I would say the numbers
have some special significance, as if they help to restore the sundering
that you have experienced from everyone you have wondered
about — are they really on your side?
Do they really want to swim in your seas, and languish in your tides?
Who are you — Derek Walcott?
Someone new version of Edwin Thumboo, or someone else that we have sought
to fill the gap? Because you cannot possibly be thought
of as having your own poetry:
your degree is linguistics, not poetic physics,
biology or chemistry.
This is a science, and this is an art.
This needs time, and this needs heart.
You have neither; we find that
you write so fast, we have no time to be a part
of anything.
How do we comment on everything
that has issued forth from your fountainhead,
a macabre Lacanian spread
of everything we have been terrified of talking about?
How do I even moderate SingPoWriMo anymore
when every single poem reminds me of my doubts
about what we have been doing
about where my creativity has been going
about the works we have been sowing
about the words we have been growing.
I said before, and I'll say it again;
this is a literary scene,
a developed sense of who we want to be:
you can't just come in here
and rewrite history.
You can't just pretend that those numbers
add up to something much more
than I could ever hope to be.
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