Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Poetry 2018 | Page 94

How are you now?
Po Leung Kuk Ngan Po Ling College, Thapa Magar, Arshu - 14
-How Are You Now?-
You need joy to feel pain, pain to know joy. So when one is in eternal pain, is the pain itself nonexistent?
•
23 years. 23 years since you left this earth.
Witnessed the worst, tasted the afterlife. Heeded the skeptics and ignored the lovers. Two minds in one
body had spread out their battalions. Yet nothing compared to those eyes, full of vacant stares and devoid of
apprehension.
An age too juvenile, unabridged of possibilities. Nonchalant to the world outside. The walls you built were
to shelter you from yourself. But flimsy they were, like new year resolutions and papers to bleed your words
on. Allegedly, you had become a shadow of your nonexistent self.
You used to have big dreams, eyes never failing to trail the setting sun.
But maybe you had had enough. Of feeling and doing and looking and listening. Of aimlessly wandering,
frantically searching for something that never existed. Every sense, every move, every sound, in hope for the
slightest of hints that never could make its way to you. Every puff of smoke you let out, every knuckle you
cracked, every leap of faith, every hollow bark. Every mouth you kissed, every stolen song, every hand you
held, every thing gone wrong.
You ran out of yourself every single time.
Until the only thing standing was your withered lifeless self.
Until the only remains left were your ashes in the wind.
Until-
•
I told you. No matter how far you venture, you unfailingly end up back here. After all, the planet we live
on doesn’t recognize its own existence. You and I, we’re merely subjects to its game. A game of highs and
lows, a game of come and go.
Still, I hope the sun has lent you its hands. I hope you’re no longer lost. I hope you’ve found a provocation.
I hope the West did you just.