Song of a Reformed Headhunter

There is a deftness of touch, a sureness of intent, a knowingness of accomplishment that makes it hard to believe that Ministry of Moral Panic is Amanda Lee Koe's first book of fiction. She has marked out in virgin territory a realm of her own, a kingdom of weird, non-conforming, stubborn passions in Singapore. And she has done so without resorting to the usual pieties of understanding and tolerance. She has looked directly at the contorted subject and drawn every contortion that she could see. Love between a senile Chinese high-society woman and a successful but aging Malay rocker with three wives? Read the opening story "Flamingo Valley." Art as vengeance by a Chinese Singaporean artist for unrequited love from an Iranian Muslim reporter? Read "Carousel & Fort." The manipulations of love? Read "Pawn" to find who is making use of whom, the middle-aged Chinese Singaporean office virgin or the Chinese Chinese food-stall boy. The attraction between ...

Wrote this for PFFA's Valentine Contest this year. Based on popular vote, the poem came in joint second with Rachael Briggs's "Romantic Comedies Give Me the Screaming Me-Mes." Love in the Third Year of This Affair that We Won’t Call Marriage Faces have passed into memory through long beholding. Separate accounts pay for joint conundrums. There will be no trade of reading materials before bed, except books on relief from the public library. Unspoken rule for eating out: the one that moves fast gets the inside seat. Shoe size is an open secret. Since the subject was handpicked, double digits must be corrected for bias. Questions have been domesticated but not yet neutered. Jealousy makes up a frolicsome threesome when it is not acting scopophiliac or agoraphobic. Nicknames have stuck like darts. Certain gestures have become shorthand for affection and disquiet. Enough time has flo...

Hong Kong some curio of the change             Tzu Pheng Lee, “Prospect of a Drowning” We found it among the small antique shops in the Soho district of Hong Kong. Below Mao posters and beside porcelain Michael J. stood at smart attention a terracotta soldier, an officer of some rank, the height of my hand. Factory plaster has been painted a gritty grey and in the hair pulled back to show a broad forehead, in the protective vest, in the folds of his sleeves and in the creases of his shoes, a brown as fine and light as sand as if he has just been dug up from a centuries-old grave. It was a lovely copy, meticulous, affordable, but we were searching for a Mao statuette for Ty and Di. The only keepsake I wanted was not photos or knickknacks but memories. You urged me to get it. You knew better than to keep me to my words when my hands returned to weigh the sold...

Steep Tea A Traditional Autumn Kasen Renga Started: August 25, 2012 Finished: September 11, 2012 Written by Rachael Briggs and Jee Leong Koh sunset steeps the world in red red maple, apple, bee balm bloom we sip jewel tea the fire temple disappears a watery moon chili dip on a seaweed cracker thesis antithesis crunch oral defence  visiting mum in Syracuse   cherry blossoms soft artillery that liquefies in my hand ... or was it snow? recategorized from 4C to 442  swear unqualified allegiance to ...  (le) poisson rouge  Taka Kigawa  Die Kunst der Fuge  alien fauna of George Street a kangaroo with gears for ears you on the  exercise bike, come share  my yoga mat  can we be Lion and Thunderbolt, Hero and King Dancer? I'm in! Mount Fuji  the dance  before the dance  my skipping stone cavorts between dust and river bottom the moon  cools her feet  in a red basin...

Saw the Met's 2008 production of Salome at the Summer HD Festival last night. Really wanted to hear it after reading about the rapturous response of the audience to the opera's premiere in Alex Ross's book The Rest Is Noise , and after loving The Rosenkavelier heard at another Summer HD Festival. Karita Mattila was an electrifying Salome. She was no girl, but her girlish manner was very much a part of her interpretation of the daughter of Herodias. In her depiction, Salome was a spoiled and wilful child of privilege, a seductress already confident of her alluring power over men. All of which made her attraction to Jochanaan, the desert prophet, so much more unlikely and yet inevitable. She must have what she could not have. Compared to the indecisive Herod (Kim Begley) and her washed-up mother (Ildikó Komlósi), Salome was unstoppable because she was willing to die to get what she wanted. As she sang, the mystery of love is stronger than the mystery of death. Juha Uusi...

