Say you just got a raise. The last good kiss
you’ll remember for life is waiting to happen,
but you come here – Friday night, Saturday night –
the mock Latino bars that didn’t last, bars that did,
cafes and coffee-shops that keep up.
The magazine stall on the corner must have turned thirty,
the proprietors still furtively fingering
glossy foreign magazines like contraband.
What they’re really selling now
is ease. People come for love of mess, looking for a stab
of feeling, the suddenness of pain, any kind of intoxication.
Well-kept bodies who leave each year
more regretful than the last. Running from silence
into noise. Even the rooftop Balinese illusion of Café 211,
four storeys above ground, can’t hide their boredom.
Isn’t this the life? That languorous drowning of the senses?
Isn’t this defeat so subtle, our bohemian afterlife,
token as a piece of heaven, resounding in seclusion,
all the world will let you have
until the hunger you came from
dies from inside?
Say no to yourself. The old man on the void deck,
already forty when these streets were laid, still laughs
although his legs have jumped ship. Some night soon,
he says, I’ll turn off the lights in my room
and never see the sun again. You tell him no
in your head. The taxi that brought you here
is still out there, running for what it’s worth
to hunt down the kind of money
you can’t even buy lunch with; your fatigue
and unclaimed grief mark the air with sighs
disguised as breathing, and it will kill you one day
no matter what you do.
So the struggle now is with the stiff
bolt on your front door, the stubborn wilting
of your balcony ferns, the straining of your neck
to catch one glimpse of the woman who loves you
in the best possible light.
Holland Village is a busy enclave of Singapore. Full of eateries and watering holes it is frequented by young Singaporeans and expatriates.