Fictional Brothers


I
He pushes paper in a corporate office and drinks beer
with all his colleagues after work. Later at night
he scours the public parks, seeking out rent boys

who are straight but only too willing to have
their palms and love-rods greased with loose change.
My other brother is married with two kids. Nightly,

after his wife has gone to bed, he gazes at the terminal,
his shorts down to his knees, his hands caught
in the throes of a wicked, five-fingered lust.

Another brother of mine sits at home on most nights
after work and watches every single movie on DVD
which he collects, without lending it to anyone.

He lives at home with his aging parents and unmarried
sisters and on weekends he teaches Sunday School.
Occasionally, he attends political rallies in the city.


II
Another brother spends most mornings sunbathing
and most afternoons in the gym; he wears
the latest designer shoes and revels

in clubbing and recreational substances. He calls
all his male friends sisters and female ones fag hags
and has his own support group who enjoy giving

each other facials while watching reality TV every week.
There’s another I know who lives with his boyfriend
of many years but picks up men in chatrooms

and brings them to hotels rooms rented by the hour
so that the sanctity of his marriage is never questioned.
On weekends, he sews clothes for upcoming parties

and sometimes performs in drag at company dinners.
He yearns for straight men but rarely gets any.
Even the married bears he likes seem to be all taken.


III
He watches all the latest MTV videos and loves
a good tipple every now and then, often by himself,
and occasionally wonders why no men ever find him attractive.

He lives in a daze of foreign men and exotic countries.
He loves to cook and entertain and the terms haute cuisine
and haute culture are signature phrases to anyone

who bothers to be sympathetic or understand.
He’s also to be seen on most weekdays and sometimes
on weekends bare-backing to all and sundry

in every gay sauna in town. Sometimes, just for fun,
he’ll tell everyone how he tops guys (but in his mind
he’s always pointing his legs to the ceiling).

On quieter nights, he stalks the guy in the cubicles
known as the marathon fucker: receiving endless pleasure
is not unlike some kind of endless romance for him.


IV
My blog-brother is usually in front of his terminal relating
to words, rarely with images. He blogs and blogs from
midnight till daybreak, essaying on every gay topic

imaginable, providing such insight and understanding,
helping build a community, rather than just a scene.
He tries so hard to create one and then maintain

its cohesive, though still undistinguished, identity.
However, he knows most of his fictional brothers online
are scouring other brightly lit webpages

filled with twinks and hunks, spreading their legs to moving
images, and never words. To them the word activist
means some kind of psycho-sexual position in bed.


V
Not all my brothers define themselves in terms
of their lusts and perversions. I know of one who
sits at the window, bewildered: he looks at the sky

as if searching for some transcendent piece
of himself so long gone missing. He has lost
his life-long companion to a cancerous illness.

He feels his life fractured, at times ghosted, by the grief.
He has no one to talk to about it meaningfully.
He sometimes joins his friends in idle chit-chat

over coffee as if talking were some kind of therapy,
but most of the time he feels they are just some petty,
public annoyance. Silent screaming would be better.

Then there’s another rare brother who feels confused
every time he sees heterosexual displays of love
and shies way from a society that is resistant, repellent,

one which breeds uncertainty about who he truly is.
There is less and less of him every day: one morning
he will wake to find the last layers of his self stripped away.


VI
My final brother is the one I like the most. He’s one
of those who rarely disparages others for their sexuality
and fights stereotypes wherever and whenever possible,

especially when such stereotypes create misunderstanding
and degrade people. He’s not limp-wristed and clubs
whenever the urge gets the better of him, though he doesn’t

believe in being part of the scene. He befriends all men
and women; sexual difference is for him a state of mind.
On weekends he devotes time to his religion

and to people he cherishes. He’s been in a monogamous
relationship for a decade now. He's bright, articulate... alas,
he doesn’t exist. He’s a fiction of my imagination.

The Knowing Gaze
(A memory for MSP)


Sue, do you remember on one cold Canberra day
in July some years ago during one of those dreary
literary conferences how tedium could be measured
between the hours of parallel lectures and tea-breaks?
When even if you told the audience present that week
that you could walk on water they’d still ask for only
your point of view? Till of course in that one finest hour
a Greek Cypriot began his paper by actually stripping down
to demonstrate the belly dance of his cherished homeland
and, not only our minds, our sleepy senses were aroused.
Don’t you remember our spontaneous hand-clapping,
some of the audience stuffing money down his pantaloons,
his wink of the eye at us, that rich wriggle of the waist —
and on our giggling faces was finally an academic joy renewed?


___________________________________________
This poem is fortunately autobiographical. I came upon the poem when Sue reminded me (over some delicious mutton curry) about the belly dance at a literary conference in 2001.

