She kept conscious while suffering a massive stroke, and this is a video of her sharing her experience.

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We will be participating in the opening of Wessex Village Square as part of MAAD.

Wessex Village Square is an artistic enclave in Portsdown Road. On its opening day, resident artists will be showing their works and conducting workshops. There will also be a screening of an old local movie called Air Hostess.

We’ll be right opposite Colbar! I get to drink Little Creatures beer and eat poached eggs on toast. And we will definitely bring the dog. The dog loves Portsdown Road and Colbar bacon.

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We will be at MAAD again next weekend at the red dot museum. See you there!

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On returning back from dinner, I saw a dog in the middle of a small side road. It should be black or grey, where the light could allow me that. Perhaps it was my imagination. Perhaps my imagination is fed by a particular psychology, and that psychology is in a lifelong relationship with history. Or else history is alive, and life constantly revolves instead of evolving, if what’s past cannot be undone…so the past is not dead but left to die. Perhaps I know too well not to dwell, but here I am wanting to find a poem, a few lines I keep wanting to contain my feelings, because I am too little to use grief. A lifetime of isolation is not grief. It is art.

I am certain there is a closer-than-imagined connection between we two. There is no one but me who knows you and there is no you if there is no me to side glance and smell how to wait under the street lamp. How it is this wait that makes us eternal children and how such eternity is a flesh fjord with no warning for its true depth. Yes, I may be bent and looking down if there is a scab to be licked off my body and yes, at another stage I may just be passing my hours passing my own tail and yes, sometimes people mistake our imaginations for a visceral eye but coming back I have not tears but these few lines to call mine but insufficient to drown my tail or to float my tale. But but but, goes the sound of my free-to-feel fists.

No, this is not what I meant to find for you. But it will have to do for me.

*****

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

One Art, Elizabeth Bishop

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When I was employed at Cooperative Fashions, in spite of the dark, ugly old maid, I tried to steal some garters. I was pursued down the superb staircases, not for the theft, but for my laziness at work and for my hatred of the innocent finery. Descend, you are pursued. The staircases are less beautiful in the offices than in the part open to the public. The staircases are less beautiful in the “service” quarters than in the offices. The staircases are still less beautiful in the cellar! But what can I say of the marsh where I arrived? What can I say of the laughter? Of the animals that brushed by me, and of the whisperings of unseen creatures? Water gave place to fire, to fear, to unconsciousness; when I came to myself I was in the hands of silent and nameless surgeons.

Elizabeth Bishop

*****

Bishop was my favorite poet. I say ‘was’ as I’ve stopped understanding words as before. The history is there; the intimacy is not. Like a lover, almost.

Also this piece reminds me of when I used to steal. I used to do so because I was hungry. For food, for nice girlie things, for stickers, mostly to be the same as the girls in school. Not that I was starved, but I really like tuckshop food enough to go to school early to eat wing after wing. Black soy sauce wings. 50 cents. Me on the wooden bench facing the field. Upstairs noises from the morning session classes tell me how much time I have to be alone, dirty, and at ease.

And still I cannot fly. Still my wings are clipped.

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As you may have noticed, there is now a great big sign on the left that says “T-shirts.” Unfortunately, there is only one t-shirt available in the webshop at the moment, due to general craziness here at Goblin Market.

Fortunately, I have managed to put up the photos (finally) on Flickr, so you can look at them here.

  

They will be available at the webshop at some point, but in the meantime, please write to us if you want one, or come to the shop. These are mostly one offs, and it’s likely that we will move on to another phase of frenzy before we reproduce them again.

We never really plan to make these things. They just kind of happen.

(If left to my own devices I would produce 100000 variations of Mas Selamat T-shirts. It is fortunate that I am never left to my own devices, and that the other people at Goblin Market exercise their veto powers vociferously.)

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The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she mused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity-like music-withered quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry I don’t think I could.” He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl-she must have swept the corners of her studio-was full of dead bees.

Robert Hass

******

At various points in the day, this poem comes to my mind, borrowing my consciousness for however long.

A memory exchanged for a time that did not.

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We also made these cotton V-neck t-shirts:

  

Available in small, medium, and large sizes for $48 in store.

ps. Mas Selamat does not believe in fate.

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We made these singlets and racerbacks yesterday!

    

They are in store now for $38 each. A steal.

ps. Mas Selamat does not think these are a steal.

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This is a constant refrain at Goblin Market. Mas Selamat has taken over our conversations.

I constantly wonder about what Mas Selamat is doing. Sometimes he’s saying prayers, sometimes he’s watching the Batam TV channel.

Last night, we went for a walk at the beach and even then we could not escape the specter of Mas Selamat.

“There is no wind tonight. You can swim over to Indonesia and nothing will happen!”

“A perfect night for Mas Selamat’s escape.”

“I want to beat you.”

Is Mas Selamat eating a bao downstairs now?

ps. I feel obliged to talk about fashion. Does Mas Selamat like Karl Lagerfeld?

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