By Jonathan Chan

A Walk with My Pig
Mervin Mirapuri
Pagesetters Services (2023) / 144 pages / SGD 19.00

The publication of Mervin Mirapuri's long poem A Walk with My Pig is itself an impressive act of retrieval. Discovered in fragments after Mirapuri's passing in May 2020, A Walk with My Pig was reconstructed from lines drafted and kept in binders, different manuscripts cross-matched for substantive and grammatical consistency. Born in 1945 of Sindhi origin, Mirapuri would go on to co-found Woodrose Publications with poet Chandran Nair in the 1970s. The imprint saw the publication of Mirapuri's first and only significant prior publication, the poetry collection Eden 22 (1974). Mirapuri would work on A Walk with My Pig between 2005 and 2011.

In the intervening years between 1974 and 2005, he had married, had three children with his wife, left the Singapore Armed Forces as a captain, worked in the private sector, migrated to Brisbane, Australia, in 1988, and had a dismal experience at the Australian Taxation Office as an elderly civil servant, retiring in 2011. Poet and scholar Gwee Li Sui describes Mirapuri's migration as "traumatic", both due to perceptions of backwardness Australians held towards Singapore as well as a series of unsuccessful business ventures and encounters with fraud. All this indicates that A Walk with My Pig was composed at a time of profound disillusionment during his years as a bureaucrat in Australia, in particular due to encounters with ageism.

To read the footnotes of Mirapuri's poem is to be reminded of the scrupulosity of old scholars, perhaps those who study the literature of Middle or Early Modern England, fastidiously checking different folios for differences and similarities, all in pursuit of some authoritative ur-text. A Walk with My Pig first surfaced after Mirapuri's wife and children found a series of poetry-related items among the objects he had left behind, before they eventually contacted Ng Kah Gay, editor and publisher at Ethos Books. Ng and Gwee pieced together the book, asking Mirapuri's family questions on his handwriting, experiences and drafts. As Gwee writes in his introduction:

This is an emphatically unfinished English-language poem on a scale that is rarely seen attempted in our part of the world.

[…]

Pig had been written in obscurity and in a state Mirapuri compared to being in exile. Yet it is unquestionably grand, with both its ambition and style calling for wider attention.

Mirapuri's last work is this great literary secret we suddenly have, and secrecy makes it an artefact to be treated with care.

Perhaps such profound editorial attention is fitting given the grandiosity of Mirapuri's work, amounting to what could probably be described as the magnum opus of his oeuvre. The reconstructed poem stands at 2,890 lines over six chapters, with its first chapter alone holding 1,044 lines. Long, individual, book-length poems are scant in the history of Singapore's Anglophone poetry. Teo Poh Leng's 1937 poem F.M.S.R., written under the pseudonym Francis P. Ng about a train journey between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, is perhaps the most notable example, deeply steeped in the modernist influence of T.S. Eliot. The impulses of epic mythmaking have also been present in the poems of such poets as Edwin Thumboo. Mirapuri's poem recalls both much older long poems – Gwee likens the journey motif of A Walk with My Pig to the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh and Dante Alighieri's 14th-century Divina Commedia – as well as more contemporary ones, such as Basil Bunting's Briggflatts (1966), Ed Dorn's Gunslinger (1968) or Derek Walcott's Omeros (1990).

To Gwee, A Walk with My Pig recalls the "tradition of a spiritual expulsion from common life", with Mirapuri's speaker an exilic figure despite having arrived at "a supposed Promised Land". It would be remiss not to mention parallels to John Milton's 17th-century Paradise Lost, as well as Mirapuri's Eden 22, which itself was entwined with a retelling of the narrative of original sin. And if the metanarrative of Briggflatts is the history of Cumbria, England, while Gunslinger draws on the myths of the American West and Omeros is animated by Homer's Iliad, the base text that holds A Walk with My Pig together, with its strands of living post-migration, cynicism towards global capitalism and tempestuous Christian contemplation, is the book of Isaiah. The first Major Prophet of the Christian Old Testament, the book of Isaiah details the judgment, exile and restoration of Jerusalem, of a cleansing after its captivity under Neo-Assyrian Mesopotamia and invasion by Babylon, and a return to righteousness through a covenant forged with God. Gwee argues that the poem's "true North" is verse 31 from chapter 40 of Isaiah:

But those who hope in the Lord
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.

