by Kelvin Tan

Lament I
Will it ever overturn?
I don't know.
Perhaps
I don't know. Never really thought about it
Perhaps it will.

Could anybody really be bothered, I asked myself as I handed the half-gashed box of cigarettes to him. Who are we kidding. No one here bothers about it anyway. We were sitting by the Anderson Bridge, hands locked onto the giant steel pillars that supported this contraption. The space between the bridge and the railings that prevented anyone from falling off into the river. I wasn't sure about the question, but I decided to shrug it off. But he persisted.

I think it will, he said. I began to feel humid and irritated. It was a hot September, and nothing stirred. What's it to you anyway, I asked him while stuffing the half-crooked cigarette into my mouth. You're not bothered, are you? He asked me while he watched me light my cigarette. You don't understand the relevance of the question.
I stared into his eyes for a while. Somehow they looked ever more fascinating behind those awkward dark glasses, combined with the disheveled hair. Your imagination stretched trying to imagine the shape of those fiery eyes now half-diminished by the night, and the gloomy creases on his forehead. He slouched at the side and let his perspiration trickle down like dew from his chin.

Staring at his eyes was inflammatory to anyone's senses. After a glint, I turned back towards the river. Staring deep into the lights of the strange city I've lived in all my life. Forgetting he even existed just for a while. Yet as I mention the word strange, the meaning from my mouth escapes me. Perhaps light does that to you. You're glaring deep into the water, and the fragments of light are tricking the logic out of you. Upon initial glance, they seem like silver luminous eels copulating in dark waters, unfettered by your voyeurism. Then, the bizarre happens. Surrendering yourself to this illusory sight, the eels transform into visible electric waves. And then into mere dots that remind you how foolish you are to look beyond. After all, shapes and colour are bestial to the human eye. Pursue it if you can, and watch yourself fade away. Fade off.

The truth was, I was just trying to leave him out for a while. I can't take too much of the endless questions, and the puzzling probes into what constitutes a despairing universality. Truth is, I can't face truth. Too much of it. I don't think there's any need to explain these things. Or anything. He doesn't make things easier.

I fend myself off from his finger thrusted at the stars. Instead I'm deep into reshaping those eels in the night. Unreal. As unreal as what causes these eels to prance. The lights of the city thrown into the jelly-like surface of this mass. Lights of the odd-shaped variants of buildings I am awe-struck and at the same time beholding in distaste. Perhaps they are the true bestial beings in the city. Packed together, intense with neon, one mistakes it for Hong Kong, thinking sometimes how similar the problems are over here. The horror of that thought drowns me in another whiff of soul-despairing nicotine.
He turns to look at me again, staring straight at the acne mark on my right cheek. Perhaps scrutinising the shock of hair covering half my face. An attempt to cut him off for a while. Sometimes, even forever. I hate it when he gets on me. Yet, I let him. I'm observing that man some distance off carrying his suitcase and running after that bus. He misses it, remains stationary and then moves on. How in every pencil sketch of the eye, the mind hurts from too much analysing. You began to enjoy the hurt and incur the expenses of that hurt. Lord, I'm immersing myself in a reality so real to me, and so dead to you. A group of people dressed in corporate long-sleeves and executive blouses skirt pass our behinds. Do they choose to be blind to it, or are we just the ones out of touch.

I finally turn to him, courageous enough to look at the reason why I'm thinking like I am. Not being sure if this is thinking itself or an awareness that I am blind to my own conscience. Till he arrived. My eyes cast off to the vehemently gloomy Victoria Concert Hall, turning back to the river and the stark rows of hawker stalls by the river. Empty of all light and gaiety. A man at the dark corner is drinking his beer, resting his legs on the rails and looking down at a river he probably has noticed too often. We are all in some way too familiar with these sights. Sights you try to squeeze out of a city as minute as this. An opulence you can smell almost just by inhaling the air of the river. Just as the river emerges barren with boats, the city becomes alive with a different kind of barrenness. A barrenness you know you're infected by. After all, the city is in some way infected by the river.

It's past midnight. We've drunk past our last affordable can of stout, and he's close to dozing off. But he refuses to. I don't want to myself. From where we are, we can see solemnity. The bridge in front of us is an arch of austerity. I put my nose into my T-shirt out of curiosity. He is fingering the worn-out hole on the lap of his jeans and accidentally kicks his helmet close to the edge of the railings. Some people just can't get enough of executive life. They are staring at us from a distance, perhaps mistaking us for shady bikers who speed in the night to get away from some mutant form of boredom. It's a boredom both of us are absorbed in. Absorbed in to death.
We could name the places with the flick of a finger. Seen them too many times to reconsider passion. The General Post Office around the corner. The now revamped Old Market Hawker Center hackneyed with pseudo-exotic murals. The rows of irregular buildings where banks, insurance companies and corporate companies hide within. The rows of restaurants and food-houses intoxicated with the air of deodorant plush, reminding us how real things could only get. The road across them all call Shenton Way, that cuts across the once-awesome river of junk boats and ends at the flyover that moves down into more signs unheaved by progress. The Tuberculosis Association marks off where we left off as vibrant.
You can hardly get a cab here at midnight. The people who eat at the large makeshift hawker center all drive.

So why are we here? he asked, taking off his sunshades and wiping his eyes at the side of his sleeves. I observed the well-endowed office girl's luscious legs and breasts and paused for a moment. Because it's dark, lonely and quiet and we know we like it this way, I replied. That's not an answer at all, he retorted, putting his glasses back on. So what is, I asked, frustrated by his interjections.
I watched him do it. He took it out of his wrist, stared at the scratches on the glass surface, turned to look at me, and dropped it into the river. Just like that.