Complete first draft. Decided yesterday to take away the section headings. The Dream Child —so what will Baby/be tomorrow?—             Antonia Pozzi, “The Dreamed Life” Who speaks to me speaks to a stir— in air, a ripple of veil—perhaps— speaking caused the ripple, hard to tell. But body is sensed— joy—as possibility, everything small but perfect, toes, lips capable of taking ravishment—giving. They walk the woods as others make love, the man who will be sent away to Rome, the girl who will lean back on grass— trembling until the slight wind drops. These children take up so much space. They tug, they push. They stride ahead, expecting the world to give way. Even when they tumble, they cover ground. I watch behind the elm and step out— a shadow. Only when I open my throat— to call, to hiss— do I occupy a place, as when...

The Dream Child  —so what will Baby/be tomorrow?—      Antonia Pozzi, “The Dreamed Life” The Dream Child Who speaks to me speaks to a stir— in air, a ripple of veil—perhaps— speaking caused the ripple, hard to tell. But body is sensed— joy—as possibility, everything small but perfect, toes, lips capable of taking ravishment—giving. They walk the woods as others make love, the man who will be sent away to Rome, the girl who will lean back on grass— trembling until the slight wind drops. The Skylark These children take up so much space. They tug, they push. They stride ahead, expecting the world to give way. Even when they tumble, they cover ground. I watch behind the elm and step out— a shadow. Only when I open my throat— to call, to hiss— do I occupy a place, as when the sound of the sea takes up the room of a shell, or when sky is skylark. Sip In their rage, the dead break things—soup bowls,...

The Dream Child  —so what will Baby/be tomorrow?—      Antonia Pozzi, “The Dreamed Life” Who speaks to me speaks to a stir— in air, a ripple of veil—perhaps— speaking caused the ripple, hard to tell. But body is sensed— joy—as possibility, everything small but perfect, toes, lips capable of taking ravishment—giving. They walk the woods as others make love, the man who will be sent away to Rome, the girl who will lean back on grass— trembling until the slight wind drops.

Flute Music  How will I open the window, unless I’m crazy? How will I close it, unless I’m holy?      Adélia Prado, “Serenade” His flute bends the garden around the moon, enclosing the light of the new moon in roses. The roses dissolve and when they condense on their stalks they are redder than before. This goes on for a long time. His flute bends time and the moon obeys, falling and rising like water along the curve of its light, grazing the wide lip of the parapet, the intricate balcony, the eaves, and at the top of the note joining moon and music falls on the roses condensing into red. She listens at her window, unable to go or stay. Behind a rosebush I crouch, waxing and waning. * Besides Prado's poem, Debussy's Syrinx and Prélude á l’après-midi d’un faune were also in my head when I was writing this poem. As was Paul Morrison's Little Ashes , the 2008 film about the thwarted love between Federico García Lorca (Javier Beltrán) and Salva...

Helen the Poet  All words, anyway are epitaphs.       Linda Pastan, “Friday’s Child” I often confuse epigraph with epitaph, to write with to grieve. But your poems speak so well of love.  Yes, they are brief. for Winston

Reversi, Also Called Othello  no matter how many turns/you make       Tzu Pheng Lee, “Tough, Love” Flip over a black lie to white. Flip coffee in a diner mug. Flip 1st sight. Flip a coin. Flip girls and boys. Flip and then flip back black light. White noise. Flip dark hair on pale shins. Flip a treasured negative. Flip a safety pin.

So nice when someone writes you out of blue, asking for permission to reprint a poem of yours, first published in an e-zine and forever archived in dusty electrons, because someone else has turned him onto you and he read your poem and admires it. Thanks, Tammy Ho of Cha for suggesting my name, and thanks, Reprint Journa l, staffed by editors who refuse to divulge their names, for reprinting "If the Fire Is In Your Apartment."  Republished today, Feb 14, the poem reads more than ever like a health warning about love. Thanks too, Shit Creek Review , for liking the poem first. Another reprint appears in the anthology Divining Divas , edited by Michael Montlack. I am one of 100 gay men who contributed poems on their muses, according to the collection's subtitle. I love the velvety feel of the cover, with its Klimt look-alike. My poem "Study #5: After Frida Kahlo" is a part of the title sequence of my latest book Seven Studies for a Self Portrait . Thank you, Mic...

In Death As In Life In some city, Trieste or Udine…             Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Day of My Death,” translated by Mary di Michele Your mother wants her body donated to science, she wants             to be useful in death as she is in life,             to brain,             eye, uterus, and even skin researchers. She wants to be all used up. We are more selfish. You wish             to be cremated and for your ash to run across             the Great Lawn             we live by, lift off like a warm grey scarf         ...

