Yeo Wei Wei 

Translator

To forget someone
Just keep on walking
Keep on dragging your feet
Like a vacuum cleaner
Sucking away life’s white noise
Like the iron put aside on its side and forgotten
The tap left running, forgotten, not turned off
Like a tune that sounds in the brain for the 99th time
And then forgetting the title of a song
Like the thread of a kite flown by a child on the grass beyond the window breaking
You can’t see 
                 the end of the thread in the tiny hand
On the field many flags are raised
The tongue loses and forgets language 
                                 abandoning lips and teeth
Like forgotten vows that should have been pronounced
Like forgetting to close the door
And turning the light off before going out 

Every platform where MRT trains stubbornly rest against

                                                                       Becoming temporary residents

Every unrevivable romance

                                              Will be assuredly defibrillated

Every manner of rumour in circulation

                                                             Has been defiled by time

Every sentence shows your having left, at appropriate and inappropriate places,

                                                                                                                                full stops

Every earthshattering, soul-shaking piece of national news

                  Has been satirized in panic-stricken press layouts and street corners

Every bolt inside my body           of lightning inside the dark

              occurs when the crystalline white bones beside my heart    are wavering

For every tomorrow’s rainstorm

                                                      I have decided to use sunshine to gather the tears

Only on encountering the breeze
Did I see the nothingness behind the outdated

Only when your eyes and mine meet and embrace once more 
Would I then see how beauty winds up in error  

If not for a bird flying by
I would not be able to penetrate the lightness of feather, the greatness of sky

I speak to the fish in the bowl in the National Language 
Each vowel beating like wind against glass 
Each accent dancing like mosquitoes 

My watch shows each second rising, teeming, like wind and smoke 

1950’s English is the colonial language 
             Imagining the National Language, let us speak Malay  
1965’s National Language: English? Malay? Both? 

Every place on the map chokes with smoke, where is there a safe place for us? 

Straits Settlements      Federation of Malaya        Malaya      Malaysia  
Taiwan      Republic of China 
Temasek      Singapura       Singapore  
Please read after me 
Nation — NAT-ION 
You have your National Language, I have mine  
Each tongue is alive, free from officialese 

We sit at a round table practising the National Language
The fish in the round round bowl pout with round round goldfish mouths 

The fish are tongues in mouths, squirming like snakes 

Sometimes with lips shaped like “O”, other times no When the mouth is round:
it is yu, it is language, it is Bahasa Melayu, it is U 

When the mouth isn’t round:
it is ikan, it is English, it is Inilah Singapura

       _______

* Ikan is Malay for “fish”. 

Inilah Singapura translates into “This is Singapore”. 

The night’s loneliness is known only by the night sky
The bustle of loneliness is known only by the dark

The brilliance of fireworks is known only by thousands of eyes
The lights in ten thousand households are only known by lonely fireflies  

While the residual taste of yesterday is known only by today
The ending of today is known only by tomorrow