Now, that will probably overturn it, don't you think?
I didn't answer. Deep inside I knew. It didn't matter.
Gawd I
If the city was a woman, I'd be her biggest flirt, betraying her and loving her at the same time. You could call it repressive angst of the inability to relate. I'd flirt anyway. This bastion doesn't need faithful ones, or naive misanthropes. If anything, it needs slaves to reason who have no place to go. Loitering around like a free-form signifying tramp. You want to cause grievous hurt to the city and play hard to get with her entrails. At once symbolising apparent contradictions, you hate and love her intercourse of concrete and corporate manners, inflexibility and evasion.
She wears the clothes of deception and wears them like a queen. The people flood to her with a buck of a dream, pushing her down to submit to their pleas for advancement. Side by side with the ordinary fisherman, standing at the edge of the boat, swarming his nets they try to avoid with the whim of a suitcase. The smell of salt and perfumed filofaxes. Alas, the city is a bitch. None bitchier than the city. Not even the alluring lady executive double-selling her assets or the down-and-out insurance salesman begging for sales. Or the doctor who only treats lawyers. The disheveled woman at the side selling the afternoon paper. None bitchier.-

And yet, she is evasive. More evasive than this page. The images turn their backs on you the moment you've mentioned her name. For the masks refuse to fade and we are thrust into what we can no longer comprehend. The made-up face of allure is now one that refuses to accept old age. The one of smooth public relations is one of insecurity. Fear of losing control of all her subsidiaries. Subsidiaries of the city. In dreams begin the sour smell of failure. Mock not the echoing anguish of that word. The city mocks anyone she wants.

Yet, I am but a bastard child. Born out of wedlock, going from door to door, knee-deep in shit-stirring anticipation. Refusing to wear a tie, a long-sleeve and a pager, I am the terror of her entrails. I am the visionary devil of this urban sod. I am an urbanite though. I choose to absorb while others choose to blend. Choice is vital to her vital organs. I choose her vital organs because I need inspiration. A laxative to my constipated lust for truth. The words have overturned again, nonetheless.

The dialogue of her entrails are one-sided. Sided to niceties. Gossip is metaphor. Business lingo is simile. Relating in a cordial way is business. Perhaps my language is laced with it. Every word is representative of another tormented implication. Alas, I am only implying it. The bottom line is the dollar, and it is a language I can't connect as being fundamental. Hours I've spent learning more about this language, while watching that other new building build its way up. They build it in an attempt to be clever. Innovative. When it boils down to the dollar, it is hard to see how. From ashes, I see why not.

The parts of a whole doesn't hold. Where is the whole? The bottom line knows. The dollar knows, and he won't tell. I shall flirt more with the city and find out. Knowing there's no answer is not the answer. Knowing why there isn't an answer is. Yet, the streets are clean and mentalities picked. The people dress well, and as long as the ulteriors are not offending, the interiors will somehow suffice. It is a job. A job has requirements, and its requirements are your exteriors. You got to have exteriors here. You got to get covered.
The city becomes a whore at lunchtime. A bitchy whore. You sit in one of those mini round stools in the middle of the frenzy and paranoia, if you're lucky to be seated. Scores of them wait by your side, watching you finish your last strand of fried prawn noodles. Everyone has taken their job mentalities into the eating places, placing stakes on a seat that will be occupied. If you didn't want to clamour, you went to a restaurant. Especially if you had clients. Meanwhile, the hawkers serve you with a rude slash of plates, cajoling to consider what you will have for lunch. The hundreds who are now seated are numb to it, except you. You are still adjusting to this quick turn of madness.

Their faces scream at you. This is the working world. And your face replies, whore whore whore. Yet who are you to curse anyone. You can afford it. They can't. They don't have the opportunities. So, why the self-righteousness. You look around the expanse of this hot, bothered hawker center. All of us are gathered here in an array of whispers, declamatory laughter and repeated gossip. The center was emerging a being, and the noises a polyphony of grunging. Chattering made inscrutable by the hollowness of its empty content. You are swarmed with it and all you can do is judge. Your choice of putting on their ties, or bugger off. I downed the last drop of sugar cane juice, got up from my seat, my T-shirt basked in cooking fumes, and left their stares behind. I can't afford everything.

Lunchtime is such a parade. She becomes a contestant in an unintentional beauty contest. All of us are judges and no one wins. Bookshops are packed with hordes of them. Looking up her skirt or observing that tie in place. She is now lit up by the subconscious rhythm of walking. The buildings look down condescendingly upon us as if we didn't really know. We shan't ever, will we? Between the glare of the traffic-light and the humidity of the weather is the glittering perspiration on the cheeks of those who decide to walk. To carry their lunch on hand and make their mark on the pavement. Always a solitary neat-ankled lass at the traffic-light. Always the cheerful nod of triumph. You've made a deal and you feel like gold. But the city knows best.

These images unfold you like a text. Rewound, re-spun, re-imagined again. It brings you back where you know best. Dressed in the evanescent gown of dusk, she is seducing you to enter. Enter into what you are familiar with and regurgitate again to pulp. And to re-ignite in phosphorescent images. You stalk the streets in the resounding gloom of night, wakened by your lapse into a deep transcendental solitude. The cabs are honking, people are rushing for transport, but time doesn't nag you down. Walking the streets, letting every miniscule of sound that shines through you enrich you. She is inviting you to re-enter, and re-enter again.

Change Alley is darker than you'd ever imagined. You have scaled her navel, but your seduction knows no bounds. Cars are crossing you at the intersection, and the orange lamplight peters out onto the roads. You're dazed by the glistening tar as you walk along the harbour, looking back at the irascible stretch of road, marked by patches of images lost to rain. The harbour is not quite as filled, and the boats are lazily sliding by, ignoring your existence. All you want to do is get to the end, and watch everything pour into you. All those images you lost before.

The Merlion is spitting forth. No one notices it anymore, except tourists who magnify importance in such landmarks. Every tourist is blind to what we accede as truth by day-to-day living. Photographs are but extensions of that illusion. I turn my face away, and beckon towards what I know they fail to see. From the bridge I can see everything. Even the illusions. Even the dreams I find hard to peel away from my senses. The river is bare. Mouldy-green in the day and incorrigible in the night. I stare back at the capsule that will be opened in 2015. It's not far from where I am but I think that's not important. We're always far. Far from far.

I'm closer to these sculptures of bronze cats struggling in the rain. So close to the edge of the river, and so far from where I perceive them to be. I am lost in the mediocre twilight, and the rain paints my shoulders grey. I had walked deep into a wandering faze, seducing this being you put before me. And my wanderlust remains insatiated. Warbled. Her bosoms wet, and her torso bearing the scars of you who seek innovation. Her hair made perfect so that you will summon order of some form Her face reordered to suit your commerce and her hips fornicating rhythm for your shoes to walk. Yet I feel her breath and sighs, and I shall stroke her gently with the truths I shall hurl at her feet. I am at her feet, sucking her toes, and waiting for a sign. But she is rejected, for I have betrayed her again. I have used her body, cancelled it and re-entered with no truths. Foretold. I have tasted her charms and found it difficult to search again. She is crying and her tears have fallen across her thighs and onto my hair. And I am helpless in her sight.

