08-03 1230am
Phase 1
The days laying in your room, scared to leave
and pick up groceries from the Shengers across,
dodging glances on the train, when you’ll bite a stranger
who coughs in your general direction.
Relative measures; dye your hair from blonde to black.
Step out of home onto a plane to Toronto,
and come back for a two week waltz in V Hotel Lavender.
The moon shall wax and wane by your windowpane.
Step onto a circuit and you’ll trip it,
step onto your fragile youth and you’ll break it.
Phase 2
Remember spilling through Little India,
lopping just an inch off your hair, less than a meter
apart. Remember the singing crystals
of a Holiday Inn that shone bright
and lonely, the appointments booked
with your best of mates,
and then never delivered,
the shoremen you were meant to busk for.
Phase 3
The invisible wound: the blood of hopeful
institutions; bleeding red; call it cost saving.
Evolution, selection pressure, develop fangs,
nangs, boomerangs, call cops on colleagues
collaborating in the sky-gardens, gloating,
fined and sent home on a boat, all twelve
of them.
And ten thirty
is the time the waiting room closes, the doctors
apply pressure to stop the wound, the nurses
place pills ever so medically with their lips
just continuing to move wordlessly,
and it’s not even a blink — ten thirty
is the time they spill onto the street, lining
the Singapore River, sinking
into tomorrow evening, again.
Future
Life whiled away in a defensive posture,
curled up by the sink, letting time bleed
out in twos and fours, forgetting what’s
worth bleeding for.