I am known by other names, of course:
greater than the sum, and mightier than the sorts
of things you might find and fund, running through Singapore’s dirty, gleaming rivers:
not really a pigeon, or a crow, but
a better sense of one delivered, at last
into his own hands.
Into the strands of spacetime that remain.
Into his own lands
where men know the price of vulnerability,
and all others build up the heights of the psyche using what little remains
as human.
I want you to release me from the sense of one who conquers.
From the smells of one who bothers
to cook his enemies alive—
that is not me.
That is not how I take flight.
That is the strength of destiny, instead,
being interwoven into gentler threads that invite
not just loneliness,
but a crossing of the heart, a real, unimagined reinvigorating of
the wilderness of the straits, and the emptiness of a life
that has become blockaded by a collective fully intent on denying
what has always been right:
a sense of reckoning, darting through the air,
following the winds and the monsoons and the streetlights
that lead to a new harbour,
to the roads that cross and crisscross the sights
that are at last, illuminated, horrible and terrifying to see:
You asked for an albatross, an eagle, a phoenix.
I give you, instead,
this Kristang boy-man-girl-woman, still only slightly less made of fire
than what you might call something that soars, and swoops, and bites.
I give you, instead,
what, in the dreaming flames of the unconscious is exactly equivalent to
any other real, majestic Brahminy Kite.
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