I am alone. And Rimbaud isn't here to save me. Even she doesn't listen.
Sang Froid I
Rimbaud Liew's parents died by the time he was 20. He wasn't even ready for it. We seldom are. Thinking it was another day in school, he got up and tried to wake his mum for breakfast. She didn't move. Her body was hard, cold, almost like a stiff carcass of a dog he would encounter years later. All he remembered was the familiar smell of Tiger Balm menthol that usually came from his mother's forehead. She was in her nightdress. The one with the sunflowers. Rimbaud felt surprisingly numb. Deep inside he knew she was dead, but he tried to remove all doubt by nudging her at the side. Until she fell off the bed with a thud, like a stack of wheat. Hard and sharp. Thud.

He sat at the bed and just watched her lie there, her face turned at the side, her back facing up. She had a peaceful face, and Rimbaud started to imagine how it would be if she was still alive. There would probably be the smell of freshly fried bacon and eggs and the pouring of hot tea. Rimbaud's mum was a tea drinker. For that moment, Rimbaud didn't want to believe she was dead. He couldn't even cry.

His eyes focused on the peel of paint hanging halfway on the wall. About to fall. His mind delved deeper into the cracks. Almost lost in it like a spiral. He wanted to forget his mother's body just below it for a while. He could almost smell the breakfast on the table. He could. But the subject soon returned. She was dead. It became more and more obvious. Rimbaud would have to face the emotions and go beyond it sooner than he thought.

His mother's thud reverberated in his mind as conspicuous as the sound of the toaster in the morning. Memory became smell. His mum's name was Mary. She was the gentlest woman he'd ever known. Gentle like wheat. Pure as dew. Rimbaud could never disobey her. And she never scolded him. She believed he was special. Even through his academic failure, Mary always thought that school wasn't good enough for her son. She knew her son could climb any mountain he wanted and she made it clearly known to him.

Rimbaud loved the way she touched his shoulders every time he failed the exams. Don't let them bring you down was what she said. She was shrewd like nails but gentle on his then-nervous conscience. The neighbours thought Mary was insane. Mary didn't care. Her son was special. To hell with them.

The rhythm of Mary Liew's walking kept the house warm with movement. Tender and impartial was her nature. Rimbaud only found out at a later age that she had given birth to him via Caesarean. Rimbaud always thought he was his mother's biggest burden. She would chide him for thinking that. But he persisted.

He knew it was only right. He dared to look down again at her body. Her well-shaped hips and soft thighs that walked him home from school through the years. She hated the weather. She cut her hair short to kill the heat. Now Rimbaud felt like he had killed her. He doesn't even have the guts to lift her up on the bed and lie her down in dignity. Her eyes were already closed and her lithe complexion was as complete as his love for her.

Memory became a slut. Spirals of them poured and devoured on Rimbaud. At a time he didn't want to face it. What is the sign behind this meaning? The air above him fell on him like a new burden. It was so hot and the gyre's of the fan didn't help at all. Everything fell short of breath. Spinning endless spheres of conflicts. Rimbaud didn't know what it all meant. He didn't care.

He reached out to touch her hand, cold as a sculptured woman left in the rain. He couldn't face her. Instead he decided to peek out of the half-opened door. His eyes focused on the ripped couch outside. The exact spot where Mary sat, her legs crossed with her croqueting. The apartment was falling apart. The carpet on the floor shriveled like an old woman. Dust hung from the ceiling blatantly. The statue of Buddha sat on the mantelpiece next to the old dusty television. It was lit up by the light-bulbs around it, and the two tumblers of palm oil with a fire on top. The smell of incense pervaded like the sound of grass-cutting motors downstairs. There were three rooms, a small hallway and a quaint kitchen. The Rediffusion was always on. Mary hated silence and so did Rimbaud.

Rimbaud tried to deal with it. He couldn't. The Rediffusion was on. The cantonese storyteller went on in his gravel, raspy way. Rimbaud didn't understand a word. He looked down on his crumpled uniform, knowing well that his form teacher would presume the same things. That he was truanting again. That he was a problem child. Rimbaud wondered if they really understood anything when someone died. He doubted it very strongly. They were keen on picking on his bad grammar more than the concepts behind the grammar. Concepts were God. More alive than structure itself. Education died here long ago. They didn't even know that.

So how could they understand the term my mother Mary Liew is dead. It was inconceivable. Rimbaud held her hand till he made it warm. She was now lying as princely as she could. Mum I know you're fine he told her. I know you are. I am fine too. Just then the sound of the ambulance vibrated through his dialogue. Monologue. If there's one reason he hated Tiong Bahru, it was the noise. There was too much of these molecules of sound. Sounds that wouldn't even leave him while he tried to reconstruct the nostalgia of mum's voice. It was low, resonate. Smooth like the fins of a fish. Graceful in action. He had lost her.

The events of that day will never leave him. The smell of 4711 cologne on the hanky by her side, the sound of that indefatigable Little Ben alarm clock ticking the palpitations out of Mary. The smell of food cooking from downstairs. These events seldom left anyone. They were neither sentimental nor flippant. Rimbaud knew that he would misconstrue everything he saw to relive them again somewhere else. Memory never emerged accurate to anyone. Memory was a dirty as the past. Shoddy politics.

It was these feelings. Nailing Rimbaud down with their spate of agonies refusing to drown him immediately. Slowly and with ease. Rimbaud was locked between truths. Unrelentingly seizing the next best emotion on to begin confronting her again. He accidentally knocked the side of his toe against the side of the bed. Numbness delayed the crescendo of pain that slowly surged up into the realm of his spine. She's dead. She's dead. She's dead.

No more arms to clutch. No more heart. No more relief. He kissed her gently on the lips. He just couldn't cry.
Lament II
I tried telling him what it meant to be so comfortable. The wind blew up against our ears and he couldn't hear me. He couldn't stop the speed. It welled within him like rhythm itself. It wasn't really advisable yelling out from behind him while the motor wailed out the exhaust of an old bike. Older than his grey hairs, now enclosed in a helmet that was labeled Martyr. He simply was.

