TUNNELS

 

Tunnel #1 (vegetable mineral emergency)

 

At five a.m. vegetables are going

to be delivered but no market destination yet.

My stomach sags with old food in this long day

trip from yesterday’s nightmare to this recovery

your mother signs with anonymity.

 

These wrinkles on the face are nothing

but fattening asparagus wired to my brain’s

street map of indeterminacy. Visible horizon

 

glowing my hair, to be grey and still; I hope

I care for another season. This tunnel cares

so much about mobility and personal crises.

 

It does. It’s the reason why we deliver

dried oreganos or life and death safely from

point to point, why in express we smell home.

 

I stay alive though, sensing velocity

as an ambulance would in a dream—

brisk, accidental. Remember the first time

your little bones cried for milk?

 

The turquoise light I detest are eyes,

 

the remaining light so imperial to touch base

the remaining skin of distance, my alabaster

bed, words dissolving to onion molecules,

 

not dying as I am the same boy my mother

used to kiss. My body remembers,

the goods are safe and I feel a likeness veined

in marble upon marble of my hopes for you.

 

As long as you’re here entering tunnels

with me, I’ll have no problem closing my eyes

in this eternity of five a.m.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tunnel #2 (Merlion)

 

The shadow tall and lean, inspired by a lighthouse, squints at the Merlion. My morning behaviour skips breakfast just to tell my body to overcome the effects of the Merlion. People at the pet store are giving up their jobs only to watch the Merlion spurt water from its mouth like the tunnels of human love. The newly admitted patient who is seen from the open window waves at the Merlion. Clairvoyants finally predict a winner with the face of Singapura tattooed on the mythic scales of the Merlion. Lovers split, fully convinced about the Mertiger calling itself no more as the Merlion. Children down 10,000 bottles of Yakult so they can help the Merlion save this lion city and the sea overflowing with centillion neon. The televangelist reports about a new miracle and how it takes advantage of the daily shifts of the Merlion, spatial to temporal, particle to plexus. Accountants give celebrities free hugs, their palms are sweating, after taxing the civil case of the Merlion. But hold on there, youngster. What is the colour of the Merlion? Does it speak a foreign language like Resilience? Does it roar, swim, walk aimlessly around the Central Business District? Will it quit water and start eating poetry? I know a place where it can go when it’s alone. Through its mouth, a tunnel: right where it starts it ends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tunnel #3 (course syllabus on drama)

 

Welcome to your life. Welcome the world.

But first you have to explain the significance

of each of the dramatic works studied in the context

in which it was originally produced.

 

Produced: all classical unities present in Oedipus Rex

are having issues on how the common hubris

of rhinoceroses, rhinoceri, and rhinocerae

constructs modern tragedy.

 

What is being taught is not The Development of Drama

but fancy blow-bubble tricks enjoyed by satyrs?

 

If you want to follow the sequence,

burn the dialogue in front of Beckett and Brecht.

Or pretend to be hypothetical

 

about seeing nothing, the weight of the weightless

 

our chutes too narrow to carry as we fade away

with human patience. Broken hearts, police devices!

 

 

 

A few times you’ll not notice reality, but

in a pot there’s a cellophane on which the Absurd

used to smoke loneliness of tectonic vibes.

 

Second, you’ll be asked to use a vocabulary

of key critical terms; although I gotta admit,

the lesson today is about your life—remember?

 

—the third or fourth time it was staged, like it’s never

gonna stop telling you to be critical of the necessity

of emotion which by the way we love

as it does translation—sshh!—on a patch of grass.

 

Finally, I know you can spell verfremdungseffekt

backwards while solving the Rubik’s. But

solving and spelling can only score high with age.

 

Believe me when I say that there exists an author

whose name is Edward Albee Hemingway

as there’s an artist called Bob Dylan Thomas

living inside the basement of our souls.

 

So forget about the structurality of naming a leopard

a leopard, of entering Tunnel #3 to hamartia.

 

We’re all part of the play anyway.

 

 

Tunnel #4 (Clark Freeport Amnesia)

 

Good morning, Spine. Out there stilt houses

look serious and fine, here we live on echoes

simply spelling the past. I’ve been told

by your sister that your Dad’s growing old

in Kampong Kleang. The sting of war, now stacks

of misery. His farewell letter on the drawer,

 

just sleeping soundly. Cars driven to drive ego

away and further into a port of somewhere.

Dead batteries tested, windshield washed clean,

ready to shelter no rain, even the 17th fly

coming to feel your spine,

your shoulder blades

the twin tunnels

the rising Phteah Keung

I’m a mess I need to go somewhere else.

 

The roads, oh they’re paved for your courage,

road signs newly painted though they’re sick

to death of neon. Spine, I wake up early

to catch not the sun but the careful subtext

of your hips telling me that there’s not a day

brighter than your special scrambled eggs.

 

We seek explanations, we carry flags.

Please remember to feed the cat as ordinary

conversations may sink if your head’s going

from point to point, tropical to jazz.

