Momento

(I've been having trouble putting something into words. For months now, whenever I tried to describe what this year has felt like in coherent sentences I get stuck. And I just realized it's because Ive been limiting the theme of my words, and in doing so failing to accurately express a very long and colorful year.

So here it is I guess, it it's least compressed form)

1. This year has been a cut-me heal-me, a kiss me tender then leave me. This year's been a bipolar girlfriend with fuck-me-harder bedroom eyes. With days like blades and weeks like being lost in a vast ocean of lukewarm bath water.

2. This year I found the silent meadow at the center of the storm, the pebble at the centre the pond. It wanders my chest like an air pocket through waterlogged corridors.

3. It's like a toke held too long in the lungs, a cascade of sensations like dominoes from thundering pain to lightheaded euphoria, but always leaving a sore burning hole in your chest later.

4. It's the mixture of righteous purpose and fear stained guilt, like a holy man with his knife at the throat of an apostate.

5. A year of being lost. Of a long searching hand finding a ledge. Of a quartz crystal growing roots, and germinating in a dark cave at the heart of the planet. It's knowing that the universe takes an allmighty breath, and being allowed to share in it. This year is a tightly held breath, released in small bursts to last the week till payday.

6. It's been a year of light. All consuming and life renewing light. Light that bouces and spins and shimmers across the palaces of sleeping kings. Light that turns green after dancing through the branches of a mangrove swamp. I was blinded when I discovered and embraced the ever-present luminescence of all things, glowing phosphorescent blue like the cold-body radiation of a dead star.

7. It's knowing that when the hair and meat and humanity has been seared off your bones, what's left will walk to the volcano's edge and throws that goddamn ring into the fiery pit from once it came.

8. It's been a year of constantly knowing that I am loved, and knowing that what love I have to give is enough for now.

Yea, it's been that kinda year. Now onto the next one.

Massive

I think there's a special kind of visual largeness, a unique sense of condensed mass reserved for the larger men of Central Asian descent.

Could it be the colors our bodies wear, that meaty washed out brown sitting next to dark eyes and lips and night-black hair.

We grow larger again, sitting inside the tents of our large billowy jubahs, linen cloth to crease and add lines and definition to this unseemly mass. 

Hair, hair could be the cause. Curly, omnipresent, indomitable, always either too short or a raging growth of indecipherable locks.
Tangled shrubs of arm and back hairs add to that i think, extending, growing the edge of our silhouettes so that we may stand larger than we are.

Could it be that lumbering, swaying gait of a man walking off a heaily spiced meal ?

Maybe it's skin after all, not the color, but the texture.
Slathered in coconut oil perfume, rose water or sweat from the humid asian air.
That shine, that slightly awkward wetness may be that last little something that completes this picture, this image, this reflection, this moment of being obsessed with aesthetic massiveness.

Micro 1 + 2 + 3 + 4

1.
His head tumbled
heavy and low
A pendulum
between swaying shoulder blades
like twin scythes 

His eyes were dark
and lost
and wild
with the color,
of living, aching,
saffron

2.
His heart is dancing 
it’s doing little jumps and flips
on the upturned palm
of his out-stretched hand

It had walked out there to look at the stars
The stars make his heart dance in his hands
And so do you.

3.
There is a new stillness,
taken root within him
like an air pocket
wandering the corridors
of a submerged catacomb

4.
He pulls you closer
eye to eye with his humid scent
Find the path from his shoulder
through this grove of hair
to the place under his neck 
and his other teeth.

Teeth that are sharp and black
to leave a taste in your mouth
like old blood, chalk-dust
lavender and thyme

Teeth to excavate the pit
to forge the trail
between his rib-cages,
to discover the lost empire
of all his mornings

Cahaya

I have a declaration to make, and it's a sort of a personal revelation.
Though probably an obvious one, if you know me.

I love light. I adore photons. Glow-sticks, Ikea lamps, fireflies, matchsticks, I adore it in all it's moods and colors, from the soft diffused glow of a rainy Sunday morning to the room filling summer sun bouncing across floor and hair and sleeping faces.

I guess it started one day when I was younger, and I woke up from an afternoon nap to find myself trapped in a shaft of sun and about a billion dust motes. I was trapped because I could not pull my focus away from the dance of the particles and the smallest shadows they cast underneath them, like tiny pillars in this cathedral shining through my polka-dotted curtains.

One night when I was eleven I probably caused permanent ocular damage to myself by shining a hand-held laser pointer directly into my left eye. I had to see what it looked like up close, and laser light up close looks like an uncountable, wondrous mass of shooting stars are flying by your head all at once. You try to follow the path of each one with your eye, for naught.

Trivia: I sometimes sneeze when I look at bright lights/the sun. I always thought that was cool.

I guess it's fitting now that I work behind a camera. It's just an extension of my lifelong need to understand and capture something that is larger than me. Something that always made my heart beat faster, and has given me so much.

The calm ocean on a full moon, a paddy field draped in the perfect diffusion of sunset, there is music there for those who listen.