Yo sa dizaboh teng naki.
I feel it rush through me,
last night, and every night
that I have been here before:
it is a homecoming,
of sorts.
What did you do here?
Why did you come here?
Who did you come
to haunt
with your greed
your dismemberments, your need
for more warm bodies,
to pile up beneath the feet
that you also sometimes hacked off,
the hands
and the lands
and only the sands
bear witness now.
I am ashamed
of what must always
live on in Kristang:
a reminder
that we, all are
dreadfully and ferociously human.
A reminder
that time leaves us all
barren,
even if we falsely claim to be gods, like the exallos,
or mere Merlionsman and Dreamtigers, like this little
leader of the new Kristang host.
A reminder
that the images you live for:
faux-heterosexuality, a stringent denial of the abused, and the uncanny
one day, their leaves, too,
will be as ashen
as the stars that they have torn away from Singapore
and cast away on the tides.
The moon is broken in two.
Pieces of peace
and blood, still twitching,
litter the ocean floor
where the keris, too, also still lies.
We all come from trauma.
From an absolute hell on earth that those in power
sparked off, ignited, burnt
our future children's bodies in.
It is 37°C, no matter where you are, on the planet within:
it is time to look up at the blood-soaked night
and decide that on this sense of horrified, spiralling saudadi ---
this is where you and I will make a stand.
This is where you and I have come home, at last,
to where it can finally end.
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