The sharp swerves over the curbs made riding with him a deal with the devil. The roads became a passage of dominoes wavering around. And we were pushing them all down. The sun was swelling heat on us, and the speed became his reply to it. Speed took away all thoughts. The housing board flats looked like pale Lego models and everyone became surreal. Crayoned faces left in the rain. When there was a jam, he charged through the gaps, occasionally scratching a car, freaking a one finger salute at the drivers in the BMWs and Volvos.

This is not rebellion. I'm a conformistic guy don't you know, he quipped sarcastically while digging into his fried prawn noodles. I disagreed but he changed the subject. This is the only place you can get food at a dollar twenty. The only place. Aren't you glad you came he exclaimed. Annoyed and bothered by the heat, I looked out at the buildings. The library adjoined to the Emporiums. The dried up fountain. They're putting up a mega-store in September. Well, they'll do anything to get something from you he said.

Such a hot place to be. Everyone was casual here. People got out of their Mercedes Benzes just to sit at the corner and gorge at the famous stall at the corner selling chicken rice. Food is an escape from boredom. They gored it for some piece of solace. Anything to whet the appetite will do. Just save us from boredom. I stared straight at the man frying the noodles, his dirty singlet smeared with lard, and the perspiration from his forehead dripping around his nose. The calendar by his side had days ticked off, as he heaved another clump of lard into the wok, and scolded his daughter in dialect for not delivering the food correctly. A family was seated by his stall, drenched in fumes from the frying. The mother trying to explain to her son in broken English that he had to eat. He refuses, and his father yells at him in Mandarin. The son cries, and the parents start to look apologetic, fearful they were making a scene in front of us. They were.

She's teaching him English because she's afraid he'll fail his exams, he laughed. The father can't even speak proper Mandarin. Poor child. He pulled the prawn shell out of his mouth and shook his head. They're killing the child he said. I lean forward onto the round formica table and and crouched on my round non-mobile formica chair. They make the hawker center seats too small. Even too small for these people they call ordinary. He had a way of making them look original. And deluded.

The floors were all cement. Step on it and feel the heat jumping up your soles. They used to have more trees here. Now there's only brick houses and pseudo playgrounds. Nothing but heat left. The auto-tellers on the left and the meticulous roads lead all over the highway. Too profuse to know where they lead to. He drinks his chrysanthemum tea and picks up a smoke. Turns to look at the different people pass by from different sectors. The fumes were intoxicating us. The Indian stall the other side was frying noodles too. Everyone is sitting down and having their share of escape. Observe them all perched under this roof like a giant ethnic sidewalk food center. Even exotic. His eyes said it all. We belong here, we belong here. No dressing up, no manners. No one conscious of the stiff upper-lip. No one's lips are sealed.

He had a way of crafting these long monologues that absorbed you. Overwhelmed you. Every word was tensed with a provocative energy. Emotionally engulfing you. You couldn't stop listening. There was too much coming out of him. Even the way he held the glass of tea in a tilting manner. The cigarette that perched crooked between his lips. His haggard face, cheeks sucked in by fasting, and the sharp diligent nose. The way his eyes darted at you like a dagger. The scraggly hair. He finished his bowl of iced red bean and stared at the bum cheeks of another girl unaware of her assets or too aware of it. There's just too many people living in Toa Payoh, he claimed. Too damned many. Maybe that's why so many of them jump off the buildings. Too damn many people.

You sure that's the reason for jumping? One can't be too sure I said burping over my can of Coke. Who knows these things except Toa Payoh, dick? He replied. He lifted his knee up onto the seat next to him and leant his elbow on it, smoking his appetite away, suddenly, a tensed listener of street sounds. It wasn't just a market to him. It was a legacy. He marked his time here. Marked by glasses of hot tea frothing at the top. Staring at the man tilt it from one glass down to the other to cool it. He loved the sleight of hand. The unseeming movement that balanced the hot tea. The fresh mentality that steadily cooled every glass.

Don't you just dig this scene, he said? He had a mind like a camera. Sucked in the life-streams that evade the naive majority. Every scene captured on a mind stalking from phase to phase. Blending with an eternal memory. Let's move over to that coffee shop over there. He said it like he was going to die. Darted across the broken concrete slabs in the mud. The shop was the length of 3 medium-sized rooms. He sat on an old wooden chair, banged his hand on the ersatz marble table and ordered black coffee. I sat in front of him, watching him sip the coffee from the side of his mouth, and sighting like sweet sorrow. Fiddling with the top of his helmet, he brushed back his straight fringe, looked up at the old stained fans on the ceiling. He made hesitance a language. I knew it was coming. I could feel the words flow.

See that man at the corner in the pyjama pants making coffee out of the long black sieve. Well, he's dying. The smell around him is dying. That's why I love the heat here. I live and prey on this heat. It's in my sweat. I don't expect someone like you to understand. This, my friend, is heaven you'll never understand, though you think you do. My dad used to work at that counter there, right next to the fried carrot cake store. That was in Hougang. It was his terrain. His.

Had a shop selling Malay food. You know, fermented bean, vegetables, damn home-made curry. Chinese guy selling premium dried noodles. What can I say. The tea was thicker than your skin, and the pastries burnt holes in your mouth. The Indian mutton soup was refined. It was all his.

It was home to me. Godamn home. I was the prince. I could eat anything I wanted. Ran around the shop, smelling of fried noodles. Perched on my father's back, playing with the loose change on the glass counter. Decent meals at a dollar. You couldn't imagine. For the life of me, you couldn't. You never will.

There were white tiles on the wall. You know the tiles you find in the toilet. White and smooth. I hated the sight of the metal spittoons on the floor. I miss them now. Do you remember the music coming out of the radio. The dialect songs and the Chinese operas. I never did understand them. Now I never will.

My father used to hum them over and over through his pursed lips. I put my ear to his mouth to hear it. He hummed a tune he learnt the first time he met Mum. In his slightly off-tune way. Mum had to go back to Kuala Lumpur every year and Dad only saw her three months a year. They married after five years. They spent two years living in a room. Dad always dreamt of making it. Mum always believed him.

The shop was beyond dreams. It was concretized reality. Dad wanted the shop because he was the provider. He provided everything. I came before him. I came before everything. He made sure I never felt I was a burden. But I was. Because I could've cared more.

