Diet

‘I am on a strict diet to gather the power – the Power and Melancholy of every poor poet.’ He is always ashamed of saying ‘poor poet’. It hints a certain fetish or vanity for the ‘neglected poet’ genre, revealing himself as someone who ‘celebrates mediocrity’. In short, there is a kind of comfort-seeking and condescension in this sort of admiration, a purely performative enunciation.

But he continued, ‘The diet of a neglected poet. Bread and plain water, porridge with canned peanut,’ he though to himself, this diet was a local Chinese entrepreneur-philanthropist’s as well. ‘…he would agree with our taste. And I would savour every flavour of his favourite film, in return. The main reason I loved Stella was because I like the song ‘Stella was a diver’. Now I can no longer enjoy this song in totality. I need to find another Stella to play and sing the song to. Last night I was chided for being unreal. But what Borges had written on Infinity and Immortality isn’t just a consolation or opium.’

With the expression and gesture of someone who was self-agitated by his own speech, he declares, ‘I think we paid too much respect to Reality. It is a false reverence. “In reality, we can’t live forever” but Reality is a merely the adopted son of truth suffering from autism. We should not underestimate the strength of illusion.’

Humanity - Chien Swee-Teng

Humans are the cancerous cells of Earth.
And what are the cancerous cells growing on us
but the cure for dear Old Earth.
I can't remember exactly what Hai Zi wrote about...
but it was something about Mother Earth,
about how she is old but still refuses to die
yet every morning we say 'Hi'

Long unpolished mirror

Reverse and reserve,
After the rain,
the road could be described as a long unpolished mirror.
The headlights reflected are like boats of searchlights, floating in pairs.

The road is a river, we have heard it before
the stock-image scene, we have seen before
of the vanishing point
of parallel lines
across deserted plains
or body of a snake

Three Songs

The world with three songs
Plays before the cheap curtain that divides
The room from the night burns

Window Shopping

‘…where the trees constantly prevents one from seeing the forest.’
-Georges Bataille, Accursed Share Vol. 1, p. 13

She wasn’t reading
She was merely glancing at these words
that formed into sentences,
and sentences into passages, filling the page.

The texts of different shapes and colours
are the names and advertising slogans
on the signboards and window displays of shops
She was passing but did not enter.

Why did she relate them to the many names each Hindu god is known by?

Murugan, Murukam, Subramanya,
Senthil, Saravana, Karttikeya,
Arumugam, Shanmukha, Kumara,
Guha, Skanda, Velan,
Swainatha…
is one name, one word.

Her words molested him
Her presence tickled the interior of his chest

This book could explain it all.
But she closed it and tossed it onto his bed.
There was hardly any sound.
It fell and hit the pillow,
as silent as a leaf, fallen from an unknown branch,
half-heartedly shielding us,
from the blades of the sun.

War and Renovation

All over the floor
Are these fallen leaves or confetti?

If only colours and shapes could tell
Whether marriage is luxurious living-on-the-top-floor, the penthouse,
or ordinary hell

She remembers the various proposals they went through
She understood them as proposals to renovate their love

He remembers the sun that was
easy on the trees,
easy on the pavement,
easy on the their back,
to him it was a treaty, based on the policy of appeasement:
They were Chamberlain and Hitler proclaiming geometry of love exists

All over the floor
Are these falling petals or confetti?

The living room arrangement, the colour of the couch,
Wasn’t it a consensus agreement to leave a gap between the kitchen cabinet for the fridge?…

All over the floor,
one of us would have to sweep it
There’s no bitterness,
there’s no war,
there wasn’t an explosion
These aren’t shrapnel but broken glass pieces and ice cubes
soaked in a liquid map with sweet minerals that would attract ants to colonise and drown in