Please remember your name’s Spine

and your Dad’s gonna call you his baby

and return to change this place into a forest

of Khmer flowers. But you say you’re not Spine

and wasn’t born so yesterday.

 

Tell you what: your real name’s Soul

and you continue to move places, ports

and bases, Los Angeles Nowhere,

Clark Freeport1 Somewhere.

Poetry and airplanes on our roofs!

 

And you were born in 1987, in the late 60s,

at the end of the century, in a time of lit hysteria

of the mind. And I was born right next to you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tunnel #5 ( * )

  

I change shapes just to hide in this place

But I’m still, I’m still an animal.

 

- Mike Snow

 

Like Badang and the Singapore Stone of long ago

I begin to fill up this hole spotted selflessly

on this avenue with something, something.

Boys and girls play together seeking

their form hiding in dark alleys,

four by four they come running, running

to see the eyes of somebody, of the myth

of madness burning up history that slips their vision.

 

What is this hole that tunnels above the roofs

of our brain? Animal love that mothers of the world

nourish, nurture, nurse... so we can feel

the future to not make us think so folded, folded!

For one, let’s not confuse the hole

to be the perfect circle or that 70s radio blasting

Girls just wanna have fun in the open city, city.

Let us think of it as fever dream coming

alive in the doorway, or as rain on the doorstep.

 

But there’s neither a hole nor more holes

to see now, like some days wanting, wanting

God’s love to caress the words

we can’t afford to say. A shape, a modern

shape speaking to me in the face. Sometimes

I’d like to say it’s this shape that speaks

the language of love, the strange interlude

in a movie that keeps repeating, repeating

in the shore that shifts the character

of our inner flowering shapes.

 

Sometimes I’d just like to watch how the sun

change the shape of tomorrow

as if grace, as if mystery in the appearance

of Badang, the legendary strongman of sampan

memories. And I would simply like to ask

how mother and father and brother and sister

offer some flowers to the rest of religion,

how they pray for my job not to grasshop

like the sight of litmus changeling, changeling.

Maybe I just miss them so much,

with each the shape of ( * ).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tunnel #6 (because I saved a lot of people on the day of your wedding)

 

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╔╤╗

 ╟YOU╢

 ╚╧╝       

?  ME ?

                                                       ?

 

 

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Tunnel #7 (from the book of love | geomancy)

 

I wonder what the boy was thinking | yeah

the geomancer explained | there was math

in the culture of cotton candy calculus

& in the garden | a late consumption

was so obvious | to swallow the boy’s desires

 

his pirouetting imagination | his face losing

a smile | once disrupted by facts & figures

disappointed he touched fire | or the logic of it

or the second skin it shed for romance | the subject

 

no book could ever tell | cite | write | but story

endings belonged to the boy’s crying | those signs

freeing tiny feet from charts & footnotes | they hang

around him like fireflies | like instructions

 

for dancing | winked the lights to the geomancer

eyes of risk that mouth shadows | to be random

still | to be like earth that split & form | perhaps

it’s only me | & not the boy | who saw magic

 

in math | when met by the very truth | by the process

the geomancer uncovered | from the book of love.

 

 

Tunnel #8 (... like the parakeets in Istanbul)

 

I had a dream you were wearing funny socks at the movie show

and that I’m glad you were there almost naked with your cuckoo

spirit getting dressed in the dark to where my ideas of the sun

unfold a tunnel, or tunnels with gyrating numbers of us two.

 

What you said this morning wafted beautifully in a haze,

full percent energy of embodied lights brought us back

together to be one in the neon rain, young was the night

that once upon a time I re-emitted life for your religion

 

of sweet air. Of course I wouldn’t confess it’s you who sniffed

the signs off my book, lifted the pages like gravity

and finally your silence inhaling vertigo, I remember

dancing in my eyes as I walked into the station, surprised

 

by what I saw: your picture on the wayward bus. I thought

of wilderness for you and me and of the stark appearances

from the books I’ve read. It must have been the movies

or this strange power driven by what vision on the road?

 

Yet on the surface were your proclivities for boldly crying

at funny shows, embers of comedy you said was tragedy

and that I may be too young to speak about my dreams—

what you said to me still lingered, like the parakeets in Istanbul.

 

Tunnel #9 (April 22, 2019)

after a 6.1-magnitude earthquake hit the Philippines

 

After the quakethis poem of the gardenof worries about my placeor the people trapped inside the supermall in a city who know nothing about the screams of pigeonsthe movement of insectsthe waltz of seismicgrace notes & diodes that map the memoryof April 22, 2019in the unexpected.

 

After the quake cries of children deservethe attention of live chickenscrowing time from afarlonerism in the wallsof buildings becomesthe unstitched silhouettethe distant fearsnearing to shed tearsthe quibbling hourssoft against earth-rattlethe cancelled flights in this station, this stingof general anticipation.

 

After the quakewe are thankful

   still

we more than listenwe more than trust the whether or notbetween our toeswe more than douseourselves in the lightsof burning binariesfrom clouds above, now tunnels in the tunnels trembling underneath.