"Borders", Ng Yi-Sheng
I am eighteen years old and I am standing at the steps of
a books and music megastore. It is nineteen ninety-eight.
I am reading a deskjet-printed ream of verse about Chia Thye Poh.
This is my first political poem. I am very afraid. The paper
is shaking in my hands. My audience is made up of teenage poetry
nerds just like myself. Also diners at Olio Dome. My poem
keeps saying "twenty-three years", a period of detention
unfathomable to my adolescent brain. An interval wherein
my country has gone from kampungs to condos, third world
to first world. My poem hints that I met him as a child on
Sentosa, where he lived in internal exile. My poem is thus about time.
Appropriately, it is far too long. It is received without shock,
without disapprobation. The applause is muted by boredom.
I step down from the mike. I do not yet know I will lose the poem
on a mislaid floppy. That the megastore will collapse. That most
of my audience, compatriots and idols, will cease to write poetry.
Now Orchard is dying too. Yet I do a quick Google and learn that
Chia is alive. So is the government that detained him. So am I.
And I am still writing these poems. And I am still very afraid.