Gwee describes how the centrality of Isaiah, a prophecy of reassurance to the Jews in exile, "sets exile as the work's emotional context, and so, like God's uprooted people, its main persona is caught between divine calling and the lure of Babylon."

The emergence of the figure of the pig in Mirapuri's poem was facilitated in part by an email from his daughter Dawn in 2005, describing Israeli customs and checkpoints during a trip to Palestine. Perhaps the proximity of Biblical to political geography, or even the sense of exilic captivity Mirapuri might have identified in the Palestinian situation, might have instigated his own mapping of his experience as a Singaporean migrant to Australia. Perhaps it is unsurprising that of the many figures who came to mind as I read Mirapuri's poem, Mahmoud Darwish was one of them.

Mirapuri's poem begins and ends as an extended contemplation, an interior odyssey, a meandering examination of the speaker's psyche. It resuscitates a litany of voices, polyphonic dialogues that spar and engage with one another, setting up a key series of relational dynamics throughout – grandfather and grandchildren, rich and poor, client and sex worker. The image and position of the exile shapes much of the poem. Despite its length, Mirapuri relies on short, curt lines, sometimes arriving with the gravitas of an utterance in a conversation. It begins with an introduction to the exilic speaker with a single word, one that recalls the beginning of Moby Dick: "Shalom". The speaker proceeds:

I am not without spirit you say
that I cannot relate to what is around me
So you have walked the lands
seen the oppressed of Jerusalem
and the surrounds

Landscape not constructed only weathered and used
abused with emotional hot flushes

Blurred sensitivities
blotted with uneven haphazard destruction

Better the smells of an unwashed unclean zoo

You have seen the contrite hearts one in every pew
the wounded innocent

Forgive us our trespasses

Intolerable smugness
Intellectual arrogance

Blessed are they
Blessed am I

Some in the garbage dump
looking for something
anything

Someone to hold in to
Some looking for a home

(I.1–24)

The poem's opening lines set up the poem's primary concerns. A sense of the exilic is activated by the reference to the "oppressed of Jerusalem", those addressed in the book of Isaiah. The speaker's landscape, "weathered and used / abused", "blotted with uneven haphazard destruction", not only intuits the desolation of a new home, but also forms of environmental degradation. This gestures towards the entwining of environmental concerns and capitalist critique that emerges in the rest of the poem. It recalls the sense of desolation in the Malaysian landscape present in the writing of Wong Phui Nam, but equally, the apocalyptic visions of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland.

The juxtaposition of a new home with the preferred "unwashed, unclean zoo" and "the garbage dump" create a sense of the bestial, or animalistic, a veiled reference to the fact that the "I" of the first chapter is a pig. Yet, the illustration of "contrite hearts" in "every pew", marked by an "Intolerable smugness", grounds the frustrations of an exiled community in a spiritual setting of repentance. There is a suggestion not only of the coexistence but the interdependence of sacred and profane that recurs throughout Mirapuri's poem.

