"That boy, Rocha. God has sent him to us. We must mark him for a missionary posting to the heathen Orient."
Padre Rocha, with his engrossment about sin, had tossed in his bed many a night, concerned about the beautiful Fonso Rosario, with the sin of sodomy slithering in and out of his body and mind like a Satanic serpent.
From his knowledge of sin he knew that the men of his flock coming in from the sea to their women would meet the bloodstreams of their sun-soaked Malay ancestry surging through them.
[...But] despite his fears and his mental torment, Alfonso Rosario grew into his teenage pure and beautiful.
Only his pride tainted him.
Rex Shelley
A River of Roses (1998), p. 24
They wanted me to be a supersoldier,
a very tall, and luscious, and luso-tropical drink of something much more than water:
a humidity baked into a divine chocolate, harvested from the sense that what is left over
is oh so hot, and delicious, and made to melt into your
mutable, and shifting matter, your shoulders that were supposed to twist
themselves into soldiers—
why are you posting these things on Instagram?
What does it matter?
It matters because the jungle follows you whereever you go,
no matter how decolonised your pedagogy, your thought-protocols, the things that make you so
ready to claim that there are so many things that I need to forego.
That every Kristang man is as leonine as beautiful, tawny Fonso—
I should remind you that my mane is ferocious, and made to glow
in the dark, and in the embrace of the monsoons that hurry down
your spine, when you look at mine
radiant in the spark that has illuminated
the Osura Pesuasang.
Bos gostah kung yo sa agu, yo sa riu, yo sa chang?
Yo pun. Teng mutu tantu di stranjeru sa barku abuah
ta beng, ta bai, ta kereh lambeh, kereh mudrah
mutu tantu pertu di isti petu pretu;
mutu tantu abertu, klai yo ja papiah?
I come out best at night, a flashing, gushing star.
I come out fully in the light, a cascading, hyperintelligent heart.
I come out only to fight, as leader of the sun-soaked Kristang,
and Merlionsman of the City of Scars.