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...