Not only is the poem's speaker a pig, but it is a dead pig. The first chapter features the speaker ruminating:

My brains can continue to not be dead
It may not be alive
but it is most certainly not dead
It will be kept frozen
awaiting the cure for death
I will be reborn
cancer warts and all
gone

(I.75–82)

The pig exists in a realm of consciousness, separate from its corporeal form, anticipating a bodily resurrection by scientific means. By contrast, the speaker addresses a "you" that is kept "alive / in the sty" (I.113–114), with feet that "Hurt so much / from walking and waiting" for "a little rest / a wash", "a little foot massage" (I.126–127, 131–133). The pigs must continue walking through the realm of exile, where "The legacy and heritage of [their fathers has] been demolished", after the destruction of places "where Eden was", now "used as transit recycle centres" (I.354, 358, 361). Mirapuri contrasts the desire for the establishment of a new home ("We are trying to build the city on the hill with the rock / Jerusalem", I.396–397), looking to the antecedents of Creation (I.448) and idealised leaders like Moses (I.449) with continuing poverty and squalor. The speaker describes children "drinking water with animal poo mix" (I.244) and the deprivation of not "much left to share / Too many pig eaters / vandalised the garden" (I.464–467). The speaker vacillates between utterances of decrepit conditions, the comfort of Biblical rhetoric, and a persistent cynicism towards the position of the exiled pigs.

The cynicism of Mirapuri's omniscient dead pig contrasts with the exuberance of the speaker he introduces in Chapter 2: a Singlish-speaking pig breeder who embodies and extols the values of hard work.

Unlike the exilic position of the pigs in Chapter 1, the pig breeder seems firmly ensconced in a Singaporean context, albeit in the grip of social and class pressures. This section feels like a detour of sorts, with the pig rendered an object through the lens of a pig breeder, a ripe source of revenue. The pig farmer's ability to sell pigs provides the means of his socioeconomic mobility. The assumption of a pig farmer persona, particularly from the position of university-educated Mirapuri, recalls similar attempts by Wang Gungwu to capture the voices of pig farmers in his 1950 poem 'Municipal Prose-Poem'. Mirapuri is somewhat more successful in capturing the verbal cadences of Singlish. The section begins with a conversational coda: "To market to market / we go buy fat pig" (II.1–2), perhaps spoken not by the breeder himself, but as the mantra that facilitates his business. He spots dead pigs on the street, one that is "raped in broad daylight in the alley", another "not die yet / run away into the river", belonging a lady "in coma" (II.5, 8–9, 13–14). To demonstrate his professionalism, he declares "As pig breeder / I now make my claim / I take responsibility" (II.37–39).

This allows the rest of the section to be set up as a form of legal testimony. The pig breeder revels in a kind of credibility, declaring in court:

I replied I was a sole proud owner operated pig breeder
I have my farm. Big farm. Many pigs. Many pigs. Many farms.

I just walk with my pigs
when I take them on their rounds to breed

Here, Mirapuri begins to examine some of the conspicuous markers of material success recognised and affirmed in the context of Singapore. The breeder's sense of worth is tied to his mother who "kiss my feet / say I very good boy / Breeder of pigs is hard job" (II.127–129). The pigs "make me how to say / plenty money / Yah so many money" (II.138–140). The breeder's anxieties come into contrast with a friend "go school and then go uni / always carry the book" and "use big word English". The friend calls him "pig father / I dirty and very stupid carry the pig dung and sell for people garden" (II.166–172). The breeder's comeuppance is to drive a superior car, take care of his mother, bring her to "see America China and England and German", and send his children "study there" to "become more clever than other people other country" as "doctor and lawyer" (II.199, 201, 205–206). He envisions a child who can "make bigger pig and many farm / after he come back" and "take American or English girl", allowing him to wear "the coat and tie" to "eat the steak" and "drink the whisky" (II.209–213).

There is a curious sense of contradiction here – the breeder insists on the dignity of his labour but retains a hope for his child to enter white-collar work. The breeder sees in the promised cultural capital of tourism, a foreign education and cuisine a possibility of being ascribed a kind of begrudging respect. By the time Mirapuri left Australia, the Singaporean government had progressively phased out the domestic pork industry altogether, rendering such possibilities completely imaginary.

