Song of a Reformed Headhunter

#28 Two Well-dressed Gentlemen Out on an April Afternoon Sirs, may I walk with you, I saw you throwing me a glance? You walk so funny, so dapper and rangingly. You walk as if at any moment you may break out into a dance. You’re so evident, men who’ve been around and still unbroken, no, that’s too melodramatic, you’re finally comic, entirely yourselves, like the sun.

#27 The Birds of Harlem The birds of Harlem are the birds of America, the brown nonentities and the self-advertising glories. They have returned from other lands to a familiar bough or the corner ledge of a brownstone. To call them the birds of Harlem is to give spirit a local habitation and a name. It’s a way of saying we belong somewhere, a way of singing.

#24 Under the Elevated Railway Tracks In the plant nursery a muscular Chinese man balances on his right hand a tray of miniatures as he walks among the cactuses and hyacinths in the rumbling shadow of the scheduled trains. He brings me back to Kunming, the acrobats climbing up one another, the strongest lifting clear the other two, a trinity exerting pressure at every point and achieving a momentary rest. I see him and I see you look at him, his shorts round and covered in a pretty pattern of ferns, his big arm lifting the greenly growth for home. You walk ahead to sneak a peek back at his face, I following. It’s a good face, strong and open. Love, do you hear somebody call out for Adam? #25 Leave from Harlem Setting his triangular speaker on the train floor, the man does not blast but croons into his mike, making love to the dark glasses on a Roman nose, the gold chain round a throbbing jugular, the phone lighting up a face with radiation, the bandaged hand...

#23 The Man in the Gold Jumpsuit Who are you, O, who are you actually, man in the jumpsuit glinting in the sun? Where are you going with the spray can, gold like you to the squatchee of your cap? Are you legendary King Midas who turns a Red Delicious to its dumb weight in gold? Are you an astronaut who shows us where to find the stars and their transmissions? Or are you the one who creates the stars on the walls of schools, prisons, hospitals?

#22 The Classical Theater of Harlem Downstage left, enter the Self in the making of what we all must see, the busy and free crayon, the things you can do with a piece of string, then it gets called names, it calls others names, one name rising above the others to stand for the Self’s self, for whom one makes a bouquet of involuntary thought and ventures beyond the house, listening in the wing for the place to come back on stage, for it loves the stage, the strutting and the fretting, the figure it cuts with its kitchen scissors around the play script, understanding so much is pre-given and all one  can do is to inflect a line or two in a particular way, to hold the pistol with one hand or two, to drop one’s head or hold it up, before moving to the end, upstaged by the audience, and right.

Yes, I have strong objections to being featured in the 2017 edition of the Singapore Writers Directory because I've sworn never to work with the National Arts Council until they return their publishing grant to Sonny Liew's graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chy e and issue a public apology to the writer/artist, the publisher, and the Singapore people for withdrawing their promised support for a seminal work of literature, and until the National Arts Council promise to work with their counterpart the Orwellian-named Media Development Authority to revoke the restriction of Tan Pin Pin's documentary To Singapore With Love from public screening. Their letter: Dear Jee Leong, The National Arts Council would like to feature you in the 2017 edition of the Singapore Writers Directory, a print and online directory of Singapore writers in English profiling living Singapore writers from the four official languages (English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil) and their works. Th...

#19 American Sentence Today I saw a cotton gin and learned how a machine expanded slave labor. #20 Elegy Black light, black light, as still as the black train is frantic, rushing the black night. As narrow as the black boulevard is wide. Old as Cheops and as the black olive is young, blasted time. Frequent as injustice and as rare as equal understanding. Sexy as hell and as heaven is detumescent. Tiny as he, snorting, was big inside after his white boy had first opened me up. As strong as the curtains are weak. As quiet as the siren is alarming, arresting never the black river. # 21 Friday Nights The movies have gone all weird on me. The murderer, the victim, and the lawyer are all white. The spy and his spymaster white. The gay teen and his crush white. The surgeon and his patient white, with a black nurse or hospital administrator thrown in for color. The poets, you guess it, white. Nothing like the world outside. My screen is not a window, it’...

