Song of a Reformed Headhunter

"Can't Sleep", 1993, pastel on paper Artist's link

This voice you hear is not my voice stuttering on the phone, snapping at the ghostliest slight, or singing all alone. This voice you hear snags on the branch of my pelvic bone. This voice is small enough to fit the span of the headstone.

Here's a repeat annoucement: R. Nemo Hill's Active Ingredients is presenting a series of poetry readings every Monday in October. I'm reading with Jane Ormerod, Paco and Thomas Fucaloro on the first Monday. It'd be lovely to see friends there, if you are in New York. Date: 2 Oct 2006 (Mon) Time: 8 p.m. Tix: $10.00 Place: The Stone, 2nd St. & Ave C www.thestonenyc.com

How hard it is to be honest and think well of myself, hard to decide which ornament to show off on the shelf. One owns the virtue of diamond cut to make it shine. The other, fired earthenware, is a vase I may call mine. Men chase the value of the stone in action and in word. They embrace the other in love’s bed or in the silent ward. And I, much too poor to be proud, much too weak to be good, must leave the old shelf empty, standing where it has stood.

You are afraid he will see you escaping up the stairs. You see the other seekers eye their feet or someone's ass.

The river is wild, and I don’t know why. There was no rain yesterday. Too early for snow. No tanker to upset the waves, but motorboats, tossed from hand to hand as if they're motorized and finned grenades.

Note: Please read Gwee's response to this post in the comments. I read Gwee Li Sui's essay on Singaporean poetry (Harvard Asia Quarterly, Volume IX, Nos. 1 & 2. Winter/Spring 2005) in Cyril Wong's blog. The essay attempts to explain the lack of major Singaporean poets between Edwin Thumboo and Alvin Pang by analyzing poetry's withdrawal from the national sphere during the desert years. In his analysis, the interim poets disengaged from a national culture increasingly bureaucratic and economically-minded, and thus limited their artistic ambitions and impaired their poetic strength. Besides Lee Tzu Pheng, Gwee cites Boey Kim Cheng as another example of this impaired poetry: Gwee: We speak therefore of how poetry had only reassumed its pure space of freedom in the general failure of a stable sense of self and home to arrive distinct from infrastructural and economic concerns. We also assert that the catalytic conflict was indeed the key to its own mediation: what...

I'm reading my first Camus, his short story collection, given to me by Winston after he read my blog-post, Exilic Time . I like the stories with their variations on the dialectic between exile and kingdom. The most impressive one, so far, is "The Guest," set in colonial Algeria. The white schoolmaster has to decide whether to hand over an Arab, accused of murdering his own cousin, to the white police. His final action is both humane and plausible to the character. The writing is economically suggestive; every detail counts. The hilly and rocky landscape assumes symbolic significance for moral decisions in the midst of the dangerous political situation.

I could not count to ten till I turned eleven. The chicks were softer than the straw in the set. One, two, buckle my shoe, nine and a big fat hen. They scratched the grass beside the shops for men. They were the best present a boy could get. I could not count to ten till I turned eleven. Mother called out from above. That was when I stepped back to answer her, stepped on my pet. One, two, buckle my shoe, nine and a big fat hen. The grass turned black. Its head was not broken. Father could fix things but he was not home yet. I could not count to ten till I turned eleven. The Shopgirl cried out, Poke it back in! The mitten with one loose strand was moving. It felt wet. One, two, buckle my shoe, nine and a big fat hen. My hands did what the woman said. Even then, I could not save it. But I could not forget. I could not count to ten till I turned eleven. One, two, buckle my shoe, nine and a big fat hen.

I have sat in this corner often because of its good lighting. Today I unbend from my book of poetry, dazzled, the library full of light extended by windows that reach to the ceiling. In the corner, a Chinese fan palm vents through a flaking stem a spray of green intensity. Outside the window, pine cones, not the ones seen on the road, small crushed porcupines on dead leaves, but hanging delicately from the tip of a fir branch, bells almost, a knot. Mouths perfectly suited to sucking the fibrous teats, they hang on with their teeth for the one life they know. One afternoon, strings unloosed, they will descend to join their fellows, the journey long and different from whatever they experience and owe.

You know letter writing requires a kind of hibernation (the months I was silent). The heart winters through it on minimum nourishment. It lives by barely beating. Then, mysterious as spring, the heart takes a pen, breaks through the cocoon, spins matter out of itself, develops feet to crawl onto dry land, grows feathers. I imagine you reading this in bed, your cat curled against you, eyes opened, wild to shred this fluttering thing and eat, as one does after a long winter.