The poem reaches a kind of apex in the decadence of its third chapter. Again, there is a diversion from the exilic experience of Mirapuri's pigs in Chapter 1, and the pig breeder's earnest appraisal of his ascension in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 shifts its focus from pigs to eagles, as in the metaphor employed by the prophet Isaiah to uplift the oppressed Jews. Mirapuri draws on the language of the festival, of jubilation, to demarcate a new era – "I now proclaim / there will be no more dead pigs" (III.3–4). Punishment for the slaughter of pigs consists of several Promethean measures: being "stuffed in the dead pigs' cavity / and given to the defeathered eagles / to be smoked in the sun" (III.9–11). The chapter is filled with lavish, luxurious culinary imagery, divine provisions to address the hunger left from an absence of pork:

I give you the all time favourites
of the gods
prepared by my Iron Chefs
Tasmanian mussels
cooked in Japanese saki Chinese red wine
Moroccan spices
garnished with olives neem leaves pistachios
served with Russian beer
finished off with Indian milk sweets
on death by chocolate

There is more tomorrow
There is a bottomless pit of wants

(III.18–29)

Mirapuri begins to introduce a more recognisable vernacular, one more proximate to the 21st century. It is a lexis of commodification and globalisation, of the importation of new cuisines and ingredients, in the reconfiguration of decadence through culinary pluralism. The poem hints at this in its first chapter, with the introduction of the voice of the speaker's grandchild. There is perhaps a sense that the exilic deprivation experienced by the pigs precedes a migration to more abundant pastures. The child says to his grandparents:

Granma there are lots of new things to mack on
Tandoori Thai Mediterranean and many many many more
All fat free with your choice of salads
all garden fresh

(I.1041-1044)

The use of "mack" suggests the arrival of Australian slang. The ready availability of a variety of culinary options is itself a symptom of interconnected, criss-crossing supply chains. It is a solution, but not an antidote, to deprivation. Mirapuri's cynicism begins to stir once again. The omniscient "I" of Chapter 3 issues decrees, like the voice of an Old Testament God: ladies with tickets must "enjoy the pleasures / of creamed strawberries" and those who do not use them must "eat their weight in mussels" (III.80, 84), while men "will continually beat their heads / with the shells of the mussels / packed in Russian beer cans" (III.55–57). The flipside of decadence is compulsion; gorging oneself becomes its own punishment, not unlike the hedonism of ancient Romans who vomited in order to eat more. All for "a festival of creation / a festival of eagles" (III.107–108).

Gwee suggests that the animal metaphors describe less "immutable types of human nature" but "socio-cultural stances": the pigs a form of "crass, servile existence" while the eagles are "expert opportunists". Yet, as Chapters 4 and 5 demonstrate, the opportunism that is essential to capitalism turbocharges its own moral rot. Mirapuri's critiques of the global capitalist order of the 21st century are given some place in his earlier chapters. In Chapter 1, the speaker declares:

      too many times
      working out the bottom line
      Dollars and cents

      Throw away the sweat shops
      New wave of imperialism
      The debt is forgiven

      I inherited the obligation
      to right the wrong
      I move from the infinite to the finite

      (I.778–785)

Mirapuri seems to write of a restoration, almost akin to the Biblical Jubilee year that portends the forgiveness of debts and serves as a reset of Israel's economy and community. Mirapuri's call to remove the conditions of exploitative labour, to recognise the "finite" resources humans hold on to, as well as the "imperialism" that requires such a reset speak of the radical upending he envisions for global capital. In this way the metonymic "I" can "right the wrong". "You have your freedom / I have mine / Now we are equal / I soar as an eagle" (I.764–766), he writes. The opportunism of the eagle is unshackled from capitalist ambition.

However, this idealism is sidelined in Chapter 4, where globalisation and capitalism are shown to have infiltrated the most intimate settings in the form of consumer habits. Mirapuri writes of "tickets" that provide an illusory gateway:

Take a ticket. Stand in queue. These are free tickets. For you.

