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.