Cyril Wong

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.

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Cyril Wong is the author of The Lover’s Inventory, and other works of poetry and fiction in Singapore.

 

On Universality

Ben Lerner writes in The Hatred of Poetry,

“Everybody can write a poem,” and asks if

“the distillation of your innermost being …

 

[can] make a readership, however small, a People …?”

Maybe because I’m not American

 

or because I was never a Universalist,

I’ve always thought, “Of course not!”

I write for you (as you watch your action-movie

 

beside me on a plane drifting through turbulence)

but more likely for me—or the infinity within me/us

 

that doesn’t toss, swell or shrink beyond

the vicissitudes of self, the words we tell ourselves.

 

~

Meditation

What is the word that means

an existence of looking

both inwardly—without judgment

 

or desire to derive absolute sense—

towards an unfolding profundity,

 

and outwardly from somewhere

beneath the surface of our bodies

at every word, gesture and

 

reciprocity passing for time, all

without feeling divided, absent,

 

sorrowful or benumbed?

(Meditation.)

 

~

Peninsula

We think about moving to Malaysia

when we have enough money

or when we run out of excuses.

Anywhere freer than Singapore.

Not freer, but across the causeway

we could disappear in that hinterland

that isn’t an island; that is vast enough.

We talk of leaving but never go.

Night inclines us to each other.

Two homosexuals in a possibly more

conservative country—the irony.

Or maybe not at all ironic, since

being invisible is what we’re used to

and now it could be an advantage.

Yes, the irony. No hope of changing

society; instead we pick a Malaccan

condo beside a hospital, as healthcare

is important in our old age. Imagine

that: we might die together

far from here, when our home here

shades into a dream we might finally

depart, before waking up together

inside a better dream. Our merging

bodies on the bed; peninsula

withstanding the sea.

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Cyril Wong is the author of The Lover’s Inventory, and other works of poetry and fiction in Singapore.

Fantasia

1

Dreaming of Kyoto in Osaka
and growing old in that town
where shrines would knock
tranquility into us at every turn
and a Buddha statue is composed
from ashes of the dead.
But food would hold no flavour
for your curried tongue; ryokans
have no proper chairs and the floor
is not for sleeping. A distant mountain
we’d never climb together
reminds me of our bodies
melded peacefully on a funeral pyre.

2

Living is
dying is loving
us for now.

3

When the mind moves faster
than light and so it freezes—
our marriage plays out in multiple
scenes on a distant screen;
forming, deforming, un-
forming. Until the return to where
we are now, like a rubber band
springing back to its original shape.
What am I left with that I’m left
to continue? What keeps me going
except for the slow hand of time
and the minutiae of love?

4

My mother told her children we must
never marry anyone outside our race,
never leave the church,
never become queer. I’ve never
been more Chinese, more holy, more
conventional than when I’m with you,
my lovely Indian man.
Your Hindu sacred thread moves
against my skin like a shifting line
in sand. When my wrist gets caught
in its loop, I know we’re conjoined and
already blessed.

~

The Terrorist

Not that it made a difference: humiliation
instead of triumph, Kafkaesque equivocation
of government officials, the press, social media—
not what we had in mind. Who knew that terrorists
would need courses in corporate messaging?
Tourists clutch their purchases against their chests,
whispering ISIS or Al-Qaeda under stalled breath
before crossing the street or re-entering trains
that pick up speed once the last body is cleared,
keeping to panicked schedules and bypassing history.
Debuting at Bangkok’s Min Buri court, my sallow face
oiled by camera flashes should have disappointed
many who thought (like me) the bomber in the photo
was handsome. This kind of work ages you,
I’d tell you. Running like a mad dog from Turkey
to Laos, Cambodia, then Thailand, praying over
forged passports, bomb-wires, bracing for the blast—
such travail sucks the soul’s buoyancy from within…
But I can’t be sorry, it’s too late to be sorry—
“Uyghur” or “Uighur”, which is correct? Who knows
that I misspelled “Istanbul” in my passport?
What does sending these people back to China
have to do with us? they must ask. Grey Wolf, Grey
Wolves: shoppers at Siam Paragon must believe
it refers to the latest brand of underwear or shoes—
If this is the life I chose, then this is the life
I’ve chosen, I remind myself. With no more fight
left in me, I’m dragged lackadaisically between stations
like a drugged delinquent. From the police car,
I spot the Erawan Shrine again, one of the faces
of four-faced Brahma merely abraded; as if the deity
had deigned to permit a cursory show of vulnerability
before lustre is restored; with dancers prancing
around it to welcome, with intolerable grace, the passing
of tragedy, the immutability of change, a new day.

~

Vibrato

A birdcall I mistake for warm vibrato, a soprano warming up becoming the koel I recognise but shrink from recognising, because I want not to break the surface of sound with my discrimination of that sound; acknowledging instead that surface is singular, stretching from koel to these ears then my skull, travelling along the underside of skin to inspire goosebumps, the thrill of an alto trill beginning in my own throat; an unending surface of vibration, perhaps, that merges with the vibration of cells in my body, going deeper still—but what’s deeper than the wavering surface of everything? (Nothing.)

 

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