Tell me where the tickets are from
what are they good for
what do you get free
what's the catch
I know there is no such thing as a free lunch
Do I have to queue are they being raffled off or drawn from a basket

No they were just tossed in the air

[…]

So dance like a butterfly and catch
catch as many as you can
you silly imbecile

            (IV.1–8, 14–16)

According to Mirapuri's family, he actually kept blank slips of paper folded in his pockets that he would distribute to friends, which he called "tickets to Heaven" as "you go to Heaven by faith and not by sight". The contrast of serious and unserious is a source of humour throughout the poem. Yet, the mockery laced in this section of the poem suggests how the tickets provide some means of satisfying material desires with no promise of earthly reward. A foolishness, perhaps, provoked by Mirapuri's design.

This signals the speaker's desire to tap on a desperation for forms of economic power, where other forces conspire to obscure the sources of real power. In Mirapuri's estimation, these may include "Celebrity politicians", who in their inebriation can perform acts of sexual harassment with impunity, forgetting "to take away / the rose they stuck on your sweet fanny" (IV.23–25). They include the corporate bosses who exploit the desires of "a go getter" who strive "to achieve just achieve", willing to "come to your office without wearing any panty / give you a good head" (IV.53, 55–56). They include the state entities that force one to "[prepare] for war / trying to be a soldier / to quality for the Veteran's Affairs / medicating to return and fuse into society" (IV.150–153). All in service of "hunting your food way out of poverty / the tribal method", where the "village people / carry Maslow's hierarchy of needs" (IV.96–100). Mirapuri's life as an Australian civil servant even seeps into this obsession with productivity: the speaker hears from the pig that "you gave me a crown / Only thing is I don't see it". He continues:

You must have pawned it to pay judgement costs
and thought you too could get away with it

Sorry I am on to you
I work in the fraud department
The more charges I frame
the better my job will be
They will have to give me more staff
to continue the good work
And when they are charged object even better
So much work

A cobweb of noise and words looking for light and direction
It is a good feel
           
(IV.237–248)

Hard work is rewarded by hard work. The temporary satisfaction of being granted more responsibility. Mirapuri leaps between depraved asymmetries and pop culture references, the banalities of corporate speak and the anxieties of making a living. The matter-of-factness of Mirapuri's tenor is actually quite funny, a jibe at the archetype of the long-suffering, diligent civil servant.

Ultimately, these patterns of individual compulsion are governed by larger forces at hand. When the speaker's grandchild asks "Granpa which country am I," the speaker replies "Global vaccination cures pandemic waves / Egalitarianism / Too much central global control" (IV.257–260). Immigrant identities are but one component of global flows of human labour, just as the flows of vaccines can cure the global spread of a disease. The concordance of consumerism, capital accumulation and indulgence demand a punishment. Mirapuri mashes together an array of defining traits of the early 21st century in the chapter's closing – terrorism, American counterterrorism and attention spans:

In the highlands somewhere
without the Edinburgh Festival of Culture and Mythology
In search of weapons of mass destruction
mass marketing of the pork crackling

Suckling pig
Roast leg of pork
Obesity

A new generation of fat people
Fat people get lazy
Lazy people get fat
Lean pork is good
There is no such thing as a fat pig

I just might send them some more
tsunamis cyclone floods fire and melt their glaciers
Then they might send the CIA to look for my eye
and the mightiest force they can muster
with the Special Forces
Keep the chemicals for later when the attention subsides

But careful with chemicals and animals
All creatures great and small
they too can die
These people have the attention deficit syndrome
We have the time to play while they absorbed elsewhere

(IV.618–640)

Mirapuri's references are anthropological and political, castigations of human nature transformed by mass marketing, deprived of any high-minded scholarly aspirations, deserving of divine punishment. Perhaps the omniscient pig wills itself the power to cast down a Biblical set of natural disasters, provoking a response from the CIA and the Special Forces. Mirapuri's non-sequiturs and seeming leaps of logic posture, perhaps, to the instability and incoherence induced by the rapid transformations of the contemporary era. Being written in 2011, they prefigure the all-encompassing assault on human attention via the ubiquity of smartphones and social media. In such instances, Mirapuri almost seems a progenitor to poets such as Daryl Lim Wei Jie, whose Anything But Human seems an echo of A Walk with My Pig.

