My city, my canvas by Heng Siok Tian

How do I colour my city
with creatures busy in living?
Do I walk along as if on an errand
seeking a lotus pond afloat with enlightenment?
Do I go in search of orchid petals
to unfurl whorls for hybrid pollens?
Do I hurry along street plans and measure landuse
to draw lines and shapes for my canvas?

My city has no mountain ranges
to be unscrolled broadened brownness,
neither has she bushfires nor epic tragedies
but her sky can be
as dry and distant as a desert's.
My city has campaigns, policies and long-term planning,
has a reputation for drivenness
of a small country,
has shopping malls and more ...

Is my canvas
a surrealscape of
a slim city slowly coated with melting cheese
where there are crowns with broken legs,
jugglers balancing on shaky stakes,
children spinning on top of whales
growing up to be adults with briefcases
on top of flying clocks?

I want to hiss a snake out of a kettle,
drink it like coffee as steam scatters
that I may
frame with passing beatitude and mosaic wisdom,
my city, my canvas.

The Portrait of a Sentenced Library by Alfian Sa'at

So these bricks will be torn down
And books will still not have learnt
To spread their feathers and fly
Like pigeons from a shaken tree

So this balustrade will be dismantled
Perhaps reassembled somewhere else -
A conch paperweight by my head is a beach.
Each hour from a postcard Big Ben chimes.

This is the logic of nostalgia -
This is what I mean when I say
That my memory is selfish.
Who can guarantee that roaming

Through a tunnel I will find again
The Children's Section, where a boy walked
With 'the Little Prince' in his hands,
His smile the first line of a novel

Neither of us had read before?
One cymbal left in Chinatown.
Blueprints and forums and rhetoric ensure
That a firecracker makes no sound.

So the shattered glass of Van Kleef Aquarium
Still magnifies the eyelashes of students.
So the ragged screen of Capitol Cinema
Still shudders as a Pontianak drips black blood.

Only in dreams. Under separate stars.
I had one last night; of sitting at S-11
With the usual bunch of affectionate liars,
Skinny artists, red-eyed dreamers,

When suddenly a book appeared in the sky
Like a carrier pigeon that had escaped
From the ruins of the library.
It landed, without a murmur,

On my shoulder. I opened that book,
Expecting a cry for help, a refugee's plea.
What I found instead was this poem
That did not know how to end. Only when.

On the Ning Nang Nong by Spike Milligan

On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the Cows go Bong!
and the monkeys all say BOO!
There's a Nong Nang Ning
Where the trees go Ping!
And the tea pots jibber jabber joo.
On the Nong Ning Nang
All the mice go Clang
And you just can't catch 'em when they do!
So its Ning Nang Nong
Cows go Bong!
Nong Nang Ning
Trees go ping
Nong Ning Nang
The mice go Clang
What a noisy place to belong
is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!!

Only the Moon by Wong May

When I was a child I thought
The new moon was a cradle
The full moon was granny's round face

The new moon was a banana
The full moon was a big cake.

When I was a child
I never saw the moon.
I only saw what I wanted to see.

And now I see the moon
It's the moon,
Only the moon, and nothing but the moon.

Morning Train by Alfian Sa'at

Why do you not look at each other's
Faces? Is the scenery that arresting,
One housing estate giving birth
To yet another copy?
Or the advertisements, read and re-read,
As if behind a slogan's promise lay
Hidden promise? Answer me:
Is that consciousness rising in you,
Dissolving your fatigue like a plastic sheet
Warping in heat, or is that simply
Sleep, draining away from you
Down to your soles, to the invisible tracks
Where the dew is dying? Where electricity
Is what pushes you to the borders
Of your own loneliness, against
The vulgar loneliness of crowds

Other National Virtues by Gwee Li Sui

I asked for teh tarek
Got half the glass in effervescence
Got food poisoning because
Half my mee's in its adolescence
Criticize, complain, condemn
With a hand over the abdomemn.

The players pant like pups
Think they are playing table tennis
The blundering referee
Is giving me tuberculosis
Criticize, complain, condemn
Throughout the National Stadiemn.

Sure, we may know we live
In a kind of modern paradise
But it's hell when we come to
Any bureaucratic exercise
Criticize, complain, condemn
All over on the referendemn.

Ars Poetica - A Polemic by Nina Cassian

I am I.
I am personal.
I am subjective, intimate, private, particular,
confessional.
All that happens
happens to me.
The landscape I describe
is myself...
If you're interested
in birds, trees, rivers,
try reference books,
don't read my poems.
I'm no indexed birds,
tree or river,
just a registered Self.

Lines by Shirley Lim

The more is brought to light, the darker the breeding ground.

Proverb is the twitch of atrophy.

Poets bless the muse of insomnia at all times of the day.

Write it. Bolt it down with steel.

The paralytic style: never say a plain word when a rare one will do; never say a rare word when a plain one will do; never say a particular when another particular will do.

Coda: Language by Nina Cassian

My tongue - forked like a snake's
but without deadly intentions:
just a bilingual hissing.

The Way Things Work by Jorie Graham

The Way Things Work

is by admitting
or opening away.
This is the simplest form
of current: Blue
moving through blue;
blue through purple;
the objects of desire
opening upon themselves
without us; the objects of faith.
The way things work
is by solution,
resistance lessened or
increased and taken
advantage of.
The way things work
is that we finally believe
they are there,
common and able
to illustrate themselves.
Wheel, kinetic flow,
rising and falling water,
ingots, levers and keys,
I believe in you,
cylinder lock, pulley,
lifting tackle and
crane lift your small head--
I believe in you--
your head is the horizon to
my hand. I believe
forever in the hooks.
The way things work
is that eventually
something catches.