Danger – keep out!
This is an identity in progress
Everything is exposed – walls, obstacles, staircases, holes
there are still a lot of things left to fill in.
Until then, mind your head! Watch out for
falling debris and failing dreams.
We've put up red tape and cones
To demarcate our relationships-in-progress zone.
Yes, there is a plan – we know that
when you look up at us sometimes
this ugly, exposed mess of whirrs and groans and nerves and bolts
you wonder
"What exactly is it supposed to be?"
Don't worry.
Someday soon (TOP: early 2017) we'll have it all worked out,
walled up, sealed from seventeenth floor to toe
ready for the brochures.
Our straight edges will be all ironed away
Corners trimmed, lines of concrete blurred into resolute curves.
And all the mess and muck, all the wiring and the tiling and the crying
Will be deep inside the abyss
Probably in a forgotten cupboard behind the sofa in the ninth floor lounge.
That's when you can come in – by all means!
View us.
Observe our rigidly-enforced lawns, admire our cold walls.
Learn nothing of the twenty years it took to build us here
A place to call alone.
Even though, today, you could, if you wanted to
look past the corrugated sheet
see the storeys we are hiding
the floors we are painting over
the fighting and the piping
the lying and the lighting
how we are zipping up
Quieting down
Growing into
I.
Work in progress
Sorry for the convenience caused.
Originally published in i feel the tails of comets, edited by Jasmine Ann Cooray. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2013.