These asymmetries of power, between individual and hegemonic entities, are put in even more visceral terms in Chapter 5. Here, the central image is that of the "pig phucer". For all of Mirapuri's comfort in dredging up depravities as he sees them, it is ironic to see his squeamishness towards spelling out the word "fucker". Sexual predation becomes the heartbeat of Mirapuri's critique in Chapter 5. Sex is a threat and a flexing of muscle. Sex is an exercise of power over material and immaterial beings. A newly introduced "you" is supposed to "phuc the demons out of you / not get phuced", provoking the response:

Was that amoral immoral equality plurality shameless he she male
a plain sex addict maybe nympho
a bloody pervert
Were you defective at birth with screwed up genetic engineering

(V.6–10)

Bursts of intense sexuality are dotted throughout the poem, but it is here that they spill into the centre of Mirapuri's poem. Sex addiction and impotence circle one another.

Mirapuri introduces a range of figures bound to different structures of sexual relation. He introduces child sex slaves. "One is eleven the other nine / The eleven is a virgin / Done oral since she was 4," the speaker describes (V.27–30). Sold "for fees for university" by their parents, the elder "Loves ice cream and lollies / Good wind in her chest when she blows / This is no deep fried chicken finger licking well" (V.31–35). Mirapuri takes his cues from Nabokov's Lolita in illustrating such perversion, though this forms a contrast to the speaker's own contrastingly tender treatment of his children. He introduces a "very phucable man" that the speaker slept with; 20 years after their separation "That breaks me up" (V.39, 44–45). The speaker experiences "the stigma / of sleeping with dead pigs" and of "many seeds dispersed we don't know where" (V.41–43). He introduces an Adam "from the MIT" with "A pig headed gentleman condescension" who enjoys women "grown but shaven" (V.64–67). Other kinks emerge: "Rub his sperms on your chest / and claim the dead pig said that was good for your skin", "Use toothbrush to give me orgasms", "Be a real firecracker", "Throw away the lotus the Kama Sutra" (V.85–86, 114, 119, 122). Perhaps Mirapuri's aim is to shock, to illustrate what are perceived to be sexual deviations to demonstrate new forms of extremity of addiction.

The thresholds of sexual acceptability continue to shift and be pushed, with forms of depravity the logical corollary of capitalism's penchant for commodifying people. In a latter portion, the speaker declares of the denizens of a city:

I could rape you in broad daylight
and no one would see or see and be moved
A judgemental jackass extols the virtues of a defeathered eagle

(V.217–219)

The city, the symbolic agglomeration of capital, also captures the fraying of social relations. Debased sexual violence draws no compassion. A defeathered eagle has lost its drive. Dehumanisation is commonplace within a hypercapitalist fold. Mirapuri's mind turns over its contradictions, its cruelties, its consequences.

Perhaps it is somewhat predictable that all of Mirapuri's vacillations and ruminations about the forces he sees at play – capitalism, globalisation, sexualisation – he cannot help but be drawn back to the rhetoric of the Christian God and to conversation with a grandchild. Mirapuri ends Chapters 1, 2 and 5 with some form of dialogue between a parent or grandparent and a child. He ends Chapter 4 with an exhortation to forgive the "lazy pigs".

