I meant, give them a new homeland.
A new high-rise village where they can stand
around and do nothing, you know,
whatever these people think or want to intend
for themselves, because it’s not like this is their island.
We’re all immigrants.
That’s the story.
We all like oil, and eugenics, and people getting executed.
There’s no rhyme scheme there.
If you want one, you can take a lorry
to your next place of residence.
We privilege consciousness, forthrightness, sentience;
this is how we engorge and imbibe the West
even as our claims about Asian values become even more intense
than the sound your heart makes, in absolute somnolence
when you wake up in the middle of the night and realise that they turned your home into a landfill.
Misery is such a thrill,
is what is encoded.
Your forbidden spring into Fort Canning Hill.
Liberty is actually possible to instill,
is what is not noted.
Your language into a patois fit for pig-swill.
You know what else is still
demoted, besides the
subaltern?
Mama Ujong’s pearls, every last one of them;
the sense that Sundaland is real, in spite of all the evidence;
the place where I call home,
no matter how future, past and present.