Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Together with other Singaporean poets, I will be reading my poems at ContraDiction, the second gay poetry reading in Singapore. The reading is on Thu, Aug 3, at 7.30 p.m. Place is Mox Bar, 21 Tanjong Pagar Road, within walking distance from the Tanjong Pagar MRT station. Everyone is invited to the party!

I’m flying back to Singapore for a two week visit. I don’t know when Singapore stopped feeling like a home to me. It happened earlier than my flight to New York to write poetry and come out as gay. Earlier than my undergraduate years at Oxford when the Anglican church appeared a more favorable spiritual home. National service, with its regimentation, terror and unreason, only confirmed, but not initiated, my feeling of alienation. The loss of a home is not the same as leaving home. Leaving involves personal choice. In Singapore, you decide to get married, and you leave home to set up a home of your own. In Britain or the States, you leave home to set off on the adventure of college, expecting to make your own way after that decisive break. My American friends who return home to live with their parents after college always speaks of that homecoming with a rueful sheepishness. You don’t have a choice, however, in losing a home. The loss comes to you, whether in the form of a letter or a ...

He is consistently original in language and thought, and he is posting his poems on his blog . I read The Unsubscriber , and poem after poem blew me away. Here's the beginning of the first, and titular, poem of that book: Like all children, you were a de facto Member of the Flat Earth Society, Believing nothing but what you could see Or touch or whatever sense led act to... The four lines are the first quatrain of a very contemporary sonnet. His non-reverent use of traditional forms is also an exciting aspect of the book.

Why should I bury him and die for it, a sister's blood splashed over a dead brother? But what is water if it isn't wet? He led the city while I followed the spit baptising the brother we called our father. Why should I bury him and die for it? Exiled, he partied with the Argive set. So let his lover bury his own lover, for what is water if it isn't wet? He led the Argive army to commit treason. My brother killed my brother (Why should I bury him ?) and died for it. The gods will understand. I will forget this foolishness. I must finish my shower. Why should I bury him? To die for it. What is water if it isn't wet?

"When I see a couple of kids/And guess he’s fucking her...” Philip Larkin In the American season of paradise, I hear through the plywood wall my roommate fucking his girl at 3 a.m. They mouth the same script every time, he going aargh, Aargh! she yelping, to encourage him, perhaps. In my poetry workshop, the girls fuck their dads, their mums, their best friends’ pets, and the poems never sound happy. They always blame their dads, their mums, the pets, themselves or they complain a good fuck doesn’t last. I start a poem about a good fuck but it slumps into a complaint in the end. It refuses to be happy, as if sadness, or badness, is the only mirror for the soul and the only way to end a fucking poem. Rather than words comes the thought of a slide, long, but not straight long, curling long round and down, and the slider sliding down so fast he keeps catching sight of himself.

It’s hardly my fault. There I was reading Maurice in a corner seat when this brownhaired undergrad staggered in with a stack of books and decked them all on the low table between us. His quick fingers browsed the shelved bookspines, parted them and shoved returns into the gap. I tried to read the face of his back but his thick checked shirt was a curtain. Then he reached for the higher ledge, as if putting his hands up on the wall, and drew his drape up slightly. The sun lit the line of hair that slid from the torso’s nape into the jeans. Given to ogling at stage-flats, non-interactive things, I held my paperback like a program. He did not catch me looking at him when he turned to pick up books. Chastity-belted in thermal wear, my groin snarled, I admit, to chance the law’s, and his, displeasure, bang him on the table, send books flying off dusty shelves, medieval racks, but I honestly swear I did not lay the tiniest finger on him, I did not say a single word, and certainly did not, de...

The seventh, and last, part of the sequence: 1. Hotel Peninsula 2. Daylilies 3. Clear Wrap 4. Visual Sense 5. Galapagos 6. Natural History 7. Parting Gifts I know you told me not to get you anything from Singapore, but I really wanted to give you something… Here’s one more for your album. Let me give you Queens, the one borough you did not see. A boulevard of body shops and billboards, it’s an old graveyard abandoned by the Irish and Italians it weans from suckling at familiar pubs and tombstone tits. Others have moved in, with their gods and groceries, and make (lawyers as mediums) with authorities their various accommodations, their different debts. In the day they maneuver, working their controls, their bodies up the levels and around the screen. At night they play the same game, only the scene has changed. The pitch or maze or city is the soul’s, in which the aim, as in the day, is mastery. Opening bakeries or books needs a sharp eye. Practice makes love, and taekwando, perfect. Tr...

I've posted this before but out of sequence. So here it is, the sixth part of my as-yet-untitled sequence: 1. Hotel Peninsula 2. Daylilies 3. Clear Wrap 4. Visual Sense 5. Galapagos 6. Natural History I've come to change my mind about Americans. Am sitting in the American wing at the museum... This is the dinosaur mummy, fossilized thing of mesozoic flesh, tendons and tubercles bumpy as birds’ feet. The cladogram labels the features of Charles Sternberg’s find in Wyoming. This diorama of the black mountain gorilla, conceived by Carl Akeley who loved Mount Mikeno and buried himself there, is backed by that volcano. The tutsan tree, the pendant bedstraw, so real! Ah, the Yakut Shaman! Slipping into a deep trance to free this sleeping woman captured by demons. A faithful record based on Waldemar Jochelson’s description of a true tobacco-influenced dance. Here’s the American wearing his bible belt below protuberant waist, his nonflammable flag flying above him. The precision of tha...

