First meeting of hands

"Sometimes, out of routines,/usually the most quotidian,
a poem breaks out,/a furrow in the calm water,
a fresh bulb in the garden,/an accident of sudden words./
We scribble in haste/ in spite of rumbling bus,/
darkened loo or impatient lover – "

Always surveying the tumult and tedium of the cities' lost horizon,
the poet ferries between his memoryscape and his share of reality,
reinstalling laws of perspectives - about erasure, about forgetting -
when we can name anywhere home.

"my squint, the picture of car-carcasses
in the auto-hospital zone of my Sin Ming
childhood, the memory of Father driving
us to Woodlands to point out Malaysia,
and Mother lighting up a charcoal fire
for the new flat in far-away Sengkang."