One down, four to go.
Dedicated to CAP lecturers:
Cyril Wong who loves to hate a box of many words.
Heng Siok Theng who believes that brevity is the wit of the soul instead.
And Aaron Maniam who shares my love of magic realism and realism fantasy.
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"Odd Jobber"
Not for the money,
The passion.
i.
You're a back alley surgeon,
Your scrutiny exposing more of me
Than a surgical light will ever be able to.
The wit of your cuts
Sharper than machine brevity,
As you operate on textual tumours
Piercing through layers and layers of
Excess I never knew was harming me
And cleansing ink-blood of
Parasites feeding on inexperience.
Who cares if there's no anaesthesia
To mask all the hurt?
ii.
You're an environmental extremist
With Grinch-green fingers
Complete with claws made to sink in
Christmas tree ornaments.
Only then, I'm ashamed to confess, did
Their tackiness become apparent.
You helped me see that
Forced sparkles cannot compare
To nature's Fibonacci sequences and
Firs, like all things that breathe, are
Beautiful the way they are.
iii.
You're a half-starved dragon,
Furnace in place of stomach.
The Inferno that burns, a
Broken hue of so
Many years worth of
Death Valley sunsets.
The number of years
It takes a cliché to cease
Being a cliché.
Its appetite insatiable, devouring
Paper hearts covered with young lovers' confessions
And sepia tone photographs of childhood memories
And tear-stained roses with violet thorns.
Flames only recoiling
When serendipity throws in a
Dadaist sculpture,
The kind that
Will never be replicated.
I can only hope
Your heat will mould me into a
One-of-its-kind as well.
