TAKE ALL YOU CAN / EAT ALL YOU TAKE

4.

I hold up my phone to take pictures the signs on the wall have told me I shouldn’t. In a long hallway, locked doors with only darkness behind glass panes that will sooner break than open. On the ones I photograph: yellow tape, torn so as to only read EX

EX

EX

1.

You’ll come rescue me from a film screening. I’ll call it the big gay reunion after, once you’ve seen the audience pouring out of the stairwell, relieved of the awkwardness of small group greetings in the lift. This theatreful of all the queers I didn’t see in person for the year of restricted movement, the months of my antisocial behaviour before. I used to think I had all the time in the world to listen to poetry past the point of my own exhaustion, till I had to peel myself away to catch the second-last bus going anywhere but home. I cut it closer now, but I haven’t had to walk the whole way back yet. 

The distance between us is underripe still, all the crispness and bite of a green mango, the sandy heart of guava. Because it is all so young, when you offer to watch the film with me, I will not be flustered about the idea of your body next to mine for seventy-one minutes in the dark, the possible space between our shoulders, our hands, the tips of our fingers. The way the light that plays out will land on our skin too. Instead I will be flustered because I already have a ticket to watch this film I have such mixed feelings about before I have even seen a second of it on screen, and you will have just joined the ranks of friends who have told me they wanted to watch this film, sold out before its opening night. the sea of gays descended upon the tickets, I will tell you.

So you’ll meet me after I leave a cinema that neither of us knew existed (and we’re good arts people, okay, or at least make one good arts person between us because you have the black T-shirts down and I have the undercut in the awkward stage of regrowth, and you’re even actually a film person the way I’ll admit to someone a year later that yeah, I guess I’m kind of a lit gay). We know the venues, but we didn’t know this one, just one close to it. We’ll find our way anyway. I’ve asked you to hold my hand because I’m so touch starved my skin is a vibrating sheet beneath itself, but I can’t remember who reaches out and when.

Whatever it is. Your hand in mine, my hand in yours, both, neither. I’ll walk you across the way, from the warm light of Golden Mile Tower to the cool tile of Golden Mile Complex. You’ll show me your best haunts and I’ll show you mine.

5.

There is a toy plane stranded on the roof of a kiosk in the middle of the building’s atrium. I catch sight of it from a corridor where the person whose throwing arm launched this piece of orange plastic might once have stood.

It is so tired as to not be worth saying, but I still reach for the Sontag. Today everything exists to end in a photograph. I won’t have any photographs with you, but perhaps that’s why, some part of me believing that if I don’t take a picture it won’t have to end.

6.

Or at least I won’t look at places I no longer tread and let that knowledge twist inside me.

2.

There’s only one bus that calls at this stop, and we’ll board it. I’ll lean my head against your shoulder, pass you plastic bags when my fingers tire of the weight and the heat of what our mouths have yet to touch. We’ll still have enough hands free between us that when yours rests near my thigh but doesn’t reach it, I’ll wish you would move just that little bit closer. But that would be weird, we’ll both think, and god forbid we make things weird. You’d think we’ll have had enough of waiting, by then, after full hours of sitting in grey corridors, between the battery of doors just containing always-strobing light, the urge to go out glorious indefatigable. After you’ve recited your litany of friends who have lost your trust, I’ll still think I can be different. So the conversation will shift and grow, sweet in my singing mouth, to reach for barriers and bridges held and borrowed and breached. I will send you a picture, someday, of a sign at a construction site made from two pieces of paper held together with tape: BOUN|DARY. Think of it as a place where things meet, I’ll tell you. Not a static line but a shift, an overlap. A
negotiation. Please let’s meet. This time. Again. Let it not be dead air between us.
 
3.

The heart in my chest not on wings, but yellow splashes of grouting on the
honeycomb lattice peeling away from the wall, still webbing together the
mosaic tiles, squares as regular and shiny when seen from behind as from the
front. 

Andrew Kirkrose Devadason (he/him; b. 1997) is a Singaporean poet and student of linguistics. Under his birth name, Devadason contributed the winning piece of the 2019 Hawker Prize to the journal OF ZOOS. His work has appeared in journals including Cordite Poetry Review and PERVERSE, and anthologies including New Singapore Poetries and EXHALE: An Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices.