waits for the rain to stop

under the kebayoran lama flyover: a policeman sits crosslegged on a thin bench balanced by two boys playing cards at the other end. sometimes, patience is just a game you play while you wait. and wait. then the black river starts. little ships of plastic aqua glasses float fast - all the captains had jumped the lifeboats - on its surface. the ripped blue plastic lids stick out like broken sails. a woman steps into the heavy rain, the water falling like cold pebbles, lifts her batik sarong, and puts one foot in the rushing black water. an aqua ship hits her instep. she lets it run around her ankle like a reconnoitring pirate ship. a cendol man opens a tweed-patterned parasol and puts it over, not his head, but his clay cendol jar. big sweats of rain already on its brownblack surface. no, the rain doesn't fall, it blows horizontally and hits your face like a cavalry of angry trains. and the smell of dead chickens, dried fish and rotting vegetables picked at 3 a.m. this morning, floats up to the grunts of slowing cars on wet asphalt above.

stop it!

the problem is my obsession to find beauty in ugliness. it's evil. more evil than ugliness itself. i'll tell you something, simply, a story, or just a footnote in a bigger story? i don't know but it's like this: outside ak.sa.ra., drizzle, light enough for me to walk under it, on the pavement, wet black, a family of seasonal scavengers, oh i don't have to tell you then, it's a few days before lebaran, the dad building pyramids of aqua glasses, the mom resting with both legs spread in a v in front of her, their child, a little balita girl in a peasant dress two sizes too small for her, the hem of the dress barely covers her ass, playing with two black stones, one in each hand. she strikes a conblock. thwack! the stone jumps out of her hand, as if the conblock, for the duration of that brief thwack! acted as conduit for the electricity of the earth, the electricity of the sad reality that she was and they were a homeless bunch of scavengers sheltering under browning plastic the dad has tied between the cart he's been lugging all day, his daughter standing in the back looking at all the traffic behind, the only comfort she gets from the cold of metal lining where she rests her chin, and a sick-looking grey tree he hopes doesn't fall when the storm hits? i don't know. whatever strikes the child, makes her cry. her dad, calmly, takes the tops off his pyramids and rolled them on the conblocks, towards her, to play with.

makes me go at the speed of light

to look for a place where i can stop. oh how easy it is to tell you no there isn't such a place, this world revolves faster even than that, but no, yes, there are places, where i can stop and look at things, my mind still racing, but i stop, my hands tight on the back of a plastic chair, my feet burning criss cross dunlop pattern into the wet earth, and the racing mind takes overexposed pictures of a man asleep, or is he dying?, on a kerb with the smell of dead rats and yesterday's bananas, a girl vomiting just-digested fried noodles, the bok choy leaves still green and the stems paler, a boy pouring zam zam water on a quarter schooner of smirnoff, the newest cocktail for infidels like him. what do you think of the ectoplasm rising out of his wet hair? her mouth shiny from vomit? the dead man's hand propping up his face? is this spirit photography or photography of? i go and i stop. and i go again. so can you tell me why i always arrive late at the limit of understanding? or stop the usher from telling me, go home, there's no seat left for people who rush only to be on time.

is where flowers bloom at the wrong time of the year

i stop. break the soft stem of the red flowers hanging over the toll road fence. red looks good on grey. i used to drink the juice that would drip from the wound. now the cut is dry. my hand grey from the dust around the stem. i move on. see where the gondoks grow like gothic ruffles on the swamp. people say they drink the oxygen dry from the water. black. children fishing with thin bamboo rods and raffia lines in it, ankle deep. couples sit on motorbikes and watch the children, his hands around her waists. all the leaves though, are green. the deep green of save the rainforest posters. i look for a death metaphor, all i could use is the black trunks of the mangrove trees, but even they are surrounded by life. green moss, yellow butterflies so pretty you think you're just imagining them, purple springs of ivy around the poles propping up an ad for ideas for life panasonic TV sets. the closer i get to departure, the more i realised what i'm leaving behind: a place where life cheats death and keeps you company while you try to do the same.

is nothing and everything pulls you everywhere

that you don't remember anything. not the puddle of black water your dunlop sneakers fall into, not the cold wet between your toes for hours after you had forgotten it ever happened, not the lime green tailshirt popping out of her olive green pants (everything else was in its right place, even the gradation of black in her hair), not the pink flowers of eczema on his arms—i tried to avoid them, but they stayed in my head for a little while, not the pathetic white cotton towel tied around a broken pipe on the men's urinal, not the milisecond wait before the sloan automatic tap washed the dirt and sin off your hands, not the conblocks everywhere under your feet, grey, white, black, the rare red in front of my office, and on their surface more pamors than on a sendang sedayu, not that anyone here would know what i mean by pamor, or sendang sedayu, unless you read him every week, not the surprise moon over suburban rukos' rooftops, the way it makes you feel good about being out there still at 9.31 pm on a damp tuesday night, not the caterpillar of clouds that ran along an invisible branch off the trunk that propped up the moon. not anything.