Fifth part of a sequence: 1. Hotel Peninsula 2. Daylilies 3. Clear Wrap 4. Visual Sense 5. Galapagos Isn’t it possible to have a great conversation with a gay man without talking about sex... We shall not talk about sex. We shall not talk about Jacques Torres hot chocolate on Water Street nor Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory in summer heat. No more talk about sex. We shall talk about New York. We shall not talk about sex. We shall not talk about the bags and multiple pairs of shoes you bought from Macy’s, nor the round-island cruise we never took. Yes, we shall talk about New York, we shall not talk about sex. We shall not talk about Darwin and natural selection though we have observed the turtles of Galapagos. We shall not talk about reptile sex in New York; we shall not talk about sex. We shall not talk about that Arab waiter we both eyed at Tut nor the white woman at the harpsichord my gut yearned for so much I could not talk. This is New York where, if we shan’t talk about sex, we shan’t...

I love reading Stevie Smith. She always cheers me up, or haunts me, even when it is a poem I have read several times. She is the girl with whom I run away into the woods, the older sister I curl up against, knowing that she is as frightened as I am but pretends that being lost is quite fun, really. Not that she does not acknowledge her own fears. But she tells of them in stories that charm me, and make me laugh or cry. Scorpion 'This night shall thy soul be required of thee' My soul is never required of me It always has to be somebody else of course Will my soul be required of me tonight perhaps? (I often wonder what it will be like To have one's soul required of one But all I can think of is the Out-Patients' Department-- 'Are you Mrs Briggs, dear?' No, I am Scorpion.) I should like my soul to be required of me, so as To waft over grass till it comes to the blue sea I am very fond of grass, I always have been, but there must Be no cow, person or house to be se...

The fourth part of a series that should be read in sequence: 1. Hotel Peninsula 2. Daylilies 3. Clear Wrap 4. Visual Sense Thank you for making it comfortable for me—the meals, the leisurely sightseeing, the photos that you so gamely took so that I won’t look like an ant. You know how hopeless a photographer I am. With no manual knack, I own no visual sense, not enough anyway to frame beautiful scenes into souvenirs. Thank goodness for the Digicam! Freed to retake my mistakes in memory sticks, I reached for Liberty’s diadem-spears and torch. You, my dear R., appeared the size of a cockroach, a poor picture among the improvised picnics. Focused on you, your pixie, but not pixelled, face, another photo showed your Mona Lisa smile, but Liberty became the grayish granite wall guarding the entrance into the American base. Lying down to shoot upwards, like in my bed, I saw you stand shoulder to shoulder with Liberty. From that temporary place, I also captured me and, looming over me, Liberty...

The third part of a series which needs to be read in sequence. The first two sections are: 1. Hotel Peninsula 2. Daylilies 3. Clear Wrap Friends are the flowers in life’s garden. I brought you a long-stemmed rose wrapped in cellophane, bought from the Peas ‘N’ Pickles in my neighborhood. It was a birthday gift. It also said: I would love you always. You said it wilted on the plane.

This is the second part of a series I'm writing on a friend's visit to NYC. It should be read after the first part, "Hotel Peninsula." 2. Daylilies I normally don’t comment much about my surroundings as I prefer to absorb whatever I see, take in the sights. It’s like if I talk, I’m afraid I will ‘lose’ whatever I’m trying to keep in my heart. There was a Chinese garden in the Garden of my memory: paper lanterns flying to the moon- shaped entrance to an artificial, green lagoon reflecting the pagodas and lotuses above. Perhaps I fell in the lake after you said you cried on seeing Hangchow’s bridges span its wide canals. Perhaps a Chinese garden forms in all locales where past and present, hurrying to meet, collide. Perhaps. The fact remains my memory was wrong. Also mistook the name of your hotel, Pennsylvania, for my Peninsula. My vast metropolismania constructs a virtual city where I may belong. But you were staying in Penn’s Woods, and in the Bronx we walked through...

Rukeyser's first book, Theory of Flight , won the Yale Younger Poets Award when she was twenty-one. "Sand Quarry with Moving Figures" turns her father's construction business, which made the family rich, into an evocative account of the distance between speaker and father. Landscape, narrative details and dialogue are skilfully deployed to set up the stumbling descent into hell: Father and I drove to the sand-quarry across the ruined marshlands, miles of black grass, burned for next summer's green. I reached my hand to his beneath the lap-robe, we looked at the stripe of fire, the blasted scene. "It's all right," he said, "they can control the flames, on one side men are standing, and on the other the sea;" but I was terrified of stubble and waste of black and his ugly villages he built and was showing me. The countryside turned right and left about the car, straight through October we drove to the pit's heart; sand, and its yellow cany...

