The Transfiguration of the Republic of Singapore

Poem in English, written at Poesiaeuropa 2023

Creole, creole, toil and trouble.
I put in the hours. I dig carefully through the rubble
until I have all my ingredients. Secret lovers, listen here:
I will need all your anti-histamines, your antibiotics, your powders,
your medical certificates, your PES status downgrades, your clandestine bargains with your doctors

as fuel for the fire.
Make it big. Build it strong. Tower it higher
until it is a throne of a cauldron, a singing, queer-breathing island
ready to birth itself a new Civil Defence Siren:

here comes the Kristang Dragon,
and we don’t need to evacuate anyone. The Circle Line Stations
will do as our magic ring of protection. The Downtown Line
as a runic incantation, never meeting itself where it should;
the Thomson-East Coast Line is the staff,
and the Cross-Island Line the forbidden, unsustainable sword cutting through

the Portuguese-Eurasian forest line. Mountains and lakes
emerge next to oiteru kung bukit-bukit kung riu.
Somebody needs to write down the toponyms;
the psychoemotional downwinds are spectacular, as is the view

of the nation, rebuilt into a living, dreaming sensation
of a long-list history. Clues to past temptations
that fell through. Magic surges through my Khar-Tobanic veins

and I make the sky into something even more sanctified than that rubbish pseudoscience about nobody being able to see blue

and there it is:

five rainbow stars
and a glowing, shimmering moon

made of Kristang rock, and trauma, and light.

We are done here.
The Osura Pesuasang and the Roda Mundansa:
nothing else over Pulau Ujong
will ever more shine as bright.