Nicholas Hughes

Nicholas Hughes (1962 – 2009)

The spaces echo empty

Vast black, an eclipse

Of all memory of light

Of solid form.

Nothing lives. Nothing dies.

No conflict or oxygen

Nourish the blood pulse.

It is the longed-for oblivion

Desperate and craved

Annihilation.

A million splintered filaments

Hurled by one’s own hand

So the hand, too – crumbles

Melts and vanishes

Without a history.

Though the void cannot hear

A static radio call

A sister’s eulogy

A husband’s poetry

Splinters are left for the living

Shards of the bomb in their hearts

Inoperable. Holes and spaces

Sewn closed. Locked.

Oblivion.

...

One of my favourite songs is Bob Dylan's 'Tangled up in Blue.' In an interview, Dylan said he aimed to portray a tangled relationship from multiple points of view. He does so well - very well. It's Dylan lyrics at their best, and I'm a writer at heart, so I can't go past some well woven lines.

"From what I've tasted of desire...I hold with those who favour fire."

I suppose this poem has a similar aim: to examine both sides of suicide. The desperate, single-minded intent of the perpetrator, and the living left to shoulder the blame, account for the mess, seek to understand. And sometimes I think there is nothing to understand. As the Holocaust survivor said in The Reader: "If you want catharsis, go to the theatre. Nothing comes out of the camps."

Or the very famous line by Jewish poet after WWII: "No poetry after Auschwitz." As if to say, here lies humanity at its darkest. Its most irrational. Its twisted and broken ends. There is no meaning here. Just consequence. Action taken to see what would happen. To watch the world burn.

...

Fire and Ice

I can't sleep tonight. More accurately, I have a few crazy deadlines to meet, and I haven't tried, nor have I worked to meet them. Structure and discipline, the very skills I'm advocating in my latest project, are eluding me completely.

So I listened to Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah', wrote a little, sipped my oolong tea (not so sexy as martinis, but if I'd had those, I'd be asleep by now!), mused some, found some dark Lindt chocolate. Life is good. "Simple pleasures", said an ex-CEO and current public interest champion I met last week. "This is what I enjoy now."

This is one of my favourite poems. Robert Frost's 'Fire and Ice.' Hope you like it.

Fire and Ice.

Some say the world will end in fire
Some say in ice
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire

But if we had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is just as great
And would suffice.

...

goodnight. off to write. or try...again.

Who said committees were a waste of time?

...after all, following three pages of careful point-form, underlined notes on booking group meeting rooms and the slick new website, my very first work meeting gave me musing time to write these two poems.

Leaving at Morning (or) Cycling.

Headlong down the Gulf
Last port before Papua
(Cannibal tribes reign still -
From village to city.)

We pick up speed as the road
Winds down
Drops sheer cliff to sea
Steady wild, as it sweeps in

Ragged as our breath, the wind
Meeting
In the breaking dawn.

You & I
Under the sun.
By the sea.

(4/3/2009)

Himeji Castle - Execution

Suicide alley
Was an honour
Wandering ronin - warriors without a cause
Or a master
Left this world
By their own sword
Their own will.

A single stone stair leads down
The only way out is up and back
Dead end alley
Black bark trees
Etch skeletal
Against a sky, cloud grey

From the fortress, the city vista
Spread far as the eye can gaze
Men dreamed of this horizon
Of conquest and map lines
Of wars, wars, wars

Himeji on the hill
Rules cold.

(4/3/2009)

(c) Wenee Yap

Shoveling Cultural Snow (Pt 2, The Japan Suite)

Hikari 425, 18.40 (Shinagawa to Kyoto)

20.01.2009.

To tie down these kite-flown thoughts
Into well-formed expression.
A single string, buffeted by wind -

Rushing from here - to there
With an essential Japanese efficiency
Slipping by the sleeping towns and warehouses
Bullet-speed - so swift it's as if
We are still.

Walking the streets feels like this.
Noise - hopeful bargains, sex hecklers, vending conveniences
Reach for your brief attention
Late stage capitalism -
Shoveling cultural snow.
'Nani?!'
Really. (Really really.)

Sex as a business expense.
Lovers in Japan
Are full volume or mute.

Pain in Japan
Must be screamed aloud
ah - hysteria. Or
Left to simmer
A low pilot light burn
Awaiting the trigger
Innocuous - as gas filling your Ikea apartment
Of all those things you kept buying to persuade yourself
To keep living.

Flick. Boom.
Nani?
Really.

...

Hikari 366 Kyoto to Tokyo (In Praise of Shadows.)

24.01.2009

Clear blue cold day.
Fuji-san to the left; low stormy seas on the right
Sleep like a soothing balm
By the growl and hum
Imitation of...

