i.m.
David Wong Hsien Ming
Issue 1: RISE, July 2023
Napkin on clouded jade
& blue mould
up from under,
thin smile saying
nothing stays white.
Ponyboy's gold
reasonable
in hindsight.
Easy to say
it's the same doom
but here 250 didn't get
a couplet,
let alone
a catchphrase,
didn't get let alone.
•
Imagine putting a table on its side,
plates on skirting, cups on legs;
imagine it's a salesman that does it,
with all the furrows
of a toddler wondering
where people go
in the middle step of peekaboo,
at the end of it a smiling administrator
—& because it's peekaboo, imagine
it happens again
with the salesman's friends
from the shipping company
& the intelligent men in the Blue House;
easier to harbour madness than a woman in a bedroom
holding a plume of knowledge.
David Wong Hsien Ming discovered poetry as a child at a Sunday lunch. His work explores the dualities, contradictions and absurdities of being, and has appeared on platforms like Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Mascara Literary Review. His first collection, For the End Comes Reaching, is a meditation on the sense of loss that accompanies each having.