#18 Reading Richard Wright’s Haiku on International Haiku Day They take the measure of things, spider webs, melons, a scarecrow, a candle with the faint markings of rat teeth. Written in France, in the last 18 months of his life, a number begin, just enough snow… 

#17 Strongman from Qinshi Huangdi’s Tomb Against Rilke  The head would have given the final expression like a peacock’s tail feathers, had we not lost it, and yet the body is too strongly modeled for us to require a face. Rounded like high cheekbones, the shoulders weigh two brawny arms, snakes lashing within, holding what would have been a great bendy pole, with a colleague, on which an acrobat would swing and somersault and land. Driven to the ground but rising from his feet, the enormous torso, of earth once trampled on by trumpeting beasts, is not smooth like a smile but frowns with clear cracks, in large fragments, about the roof of the barbarous belly, the lines, opening and closing, emanating from our mouth.

#16 From the Vantage of Harlem A plane flies by my window, and then another, very slowly, as if to say, you can’t catch us, poet, living the way you do.

#15 The Places I have lived in NYC Compared to Literary Genres Brooklyn is a big novel. Queens is a memoir. Hell’s Kitchen is a play by Tennessee Williams. The Upper West Side a film by Woody Allen. Harlem, with your crazies, your preachers and loafers, you take the prose poem.

#14 Counting Song This is failing territory, where we will die of prostate cancer or sweet pneumonia, after we hang our coats up in the broom closet. This old man played nick nack on my drum. Ambition, the devil, has descended to details and every meal is eaten with Dissatisfaction. Give, my Love, the long-dead dog a bone. Paddy whacked, this old man rolled home. Friends go before us—who knows where. The doorbell rings for other men, our door opens to the mocking grin of thinning air. This old man played nick nack on my shoe. Look, our eyesight is deserting us, o parody, They say hearing, HEARING, the first to go. Sans eyes, sans ears, sans smell, sans taste, paddy whacked, this old man rolled home. What have we left? The furniture of memory. Dining table your dad made, the ghostly TV,  the ghastly hooks of animal horn on the wall. This old man played nick nack on my tree. A house of sadness when we intend joy, it will be a property, a prop, for tired fe...

#13 Their Eyes Are Watching God The God of the Church of Scientology of Harlem, the God of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the God of the Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the God of worldwide socialist revolution, the God of the big black butt, the God who made Ellington the Duke, the God of Malcolm X, the God Asclepius hobbling out of the College of Podiatric Medicine, the God racing another God down Powell in his souped-up go kart, the God of waffle and fried chicken, the God of fried fish, the God of the Harlem Renaissance, the God of the real estate renaissance, the God of the big boom box, the God of small businesses, the God of beggars, thieves and magicians, the God of children, the God of Apollo Theater who is also the God of Comedy.

#12 Sleeping on Park Benches Stretched out on park benches, these men tilt their dark rumpled faces to the sun, xxxxx like sunflowers, I could say, but they are really emperors xxxxx of their time. They remind me of retirees back home in 80s Singapore, sleeping the day away, xxxxx white ribbed singlet their pauper disguise, returning at night xxxxx to well-lit homes. They have disappeared from public parks. They looked unsightly to someone, or useless, xxxxx so they are clearing children’s trays, picking up cardboard xxxxx for the weight. I don’t really understand why I’m thinking of retirees while crossing Marcus Garvey xxxxx on my run, seeing in these men swathed in coats and jeans xxxxx stone effigies.

#11 High Enough Now I live high enough, above surrounding roofs, to see the unimpeded sky turn ever so slowly to light, the black church tower coming into sight with its bells, turn in the spring evening to purple wash, into which the water tank, like a squat rocket, catapults its icon and flies without moving as darkness falls around it, the shopping mall pulsating in the corner of the eye with an unearthly glow, high enough to see all this, unimpeded, I repeat, with only the sky looking in, when the buzz-cut jock in the vid, left hand relaxed on the steering wheel, master hand on himself, looking back and forth between the motorway and her activity  between her legs, passing pylons and twelve-wheelers, brings himself off, oh my god, self-recording, laughing.

#9 Ordering Takeout in Harlem Being a pedant, I told Empire Corner II on the phone that it was Apt 5D, as in D for Donkey. That didn’t sound quite right, so I told Sottocasa Pizzeria that it was D for Donald, before I remembered Drumpf. Finally I settled on David, to the very fancy Indian place, for Jonathan’s sweetheart, the king of Israel, the dancer, the psalms. #10 Harlem Haiku Alighting on a high branch of the tree outside my study, the silhouette of a songbird chirps and chirps: I know what branch will hold my weight, I know what time to go, what I know I know I know.

