Lords of drowned Sundaland, hear my prayer:
I am too young to be old again.
I have lived my lives entwined in the vines,
my bodies entombed, not so many layers down beneath the streets,
my earths enraptured, entrapped in a universe not so many suns before this one.
I am old again, and young.
I am without time, and between space.
I am, at last,
able to nap
for a decent plot and period of spacetime.
I am 31 in October of this year,
somehow.
Nanny passed on 31 October,
just as Jeyaratnam won Anson, eighteen years prior.
Cities do strange things to time, and space, and Kristang people.
But it is done.
It is a city now,
as more and as less of a city than it will ever be.
And it is here, come hell or high water once more
here where I'll build you an ocean higher than water,
star by star.
I'll write you a new physics,
angstrom by angstrom,
draw you a new psyche,
Osura by Osura.
Abstract by abstract,
paper by paper,
trauma by trauma.
I'll walk you to
that new opportune time,
waiting right there beyond the dream.
This I promised.
This I have fought for,
for the right to dream that
no one gets left behind.
So now, dreamlords and nightladies;
siara-siuris,
sinyora-sinyor-sinyorang.
Hear this player for the universe:
This is what I have dreamed into life for you.
A clockwork creole dragon's heart,
a magic, majestic merlion mind,
a battery of a body so otterly Other,
a soul streaked with stripey Dreamtigerine tears.
Elide me only to make way
for the music that must never end.
For there is no other way to teach.
There is no other way to learn.
There is no other way that this can be earned,
quark by quark,
quasar by quasar,
question by question.
But you,
quing by this quing:
You have earned it all.
You, and all you seek:
here, my electroweak prayer, my equatorial oration, my oratorical equation, my very last theorem—
my very last question:
Where is my classroom?
Darklightly lit along Rochor Canal, perhaps;
or amidst the brimmering backalleys of Kandahar St.
Or perhaps the old shores, that you can still slip sideways into, if you are gay enough and Kristang enough;
perhaps all we ever needed in order to teach
was really, ultimately ourselves.
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