SINGAPORE

SINGAPORE I: 8 DEC. 1942. 04.15 AM.

‘Well, just push the little yellow fellows off!’
Vaguely at first, then suddenly in focus, I see them
from my balcony, in uniform or even evening dress,
you at their side, standing waiting on the roofs.

Like countless ones before and after us, everyone
tries to decipher his destiny, which streams past
in antique signs, swollen with comfort,
coalescing with what we constantly forget.

I too, ill with you, peer to the north and listen,
rising from the city that’s becoming static,
towards what must now approach
as past, silently and inescapably.






SINGAPORE II: P.O.W.

Descending, we circle above the city,
resetting our Seikos so they correspond
to the time that’s demanded of us here;
it is now earlier and later all at once.

I become a travelling companion
with an excess of love. Arm in arm we saunter
among the fountains and the goldleaf of Changi.
He strokes me, pinches me, licks my eyes:

barracks break open from hangars,
announcements harden into summons,
the guard stands in the control tower.
Anglosaxon, their laughter from the reeds.






SINGAPORE III: BUGIS STREET

Here too the possibilities, like totems,
soar into a sky of glass and steel,
traffic rushes through us like time,
builder’s cranes tighten in the memory.

But at night, with us beyond ourselves, all
energy convulses in a cramp, we bow,
numbed at the travesty of Bugis Street,
for the lap of the deathly quiet city,

and bite into the flesh of the fruit. God
is a hypothetical point on the spiral
of our longing. We bite down on
cities, masks, poems. And bite through.









Publisher: In de Knipscheer, December 2003.
Book: € 15,00, cd (music by Dirk Stromberg): € 18,00. Set book + cd: € 29,50.
Postbox 6107, 2011 HC Haarlem, The Netherlands.



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