Tao - the many named, and nameless
We doze our last before Shinagawa
The train shoots through - Tokyo Station
Where the municipal salarymen go
Flow to the East
We, of the West
Come for nothing.
To laze under a sky of nothing
Deep sunk well where only an oval
Blue snow cloud shows

"We will soon be arriving at Shin-Yokohama
In 4 minutes."
In minutes leaping distances
By foot - days

Roll on. Doze.
Dream of shadows.

...

Paper Chaser (Fukuoka - Beppu, Arr. 23.39)

Looking to live in my own skin
Pen spinning Paper Chaser
Left to the devices
Of the world's whims

14.05. INT. CANAL CITY.
I'm watching from 1F
A handsome juggler
Yoyo thrower, men's joker
Rhythm flow to the to/fro
Gypsy accordian song
Chords plyed
By a classic kawaii girl
Love, is who they are
And radiate.

They play anarchy - with ease
Their practised chaos
Is really a departo store joke
to delight the Japanese children (Fukuoka size!)
We're laughing along, us camera-hanging gaijin

Together, they love as love is and should be
Mr Juggler & Ms Accordion.

Mia, from the Shire ('but don't hold it against me')
Turns between photographic capture
And grins:
"Everyone in Japan is dating!"

Nani?
So des ne!

I found it.
What I longed for -
Paper chaser's dreams
(It was on the Sonic 57 to Beppu
All along.)

I'm ready. Alive and entirely
Here and now.
Singing
(I dig it.)

----

Before/After

----

White Lillies (Hotel Costes)

4.2.2009

White lillies
Views of the city
Summer in Sydney: $200
Breakfast (American) for two

Wine, well aged, cooling by the mini-bar

Skyscraper lights leading the way
To the Bridge, to the glimmer Pacific
Wilkommen.
Konbanwa.
This is our city in Summer
Say the street banners on George

Most definitely.

Home is this hotel room.
Home is the space left quiet
Between 2am conversation
Between your hunger and my
Back pressed against these anonymous white walls

Say nothing.
We are East. The sun peaks to glitter the CBD glass
Law firms, banks, Ernst and Young auditors
Aflame by the dawn.

Shimmer on the ranging glass
City, and Hyde Park, the Domain
Sunday morning.

...

Shinagawa 304

9.2.2009

Let it come as it goes
Fall in with the flow
Be, wherever you are
'Now, life is living you.'

... (That line was on a poster outside Higa...something temple on Karusuma-dori, Kyoto's main street.)

...

Isn't it good.

You.
Always trying to undress me.
My beautiful clothes

'Leave them on, then.'
Sure.
And as I do, I sing
'Isn't it good
Norwegian wood.'

And you say - again.
Again.

...

Neo-Tokyo: Year 21. (The Japan Suite.)

So I'm fresh off a flight from Narita Airport, where the ground staff wave you goodbye with glowing airport signal sticks and the temperature flatlined at five degrees for a week or so. It was a culture rush. Where to start? Well, me and my boyfriend and a friend I met in the first week of high school, now over ten years ago, headed north for to flee the bushfire/flood of another Aussie summer and celebrate the end of undergraduate uni forever.

Along the way, we found a Netherlands trust fund traveller/philosophy student/writer who doesn't write/player of the Neil Strauss Game and self-proclaimed Napoleon reincarnate. We missed the last bullet train home to Kyoto after a tipsy karaoke session with my boyfriend's unbelievably hip Jap cousins in Shibuya (yes, Lauren, I did the Bill Murray cover of 'More than this' in honour of Lost in Translation), and accidentally stayed in Hotel Zero, in Shibuya's infamous Dogenzaka, or Love Hotel Hill. The windowless room with plastic wrapped mattresses came with free condoms, NHK news and both european and japanese porn. Plus a seductive box of Japanese chocolate wafers and every kind of luxury skin cream imaginable.

While bathing naked as fashion and Japanese tradition dictates, in Japan's most locally famous onsen (hot springs warmed by the lava of volcanoes) in Beppu, my boyfriend was awoken from his blissful onsen sleep by the splashing of a very fat man. After which I ordered 5 for 300 yen somethings from a vending machine...somethings turned out to be eggs hard boiled in said lava heated onsen water. Haha!

We hung out at Harajuku's Takeshita St and Ura-Hara every weekend and every spare day, and are now far too cool to function. Seriously. Haha. A black guy heckling for an out-of-the-way Harajuku back alley fashion store tried to persuade me from my beeline path to pasta lunch, and I nearly punched him. Don't get between me and a meal.

We watched Nagano snow monkeys bathe in onsen north of Tokyo, and a little baby one, tapped on the shoulder by me, turned and shook my finger out of a very Japanese politeness. Although another one attacked my friend. You know how it is.

I bought a second hand bicycle in Kyoto and cycled around like a local for three weeks. You know, that local you see everywhere, with panda ears who keeps falling off her bike? Yep, that's me.