It is in Chapter 6, titled 'Eye of the Pig', that the swirling morass of Mirapuri's visions and contemplations find their fulfilment and conclusion, perhaps unsurprisingly, in Christian liturgy and domestic relation. There is a sense to which Mirapuri can be seen as an analogue not just to the prophet Isaiah, who delivered his prophecies in poetic form, but also to the beleaguered Job and the exiled John of Patmos. Mirapuri assumes a maximalist position, the "I" bursting forth with similar energy to Walt Whitman's "I" in 'Song of Myself'. The section is prefaced not by proclamations from Isaiah, but the beginning verses of the book of Genesis and the Gospel of John, addressing the "beginning" of all creation. It is within the eye of a pig, like the eye of a storm, where Mirapuri rouses a sense of awe and sublimity:

I am the eye
I am the eye of the tiger
of the dragon

I am the eye of the tiger
of the dragon
of the phoenix

I am the deep of the ocean
the abyss of stillness

I am the fury of the winds
on the hair of your skin

I am the eye of the tornado
twisting the covers of your houses

I am the emptiness
of the heavens
you do not want

I am the fullness
of the clouds in colourful skies
that brings you rain

I am the rainbow
with the promise of a new beginning

(VI.1–20)

The breadth of Mirapuri's images recall the climactic confrontation between God and the long-suffering Job, which reveals no direct answers regarding the agony he experienced, but is illustrative of divine grandeur. Mirapuri's use of the anaphoric "I am" seems a reference to God being known as "Yahweh", or the great "I am" in Jewish and Christian tradition. Mirapuri's references to extremities and contrasts, the oceans and the abyss, winds and the hair, tornadoes and emptiness, intuit an all-encompassing sense of divine presence, recalling both Job but also, curiously, the metaphysical writings of Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi and the poetry of A.R. Ammons. The speaker continues:

I am the circle
you keep going around and around

I am the lark in the air
that circles without a spiral

I am the road that
has no end

I am the confusion
the frustration of the jigsaw with the missing piece

[…]

I am the winters of your discontent
I am the spring of your creation
I am the summer of your growth
I am the autumn of your fall
I am the orgasm of your creation
I am the finite and the infinite

(VI.39–46, 72–77)  

Mirapuri's ruminations extend to the cyclical, circularity present in the Buddhist tradition, the phenomena that extend beyond human perception, the seeming impenetrability of intellectual knots like koans. Mirapuri cites the seasons, referencing Shakespeare and the biblical parlance of creation coming into being via "birth pangs". Finitude and infinitude seem a call back to Mirapuri's critiques of humanity's excessive resource consumption.

Then the poem pivots. The voice of the grandchild breaks through the declarations of a divine figure from the eye of the omniscient pig. "Granpa I want to start at the beginning," the voice says, "I can see this / I can I play with this / I can build this" (VI.78–82). This introduces Mirapuri's last sequence critiquing the vagaries and banalities of contemporary life. In response to his grandchild, the speaker responds "Look for the eye. / My eye" before describing a kind of monasticism:

I will be a monk and shave my hair
and give up the eyebrows
exile myself
on Napoleon's island
If you can find me and catch me
and my eye
And you are my eye
Better still you can take my eye
use it
Make your own virtual reality
Bingo
Be the one eyed Jack
Better still come on Tuesday at happy hour
Come every Tuesday
Then you can have the other eye too
Grab one and get the other one free
Secular marketing makes it easy

(VI.103–119)

Again, the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane, the high-minded and crass, intermingle in Mirapuri's lines. The crude commercialism of a happy hour setup makes the seeming enlightenment found in the eye seem like a cheap product. The vision of the exilic monk, treasure protected at a remove, is undercut by the easy availability of the eye at a bar on a Tuesday night. Mirapuri's lines recall the parlance of daily life in Brisbane.

