RE: To All Chickens Concerned

RE: TO ALL CHICKENS CONCERNED

Here is the latest coop from the Progressive Chicken Party (PCP):

 

The Party believes in equality for all chickens;

no chicken should be left behind, caged against its own will.

Eggs must not be aborted into omelettes but must claim

their rights; as shell-shocked chicks scrambling to life.

 

All chickens suffering from cage layer fatigue

will be given a free pass to watch Chicken Little.

Chicks are yellow because they have escaped the yolk;

they are free range children of the sunny side of life.

 

Cockerels rise to greet the dawn, chasing the devil away.

As hens lay blessings, chickens are the progressive proletariat,

watchers of time and egg, hard-boiled believers in suffering.

Stop chicken genocide. Go for the cows, they won’t see it coming.

 

Chickens will be restored as oracles; once we brought

prophesies to pass, we still guide nations from the dinner table.

The foundations of philosophy have been laid from us;

which came first, the chicken, or the egg?

 

In other news, the Hen Pecked Association of Cockerels is organising

its annual summit on ways to minimise committing domestic fowls.

Vacancy

Something I wrote for a reading at the close of the Singapore Biennale 2013.

photo(3)

Cosmology of Life, detail

 

Vacancy

After Toni Kanwa’s Cosmology of Life,

Singapore Biennale, 2013

 

If empty has a sound, what would it be?

There has been a sign hanging over this door

for as long as I can remember. It waits, resigned,

the way some shops are perpetually on sale,

their dusty eyes with no expiry date staring

balefully at shoppers who pass them by.

 

For rent, the sign speaks, in a thick steel tongue,

its prayers unvoiced as I grow older, and still, this

gnawing continues at the bustling heart of the city.

I can only imagine the unconditional summers

in the eyes of the man who laid the first brick

in this façade before it became forgotten, while

 

we laid down our pillowed offerings elsewhere

and promised to appear fully stocked, steering

through the solitude of a thousand ways

to fill our lives while the world turns, slow as ever.

So we consume desire in passing eyes, we drink,

in the shadowed days, the sighs of crowded hearts.

 

But look again, past the sign. The cosmos heralds

a thousand voices gathered around in the shape

of life. Look again, at its curving pageant, its delicate

pleasures, look how it falls in order. If empty has a

sound, it might just be the hum of possibility when we

take down the sign, and start to fill this vacancy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Plagiarism Is Seven Words Long

In the beginning was the Word eternal,

sunshine of the spotless,

mind petals on a wet, black bough,

the best laid plans of mice

between the shadow and the soul.

 

Death is nothing to us, since

there’s a bluebird in my heart, for love

is strong as death, friends, Romans.

Countrymen, lend me your hope,

is the thing with feathers, all kisses

 

are metaphors decipherable by sea

that bangs in my throat. Between my

fingers and my thumb, I wandered lonely

as a cloud, the mind is its own place.

I have heard the mermaids singing

 

when a woman loves a man, the clock

strikes with her hands, when we two

parted in silence, your absence has

gone through me. The breezes at dawn

have secrets, the rain is full of ghosts.

 

Do I dare disturb the universe?

You can hear the dew falling.

I carry your heart with me and

your fingerprints on my windows

in the machinery of the night.

 

Between the dark and the daylight

the stars are not wanted now,

death makes angels of us all.

Two roads diverged in a wood

and in between are the doors.

 

Now I’m trying to dig deeper, things

fall apart; the centre cannot fear

in a handful of dust to be, or not to be;

I still have time to be, a narrow fellow

in the grass, going where I have to go.

 

Tonight, let us not become tragedies.

To err is human; to forgive, I celebrate

myself, and sing myself. Like a bridge

over troubled waters, the weight

we carry is love.

 

Although this is technically not necessary, nevertheless here are the lines by their authors in order of appearance:
The Bible, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, John Steinbeck, Pablo Neruda, Epicurus, Charles Bukowski, The Bible, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Saul Williams, Anne Sexton, Seamus Heaney, William Wordsworth, John Milton, T.S. Eliot, David Lehman, Saul Williams, Lord Byron, W.S. Merwin, Rumi, Edna St. Vincent Millay, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, E.E. Cummings, Allan Ginsberg, Henry Longfellow, Jim Morrison, W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, Jim Morrison, Richard Siken, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, Anis Mojgani, Emily Dickinson, Theodore Roethke,
Buddy Wakefield, Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Paul Simon, Allan Ginsberg

 

Reading between the lines

The National Library building at Bras Basah is a fascinating structure. I have returned to photograph it time and time again, and always read something new into its munificent intersections, framed in glass and space.

Sampan 2.0

Sampan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sampan* 2.0

 

“I think we’ve upgraded our sampan. Sampan 2.0″

– Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, 2013

 

Dear Captain,

when your father cast off from Kuala Lumpur,

and you threw overboard the white man burden, you told us to row,

for our lives depended on it. Not to look back, should the salt in the air

steal our tongues and dissolve our freedom. To trust, that this is the course,

that you will lead us home.

 

Dear Captain,

Now we want to talk to our crewmates on this boat, but winds of progress howl too loud

We want to write poems on the floorboards but they have to remain clean

We want to shimmy up the mast and dream to the horizon, to be fine, and not be fined

Continue reading “Sampan 2.0”

Going Postal

After three years of plugging away at my next collection of poems, I’m really proud to say it’s finally coming into the light! Postal Code is going to launch on 4th November at the Singapore Writer’s Festival at 7 p.m., alongside Desmond Kon’s The Arbitrary Sign. Expect a special guest appearance from my former prof at NUS, Dr Rajeev Patke, as well as a reading and Q&A.

Postal Code Cover Image

 

Postal Code is a book about place. It divides into five sections; broadly speaking.

Singapore

Faith

Love

Death

Endings

While the Singapore section seems to encapsulate all of the other sections thematically, I felt that it was time to return (after the nomadic wanderings of my previous book, Chai) to more home-grown issues. Hence poems about the 2011 elections, Mas Selamat, the 6.9m white paper, reservist training in the Army, and so forth.

The poems in the other sections consider other geographical places, but never quite stray from stories and experiences close to my heart.

And if you want to get a sneak peek of one of the poems, do drop by the Smoke-Filled Room this weekend. ‘Suara,’ a poem from Postal Code, is part of a collaborative work with Vikas Kailankaje. And I’ll be performing poems from Postal Code and more together with two other smashing poets, Jennifer Champion and Raksha Mahtani, on 27th October, 6pm. The gig is called Smoke-Filled Poets (naturally, right?) Come on down to get a lungful of socio-political incorrectness!

Smoke-Filled Room Events