Someone told me you worked in an
Employment agency, placing lives
into a semblance of dignity and good conduct.
All very good, of course, pigeonholing.
That after several years, reams of cyclostyled journals,
after rising from the humanistic depths of dead (long dead)
German, Roman, Grecian, Indian, Sinonese
shamanistic wise men, after
All that -
You would board your clockwork train, ploughing,
sighing, humming, generously producing
Productive nine hours worth of job analysis.
A plastic card, imprinted with
your voice, your image, your astrological significance
now appears in your hand to be given over.
A life to be given over,
a sum to be computed.

Campus-green, a long anachronistic time ago (long dead)
a cry of, "cigarettes and alcohol !" would rouse
the most fervent of those
sweating, bullying,
swearing, pushing white-mice crowd of you.
White umbrellas in a mockery of Greek amphitheatre
Shelter harbouring minds, amidst frozen café lattes,
Idle chit-chat, droning on like fashionable bees.
One eye on the clock at lunchtime for the next
welcome into patient lectures, had suddenly
Metamorphosed into two, now -
nailed straight at the hand to five.
Your chrysalis is still glistening.
Drawing your shades further inwards,
I merge into you
In a drawn-out journey out of a glass tunnel.


Dance

Twisted in a dance step
Transfiguring the diabolical nature of the lion
to a symbolic allusion to higher things:
which side of the celestial battle I do not know.

Twisted as in a dance
Their long bony hands raised, fingers
Splayed like wings,
And like wings were their hair and beards.
Stirred by the prophetic wind,
the folds of the long garments sweeping,
giving life to waves and scrolls
opposed to the lion but breathes
the same substance.

A dance twisted in half-step
The body contouring to fit the image, casting
a pale shadow back to where it resides waiting,
In the nexus. The dancer skimmed, alternating
the sameness of equivocation, decoration and vicissitudes,
freed by impetuous winds to wing
Towards a centre.

The feet stopped twisting
A packet of red between the green splash
Marginally, a compromise is met
at the centre of luck and life.


Deep Afternoon at Sungei Buloh’s Park Office

Long-necked birds elongate the season into
deepening shadows, temperature dropping.
Migratory instincts and the magnetic north
honing their persuasive flight judiciously ;
a push-pull pattern discernible.

There they are, pruning and bobbing right outside
my window, murky through the frosted glass -
an artificial season all in mine own world.
They have left one and I have arrived at neither,
why is it that I am tracing their route?

Grenson. Sir Grenson. Orthinologist and authority
fixed and butterfly-pinned their flight seventy years ago.
Enough to allow us to accommodate our visitors
in this to-be-rapidly-cemented unkindness
without raising paper public rage.

The wider eye casts and finds no respite. Our visitors
bob their heads once more, convinced more from
an eternal cycle than of the transient human interest
that moves from season to season, whichever, practical.
And to this end, I snap shut my book,
reaching for my camera bag, I slip.

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