Such a soft gentle touch he had. I tried to touch like him. Even when I placed my ear by his side. Dad, I said. Dad, I'm listening. Was this the tune you hummed for Mum? I can hear it. Yes, I can. Don't try too hard. You'll cough again, I said. It was hard for him to hear me. There was nothing to hear anymore. But he hummed on, as though it was the only indication to himself that he was alive.

I used to help to serve coffee to the customers by the side. Dad gave me ten cents for every cup I served. I saw the most interesting people in the place. The workers, the families, even the triads. Knew all their codes, their passwords and their curses. Their tattoos were so real you could feel their allure on their biceps while they wrestled a deal with another faction. All these done by an unwritten code. A subtle gesture.

Dad never complained. He worked twelve hours and had time for me. Bought me all my Matchbox cars. Gave me everything I wanted but showed me discipline. How do you explain that except if you've known it from birth? Dad never explained anything. He just portrayed it. You don't know how hard it is doing that. You haven't the funkiest idea. Dad went through all that suffering without even looking back. He never believed in wallowing. Always looking forward for some reconciliation with his failure. He never really believed in a God though I think deep within he did. He just felt the world became too paranoid and louder than God after a while.

They're all just too bloody vivid to me. These images and memories. Damn them all. As obsessive as the crimes one commits to forget about meaninglessness. The images become stronger as I grow older. They won't leave because too much has been lost. I don't think anyone can handle that within one's grasp. No one wins. Some words just repeat themselves too much to be cliched. Everybody eventually leaves you. No one really faces absolutely with truth. Nothing really lasts here. Screw those who think of it as romantic. They bleed from my veins and drown all such notions. Nothing is more unromantic than a soul filled with no more quest for Truth. And we all live there.

You want all these questions answered. So you sit behind my weary back all the way here to probe into it. Simply because for all your intelligence and affluence, you want something more. So, here you are wanting all your answers. Well, stick on and realise you'll never find them. I don't understand you. You romanticise everything in all you do, down to the T-shirt you wear and the car you drive. You pretend to be one of the guys. But you're not. You think you've gone through so much to know what wisdom means. You poor misguided fool. All you do is romanticise. You can't take it in right? I suggest you leave.

But I know you won't. You've gone through crap, precisely because you think you've gone through so much. You've living a lie. You're sitting there in your comfortable luxury suite suffering for the world. You stupid asshole.

I'm sitting here with my last cigarette, enjoying the lambasting sounds of traffic, the stuffy food-stained air and the dizzying clumps of people who haven't the slightest idea whose ideas they're living. You're one of them, though you pretend you're superior. You're one of them. You can't move from that. So, why don't you keep wearing those Spiderman T-shirts, those ragged jeans, smoke those weird tobaccos, drive those BMWs and go hounding your poor soul, bitching about your witchy mother. This is Singapore. Blend in and die, or cop-out like me, and die of poverty. You're worse than a Singaporean. You're not even sure who you are.
He spits his phlegm on the floor. Just get out of my life, Winston. Go back home to mummy.
He's indestructible when he's like that. Invincible. There was no way of returning the lines that come to mean nothing. There's no Rudeness, no Politeness and no Cruelty. Honesty became Brutal and he had that air about him that kept people waiting to hear him spew out wisdom by the chutes. But nothing was Wisdom to him. Nothing is nothing to gloat about. One couldn't get angry. Although one could obviously Hate him for what he was.

We hated what his place was turning into. The walls on the apartments were painted layer after layer with pink and blue. With houses and people running around. Rimbaud would smear chewing gum all over the walls before. Now that chewing gum was banned, he merely marked the walls with his boots, spit at the murals, or threw coffee at it around midnight. Rimbaud hated concrete. And he hated me. But I couldn't leave.

Rimbaud knew how to destroy me emotionally. He knew I could only be truthful when I was drunk. When I was, he'd tell me just how low I was. How I was worth nothing. How I had betrayed him, like the country. I let him, because he was right, and I was defenseless. He would do it here, exactly where he was taking it out on me again. This replica of a coffee-shop his father once owned.

I felt like this part of town. Hot, angered, and ready to take that step down. But hate for him kept me alive. I don't know how that is possible.

Rimbaud suddenly got sick and tired of Toa Payoh. The concrete intoxicated him, and so did the Mandarin he loathed. The people became so irrelevant and redundant to him he couldn't believe progress could be so stereotyped. He put on his helmet and sped off on his bike, refusing to take me with him. Stranded in the coffee-shop, I ordered another tea, looked around at his objects of hatred and waited for my driver to pick me up in my BMW and send me home.
Sang Froid II
The moment Rimbaud knew his father had succumbed, he knew it'll all be over. Every reason to doubt was cast away. He couldn't really comprehend the feelings though. There really wasn't anything to feel. He wasn't twenty yet. He was far from over. What was there to feel, after a while. There he was, his plump weary body lying in the hospital ward. The smell of medical sanitation and the doctor walking away, indifferent to the silent scream that welled within Rimbaud. The doctor walked over to apologise. He said, I'm sorry. That would be all, he said.

Father was wearing a singlet. His hair was brylcreemed, soaked in the fumes of the coffee-shop. He had on the baggy brown pair of pants Rimbaud remembered him wearing when he helped out in the shop. He used to lean so close to his father just to hear his heartbeat. Now it all seemed so distant. Rimbaud felt his father's coarse fingers scalded by boiling cups of coffee. Felt the warts like he felt the sores. In his heart. Just as he began to feel these emotions, his father's heart stopped. Every known exit was closed to him. The grey sides of his father's balding head moved him unbearably. Infinity had crashed on him like a cruel joke.

No one knew about the death yet. Rimbaud stood by the cold white walls of the ward, fists clenching his father's hands. He didn't want anyone to know. He didn't want to share his pain. His pain was his, and yet he didn't know if it was pain. You come to a certain distance only to be confused by what the words meant. Were you conditioned to understand these words emotionally, Rimbaud asked himself. What did it mean to be blessed or glad or all these words you proclaimed you knew. These words seemed too ridiculous to unravel. Do you compute these words so brilliantly to proclaim all these events that have been thrown upon you? Rimbaud looked at his father's wearied used up body and began to writhe in anger.

Nothing can kill me now, he told himself. Nothing can kill me now.

His body was lying there, froth around his mouth. Rimbaud's father died while reading his favourite daily, soaking biscuit into his black, sugared coffee. Deep inside, father wanted to die. He started to acquire the habit of twitching his shoulders after mother died. He had begun to plot his own death. He left the coffee-shop to his subordinates and gave all he had virtually to Rimbaud. Sit there with his coffee was all he would do. He refused to talk or tell you what was wrong. There were no last words. There were no words.