Stutterings


He didn't believe in the power of words
to get any message through but the power of his tongue
was to me that night like premature re-birth:

his tongue darting in and out and then around
my recalcitrant ass-hole, his lips on mine
begging them to summon a language

I thought I was always conversant in. Fluency
left me that night just around the moment
I got my ears moistened and his saliva

sucked out of them before it could drip
down my ear lobes just past the rain-gutters
howling with the thunder and rain.

Then he was a boatman on a silent morning
prodding for signs of fish-schools between
the crack in the misty river of my legs.

Patti La Belle


Patti improvising Patti!
A metaphorical overdrive is sparked:
language is loosed of its dead secrets,
singer and song self-transcend.
Mythical things and iguanas gleam.

Then life’s imprecisions seem so little.
A hundred rainbows arc unseen.


__________________________
What’s queer about Ms La Belle? Just ask any queen in the States and anyone who’s been intoxicated by her glorious improvisation and runs of melody.

Kamala Das


I’m that little girl again
sensing sheer happiness
is around the corner —
with the exams just over,
the holidays just begun.

I’m just a little girl with long
black hair running home
past the brothels and
the neighbours’ houses
with my schoolbag and pigtails

to the open arms of Amma.


_____________________
Kamala Das has had a profound impact on my writing. She’s one of those who taught me to write using an Asian idiom and, at the same time, by being true to what I was saying on paper. She’s also inspired so many poems here because of her all-original blend of South Indian frankness and sensationalism.

The Curtain of Pearls
(freely from Wang Chang Ling)


Stopping the piano, he undraws the curtains,
hoping for the cool night to console a perplexed heart.

But only a livid moon streamed in. His face
in his arms, he remembers sitting in the garden

and how that gentle voice would come drifting to him
like the noontime glimmer of falling rain.


_____________________________________
In the 90s I found a slender volume of Chinese classical poems translated by various people and there was this piece by Wang I liked especially. My transliteration took on many emanations, straight and otherwise, till it finally ended with this one you see here.

Daily Infidelities


For him it a weekend affair, almost casual even,
and for the other it was an hour's journey by plane
every Friday and another hour late on Sunday

(later, when out of a job, it would be a two-way
five-hour bus ride). For him it was a timely
diversion from the ordinary weekdays and nights

as he discovered that a forced fidelity was totally
desirable since the boredom of life was too hard
to anticipate or overcome by wanking alone.

The signs of weekday infidelities were all there:
on the dresser a pack of condoms smelling of KY
and sweat, under the kitchen magnet a slew

of phone numbers and names of different boys
for every weekday, hastily written and then
cancelled out using different ink. But he, the other,

chose to ignore all of what was there, choosing
instead to overlook, or at worse to forget (years later
he would say he never quite saw those signs).

For him it was a love just discovered and for
the other a love just past. It was the refusal to kiss
that clarified the matter at hand.

Then it was the many unspoken rehearsals
to part unannounced and another hundred to stay
till the other found someone again.

It was a quiet rage and a sullenness that never
seemed to end, till finally it did when quite
unexpectedly he said he would learn to love again

but on different terms and on different weekends.

At a Poetry Reading


I heard him that afternoon for the first time
and I wondered how his wit could suborn
his thoughts amidst a freeplay of exteriors
that had no obvious roots of any kind.

I listened to his dispersed, often decentred, text
hoping I cold subpoena a sudden rupture but all
I really did was to daydream myself

into his work: I imagined myself at court
as the sententious, expert witness of sorts
and he the young prosecuting attorney
(whom everybody wants to ruin),

and then I the closed paradigm
and he the affable talkshow host
(already showing signs of polite frustration).


_______________________________
These lines were conceived after a poetry reading in KL some years ago. I’m not telling who the young poet was but let’s say I partied with him many years before that in a gay club somewhere or other.

Self-Portrait
(with apologies to KBL)


This morning I discovered I’d run out of condoms.
Luckily, I remembered stowing one away in a lucky thong
I’d worn on a great date years ago. The only problem
is that it’s orange flavoured and past its expiry date.
Well, no matter, the picture of my date I chatted up online
looks bloody ugly; even the pix of his dick
he sent me later screamed inadequate.

I’m no size-queen, though my last few dates ended
in some serious length-anxiety attack. Perhaps it’s time
for change. Perhaps I’ve to change positions as easily
as they slide in and out of me in bed. Just yesterday
I was reading my diary and looking at the initials
of the surnames of all the boys I slept with in 1999:
I felt sure the acronym spelt BOTTOM.


_____________________________________
This poem is not entirely mine. I’m echoing a poem of the same name by the Singaporean poet Koh Beng Liang. His is a far more hetero version. Many apologies, Beng!