In the burning tides, the torrid men,
there is only a world made of ever-draining sand.
A world filled with glass, and the screams of the wicked and the damned,
and the righteous and the divine, who offended
heaven, and suffered through hell. No one alive realised, then,
that this was not the end. This was not where
the gods would be found wanting.
This was where Altered Straits was always, actually
a warning.
This was where I reported sexual abuse, twice,
and my superiors did absolutely nothing.
Don’t look too close at the metaphors that have survived.
They are broken, they have missing limbs, and they are still not inviting
the real picture.
You think hell is bad.
You need to be Kristang, if you are ever going to understand that
hell is only the beginning.
Hell is not other people. Hell is what other people do, to each other,
and to themselves,
with very conscious thinking.
Hell is what we continue to let happen,
with very conscious screaming
going on, somewhere—this is wrong, this is unfair—
this is Singapore. This is where
there are office hours, for what little remains for the soul.
You can be called up at fucking midnight to do work, but not them: you would have stole precious hours of lifetime,
what’s mine and yours almost completely redefined as
ego. As people scrambling over each other. For attention. For validation.
To be known—
and you know what, there is a reason for such faithless, pointless hope.
The reason is that dead things do not float.
Dead men do not write poems that note
that what is corrupt is literally corrupt.
No matter which way you skin a Singaporean on death row, no matter how abrupt
your slideshow suddenly invites fires and ires to erupt:
the difference could not be more stark
between what we were told was truth,
and what becomes true, once light becomes dark:
integrity is fleeting.
Integrity is meaning.
Integrity was always, as it turns out,
something especially fucking difficult and hard.