Rimbaud would return from school only to find the house-lights all dimmed in the flat. His father would be sitting on the old couch, the TV on. He wasn't watching. He would eat. Rimbaud couldn't get through to him. The crucifix hung on the wall next to the idols and the lighted vases of oil, dulled by darkness. It was directly above his head. Cars whirred by, the headlights shone through the windows, mobilising reflections across the walls. Rimbaud stood there in the dark, shoes undone, staring at his father. His father reacted as if no one existed. Burping over a packet of peanuts and beer. The silence destroyed Rimbaud.

Father had that smile, Rimbaud remembered while looking down at his disheveled death face. Father talked to everyone, helped anyone he knew. He believed in goodness. He learnt his English on the streets while growing up in Hock Lam Street. Father never spent a cent on himself, even when the shop was making a killing in festive seasons. He bought anything for Rimbaud. As long as Rimbaud studied hard and did the right thing. Whatever that meant.

A nurse came in to check if everything was fine. Rimbaud lied. Yes, everything's just perfect. Rimbaud stares at the nurse, implying he wanted time alone with his father. He looked again at the body of someone who had wanted death so bad any form of darkness was light.

Dad loved Mum so much, It wasn't the physical kind. It was... what did it matter anyway? Rimbaud lost faith in words long ago. It was just Rimbaud, Dad, Mum walking along Chinatown. The row of old makeshift stalls. Eating porridge and raw fish by the crowds that walk by. The mildly abusive smell of debris in the drain. Dried up old women in traditional clothes selling chillies and vegetables on the road. Rimbaud was twelve. Mum had a way of asking if Rimbaud wanted another bowl of porridge. She asked it like she'd sacrifice her life for him. Yet Rimbaud found it so hard to explain.

The way Mum and Dad talked to each other, it was like both of them wished to die together. Mum never did anything without Dad, and vice versa. Rimbaud had never seen them hug or kiss, and yet the way they talked to each other spoke beyond volumes. Chinatown on a sunday morning. Warm and glowing with tender longing. Men stooped themselves on narrow stools eating fermented bean curds with porridge. Trishaw riders lying back asleep on their vehicles. No one gave a damn how you dressed, who you are or where you came from. You were here to watch the sights.

The man hurled the huge monstrous python across the chopping board. He slit across it with a knife and tore it apart into half. The hawkers at the side sold noodles and chicken rice at unbelievably reasonable prices. Rimbaud's father told him a number of stores that lit up Rimbaud's passion for memory. Pointing at the old houses above, Rimbaud's father spoke about the unspeakable squalor and deprivations of the poor. The naked children and the rats that ate the young. Every flicker of the place evolved him to stories and vignettes Rimbaud couldn't shut out of his mind. Mum and Dad never held hands. Yet it was as though their tears and laughter were bonded by some illogical tenacity. Rimbaud wasn't sure if it was Love. Damn these bastard words. He only knew it was positive.

Rimbaud was quite sure his father wanted to be cremated. His father never understood him. Why Rimbaud had chosen the longest, seemingly unnecessary road to live. Rimbaud didn't either. But his father just let it go. Now, Rimbaud will have to cremate him. Reduce his father to ashes. Nothing simpler than that.

Don't let anything get you, he told Rimbaud. Fend for yourself. Rimbaud looked at him again. Mum used to lie by his side, discussing where to eat for dinner. Now, her presence didn't figure anymore. She was cremated a year ago and her urn stands somewhere among thousands of others. What did it matter anyway. Rimbaud held his father's hand for the last time. Tears didn't well. Tears had lost significance for Rimbaud. The nurses prepared to wheel the body to the morgue. His father's face was peaceful although one could see the melancholia at the side of his lip. I used to come close to you and ask you if you were humming. I put my ear near you, remember?

As the wheeled him away, the side of his bed hit a corner. His hand tilted out from his side. It's too late, Dad. I'm alone. Again. Rimbaud looked out at the grey clouds approaching and looked down at the people passing by. The people, the sky, the loss.
Nothing can kill me now, he said. Nothing can kill me now.
Other I
Why do I live here? I do it for certain reasons. Nobody knows me. Nobody understands me. Nobody cares. Nobody knows. I live here because I have no other except you. Yet you seem too distant. I must say I like that. I don't like to talk. But I do. Once in a while, to wrestle the old gut-wrenching heart. To reclaim what I never owned. What I don't care for. This is why I live here. It could well be anywhere else. But it happens to be here. I have no idea why. But it is here I shall address you. It is here where our roads merge. It is here where you will see who I am. Who I appear to be.

I am not sure why I say these things. If I did you will know. You will need some reference for yourself. I have no such thing for you. I have nothing to escape from the seemingly naive sense of discourse. This strange groping for references. You will choose to believe that I come from somewhere. If you saw me, you'd probably know where. But all I have is this dialogue. This warped imagination. And you. Nonetheless, we merge somehow.

I could go on and make these links if I tried defining it all for you. Or leave you with the facts to let you define it for yourself. But how pointless it will be. You have read the magazines, the books and the bulletins that tell you otherwise. You have watched the endless TV programmes that define it all for you. The rapture that surrounds the cabled wonder. You have all these words to delude you into believing you knew what others have defined. You have even defined definition. So, it will be doubly easy to define me. Like it is to define you.

Time and time again I tell myself Rimbaud you have stepped too far off the line. You don't have the vocabulary or the truth someone else from somewhere taught you to present the problem. I convinced myself long ago. Everything I learnt was handed down to me. I must be able to be able to exoticate these words, so that they can understand. As if they couldn't understand what it was to be. Truth is, they don't. Then I tell myself perhaps someday they will. Then I realise they never will.

So what is this I'm searching for. Does it come from you? Do I need to clarify myself so that you can put me in your little bag of signifiers? Do you really think I need to express it in your language. Or am I speaking yours. Am I simplifying it too much? You want it all so simple so that you can absorb it all so effortlessly. How many times do you think you know this. Does it please you. To know how similar you are to me. That you have the wrong signifiers. The wrong hearts.