Winter: Five Poems Those who compose poems must regard feelings as of foremost importance.                         The Nun Abutsu, The Night Crane: Treatise on Poetics Philosophy’s toothache a poet takes to be the throbbing of an open mouth. You cannot walk toward the sun without trying to open your eyes, not here. I rose to write, you moved the space heater to the workroom and went back to bed. The day is growing longer but I am not waiting for anyone at the end of it. To modulate without line breaks, remove glove, run hand over the lime tree.

Do You Think I’d Let You Go? In the winter he had the reddest cheeks of the Lincoln College crowd who included me and you. He was not popular like Darren, looked puny beside Anthony, but in the winter he had the reddest cheeks. He walked out on you and the kids, you wrote, in the New Year. The older boy is difficult, the younger came down with swine flu in the winter. He had the reddest cheeks of the Lincoln College crowd who included me and you. for Sara

Gingko Leaves I go to the things I love with no thought of duty or pity             H.D., “The Flowering of the Rod” When I put down my book and step out of the dream into the poky kitchen, the counter stained with sauce, to chop celery, bell peppers, mushrooms into cubes and stir them into sliced chicken for Monday’s dinner, I am not going to love, my love, I am going to duty. When you rage against the computer for being slow or not doing today what it did so quietly yesterday or eating up your files or not saying what is wrong, and I come to you to put my hands on your shoulders, I am not going to love, my love, I am going to pity. I go to a river, its waters secretly continuous, out of love, to wet gingko leaves that renders the earth their ground, to a glass of wine, loud dance music and men in trance. These things I go to with no thought of duty or pity, as when you turn in bed ...

Mark Burnhope suggested I write a poem taking off from the title, after he visited this blog and read the warning page. Thanks, Mark! I Understand and I Wish to Continue Before he comes home, tired and faintly greasy from office disappointments and crowded train, I flick open my laptop to get off the head of steam accumulated from an hour of workout at the gym. The two men, one darkhaired and toned, a regular, the other faircolored and fresh from his “first time,” the website-speak for a solo jerkoff shoot, greet each other’s body with no surprise but with speed suggesting desire. They know the routine, as do I, first one, then the other, sucking the other’s dick, the tongue, through circles that it draws, darting, the thrilling amble like an elephant’s into the ring. The shouts mount in well-timed urgency, released like flying handle bars and caught again on return. The head falls backwards before the camera locks on his dick when he can...

Another America the eye-white sky-light white-light district of lunar lusts      Mina Loy, “Lunar Baedeker” Port people with sea for eyes and river mouths set up campfires, courses of dirt, and chandelier palaces The other Paris who picked Hera, objectively most beautiful, for the apple from the Hesperides received the city, the arrangement of avenues, handkerchief parks, noon showers that flirt with bicyclists but keep their promise to the asphalt, midnight inheritance of the stars, cemeteries on land Sailors on saddles sing of the jacaranda district ride, singing, to the silver altar in the silver Basilica The tango schools once taught men only to drop like a purple petal from the mouth of the gaucho

domed/doomed/deem'd This reading light on the poems of Lady Mary Wroth is like my spot of consciousness. It decodes the marks, grievous and oddly spelled, as in domed for doomed , straightens out the urgent inversions, reconstructs the labyrinth of sense into a familiar sonnet form, and bathes (and I mean bathes ) in the aura borealis. Just beyond is darkness. Unseen, in the next room, you finalize your drawings of the church renovation. You said before, you love knowing that I am near, hearing the couch sighing, or smelling my coffee, whereas, submerged in my books, I am oblivious to your existence, and so you feel outside of love. Dear, you may be outside the circle of my thought, but not the influence of love. As Lady Mary Wroth writes, The knowing part of joye is deem'd the hart. Know, if you must, a greater part lies in unknowing. I am more than the heart, more than a reading light, this coffee, this sighing, this darkness, is love too.

Love and Lawlessness But love is lawlesse, every wight doth know           Isabella Whitney, “The lamentation of a Gentilwoman upon the death of her late deceased friend William Gruffith Gent ” We know it, but we know it suddenly as a tree knows itself in a lightning-storm. We know it fearfully, so most of the time we’d rather not know it but fill in the form, bring our own bags for bagging the grocery, tear up the number, find an easy rhyme. We know it, but we know it secretly as a vineyard knows itself in the dark. We know it nightly, so most of the day we don’t remember it but hear the dog bark with a deep blue sound, fumble with the key, novelize a western township in decay. We know it, but we know it privately as a tulip knows itself in a tulip bed. We know it flashily, so most of the thaw we open to the sun our hearts and heads. We know it and we know it defiantly, but two is the beginning of the law.