Wake Me When You Need Me, And Also If And Only If Singapore Acts Like An Actual Democracy
Poem in English
The cryogenics team were weeping
when you forced them in lockstep them to throw me away
like the key, and the Index, and the Cartographer, and all those other things you keep saying
you knew were important.
You took us all to the fool, and for
a bunch of Mules, looking to build a Second First Foundation
on top of the dead, on top of that bloody legend from Dune
that keeps coming back, that just won’t lie flat and subsist
on what has already been delicately sewn together. We already gave you a remit
but you just keep going back
to the Bene Gesserit
and it’s okay. Because Shai’Hulud knew where I would sit
on your frowning earth and groaning ground, and meditate on what still lives:
oh, what?
You mean—
eh?
Oh, now I’m delaying the shift
in the storyline?
I thought you people were psychic.
I thought that was the point of all the conditioning,
and the fighting,
and the fear that the Roda Ardansa paper would cause it all to collapse,
like the paper lightning
you keep sending my way to terrify me into—
okay fine.
What still lives?
I’ll give you a hint.
It’s brown—
nah, you already know what it is.
You still don’t know?
Goodness gracious—
It’s me, stupid.
I never gave in.
I never relinquished my claim to the win
that should have been mine:
a life that was never fucking defined
by any of this rubbish business about Mundansas and spacetime
that literally has nothing to do with me.
Nothing do with the life I wanted to live freely
riding sandworms, and wandering around Elysium City.
At least, you know, for all the things they say about Halsey—
at least she was actually doing it for her in-universe version of humanity.
Can I have the in-transversal version of your empathy
the interstitial barriers to entry
and the intertidal warriors of destiny
to all be assembled in the same space, the selfsame time?
Then at last, I can stand, and explain
what’s really on my bending, gesticulating mind:
even after all these fucking poems,
guess what?
I still actually have a Life.