Then you start asking yourself what is wrong. You ponder for a moment and you think you know. But you don't really. No one really knows. So why do you keep defining who I am. When you have no idea just how wrong you've been. Isn't it strange how exotic all these ideas can be. Just because you don't understand it, you think it's all wrong. When the problem is with you. And yet, you push the blame to me.

You poor bastards, I say to myself. Telling us what's best for us when you can't even decide for yourself the liberties you take. You claim you know everything and claim that you stand up for what you know to be right. Yet you constantly lie without knowing. You assume you know. You're so evil you assume everything. I shall take your knowing and your claims away from you, with my limited vocabulary. My pale dull skin and my chronic enunciation. Without you even knowing it. I shall not use your style, your words or your crutches that you think alleviate what you don't know. Because I want to free you from your unbelievably stale sense of my existence. Your assumption that I don't know how you sink so low to think you know. I shall allow you the liberty to think I am a pissed-down old clown and that you wear the crown. But you are the sluts of hags. The sluts of word. You own nothing anymore, you can of piss.

You would think because I assumed an other there is consciousness between us. There is this rift removed by world peace. This ideal you all talk about. That it will bring understanding and universality and all those ideals you've built with your petty twittering. You claim I don't understand because I need to be taught. I need to crawl into your box. At best, I am exception to your self-stipulated rules. You fucking bastards.

Who gave you the right to put these rules, these mental images in your mind. Who gave you the right to assume to me you understand me. Your power? Your sense of freedom. Your hollowed objective. Or just you? You expect some sub-layered consciousness to occur, something that you claim more profound than we can understand happening between us. Then you will say Eureka I understand. I understand why millions die. Why there is so little understanding in the world. Why total understanding is possible.

Deep inside, you realise how conceited your thoughts are. You think for no one but yourselves. You have no answers but you think you do. You try to convince me that you do. So you sell bus-loads of sophisticated thought theories and complicated processes to repossess my brain. Convince me I should buy them. They buy it, except me. But you think if you keep on serving the main course, I will buy it one day. You don't care about your words. Your beliefs.

You rape me with your words. You sodomise me because you talk pleasure in verbally nullifying my existence. You watch me bleed because you want me to know who's in charge. You break me because you love deceiving me. You rape me and where I live because it's the only thing you know. And worst of all, you know how words can rape so ruthlessly. So nonchalantly. I bleed from the wounds you've inflicted me with your words. Your misplaced good intentions. Your unknowing good intentions. Your ideals.

Yet, you persist to think you are light. That you hold the reins to my existence. You do it by seeping your thoughts and your false sense of triumph into the loopholes of unadorned machinery. Gullible systems. Seeped into them like cruel osmosis. Demoralising the self. Uprooting and reconstructing. Tearing down the tough ties that used to bind. You seek no alibi for this. You do this because you think you understand. You do this because you assume. You assume us to death.

And where shall our thoughts lie? All this you've known and known them way before we knew your words. Your motives. You want us to romanticise you visions. Your deeds. You want us to be grateful for the favours you've so graciously presented to us. But you don't see beyond your horizons. Or your romance you have bought all the images and are now whoring us with them. You all deserve to die. Die by your own romance. Your own lies. Your own words.

That's why I live here.
Gawd II
Here is where we draw the line. This is how far we repress the city of her need to be desirous. But we can never destroy the substratum. We need the bowels to keep transforming into the voices we need. Voices we can't deny or suppress. It is however, about balance. Even Balance needs shifting. We try to control that and something else demolishes itself. We must allow these little ruptures to form. Pretend they never happened.

It is, after all, a question of shifting the points on the triangle. What straddles between the lust, the things and the delusive signified. The trick is to move away from what you cannot hope to achieve. To achieve only the lust you desired. The rest could be switched or snuffed out like a helpless light. To know of that helplessness is to know about the city's cruel incandescent streak. We watch the streak flash by like a premonitory meteor. We are are treading on such grounds. Alas, the helplessness. The helplessness. The uselessness of such desire. But we are thrust into it because we can't really control these voices, can we. Every time another soul is snuffed out in the city, another voice fills in for it. We are trapped in a lost series of directions and there are no more causes to believe. No more options for the soul that wants out. The soul that can tread further within this grime. These meandering streaks of sleaze. This city.

It is about lust. About the forces that draw us closer to the things we stalk for. It is after all about the games that we play. The rouged politics of material worth. Things we seek for redeeming ourselves because the city spares no vacuums for the soul. She fills it with illusions, then deafening silence. She expands and contracts your bloating froth of desires. You lust for it because you can't stand the hollow walls of your home. The space you've set aside for your own existence. Everything has to fill the empty crevices of your soul. You don't even care if the lust kills you. You are your own home. And you don't even know you are burning.

Every concrete entity reeks of archives. So does every set of eyes, moisting in their need for some renumerative hope. Every calm exterior troubled by the inner archive. The internal histories of despair. Is this what we wake up for every morning. Holding the suitcase of despondency. Wield it into the rim of golden opportunities. Everything that is empirical marks success. Yet, our histories call us back. Our history haunts us. We can't escape from this self-consciousness we bury within us.

We all have a set of archives that we try to escape from. Remnants of the processes you try to hide away while satiating your desire for the city. The ruins you no longer want to rebuild. The text you've chosen to re-invent You see it in flashes. Why you've remained warped and weary, destructive of your own hold on the realities. Casting it away by drowning into the businesses, the lunch time drinks, and the smoky lounges of your own inability to cope. Deep into the Archives is that bank of the past. Those perceptions that caused you to bleed. You tire of them because they have killed you. And you have already re-invented yourself.

Yet deep inside you there is a wordless scheme that slowly drowns you. You feel the quirks of the scheme that doesn't speak to you in conversations, but consciousnesses. Reminding you of how you really have nothing. That you are nothing, in spite of your renumeration. Your status offering. How you have not faced the crux of the question. You let another drink douze you further into fantasy. But that consciousness remains. It is a consciousness that kills great men. Political leaders. A consciousness that knows now morals. Guilt.

All this need to re-create a history we have abandoned for one we borne out of wedlock. There are no more histories left, except for those little pockets of fate. These twists and turns we've allowed ourselves to prefabricate because we lie we have no history. We lie that all histories point to what we know best. Yet, the archives stand before us, brighter than Jerusalem. And we dip closer to the abyss. Closer to a suffering sense.
Somehow, it seems absurd to believe that words give us access to our consciousnesses. Our archives. What foundations do we make to draw conclusions like that. Words are twisted, like jaded systems of existence. Is it no wonder our words force our discourses to overturn. Our narratives to belch insanity. And we still believe we are the architects of certainty. The scheme is trusted again.

