Sunday, January 31, 2010

Songs I can Already Play on My Guitar

I bought a guitar sometime ago and so far I've learnt how to play these songs, except for the solo parts of course. I think all are easy songs that don't involve any plucking whatsoever.

1) Anyone Else but You
3) About a Girl
4) Wild Thing
5) Jack & Diane
6) Use Somebody
7) Suffragette City
8) Sweet Jane
9) Last Caress
10) Throw Your Arms Around Me
11) Big Me
12) Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again
13) Last Night
14) Brimful of Asha
15) Unintended
16) Espionage
17) We are 138
18) Rebel Rebel
19) Harvest Moon
20) Here Comes Your Man
21) Show Me the Way
22) You May Be Right
23) Personal Jesus


Easy-peasy right? Well right now I'm trying to learn how to play Muse's Unintended. The chords are simple enough but the trick is in nailing the arpeggio plucking. Wish me luck.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

A pinch won't do

Saints and sinners, losers and winners
We are all drowning swimmers
in this God-forsaken, water-logged land
God gave us heaven, but just because he could,
Chucked us out of it after some female fruit
Ate a piece of paradise fruit.

But then again that's just what my mother told me
She learned it from her own mother
They read it off a century-old bestseller
One with no shred of evidence nor an ISBN number.

A pinch won't do, so just leave the shaker here
I need a lot after all the lies, after all these years
The female kind has been quite unkind
to me whether I choose to believe or die an unbeliever.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

The bottom line

I am your pillow, you my blanket
We can't have it all even if we crawled,
The keyword is sharing the bottomline is caring
for one another, not making it hard for each other

Thursday, January 21, 2010

DIFFERENT UNIFORMS

Let they build no statue for me,
In honour of me, nor in my memory,
Bid me no grand farewell fit for kings,
Let none do any mourning and crying.
Let me lay in the trenches, deep in the puddle,
After I fall, in the thick of the battle.

Just take my helmet, and take it to the Fuhrer,
Lay it on his table, in front of his dinner,
Tell him quickly, before he gets angry,
Tell him, and tell him quickly:

“This belonged to a soldier, Herr Fuhrer,
Who’d fallen and will return never,
Who with his last breath cursed you aloud,
Who in his death can never be proud.”

What have I done to deserve my death?
When the Fuhrer merely slouches behind his desk,
After he waged war with a proud roar
And sees not all these horror and gore.
All for the sake of his pride and greed,
Disguised as what the state wants and mortally needs.

How different am I from this French I’d just shot?
Cowardly I feel, for he saw it not.
And the Briton I found broken in two,
Doesn’t he deserve to live as much as I do?

When the time comes, honour me not,
Leave me alone, let me just rot,
For ashamed am I to bear these weapons,
And to kill and maim my distant brethrens,
Just because they come not from where I come from,
Just because they are clad in different uniforms.

Here we go again

I hallucinate to get a better picture
to enunciate all that I cant see clear
I see you for who you are when I dont look
you simply dont see me when you dont look

I surrendered to your fighting spirit
you've rendered me nothing, jackshit
but if you let me wash off all your spit
i'll come again raring for a second hit

so now the playing field is even
its you me and all the self-inflicted pain
no more talking no more teasing
there goes the bell here we go again

Eternal Twilight

I shall no more be seen walking among the living
For all that’s left alive within me, is slowly leaving,
And the joys of the sunlight that burns bright,
Reveals all that is absent from my being
In whose gaping valley sits the darkest of nights.

When the time comes and nobody sees
I’ll depart this plane and crawl to the next
I shall be walking among you, but unseen by you
(Without a worldly care and trivial affairs)
Whose mortal eyes are glared by the sunlight
And I walk among you in my eternal twilight.

A Flower sticks out

I’m a man who sits on the edge of everything
I fidget with the gadgets that came with my being
And I collect people’s dirt and turd in my pocket and I keep it
Then I pile them into one heap of god-awfulness and eye-brow raiser

So they shun me but mostly they are a lot meaner
In their meanness they’re painful, like the edge of a razor
But behind me a flower sticks out of the muck and soil
And they stand, mouth a-gaping at the fruit of my toil.