I watched the sun rise through the concrete alleys and valleys, artificial mountains and skyscrapers of Tokyo on the Yamanote Line. My boyfriend was told he was a Japanese Olympic Swimmer lookalike who, during the month we were there, kept advertising Quarter Pounders (tagline: Big Mouth! No Limit! Quarter Pounder!) We flew by Fuji-san on the Shinkansen at 259km/h (and that was the SLOW train...the other Nozomi bullet trains zoom through the country at 500km/h)

My friend did a 12 hour marathon date with her kinda boyfriend. We met another Aussie soul struck with wanderlust, with absolutely no homesickness for her home country (she's from the Shire, so really, it's quite understandable), with whom I wandered Fukuoka for four hours, blissfully lost, eating Ramen at Ramen Stadium in Canal City, watching a Jap Amelie-lookalike play the accordion as her boyfriend juggled for unbearably cute kids. We talked about love and life and other things. Ceiling Wax. Cabbages and Kings!

It was that kind of trip. Life is beautiful, as it always was, as you always knew. But it helps when you find an MIT student hired to design a world-leading eco-green city in the suburbs of Tokyo filled with the same awe, to share the culture rush over an egg and coffee breakfast on a quiet Kyoto street. Cheers Chris! Hope you read In Praise of Shadows. Here's to the nothing-like-Shibuya-green-city that only a generation raised in the smoke of overcrowding, Blade Runner dystopias and SUV supremacy could imagine. And thanks for voting in Obama.

"I think it's great that a country where once the slave class of black men worked under a crippling racial divide now, after the Civil Rights Movement, can elect a leader from that class to change the nation. This is what I think people mean when they speak of the dream that is America. We are an idea. An idea that opportunity is for anyone - hispanic, black, asian, white." Well, Chris from MIT, I agree. Who could deny it?

Of course, I have a few poems to light the way of tall tales so good, they could only be true. Here's Number 1. I wrote it on the second or third night after landing in Tokyo. The title is from a billboard we kept seeing everywhere (we got very lost, as we thought it was feasible to walk three suburbs to Shinkjuku from Ikebukuro, the sex/dinner/shopping district where we stayed) - a handsome Japanese soccer star's face underlined by the words: Human x Beauty (Take Action!). No other explanation. It's a call to action, honey!

Human x Beauty (Take Action!)

Ricochet pachinko
Let it go, glow
Living in the Seibu side of Ikebukuro
Where Tobu pleasures sell their wares to the Seibu West
Let it flow and fall into an
Unquestionable logic.

Chaos underscores Order, and order - chaos
It is a happy marriage. Mutually beneficial, contractually binding
Quid pro quo.
Flip it over and re-use
Break it at the bend, renew
"Happiness" (you see)
"Spurs the world's turning"
On an ever replenished wheel
Oscillating wildly
Beyond evil/good. Useful/used.
It all is as it is. And ever was.
And will be.

This is the philosophy of
"Kinda Buddhism", practised by Yu-kun
Tokyoite to a tee, who studied at university
Because of Bruce Willis in a blockbuster Hollywood
Armaggedon, the movie
Astrophysics, the Masters Degree.
Citibank graduate by March

He loves this city. I love it too.
This world, its whacky cool
Accustomed to its contradictions
Fashions and ideas flow with the seasons
Rather than reason.

In the air, an ineffable urge
A spark, a dark well un-filled
To go - anywhere
'Takodanobaba, Gotanda, Shibuya, Ginza
Haha, Hakata'

We're half-cracked blooms
Cherry blooms - sakura
Dying at their height of life and drifting
Boom. Eh? Kapow!
'I need something to do now.'

We'll head to be Beppu, in a week or two
"Nani? Bepp-oooo? You know?"
Yu-kun knows, impressed.
"You are very energetic, you know.
Good for a writer."

Domo arigato.
Curious too. Another essential.
I want - the beginning, the end, the middle
In that order. I can wait.
Take a day, take a lifetime.

Time ticks down its hours
The world turns
Salarymen file home on the 6am commuter
Necking a callgirl on the stairs to the street
Dawn is grey, daybreak calls
Other night-watchers
Gaijin honing in on the Pig and Whistle
Lovers 'nesting' (vigorously) and by the hour
Pachinko slot addicts blinking in the first sun rays
Sex show hecklers in full body black coats
"Are they Yakuza?" asks my friend.
"Will they steal us into sexual servitude?"
"Do they live in rich Shibuya?"
Hai, hai. (Yes, yes, sure.)

4.01AM.
I have a point to prove.
Though words, as always, will not do.
Do not do.
By the shadows as they slip between the cracks
Of the steel frame wire-net window
Frosted by midwinter snow
I can feel its pulse. The grappling logic.

Of whacky-mad order.
Turning over worlds
Re-use, renew.

Goodnight, and thank you.

