MEN AT WORK: "Land Down Under"

Brisbane (Australia)

INCUBUS: "Here In My Room"

Bianca is her name. My lover for the night. I didn’t even know her until today. She came out of nowhere, and will lead me to nowhere. She’s dangerous, unpredictable, ruthless and destructive, but some of us are attracted to risks, and we love what we fear most sometimes. She locked me up in my hotel room, will keep me caged here until the morning comes. There’s no escape from her merciless whims. She turns left, she turns right, her endless moves make me crazy. I am a little David fighting against her centrifugal Goliath forces, swelling above me and getting stronger every minute. She makes the blood in my veins pump harder; I am restless as I surrender to the randomness of her will and desires. She moans, howls like a wolf on the loose. Raindrops splash against the window. She’s a goddess of wind, water and heaven; I’m her devotee, bound to earth and fire. My clothes are a mess on the floor. I took them all off, hours ago already. I won’t go out from here anyway, not as long as she’s around, for I know that there’s no escape until she allows it to. I sink into the mattress, turn my body once again, and close my eyes .

Bianca. “White girl”. It’s a beautiful name for the first cyclone of the year that rages over Western Australia today and places all living creatures , including this “white boy”, under house arrest until the alert is over.

SHAKIRA: “Sale El Sol”

I step onto the shore like a dog after a swim in the river, shaking the water off from its fur. I am ready for some happy times. The best plans are those you don’t think through but straight away put into practice. Peel yourself like an onion, show your different layers and discover what you find inside. Don’t worry too much about some tears in your eyes while doing it.

SCORPIONS: "Still Loving You"

At first, when we start loving someone, we fear that our love won’t be answered, and that we’ll hear nothing more but the echo of our own voice, sarcastically resounding in the vast mountains. Then, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. But what we should fear and dread as much, is that we won’t stop loving them, even after they are dead or gone. Perhaps it’s more bearable to live without any answer at all, than to know the answer yet not being able to ask another question.

TASADI & NHATO: "Time Ticks Away"

There are time zones, rather than miles between the country I left and the country I came back to. We step in a plane at night, these days, simply to step out the next morning on the other side of the world. It comes at a price, though. A persistent jetlag is the culprit of my nightly activities. I open a door and breathe a coolness that lives in this city like a night creature. The dark silence outside is comforting and it feels that I am the only dwelling soul that is awake at this impossible hour. I fell in a deep comatose sleep very early in the evening, yet came back from it before the clock struck midnight. The haunted hour, they say, but the only things that are haunting me are thoughts that emerge with intuitive clarity like the sun rising in a desert. You can do the wrong thing, for the right reason. Or the right thing, for the wrong reason. It’s too late to invite the sandman over by a glass of red wine, and too early for a cup of coffee to fully wake up, at least if I want to keep my chances open to catch some sleep still. Time ticks away, while it still can, for its ticking gets increasingly rare in this digital age. It blinks, nowadays. Cheap electronics have banned the dignity of roman signs and gracious hands on golden watches. Time is just as steadfast as before. But we now measure it with a stopwatch, where we used to pace our day by the hourly jingle-jangle of bombastic tower bells or an ugly yet cheerful cuckoo clock. You need to waste time, to find it.

CITY TO CITY: ”The Road Ahead”

The new year unfolds like a roadmap in our hands. There are endless itineraries to be followed, the meanderings of which are determined by unsolvable algorithms of junctions, dots and lines on a large sheet of paper. It contains colours, symbols and letters that all have an obvious or sometimes less obvious meaning. There are speedy expressways and slow walking paths, kerbs, shortcuts, dead ends, U-turns. Hills to be climbed or descended, boundaries waiting to be crossed or respected, bridges that will bring us to either side of rivers we do not wish to swim in. There’s a scale to put things in perspective too, for not all is as big or small as it seems at first. All we need to do is to get moving, for to stand still is not an option. Just throw away the map before you go. We are better off without it. Walk freely. Discover.

JOSHUA RADIN: "Don't Look Away"

“Men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, it’s the other way around.”

(from “Shantaram”, by Gregory David Roberts)

MIKA: "We Are Young"

Youthfulness is a quality, not an age.

FLOWER: "Strike While The Iron Is Hot"

趁热打铁 (chèn rè dǎ tiě)

"Strike while the iron is hot."

COLDPLAY: "Till Kingdom Come"

The day is a white sandy beach, and I make a castle of your body, dig my fingers in your white curves and let the silky grains slip through. I slake the shores of your thighs and take edacious sips from the salty canal that connects rivers with oceans. There are thousand ways to breath, but there’s only one in which my inhalation finds your exhalation like two unknowns of one and the same equation. Acceleration; exaltation. Your lips are a bellows that fumes desire into the heated fireplace of my body. I indulge in the crisp crowns on your royal hills¸ with an unstoppable eagerness to surrender to the powers of your mountain kingdom. My hands draw circles on your skin, they spin on either side of your chest, no longer knowing what left or right is. Our tongues are allies on this linen battlefield, and I send mine on an exploratory mission before the troops march in. Where eyes meet, they hold, and their depth is deeper than the dark black ocean in which I am drowning.