Notes from the City of Lions
You wouldn’t have thought it, but Singapore is filled with mosquitoes
in the autumn. They buzz in the breeze, heading toward you: dinner; you: warm;
you: succulent; you: pulsing. They know. They see you. And there are swarms of
them. Great, black clouds of mosquitoes rise from the marshes around the
island. They rise and then they head right toward you, right into the cities,
right into your room. Even if you were careful, even if you kept your doors shut,
your windows closed, and your lights on low, when you go to bed you’ll hear
them circling. Bzzzzzzzzzz! Their little wings like wound up rubber band toys
hitting bits of paper. They’re like a baseball card in bike spokes, and then
that buzzing is right in your ear, intensified by that marvelous saxophone in
your head, and you jolt up! And you hear it fly off to the farthest corner in
the ceiling, near the closet, where it knows that you can do nothing.
One might say that I’m tired of Singapore, so tired that all I do
now is notice the mosquitoes. But that’s not true, I just happen to notice
something that’s so prevalent that no one here, no natives, seem to even see
anymore. Like mountains that you pass every day of your life while driving to
work and then one day, while driving home from work, it dawns on you.
Mountains! You never knew. And their glory and majesty, their presence, holds
you captive as you drive by, and maybe for most of your drive home. And then
it’s gone, and then due to the same traffic that keeps your eyes focused on the
bumper ahead of you and the times when there’s a space in front of you and
someone is trying to merge in, though they don’t have enough room and you just
know, you know it’s going to slow you down… well, you don’t see the mountains
anymore. Not until you realize, again, that they’re there. They remind me of
lovers. They remind me of what I could be one day. A lost mountain, there and
yet… like mothers to small children. Recognized for brief moments as the need
arises, then sunk into the background of a theater burgeoning with video games,
primary colored balls, and other squealing children.
They say that boredom is what creates psychotic tendencies
in the normal psyche. So even the perfectly, absolutely, swearing with my left hand
in the air normal person can develop psychotic tendencies due to the desk job.
The only thing that keeps psychotic tendencies, induced by long hours with
little to do, under control is adventure, excitement, the act of doing
something new. You could say that that’s why I decided to move to this once
fishing island, to this island occupied by the British in World War II, this
abundance of plant life, exotic birds and natural resources. One could say that
that’s why I moved. Or one, like myself, could say that the craziness lead me
to it. That Singapore,
now, is, as Antilla Joez said, like a Diamond Consciousness. It is my poem, it
is the outpouring of all that I know and all that I can know, concentrated into
a fine beam, a laser, and then crushed into white, sparkling, laser diamonds. And
I wear these diamonds, on my wrist, in my watch, on my ears, and I know that
then I have no reason for soundness, no reason for tranquility of the mind. My
mind is on my wrist and dangling from my ears. I’ve crystallized it with the
pressure of a millennium, and now I’m free. Free to go where I want, to be who
I want to be. A Diamond Consciousness. Free to move from the weight of the
mountains. Free to reclaim this Singapore,
the city of the lions.
c paigerella! 2007
