Excess Baggage & Claim
(co-authored with Terry Jaensch | Transit Lounge, 2007)

"These poems are odes to longing and desire, sung at 4am from the back bar of an impossible city where the borders have yet to be created and have yet to be dismantled. This is a shimmering, hard and beautiful collaboration."
- Christos Tsiolkas

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I am Listening to…

#1 The rate of exchange – the price of underwear dropping.
#2 The Merlion, emblematic, problematic – spitting for us all.
#3 The colour of my skin shouting – quietly down Kerbau Rd.
#4 My order repeated back to me – minus to front teeth.
#5 Full employment Orchard Rd – tissue sellers, every other corner.
#6 Giordano sale bags fall toward each other – next cubicle down.
#7 Singh hotel’s proprietress call my nighest name – gentle male.
#8 The sound of my waiter on tiles – SAM, Singapore Art Museum.
#9 Teh-ping? teh-o? – a tourist’s questionable thirst for absolutes.
#10 Poorly realised gay characters cough themselves to death – still.
#11 Your letters amass proportionate to my guilt – I must write!
#13 My bowels empty – dealing with my own shit alone.
#14 Pragamtism – bonsai coming to an arrangement with wire.


- Terry Jaensch (Copyright 2007)



“Do you still dream of that night?”

Not father in my dreams anymore
but Shahrukh Kahn in that movie,
manly face pinched by that half-pout,

cute as the son whose entreaties
would make his mother
or any woman smile, Shahrukh Kahn

teasing a laugh out from the neighbour’s
daughter whom he loves.
Mr Devdas in my bed and not

father upon me, whispering:
Don’t worry, don’t move, this won’t
hurt, ok? No longer

that initial horror, but simply
shock dissipating
quickly into pleasure, an echo

of love numbing the mind, occluding
shame. The first time, I remember,
I failed to cry, because as far

as I could see, that night,
there was no cause, only
a car’s passing headlight

piercing the unmetaphorical
dark of a boy’s bedroom.
A curious hunger

spent, balled up in tissue paper
he forgot to discard, left on the floor,
the smell of it

staining the air, the present, and
future remembrances
of those long, wakeful hours. Not

Shahrukh, but father
cleaning me up now, his face
crumpled by that grimace,

a constant hiss between his teeth,
rubbing tissue across my stomach,
his hand a wet clamp on my thigh.

Not even mummy, ok?
And not any of your friends...
Look at me on the bed,

this boy stripped of sleep, under
a man who insisted he loved him
again and again

till there was no choice but to feel it
surge from the centre of him,
springing free like an animal out of a fire.


- Cyril Wong (Copyright 2007)