On National Day, 2009

August is the crudest month,
festooning lamp-posts with dead banners,
dulling memory and desire, stirring
tired people 
HEART TO HEART 
HAND IN HAND 
REACHING OUT 
heart in hand 
hand in mouth;
collective delusion.
April kept us warm - sweltering -
running for the blessed air-con,
defying nature 
with a little touch of Siberia.

*

Subtexts keep us alive,
help us remember who we are -
This is home, truly 
(kid you not)
Where I know I 
(am legally bound to) be;
Where my dreams wait for me 
(in my bunk after I'm back from outfield)
Where the river always flows 
(damn RCOs give you crotch-rot).

But there are many amnesiacs
in Singapore. Where there's money,
it pays to forget.

*

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
Got Girl Got Boy, Stop Fucking.
Tie Your Tubes, Then Carry On.
Don't Tie Your Tubes, We Need Your Babies.
Gays: Don't Fuck, We Only Want Your Money.

no self-contradiction at all.

*

I heard two housewives chatting -
Did you know, my last maid cheat my money
when she go to the market
so I send her back - Aiyah that's nothing; 
I caught my last maid talking
to another one from her homeland, 
so I dun let her go to market anymore,
Budden one day dunno why she fall down
while cleaning the windows! Aiyoh, bopian,
get another one lor. Lucky thing
corona say accident.

*

Does your heart bleed too?
Or are you one of those who,
after dining at Ministry of Food,
clubbing at Ministry of Sound,
wrinkle your noses at the Banglas
on the bus from the Ministry of Smell;
they who built your flats, your offices,
your lifts that stop on every floor
on the sweat of their broken backs
in the hope of buying a better life
one-tenth as good as your own?
Did you forget their humanity?
Did you stop to count the cost
of broken lives, O Singapore?

No, careless sentimentality costs money;
self-doubt is a loss-making business.
Didn't you learn that in your management course?

No, I studied arts, 
the best way to disappoint my parents.

*

I see flags hanging along corridors,
under windowsills, twisted into
vague memories of themselves by the wind.
Don't they look like bedsheets? -
red blood, five white dots and a smear of man-seed
from the few times the newlywed couple
tried to make love for the greater good,
the survival of the motherland,
the smear when he didn't know how to do it.

In sex-ed the motherland only taught him not to have sex;
presumably divine inspiration 
or porn would take care of the rest.

*

And under the grey fog of a Sumatran haze,
A crowd flowed by the Singapore River, so many;
I had not thought money had undone so many.
Unreal City, dry-eyed in the air-con
trooping out for lunch and a coffee
one desperate hour, one desperate scramble
past the quaint-hatted Japanese tourists
posing with the quaint-hatted bronze statues
of bronzed rickshaw-pullers, coolies,
now long dead; a grotesque spectacle 
proudly brought to you by the STB, 
in collaboration with the EDB.

*

You never give me your money,
You only give me your funny poems.

*

Who will sing of you, O Singapore?
Who will tell the stories of the land,
the million useless things -
the old Tembusu on the grounds 
of the shadowed yellow house at the junction -
when the few scattered survivors from old Singapore
are gone? Who will hear the echoes 
of the past in the names 
of places that all look the same?
Singapore you killed Calliope
and the clay of your soil 
and the bricks of your flats 
are red with her blood
and the blood of the people you forgot.

*

The URA's motto: Leave No Headstone Unturned.
I still remember the serene peace
of Bidadari, the scented breeze 
under the age-old trees;
it was the breath of a place 
that knew its time had come.

*

Singapore I waited in the corner
of the Japanese tourists' photographs, 
daring your river to swallow me whole
and make me forget. 

But no Lethean waters came to meet me,
only the still waters that one man's vision calmed,
and people dead to me flowing past me
on their way to oblivion and yesterday;
they know where they're going.
They wear the same quiet optimism -
a death-mask.

And when they die, they leave behind
nothing. No memories, no whiff of regret,
no sadly-missed sweet breath,
just a chequebook and a jar of ashes,
stuffed into a maze of urns stretching
up and away as far as the eye can see.
When they die, who will sing of their stories?

*

Sweet river run softly,
there is no one left to listen.

-----

This poem was 2 days in the gestation, 8th and 9th August 2009. I'm of course greatly indebted to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Allen Ginsberg's America, and indeed the entire canon of Greek and other classic literature. You may of course hear echoes of many other works in it. Thanks also to Zhaohan for looking at an early draft, and Cheng for a very encouraging review. Adam I wish you could've read it in the process, but oh well.