This continues onto Mirapuri's continued critiques of consumerism and a banal developmentalism. "The surveys tell you the pulse of the people / So let's go shopping / with all these vouchers / Flybuys all prepaid" (IV.213–216), the speaker writes, referencing the impulse to collect coupons and tickets. "You would not be able to list all the coffees they have in the café / No more coffee shops / or the teas they have in the tea holes" (IV.248–250), the speaker admonishes, tiring of the excess of variety, of the addictions of "Coffee with opium" (VI.255). The speaker describes plans to "give them homes", ensure the provision of "good clear clean water" and "waste treatment plans" and "some development on the north side" all to "keep many executives' jobs going / for a whole career lifetime" (IV.306–311). The speaker describes "new change [programs] / scrubbed in the hearts and minds of all", ostensibly for areas occupied by the Australian Defence Force in the Middle East in the 2000s (IV.340–341). "Better to grants than to the taxman / and better beds and hospitals for the regular people" who "keep abusing the medical benefits given", the speaker derides. "Looks good to be seen caring", on "ungrateful infidels / all waiting to come over to the lucky country" (IV.343–351–352–355). As an officer with the Australian Taxation Office, Mirapuri is likely to have been privy to the collection and disbursement of funds via government spending, and equally disillusioned with its priorities and allocations.

Mirapuri's return to the figure of God by the poem's conclusion is perhaps significant because it signals his breaking through his cynicism. This is not to say that Mirapuri held no cynicism to the structures of organised religion. Rather, Mirapuri's is a call to return to what he sees as the "basics" of existence, the "core of what has gone wrong", the fact that "God was not sleeping / We just forgot to listen" (VI.377–384). The severance from a divine source caused "the magic" to "very very slowly [ease] away" (VI.389). The defeathered eagle and dead pig return – the dishevelled opportunist, the slain servility. The figures that represent fundamental human positions and temperaments, the devastation of both by the systems structured around their desires. How does Mirapuri respond?

Love conquers all the defeathered eagle says
He still lives
They that wait upon the Lord will soar like an eagle – he thought
But what that has to do with the price of fish wow
I might get my feathers back again – one day again I shall fly
For now I will quietly watch dead pigs and dead pigs and scavenge the             dead rat before the living rats scavenge me
Then he remembered hearing the old promise
that every valley shall be exalted
and every mountain shall be made low
and the crooked shall be made straight
and the rough places made plain
And hey all that was free
All he needed was to love in faith and listen to the sound of silence
 
Be still and know that I am

Man was I stupid or what
I didn't have to eat dead pigs at all

(VI.410–425)

The lines of Isaiah make their return, somewhat unvarnished, relayed almost ad verbatim from the Bible. It is tempting to say that a kind of religious comfort or security forms both the climax and catharsis of this poem, but it seems to be what Mirapuri regards as a solution to the disenchantment of contemporary life. Isaiah's prophecy calls for a restoration of the righteousness of Jerusalem. In Mirapuri's estimation, both the eagle and the pig will face a bodily, physical restoration, and the inequities and injustices he has seen will be fixed. A fundamental, religious reorientation, a metaphysical grounding, a humbling within the form of faith is what Mirapuri seems to have regarded as a palliative to contemporary life. The last two lines are also quite funny.

So ends Mirapuri's odyssey, a deeply inward journey through the interior landscape of his intellectual, spiritual, and emotional life. The pig ceasing to be a mere reflection of the social ills Mirapuri observed in Australia and elsewhere, but a personal companion through his depths and sorrows. It may be tempting to regard the poem merely as the mutterings of a disillusioned old man, sifting through disappointments in the last, unhappy phase of a career of an unfulfilled migrant dream. However, that would disregard the richness of Mirapuri's cadences, the studding of his poem with allusions, and the sheer discipline and temerity needed to craft a continuous poem of such marked ambition. Mirapuri's vantage point is as something akin to a prophet, observing and discerning and decrying matters of moral objection. Mirapuri's poem inscribes itself within a grander prophetic tradition. A prophet is not without their fears and frustrations, hopes and disappointments, but a prophet continues their work of truth-telling out of obedience to a divine master. The discovery and reconstruction of Mirapuri's poem is a remarkable achievement, one that Singapore, as well as Australia, will be all the better for.

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