No matter how individuated you become, you can always be stopped by the White Man's gun
Poem in English
I believe you.
There is no question that if that were how things should run
you would have eliminated me long ago, long before everything I have done
this past year, and in spite of all the fears
you keep trying to send my way:
Let me tell you, it's hard enough as it is being gay
as a brown boy in Singapore, never mind every day
now where I worry that I have not done enough to defray
all of these stupid, and incessant projections that want me to say
I am scared. I am abnormal.
I am all alone. I am trouble.
And yes, to all four.
Especially the last one;
but what's trouble, and being all alone,
without a little fun?
And I repeat, quite headily and steadily:
if you wanted to kill me, well,
then why haven't you done it already?
If a sudden and mysterious plane crash was so readily
available, if bad actors were really going to use the law so leisurely,
as they seem to have done in the past to so freaking many:
well, then what the fuck have they been waiting for?
I have been on a lot of planes, and in a lot of ways
that one might call potential harm:
and yet, I am still writing this poem, clear as day.
Is this what you fought to make me betray?
And where is the sense of despair that you sought?
Where is the terror that you supposedly brought
to this little Kristang mind, that was apparently so fraught
with fear that I wouldn't even shout at 19-I5?
Let me tell you something else:
I am absolutely, completely and fully alive.
I am not in the business of ever again wanting to deny
who I am; and if you ever so much put a toe toward that line
I'll make sure the entire world knows who you are, and that even more beautiful skeletons
get revived.
If individuation doesn't work for you, then maybe you need to redefine
well, what work for you means. Because, at least for me, I find
It's less a tool, or a supernatural suit of armour that stops bullets
than a beautiful, and completely unstoppable state of Life.