Your Opinion Becomes Valid When Said With Loudly and With Confidence

Poem in English, written at Poesiaeuropa 2023

I don’t do this,
but this is someone’s principle, surely, in their own collective;
magnification makes the man, I guess,
assured in his prowess
to opine, and regress

to a much simpler kind of rhetoric,
the kind that appeared on television, and at Graduate Mothers’ Scheme announcements as a kind of supreme logic:

I know how to persuade (in English),
and therefore I am made of pure, living, clean magic.

I keep having to listen to you on the sidelines,
on the periphery,
and I think to myself:
how the fuck did this become so welded to the intrinsic

nature that you seem to also co-construct with your hapless interlocutors as weirdly straightforwardly rhythmic?

I am not so dismissive, or so foolhardy
as to say there is nothing worth considering
in such articulation. Nor am I psychic
enough to account for everything going on
in such light-hearted conversations (at least I think
they’re light-hearted. It could also be a trick).

Nor do I really care about what makes you tick.
It’s just that value for discovery without any substance makes me wary:
what supposedly makes my head so big

makes yours freaking enormous, friend. I’d stick
to discussions that don’t make anyone’s minds explode,
and where the aphrodisiac
your administering
isn’t to yourself, because ultimately
you’re afraid of being alone.

This, too, can be dissected;
this, too, your friendly neighbourhood Merlionsman knows.