So you can go to work

I seem to be needing a new wallet
Mine’s rather old, admittedly I’ve been faithful to it
I have just enough money to buy one, that much I admit
The problem is I’m broke and down to my last ringgit
If I go and purchase one, there’ll be nothing left in my pocket
The new wallet will be moot, for I have no money to keep in it.

Life is a hoot in all its day-to-day pointlessness
You get a wife, she gets on your nerves
You take out a loan on a car so you can go to work
But you forget that you got the job so you can pay the dealership jerk
Most people soften it with religion, the rest with hard liquor
Thus I’m left with the full brunt of life’s confusion, for I subscribe to neither.

The 8 o'clock cabaret

The crimson caps line up and congregate on one side
From cadet to colonel all collaborators
of this cabinet sponsored cartoon democracy
In the other corner us; the conveyor of catalyst, the coalition
Coaled as criminals, conmen and subsequently convicts
No doubt the amoral character of their 8 o’clock cabaret

We clash with them of course though we do no clobbering
They commit all the cleaving, we contest but a little
For we do not fight cowards, those who are cockless
And it crumbles into a cat and mouse hunt, catch-at-all-costs
They cart and cuff us into their coaches, not unlike cows
Parading us in their convoy, a caravan of curiosities

Their kangaroo court quickly finds us culpable
Culprit of the conspiracy, a cult of the coarse
As if on cue, our custodians carry us away
Confiscate our freedom, curtail our courage
We don’t plead our case, it’s not in the script
The curtain comes down, but no one’s clapping.

Kuala lumpur oh kuala Lumpur
Can you hear our cry oh Kuala Lumpur
The cock and bull on your cable, consider it carefully
For they were all created quite cunningly
Keep in your recollection, never quell the memory
For we convened for you, and collapsed in your view.

The Serdang Gloom

I remembered it like it was in my own backyard
Every turn, every stoplight, every money grubbing toll plaza
All the young lovers oblivious to their partners' disinterest
All the vacationing couples putting off divorce for another week.
We would fight half the way and sulk the remaining half
And in came a silence so stinging a slap is a caress, that things
Ended with me chasing away the dim sun thinking it was a rainy cloud
Ended with me grinning a smile that’s so damn proud.

But Serdang is now like the drop when using a long noose
Much like watching the government-written RTM news
I recognise it when I see it in my term paper
It keeps me company when I'm having a lonesome dinner
It swirls and waves at me at the bottom of each bottle
And I cant now smile even when a gun is at my temple, for
Some nights I think I'll go mad trying not to think of you
Some nights I'm sure I'm mad when all my dreams are about you.

With Prozac in one pocket and a ring in the other
With happiness on one hand and enslavement on the other.
I will return to Melaka my land of future promises
Where the sun shines sufficiently for those who badly need it
For returning couples that chickened out of divorce
For young lovers who come with a new amour.
Whether you like it or not I'm grafting a smile onto my face
If it means you'll shine brighter and chase this Serdang gloom away.

That self-made ire

My problems real or imagined can be solved by liquid solution
(and no I don't mean ablution)
Wherever you are now is none of my concern
Since I can find you now in sweet intoxication
Where we spend our nights in make believe fornication

I've been made to grow older but none the wiser
A constant quitter, who's every bit a loser
That you painstakingly made in your image
Only to later hate with a passionate rage

In my current state I confuse the facts all the time
All the fights there were many, all the joy I keep recalling
Yes I was the one parachuting out the plane as it caught fire
But you were the one torching it with that self-made ire

I hate it when it wears off, this temporary absolution
It tends to put me resentfully in this realistic position
As I am more able to walk in a relatively straight direction
The truth starts to sink in:
I am here quite sober, in your resounding absence.

The last cigarette at the top of the minaret

The tallest building in Bangi
Seems to be the minaret of the mosque
So that will have to do for me to fulfill
My pledge as a man who's at the edge

Bearing in mind that this, too, shall pass
I'll crawl up the stairs, out of this self-made mess
Broken glass, promises, confidence all now ghosts of the past
As a new man emerges at the top, almost with a hop

The view will be breathtaking in the stillness of the night
As I light my last cigarette at the top of the minaret
The cold shackles will have bound me for the last time
For I'll be flying off the minaret fearlessly, worry-free.