And you look like a liar,
but you don’t hear me saying that to your face;
you look like you try so hard to mire
me in discussions of why I mark so much for my students,
and why I don’t shout at them, or act more
manly:
is this what you mean when you say that we are kith and kin,
that we are family?
You look fired
up to take me down a peg;
why don’t you
break a leg, metaphorically, of course
and go and create
some actual art,
out of the trash of your own sad, lonely
plate of remains?
At least nus jenti Kristang teng feng.
At least nus jenti Kristang have enough space to deviate;
to ask ourselves, to always keep saying
why so much hate?
Why put in this much energy
into causing distress to someone that you also simultaneously somehow
regard as great?
There are better ways to motivate
that aren’t so occluded, and aren’t tortured and baked
in the flesh of a civilisation that has largely gotten by, for 75,010 years,
by murdering the old and smashing the slate
into fragments that then get reshaped
into a new madness, a new potter’s hate.
A vase full of dours,
an ugly, hyper-incomplete safe.
A polluted and overcrowded straits.
And a real sense that honestly,
it takes a lot of energy
to be this particular kind of
pathetic.
Get out of your shadows,
and stop trying to relate
to feelings that aren’t there.
Stop trying to suggestify me into getting sick.
Let me see some moves.
Let me see some real sense of
the kinetic.
Because honestly, let me run this by you again,
this time with all the meaning
that you wanted to make:
you look, honestly, very unindividuated and extremely tired.
Why don’t you apply, for yourself, for once in your five Mundansa of madness,
a real, satisfying brake?