Five Poems by
Cyril Wong
Vagrant
Do you know if you could survive on the beach
forever? Eat from a bin or cooling leftovers
at barbecue pits and tables of a hawker centre.
Pick up things you can use from a 200-metre belt
of bottles, wooden debris and household jetsam
regurgitated here by the southwest monsoon,
disgusting passing joggers picking up speed.
Hide from the police behind bushes that sever
the night’s chill waiting to strangle your inner light.
Once I saw a dead pufferfish beside a dented can.
Another time a hawksbill turtle laying eggs.
I dream that when the planet becomes uninhabitable,
Singapore will be an island of trash vomited here from
everywhere. A plastic bag yawns, laughs, closes its mouth.
Pearl
Pushing a grain of sand right into me
and not realising what you were
doing and carrying on, carrying on
transforming pleasure into a pearl
of pain after penetrating me
with our swim trunks still
dangling around our knees
so precariously I hoped the rip
tides would not yank them gently off
the way rising currents kept pulling
the sandcastle of our bodies
down to itself, melting and absorbing
us back into the heaving
and ever-deepening waves.
Teleology
Alas, the beauty of intelligent design.
Praise it to the child with brain cancer
or epidermolysis bullosa, whose skin
falls off, no, is painfully renewed again
and again like sand along this beach
the sea eats from and replenishes.
Praise it to the caterpillar whose body
is pumped full of eggs by wasps
then watch how the larvae drain
its juices before gnawing free from their
host. Alongside such thoughts, I admire
a woman lowering her head into the waves
before pulling out, hair sweeping back
like in a shampoo commercial or a baptism.
Tower
This bench might not know you
or it has known you all your life.
Repainted or replaced, how do you
begin to remember and yet it calls
you to sit and names you through
the hush of waves and coagulating sun,
the days you waited for love to show up.
Later a forgotten Amber Beacon tower
where you remember penetrating a man
or a man penetrating you and filling you
up along the staircase circling
its hard-on column, ecstasy
hailing you by your truest name
all the way up to the moon.
Sequence
In order for anything to happen
something must first take place.
Then after the happening, something
else follows the action that came
before. And so on and so forth
until (or already) our actions
make an ocean racing or pulling
against and away and towards itself
in every conceivable (and inconceivable)
direction. Turbulent action,
consequence, reaction that is
the road less travelled or the road
you think is the same road worn down
to nothing. A sea is every road, every place.
Cyril Wong is a poet and fictionist in Singapore. His last book was Infinity Diary, published by Seagull Books in 2020.