The beauty of Akhil Sharma's novel Family Life lies in its understated style. The sentences are simple but delicately weighted. The metaphors and similes, born of close observation of ordinary life, are highly original. Throughout, the hopes and fears of migrating from India to America, and then the effects of a tragedy on the family in the new land, are evoked with painful honesty. This is not an easy book to read, for it deals with the devastation of happiness, but the style holds up the devastation to the light with wit and grace. * WL recommended that I watch Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) when Kristen Stewart came up in our conversation.  I'm so glad I did. It's one of the best movies I've watched in the past few years. Directed by Olivier Assayas, the movie stars Juliette Binoche as an aging actress (Maria Enders) who returns to act in the play that launched her career but this time as the older woman, not the younger one. Stewart plays the personal assistant ...

#8 Was It Known as Mount Morris Park Then? You used to live in Harlem, back in the 90s, and cruised the boys in the outdoor pool to the north of the park. Not in the sex clubs, which you likened to shooting fish in the barrel. You always have a way with words. I can see you chatting up a young buck, one yourself, while children thrashed about on floats and parents shouted instructions, then heading for the changing room, you first, and then your accomplice, to finish up the confab. I can’t wait for summer, if the boys at the gym are anything to go by, when the pool will be filled with water and the park with the sour cherry, which the website tells me is self-pollinating.

#7 Sisters Caribbean Cuisine They are an allegory, these two elegant women, chicory brown showing between the flaming red of their origami turbans and long flowing dresses. They move with a slow stateliness that yet owns a required quickness for plucking a child from a river or a flower from a stem. Unmistakably sisters, they have a brother (or is he a husband?), succulent as goat curry with collard greens and candied yam, who is not always there. They manage without him. Once, someone threw a rock through the window and made off with the cash register. It was empty, one sister told me as she swept up the fallen glass. (One speaks English, the other, however, does not.) The restaurant is on the rougher side of the park.

#6 I Don’t Believe in the Long Arc of Justice In the Martin Luther King Jr. Senior Center, a dozen Martins and Martinas doze and drool in front of the Baptist preacher on cable TV.  They know better than to take him seriously. Sure, they sometimes wake at night, blurred with heat and sweat, and cry out for a savior. But in their better, which means less fearful, moments, they see through cataracts the truth. No one will save them from slow deterioration or a heart attack. No words will do. Sure, it is far far better to have brave words than harsh, but the time for words is almost over, so they look forward to their children coming for them, after a hard day’s slog, to bundle them into coats and wheel the feebler out to the open chariot, paid for by monthly installments and rough hands.

#5 Sea & Sea Fish Market How does Sea feel, knowing that there is another Sea, that he, or she, or they, is not unique? Not just in a Psyche and Echo way, not just in the coincidence of a common name, like Smith, nor in the past and present tense sense, not even in the fashion of the replication of a gene, like two daughters from a mother, or two poems from the great Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, but exact copies of each other in alternate universes except they live in the same one where together they set up a Fish Market, selling Atlantic Salmon, Red Snapper, Large Whiting, Sea Bass. How do the Seas feel? We can ask Jee & Jee of Harlem and Harlem. Or we can ask the fish.

#4 Revolution Books You are Ngugi wa Thiong’o! You are my O Level textbook, the river between Nyambura and charismatic Waiyaki. When you rejected the oppressor’s language in favor of your native tongue, Gikuyu, you made this would-be writer sweat over if he should follow your example. He couldn’t, for he received praise for his As, Bs, Cs from his teachers. Good-bye, Ngugi. He’d thank you, if he could. He is a young man still star-struck by authority sanctified by sacrifice. I’ve locked him up in solitary, so he can’t speak to others, starved him, beaten him once or twice, but he won’t die. Nor I.

#3 M60 on Monday For the stretch of 125th Street, these American children, on the bus with luggage racks, dream of summer and flying to Dakar, Port-au-Prince, Lagos, and Charlotte Amalie, until the driver snaps to a stop, just before the flyover, and lets in a cold blast, filthy piles of snow, oily slicks. Then we know we’ve landed on the wrong landing strip.

We've been in Harlem now for two months, so I'm going to try writing about it for NaPo as the newbie that I am to the neighborhood.Yesterday's poem and today's. #1 NYC Best Grocery Corp The church across the street  says you sell stale bread at exploitation price. Pot calling kettle black. #2 Aims 99 Cent Store The men shooting the breeze outside aren’t going anywhere on the rental wheels or the bikes brought in for repairs. They are going everywhere, everyone, on their mouths, traveling, and doubling back, setting up a hoop, 3-pointer, cheap shot.