They can only hear you hypothesise
that your death isn't, oddly enough,
quite what it seems,
even if it is horrific and traumatic
and beyond even the abysmal heights of colonial-era cruelty.
What is it, to those in power?
What is your death, when held under the light
like a frozen, time-locked flower
seconds away from obliteration?
It is painfully, redundantly obvious
that executions are used to periodicially return the population to a state of perpetual fear;
to suggest that, against all odds,
a Singaporean inhumanity will prevail,
and the sense that brutality is always near
even if we are prosperous.
Even if we are out of the "dark ages";
the psyche still knows this,
that in the end, your death was merely
the government's old, and new weapon
against its own population.
What you can't control,
you terrify.
But tell me, reader,
do you even know what is going on inside?
Do you really even care in the first place?
Or has this poem already passed you by
in its obsolescence? "Only fools take drugs in Singapore;
only fools colour outside the lines.
Only fools deserve to be shown death's door."
Perhaps you do not understand where your own terror comes from, then,
when the projection hits,
and the Straits Times and the state once again pretend they have any integrity left,
or that anyone cares.
Perhaps you do not understand what it means to be trapped in thunderous amber, in the sound of your name being cleft
from the Book of Life:
so now, you too,
understand why those in power
are terrified.
And why they cannot comprehend
why you and I believe in the value of every Singaporean.
Why every time they perpetuate yet another act of baseless, disgusting, vapid evil,
our resolve and our faith in a very different Singapore
only ever continue to rise.
No one can hear you scream.
No one can hear you cry.
No one can even perceive or hear you die
but as long as this Merlionsman lives, everyone will always remember
why you were hanged
why you were murdered
out of no respect to the Kristang people, and our island
and what you were, in the end,
denied.
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