Christian Yeo
Issue 1: RISE, July 2023
i. Ma says the shoe is always on the wrong foot with me. I have been trying to unravel this for a long time. Isn’t it the other foot? I say. Somewhere outside, a crow is shot from the sky. I dislike the violence of aphorisms— dislike their arrogance, dislike their truth. Find them unnecessary, even dangerous. Keeled over contemplating something like we have children to have something to love, or, the world is ending because we wanted it to. This is the pool of light created for the purposes of this exercise, how the Mediterranean curls in on itself like a cat gone to sleep but not to death. A rockhole fills with water, fills with spray, fills with dread for the interminable day. Where you lay your head becomes your home. So it was that the art forms resembled gravestones. There are no more raptors—not as ciphers, simply as raptors. ii. You wake beside world peace. It’s light streaming through the blinds and the hours are long and the day is getting away from you again. Did it happen or was it in the dream where you were an activist? In the dream we started the experiment when the albizias began to blur, stalwarts blending into soundwaves. The figs had fallen directionless—so we were adrift, so we were alive, still amidst a terrible nowness. I no longer want the sensation of flickering, how the crow is temporary and so does not need to live with itself for too long. In the absence of precedent, allow me to love you and believe in the world. iii. Within poems I can be untrue. I can run my hands along the smooth inside surface, implicate myself too little. It’s easy, this business of riding on instincts, lapping up ambiguity like salvation. Earlier in the years we’d have gotten somewhere inverting Ashbery, inspired something better than ideas. I wouldn’t have written poems unable to escape poetry, in place of interceding for mortality. We are no longer talking of shoes, or feet, but we are still talking of wrongs.
Christian is a writer and actor based in Singapore. He has been featured notably in The Mays and Gaudy Boy’s New Singapore Poetries, among many others, and won or placed for a number of prizes including the Bridport Prize. Find him at christianyeo.com.