Recess / Recession
Here comes the sun;
across your vision
it climbs, steadily nightier.
The darkness intensifies.
The lessons
were never learned.
The temperature
rises burn
themselves, lightly,
into the new lines of your fear.
The graphs trend to nowhere.
In this, I thought I told you:
something wicked is very, very near
and has been all your life
and mine, and those of our ancestors'.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
My love is like a writing desk.
A place where you and I can peer
into unfortunately safer universes.
Is this Hamlet? Othello? King Lear?
Titus Andronicus, perhaps.
Julius Caesar.
You seek to navigate by the clouds of your own mind.
I would have you steer
yourself into a far safer harbour.
You persist. You say I am a mere
bantim. And those don't even exist
anymore. After you wrote the Kristang out of a future
that you still want us to believe is not haunted.
I go swimming in ever deeper water
looking not for a solution,
but for some, any kind of shelter
for you, reader.
Your Merlionsman can weather all storms
but us? All of us?
We can only make it through if we decide
that all of us are Dragons inside.
All of us are leaders.
All of us know our real line:
that forever really is something
we have to make together.