Cyril Wong is the author of The Lover’s Inventory, and other works of poetry and fiction in Singapore.
Plainspeak: Holes, Lines, Bonny Hicks
Whether we know it or not, we still wait for each other to go.
Every morning, another sentence appears in my head; I believe these lines add up to a story.
Nothing tallies.
We never stop trying to become what others told us we cannot be.
Everyone carries on, unjust or not.
Always something that fills the mind before anticipation; before knowing how long it remains there.
Just because you see a hole, you keep wanting to fill it.
I want to love with greater openness, but I grow suspicious and strange.
People seldom care as much as they like to.
Limited perspectives aside, everything is a surprise.
Can you guess the exact moment of your childhood that made you what you are today?
We remain the sum of what we were, even when we forget.
Narratives aren’t the full story; something is always left out.
You told me you were sexually molested as a child in a cinema; Pete’s Dragon was playing and it was the year I was born.
Tragic synchronicities are only funny to me.
Present tense is future perfect.
Everyone has opinions—all that noise.
Twenty years after the abuse took place, SilkAir Flight MI 185 crashed into a Sumatran river.
Before poets became more honest in writing about their own lives in Singapore, there was Bonny Hicks (who was killed on that plane).
Her fiancé died beside her. (Was she lucky or unlucky?)
She was a fashion model who published writings about topics (like sex) that made stupid Singaporeans uncomfortable.
She also wrote: Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
Heaven can wait, but I cannot. I cannot take for granted that time is on my side.
I experienced great happiness and great sorrow in my life. While the great happiness was uplifting and renewing, the sorrow ate at me slowly, like a worm in the core of an apple.
The sorrow which I experienced was often due to the fact that my own happiness came at a price. That price was someone else’s happiness.
Grace Chia eulogised Hicks in her poem, “Mermaid Princess”: … spoke too soon / too loud / too much out of turn … / too much of I, I, I, I—
The government doesn’t care about your feelings; just make sure you contribute to society.
I like what Bertrand Russell writes in “In Praise of Idleness”: … a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised diminution of work.
He defines work like this: … of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.
Singaporean politicians are highly paid.
When I write, things become clear to me; when I seem random, I become even clearer.
I’m clearing matter from the surface of my mind.
On BBC News, the prime minister spoke about the law that criminalises gay men in Singapore: An uneasy compromise, I’m prepared to live with it …
A friend and poet responded on Facebook: WHAT THE FUCK DOES WHAT *YOU* ARE PREPARED TO LIVE WITH HAVE *ANYTHING* TO DO WITH ACTUAL GAY PEOPLE YOU WORTHLESS, SPINELESS OVERPAID SHITNUGGET OF AN AMOEBA.
My favourite kind of homophobes are those that believe they aren’t homophobic, by virtue of the fact that they feel “sorry” or “compassion” for us.
I can live with bullshit; bullshit never gave me much of a choice.
Religion teaches us to be grateful.
Fuck religion.
When there are no more thoughts in my head, it means I have no more “you” in my head.
Another friend died today. Drugs and illness killed him. He took drugs because he was depressed. He didn’t think he was depressed.
When society tells you what you are is wrong, this does something to you.
Somebody once close to me insisted that bad medical care was the main cause of his death. He won’t accept my explanation.
Years before the drugs, my friend was plumper, gossipy and kind. We had late suppers together (oddly enough, at the University Hospital cafeteria; although it wasn’t the same hospital where he died).
But it was in Manila (we were part of a choir that travelled abroad) where he came out to me, promising he didn’t have a crush on me or anything like that.
He just needed me to know.
The conductor of the choir declined to attend his funeral. I didn’t attend, either; I didn’t want to meet other choir members who understood less about his life than me.
Heaven can wait, but I cannot.
Living fills me with disappointment that I learned to accept—even use.
The Cree have a word “Aayahkwew” that translates as “neither man nor woman”; the Navajo have “nàdleehé” or “one who changes”. But is there a word for “genderless heart of ever-widening holes”?
My holes are merging into one.
Christian women rang our bell to evangelise after noticing a portrait of Hanuman hanging above our door.
You gave me a look that stopped me from cursing at them.
I love my anger and sorrow as much as my need to love.
If I become unfeeling, it still means I care, but differently.
Does this make you unhappy?
Bonny Hicks: I think and feel, therefore I am.
Poetry is not just the way I prefer to organise my thoughts; it has been my way of moving beyond thinking and feeling.
Hicks, again: When we take embodied thinking rather than abstract reasoning as a goal for our mind, then we understand that thinking is a transformative act. The mind will not only deduce, speculate, and comprehend, but it will also awaken … and inspire.
The Oddfellows, a Singaporean band I listened to, composed “Your Smiling Face” for Hicks: … another day of nothing; that everything is the same, if only I know your game, yeah everything is the same, I see the smile on your face …
And if love is blind, then I can’t see what you’re hiding inside.
Sometimes I think I’ve misheard the lyric: … if love is blind, I can see what you’re hiding …
I neither think of myself as good nor bad. I think only when vanishing down these lines.
To almost see the goodness you see in me.
Maybe I reflect parts of you that are good; like a mirror, not “me” at all.
Then when you’re gone—
Hicks (apocryphally): How glorious it is to be good! I have discovered its secrets and I want to spread the word.