I'm writing a series of poems for a very good friend of mine who visited New York City for the first time last month. The writing is gaining in momentum though my ideas on the narrative, characters and themes are only developing as I write. So the pieces posted are rougher than my usual ones. Here's the first part: 1. Hotel Peninsula Thanks for bringing me around New York City! Have enjoyed my time with you, especially when it’s just me and you alone... Who did I think I went to meet at JFK? A friend, of course, of ten uneven years, an ex- colleague, a Malay woman, to whom race and sex counted for less than yet another damn birthday, at least on your first outing to my new birthplace; the first old friend I told about my first boyfriend, an outing of a different kind that puts an end to false romantic barricades like age and race. You saw me before Hudson News , and recognized what? My face? Arms folded across blue tee? A glow? Convenient signs that told you where to find Cosmo...

This is the dinosaur mummy, fossilized thing of mesozoic flesh, tendons and tubercles bumpy as birds’ feet. The cladogram labels the features of Charles Sternberg’s find in Wyoming. This diorama of the black mountain gorilla, conceived by Carl Akeley who loved Mount Mikeno and buried himself there, is backed by that volcano. The tutsan tree, the pendant bedstraw, so real! Ah, the Yakut Shaman! Slipping into a deep trance to free this sleeping woman captured by demons. A faithful record based on Waldemar Jochelson’s description of a true tobacco-influenced dance. Here’s the American wearing his bible belt below protuberant waist, his nonflammable flag flying above him. The precision of that price tag! And see, this life-sized cast, his hero, Roosevelt.

I read Anthony Hecht's poem "To L. E. Sissman, 1928-1976" week before last (in his Collected Later Poems, a magisterial, in both senses of the word, volume) without knowing who the dead dedicatee is, and promptly forgot the name though not the poem. On a trip to the local secondhand bookstore here in Brooklyn Heights, I picked up Sissman's first volume of poems, Dying: An Introduction , because of its beguiling use of meter. After reading and enjoying most of it, I was surprised to find the same name topping Hecht's poem to which I returned, Later . Here's a section showing how Hecht praises Sissman's poetry: Dear friend, whose poetry of Brooklyn flats And poker sharps broacasts the tin pan truths Of all our yesterdays, speaks to our youths In praise of both Wallers, Edmund and Fats, And will be ringing in some distant ear Whem the Mod-est, last immodesty fatigues, All Happenings have happened, the Little Leagues Of Pop and pop-fly poets disappear To join ...

I finally got round to reading "The Line of Beauty" after buying it from "Bon Voyage" in Provincetown. I had sensed that I would enjoy reading the novel, and putting it off was a way of enjoying the luxury of anticipation. It is a beautiful novel, saturated by desire--sex, power, class, wealth--intimacies thwarted one way or another except for the intimacy of individual aesthetic appreciation, in reading or appreciating fine furniture or architecture. The protagonist's self-willed illusion is that the appreciation of beauty can bring one closer to lovers, politicians, patricians and millionaires. Here is the protagonist, in bed with his male Arab British lover, explaining the novel's title: He slept there from time to time, in the fantasy of the canopied bed, with its countless pillows. The ogee curve was repeated in the mirrors and pelmets and in the wardrobes, which looked like Gothic confessionals; but its grandest statement was in the canopy of the bed, ...

You live in a combustible building, love, so warns the fire notice on your door. Sure, the apartment is controlled for rent, above a laundromat and liquor store, but have you not observed the plaster tear and the hardwood floor curl its long-nailed toes when flames, for regulated gas, consent and sear cod fillet and asparagus? Or when you plugged in the a.c. with hand damp from an afternoon of sex, were shocked by the hideous circuit hidden in cement, unplanned combustion in what’s built and blocked from us who live in this construction sham. So read this notice. Plan your escape route. Run if things ignite, despite intent, and hammer every door on your way out.

Of the five acts prescribed by the Prophet for purity—plucking the hair from armpit, clipping the moustache, slivering the nails, shaving the pubes, removing the foreskin— I have obeyed and performed only one (my nails are short), another ritual act being impossible since I keep my face clean shaven to receive the kiss of sun, so I must represent impurity, hair and skin growing in disfavored places, shedding apart from or against my will on wash basins, enamelled baths, and bodies, but I will still keep my fingernails short for making love, the teeth’s ferocity notwithstanding, for moving on the stretch inside, without a puncture or a scratch, and I will still shave my face every day, no party to the Prophet’s clipped moustache nor to his foes, the beardless polytheists, still rave about earth’s sun-woven toupee.

Lying on top of you, my arms and knees support my body even as I grope for how much of me your frame will carry. You hold me closer, you’re not heavy . So I lean a ladder into you, step hard up, and clamber to the top window to hear you play Chopin’s Etude in C Minor. I enter through the window and drop into your room. I sit down quietly. You come to a passage hazardous and slow like footsteps on decaying floorboards of an old house. The pedal mutes the piano. Then I become afraid you will not be playing, beside me, with such quiet hope forever, for night-fall, for lonely, and what that will do to me. I tiptoe to the window while stroking your forehead, lean back into myself, walk away below.