FagHag Profiling 1

Some say she was the party girl of Bangsar,

or should I say she was its party girl long before

the place became everyone’s desired address.

She could entice boys like nobody’s business,

I was told, but then again her ancestry’s part Serani

and therefore its in her blood to let her hair down

while she rides some mythic horse bareback into parties.

Or is it her blood which attracts boys like flies?

Shanon Shah

 

 

It’s all too dark;

even the stars are hardly shining.

But the rays from your heart

have always made light of my sadness,

especially when we’re together.

I’m an astronaut who’s seeing

space for the first time:

 

and to think, this lonely universe

has for so long now excluded

my tiny heart. Even the moon

and stars displaced

have only now begun

to shine again.

 

_________________________________________________

I met Shanon a few years ago at an excellent Fado concert in the city. He’s as friendly as his tunes in his last album. This “poem” is a nonliteral translation of two stanzas of his song “Angkasawan” (Astronaut).

 

Another Fictional Brother


I have one more curious brother. By day he’s like
any of us; by night, he’s to be found on the streets around
Central Market out on a manhunt for any kind

of migrant worker who bothers to return the smile on
his hankering lips. These men he seeks read like some
exotic list of entrées: South Indian, Arab, Burmese, Thai,

Vietnamese…. They are straight, but for a hot meal,
some undivided attention and the chance to bonk any
willing hole, they’d be more than glad to feed any

ageing queen’s bedroom fantasy. I am told a few even
fall in love with him, demanding that they’d be his boyfriend.
But my brother isn’t interested in unrepatriated love:

he says he’s in it for the foreign foreplay and their easily
aroused dicks, and not for some dickhead who believes
he should play the role of surrogate wife or girlfriend.

About a Friend's Blog Pix:


While I love your re-reading of the Adam/Eve story, I think it’s a bit solipsistic to think that God would create two, mutually incompatible, versions of Paradise. So long as you’ve to create an alternative Eden I’m afraid your vision of gay life would always remain an alternative lifestyle (choice), and therefore remain peripheral.

Perhaps Adam and Steve could be incorporated into the original Edenic vision (it’s Sumerian I believe): they could be the ones tempted by the evil couple Adam/Eve and then turn on themselves (which would fit the bill of two bitchy queens quarrelling as ex-lovers). Or, better still in a postmodern context, they could be living quite peacefully with everyone else that inhabits the land.

Perhaps they could be two modern DJs spinning tunes for the Garden Party or a bunch of economists trying to squeeze the last cent out of the national budget to keep the myth of a capitalist Paradise afloat, while everybody else eats of the Tree of Knowledge and so are condemned to a less-than-heavenly life about them.

Here’s another one: since in the original narrative Adam and Eve are condemned to a life of drudgery and loneliness, how about having Adam and Steve toil amidst today’s homophobia and distrust by making them discover their sexuality with women? Hey, wait a minute, that actually happens in real life!

Lines from a Song by Jay Chou



The fallen maple leaves are like beads
of my yearning for you; why do we have
to clear this colourless landscape of them
before the coming of winter? I go back in time.

I let two droplets of my tears from this
season’s end to remain, so my love too remains,
here within the empty topography of my heart:
How I wish you could stay beside me always.

In Scattered Birdsong
(Or the Dreamer Always Loses)



You’d been fighting with him
for almost every day the past month:
he said he still loved you but wanted things
to be more open, whereas you threatened
to walk out on him altogether.

Just this morning you thought
you heard in the intricate song of the oriole
that a decision had to be made.
The signs for it, it seemed,
were all present to seek resolution.

So you skip having lunch with your colleagues
to hurry back home to send him word,
skipping over the terracotta stones
past the front door of your apartment,
past the living room to tell him

you’ve decided to stay,
and that your love still endures
even if it had to be shared with strangers
you’ll never meet. But no amount
of celluloid cliché could prepare you

for the next unconcealed moment,
not the many Korean dramas about love
and family honour you’d watched with him,
and surely not the Gol and Gincu series
in all its innocence.

What you saw was just blatant melodrama:
your Pilates instructor humping your partner
(who has his ankles to his ears),
and a smile of unsanctioned ecstasy
written all over their faces.


__________________________________________________________
It seems that it’s the dreamer that usually gets hurt in a relationship whereas the one more in touch with reality gets away quite unblemished.

An X'mas Memory


Heads heavy
with dreams that chime,
the fake snow wobbling
under the fan on the christmas tree,
noses filled with wafts
of cloves and pineapple jam,
pastries and curries
draught down
the kitchen corridor:

and I can hear my voice
laughing with Rani’s
as we decorate
the chicken pies
with the doughy words
Bong Natal, Bong Anu Nobu,
as mother hurries
to wash them over
with beaten egg.

Neither the dreams,
nor the odours, nor the voices,
nor the glaze can mask
the merriment of another
wondrous season; but they linger
just long enough in the warm
corners of memory
to remind me about how
happy I once was.


_________________________
Merry Christmas everyone! May grace and peace be with you and all
your loved ones throughout this season.

Haiku


Love’s many changing shapes:
a pair of skittish doves in the cempaka.

A handsome smile of an Indian guy;
loose-wristed, talking with his hands.

A Song of the World
(freely from WS Rendra’s
“Nyanyian Duniawi”)


As the moon sleeps with a rich old lady,
I silently kiss him in the mango orchard
and his heart goes wild with desire.

We trample our earthly concerns
of thirst and hunger underfoot.
Our miseries reach out to each other.

The passion of our rebellion
roars in the dark and his ballsy
laughter gladdens my heart.

In the shadows of trees his body glistens
like a golden deer. His unflinching
breasts are like fruit just ripe;

his sweet fragrance the smell
of fresh grass. I embrace him,
as if embracing existence itself,

and his quickening sighs he whispers
to my ears. How amazed he is at the rainbow
that appears from closing our eyes!

Then all our former boyfriends
appear from the shadows
and come closer to us;

dressed in their ragged clothes
they stand like spectators
watching over us.

Transparent


Even if the sun
hasn’t pierced
the hazy sky
for weeks now,

even if the streets
are still asleep
(given to dreaming
for a change),

even if this city
is left unfinished
amidst bricks, mortar,
and revised blueprints,

and even if
my neighbours’
shouting shatters
the silence

of the neighbourhood,
my love for you
still remains:
transparent.