(c) Wenee Yap, 14/01/2009.

The Next Crazy Venture...

Writing is best done when you're supposed to be doing other things. (Haha, in this case, writing, of the paid kind.)

Happy 2009, everyone!

The Next Crazy Venture

I craved an uncomplicated life.

Problem-free

Though, of course, the problems wound their way back to me

As I suppose

There’s no show without

A conflict

To be expected – silly, really

Resolution is for the rested dead.

So we deal, we play

We place our wagers

Here a five, and there, our life

Clenched by a tight wire thread

Strung between the Twin Towers – NYC, 1974

Walking as the wind

Dances, and we dance, we do

We lie suspended in the sky

We laugh at the ease of it

We sing; we wait to deliver

The wisdom of an age.

The punchline finale:

‘All the world’s a stage’

‘Reach, though your reach may yet exceed

Your grasp. Or else what’s Heaven for?’

Know this. Life is one, and life

Is not meant to be survived.

Announced to wild applause

Real and recorded.

Your quality – one to be remembered

Then forgotten.

Peace. Cease to seek it.

Be.

Whatever. Hand me the deck.

Deal over.

© Wenee Yap.

wine on the high wire.

Blog update. Work rushed headlong into Xmas break, my book/website project has been tentatively approved for sponsorship by the faculty, I scored First Class Honours in Law as quietly confirmed (in manner that is not open to most students - so hurrah for working in the faculty), my little bro looks on his way to cruising quite well into a selective school with all his friends (which is all he wants right now, other than more lego and to go to the Powerhouse Star Wars exhibition and play Wii + PS3 and sing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, the Bono cover), I fell privy to personal scandal to rival de Sade's finest works (Philosophy in the Bedroom, of course - thank you Iris for that continually amusing book), I am now fully employed and then some, pulled into several projects (Catfox, 85Boroads, the new Communications Law Centre), I caught up with old friends and found new ones, tidied up a little more Japan organising...

...and Julian came back from Vancouver, alive with the wild bug of traveling in a way he's never known before.

This, like so much, is for you.

To the world out there: I expect your intelligence and worldly experience, whether gained from a book or first person, will leave you to infer the finer omitted details.

"Travel & Leisure." (or "Here, the strange familiar.")

You said: I'm home when I'm with you.
Whispered in my ear as we reached (backseat, where else)
For the elusive
In the midnight crisp
By the black shadowed park tall with trees gnarled
Skin dried thin, cracked and peeling with burn
Trees emaciated after an overindulgence of summer.


You said: I found something
The Siren's song, an Absolute
I've sought so long in the strange familiar
Shapes of clouds.
In dead philosophers and suburban churches
In nights deep with you
I found it
In the north of the border city, walled by wide high snowy peaks
All alone but not lonely
Kerouac's months of mountains.

And you should see it.
I want you, you said, to see it.
I heard you. In my head, your voice -
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera

I - in stasis so long
Broke.
Fell below bottom and loved the fall.
I rolled as the wind in the tunneling space of no stars, no milky way
Flew me to a place
Free of -
Words and art and other cages
Naming the nameless.
Grasping the Tao - The Great Beyond.

I dipped my pale face, my slender long nose and its midway crook
Into spring bloom roses.
Low hung magnolia seized my senses
And shattered my sensibility.

Oops.
Beyond rock bottom is not a floor
Solid and infallible.
No, it is an endless fall.

Delicious.

And through, you call -
I want you.
I want to give you everything.
I am ready.

I heard you.
I fell through.
Sweet with dinner dates
Clever young men of many inclinations and tastes
Sharing our elitist histories under the glimmer lights, a carnival
This side of the Harbour.

You know as well as I do -
You can lose yourself, you can betray
In many creative and amusing ways.

Et cetera, et cetera.
Singing in my ear, Thom Yorke is so
Beyond the thrall.

You are here. I am here.
I wonder at the lines that have left your face
The world's weight cast from your
Muscular, winter-tanned, taut shoulders
Your Armani exchange and your red muffed headphones
Your bewildered smile. Your assured, self-possessed air
Your confidence.
You speak - but unlike before
With sureness.
Built upon a deeper knowledge and understanding
As always - you say precisely what you mean
And do exactly as you like.
So right.

Though now, it is 5.05.
None of this has happened yet.
You're walking in the store - looking for
Kino's Travel + Leisure
December's evening pleasures.

You're looking, well, very good.
I'm thumbing through Lonely Planet
Budapest - the Avis-itis city
The 'Second city' of the Hapsbergs

You're here. Like The Who:
You're looking at me and I'm looking at you
We - ah. Don't know what to do.

I look you down and size you up.
Head to toe, to fall for.
Absolutely.

Stranger. Familiar.
Later, you will say: for you, I'm here.
For now, I straight-shoot look at you
And say:

"Hello there."