Do you hear me. The city does, and yet the perversion she offers delights me. Like it delights you. Everything in the city is murdered. Your choice images, your facades. The city sells everyone the illusion of his or her choice.

So I can go on. But the situations remain infinite. How best to present it to you, valiant one. Valiant for some purpose. The words must reveal themselves to you like blood on the streets. You must take it all in, and drink the words like communion. Await the beast. I have seen it long enough. For I am so filled with your hatred. Not to say hatred for myself. I have gone beyond being a vehicle for all the terror I see in my unworthy vision. I have become the terror himself. Stab me. Stab me, I am Winston. The beast.
Sang Froid III
He stared straight at the teacher's eye, and knew it'll soon be over. Looking around the classroom, his head became dizzy with an obstructive defiance. Anger made him dizzy too. He was really too young to know these things, and yet he knew them. Remembering every face in that class, and the teacher's frustrated sense of education.

He knew the teacher's inadequacies. The way she jerked the chalk as it screeched against the board like a parrot. She was built like a bull, but he noticed her ass bulging out of her skirt like camel humps. She had incredibly huge breasts and they hung out of her chest almost like a burden. She spoke in shrieks that exasperated him. Kept pulling her skirt down, as if the boys wanted to see what was behind it. He wanted to. He was nine, but he wanted to.

Rimbaud slipped the mirror under her table from time to time, just to see how that ass looked in tight knickers. He had an erection from looking up all their skirts, but he couldn't quite understand why. He felt the sensation but didn't know what those sensations entailed. Especially one of the other temporary teachers, who wore loose yellow underwear. It was the first time Rimbaud had seen pubic hair, sticking out of her tush. He had never seen anything like it before. This particular teacher was beautiful. Like a ballerina. Her thighs were milk white and her breasts small but firm as sensual anthills. Rimbaud wished he could see her breasts. He used to think he was really sick and queer to think like that. But he became indifferent to it. She never sits properly, crossing her legs that way. Why shouldn't he look. Rimbaud knew it was the image that mattered more than the substance or lack of it. The way she opened her legs, sitting in front in a chair while the rest of them sat on the floor, it was like she was so giving. Giving her zones of pleasure for the less pleasurable. She felt like a giving person to Rimbaud. But he'll never know.

He stared at the teacher's eye again, when she'd noticed he wasn't paying attention to her. He was thinking of the ballerina's cunt. Rimbaud found them all so predictable. He knew she'd ask him a question and if he couldn't answer, she will haul her abnormally large breasts at him, and knocked his knuckles till he cried. She had done it all too many times. Rimbaud hated her and the way she smelled. Most teachers smelt like they didn't believe in bathing. Except the ballerina. At least she didn't look like she smells.

Rimbaud knew her every move. She acted like she enjoyed torturing him. What irked her so, was that he never cried no matter how many times she hit him. And she hit him all the time. She hated his indifference. Deep inside, Rimbaud knew she did. He knew everything he needed to know about her. He felt like he was the one with the power, although he was being tortured. Once, she even tried to whip him with a cane, till he bled. He couldn't forget the look on her face when he looked into her eyes and smiled, almost wickedly. Closer to defiance.

She's beyond redemption now, he thought. This overweight, bloated lady, who like thousands of others, didn't really know the true consequence of her effect on children less introspective than Rimbaud. It didn't even occur to her that he knew every answer to her lame questions. He didn't answer them because they were useless questions. Quotations that put you in a box and destroyed you. All she card for, were the right answers to the wrong questions. By now, she would have made known to every teacher, this one student who was the scum of the earth. It didn't matter one bit to Rimbaud All he wanted to do was look up into her skirt. When he had done that, he knew he had truly humiliated her.

He was too young to see the words. But he felt then like he felt the knocks on his knuckles with the ruler she held with glee. Or her long dirty nails pierced into the tip of his ear. He knew the only way he could hurt her was not to react at all. To take it all like medicine. His mind began to soak in these thought devices. Devised to destroy all these people who claimed their power over something as vulnerable as education. He knew they knew nothing at all. They were all servants to the grind. And he will be himself.

What was school to him but an endless routine of dead hours. Watching the fuss over school and her amazing ability to pervert the senses. He never played with the other boys. Everyone within the domain of school gave him the idea that he was crucified. The meaningless school-work. The ridiculous exams. The chocolate ice-cream stains on his uniform meant more than that. Rimbaud pipped through the tall unfolding fence that caved his school and looked beyond the buildings. He wasn't sure what he was looking. But at that point, nothing meant the world to him.

Is this the price you pay for thinking at such a young age, he will ask himself much later on. He knew it was a stupid question. He didn't believe in paying prices. There was no such thing, although he knew he would have to relive the mess in a whole series of inane systems. He knew these evil teachers will continue to bugger him into forcing his eyes up their skirts. He knew that his only weapon was forced ignorance, indifference and absolute silence and cunning. To do that he'll have to be very strong. Principals were beyond redemption. Their minds choked up by too much protocol. They were as human as corpses. Teachers had that little hope, but Rimbaud will not give them any hope. Yes, he'll have to be very strong. Very strong indeed.

Rimbaud was always polite to everyone. But his politeness was one of scorn and incredible tension. His schoolmates feared his politeness although it was honest. The teachers hated it because they didn't even know the unknown. Once, Rimbaud peered down into the enormous cleavage of a teacher, and then told her she was disgusting. He was slapped in the face and sent out of class, but he acted as if he wasn't slapped at all. He would stand outside and think of all the sickest things he would do to her if he had her alone. Then, he'll turn back and stare at her with the coldest eyes. She would know what he meant by that. Then he will stare straight at her huge tits and savage them with the glee of a sadist.

His friends never understood him. Why someone who was so obviously intelligent and brilliant opted out. Rimbaud loved confusing his friends. He loved it because he knew how helpless they were. How increasingly unaware they were that there was no hope for them. Seeking some meaning in these things. Rimbaud was deceptively vulnerable and weak. But his friends knew better. He never agreed with any of his mates. Constantly giving them the wrong answers. The lies and the banter. Shocking them with his perverse jokes and his perverted sexual mind. But his mind always had the last laugh.

Aporia Society MCMXCIX