speak with one voice because I'm still half-written too, and there is time for me to become something. While I'm becoming, I'm always writing. 

In no order, in this book you'll find

• a lot of poorly written spills in poetry &/or prose 
• among the messes, perhaps something that speaks to you
• the paperwork to exhibit the cognitive and emotional development of a young woman 
• no claims anywhere that the person behind these words is a writer or poet 
• poetry in free verse 
• poetry in structured forms
• haiku 
• pantoum 
• short stories or flash fiction
• spur of the moment scribbles
• acrostics
• obscure words and words lost from our vernacular 
• photographs 
• metaphorical blood, figurative sweat, and representative tears. 
• typewritten bits and pieces

Happy hopeful reading. I hope you enjoy the images. x x x x 

i. twisting your bedsheets into rugs and curtains so that you can live with yourself. 

ii. windows are beautiful, and the sky, but i'm not a bird

iii. visualise yourself and force the metamorphosis, you can wash out your own brain with bleach while you cradle it, blinking and breathing, until -

iv. toothy and blood too much, gathered dust, this is not what I wanted

v. learning you cannot plan to be someone you do not dislike, or to be someone happy, because could you answer the question- what makes you happy?

vi. those words don't sound so bad after all, now. 

vii. the scarring sentences, the ugliest ideas, are childlike and bellicose and sound to me like they have a purpose,

viii. nothing but a winter road ahead, and you don't even want the fog to clear

Outside, the light changes hands, gold, changes colour.
Hypnos tells me it's okay- I tell him I'm fightless 
while cold daylight chews me into nighttime pieces and
perhaps if I tell the sun what I am reading it will stay,
a little longer.

            Everything past the window is uneven and loud
like the ocean, melancholy and pointed, 
       all knees and fists and teeth.

September falls into October and paper stays paper
though it used to be trees somewhere in the sun.
There is emptiness in more than just beds and bathtubs.
October, coming, coming in like a train whose whistle
echoes for days. An old steam engine.

            Whole rooms for watching time but no space
for little tides, big blinks, and the list of books
        I must eat up before I turn twenty-five.

Light retires with a soporific goodnight and
all that's left is a dearth of sleep, imaginary owls
and other big eyed birds, contemplating stars.
Morning will sound like breathless trees,
stretching new leaves,

            Clouds whirling, tiny winds darting through
my sheets until I am grey again. Sleep is just dust
       and I hate feeling forgotten,
          feeling filthy.