THE POEM

like the moon in your mouth, insinuating the resentment just turned into friendship, soulmates. Not to just collaborate but to also fight with her, both fractured and invaluable. You’re spinning between the high and bitterness. There’s a line dangling between your legs, and the children beneath your belly button have run away from this Earth.

in a nightmare you’re trying to write down, when everything is still hard to name, you already know the name of the darkness that follows the light, before even the water and fire. And from the ocean, I’m your breathless child, like all the people lying on the beach, trying to breathe. And I could see that at the foot of the horizon, appeared the shape and form of the vernacular of art and literature.

THE MEMOIR OF POETS

when Your Time has yet to become a thing of the past, and there are yet those with remorse, the Sun continues to face its Nemesis. I can see you there waiting for me with a poetry publication, because all you ever want to do is to be involved with the arts. You hate politics. Because you’re stuck.

But they found your words of censure from long ago. 

I didn’t know you then, but, by turning back time, I waded through a field of sunflowers in the middle of the night. The moon was behind me, my finger surrendered to a red butterfly that you told me I was not allowed to touch. You said it’s taboo.

Tears are not the error of a clown, bad poetry is not the error of an editor, it’s the fault of a panel of censorship. maybe

PARADISE HIGH IN THE SKY

The window curtain covered my eyes. the man working like a slave on paper, he’s like an arrow piercing the screen of the old computer. There’s a fashion establishment flying like a cloud in the sky. Where people had to line up to get into paradise to buy the clothes on sale without vouchers or food stamps.

a man was walking his electric bike across the highway, like a child barely out of danger, like with national pride the people buy products made in China and relabelling them as high quality products endorsed by the nation.

There are fishermen out there beneath sea level, dreaming of a gift on dry land. Because they continue to row through the flooded streets because of the torrential rain. The billion dollar flood projects lead the city towards the harbour, still sounding the flood sirens. They are still too young because of all the stars in their eyes and still too soon that those amongst them must die. 

beneath a blue sky full of friendly clouds.

they had to scrounge for their bait in a war once upon a time. There’s no such thing as a compassionate enemy, since fate was determined by bullets in a game of Russian roulette, so hope may be spared, to live again for one more day. The chilling sound of bells summoning the souls steeped in each and every hairy pore of their tired bodies.

gosh all those boys who had to quickly grow up, we will never forget you. We have been taught that grown men do not cry.

THE LOGIC OF A DREAM

I recognised the face on the sand. It’s staring at me like a child watching an army of ants marching in a row. I know that face, I have traced each wrinkle with my finger on its forehead, and rubbed the beauty spot just beneath one eye, thinking it was a speck of dirt, but it was not.

It is the face of a woman who appears regularly in my dreams, always in high heels, always trying to find a way to bury me with her purple fingernails. “Are you looking for this?”, I asked, and she said: “This loneliness, it’s calling me, becking me with its index finger, but this is not my face. I belong to the light on a stage. I need to drown myself amongst the fanning goldfish tails around a pair of bull horns, the kind of images that may help with the experiment of each word in my poetry. Dawn will be the final home for all my green dreams washed up just now on the sand.”

I have lost you like someone who had lost sleep, I am a tangible shadow, allow me to take a picture of you, so I may draw you on the wall, and write your name on the water as naked and as bare. Allow me to sample the startling taste of you like a random shower of arrows as surreal as white birds. And as twisted as a tongue would be in the damp darkness as the churning hurt and resentment within you.

Damp and wet.

– I will draw a dragonfly perched on your finger so the poem may be easier for you to understand.

Drawings on a wall, much like history on paper, I find the calm amongst the storm inside a cup of tea, blowing away the steam as time passes by, listening to the whistling as though it’s the scar of those who had been re-educated.

I am a wish that you granted last summer amongst the giggles of horses, as the dragonflies danced over the lake and all other things slithered in the dark, I showed up to answer. The way people level history with blood and gold before it’s allowed to be sung and written up in poetry. Long long ago, living was repetitive, and war was destruction, re-creating humanity with a renewed heartbeat by the simplest of methods to the point of inhumanity. 

Humanity’s wheel of time shaking like a white fish washed up on the sand, splashing about before its death, like a dragonfly discerning the moment of death, everyone including her will leave.

Those who died from poetry were by choice, because they wanted to breathe, she said. And rather sad: because now there are only the clandestine verses left because everything has to be reformed.

THE END OF A FIGHT

When the strangers came armed with guns, I thought how is he able to remain so calm. He continues to lick the grass under my feet, catch the falling butterflies night after night with my fingers, and drown my pain in the fire and explosions long ago. Listen, I’m talking, I can withstand anything, the sound and images of flapping butterfly wings night after night. And my finger will draw a straight line of an arrow on fire across the sky, perhaps with blood, but tears are more than sufficient.

They are ready in spirit,
their feet firm on the land of snakes
the soles of their shoes thick and frightful.

Peace arrives as a shadowy form of the twilight of dusk belonging to those who just woke up. After sleeping, pages after pages full of the ink in my handwriting from the damp wet, and pungent edges of artillery smoke there, just yesterday.

Going home, so Mother can prepare platters of betel nut and leaves for her engagement. Out at sea, the waves exploding like an exchange of gunfire.

—

September 2023