| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| weihsin |
Posted - 20 Jul 2004 : 18:59:11
Apologies for adding yet another text to the fishy beast's repertoire. This one, I hope, will be different - those of you who know what concepts I've been working on academically might understand where I'm coming from.
Anyway, here it is. Comments welcome!
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TELEMACHUS BY THE MERLION
[after Edwin Thumboo, Lee Tzu Pheng, Alfian bin Saat, Felix Cheong, and Alvin Pang]
Mother, dearest Mother
I have circled many waters, sought his voice among singers
who unraveled their notes, threaded my way
to this jut of land
foreign under a sky blue and aching as home.
He was here.
The poem on the plaque bears his name,
authored by yet another prophet.
So this is the ponderous beast who blew him away,
deported for tales too dreamy for its practicalities.
This fragment of abrupt imagination,
shored against the ruins of independence;
a legend lionized, the word fleshed in stone,
but no sculpture could have scolded him back to rocky Ithaca.
Now I charge you, protean child of anxious men
who fashioned you out of dismay, speak!
tell me where he is, or where he lies.
What? nothing, nothing
from your mouth but senseless spray,
filling the sea with your affluence?
Which one of these motley cats around you
finally got your tongue?
Did he spare your city his sacking wit,
trade his compass for the wind,
or learn by your panoptic presence
the fickle art of differance
and now, like you, O feckless signifier,
always already elsewhere,
evading those who hail him?
No, you are a figure of speech
weighed down by poems and postcards,
measured by dreams and smoothed by shadows
but he is smoother still.
Mother, O Mother,
I am leaving this port of recall,
I am drinking the wine-dark sea to whatever shore,
and giving him up to the winds.
If you ever see him, tell him
I am living his lesson:
home is where the heart lies.
He was never at home, I am forever at sea.
Gui Wei Hsin
July 20, 2004
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| 9 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| xzonk |
Posted - 19 Aug 2004 : 00:06:15
merlion equal singapore?
i am singa see me pour.
roar. |
| grace |
Posted - 12 Aug 2004 : 12:06:10
We should collect all the Merlion poems and make an anthology out of them. With a Greek-myths primer for someone uncivilised, like me. |
| alf |
Posted - 11 Aug 2004 : 18:20:13
haiku
Merely a lion -
not hot pan-fauna model?
Go to end of queue. |
| grace |
Posted - 11 Aug 2004 : 14:27:09
The Merlion at Crazy Horse
Horny
is best left to the unicorns,
being an ass to the centaurs
and voluptuous to the mermaids,
whose sniveling songs (each to each)
I have endured these long years by the beach.
I've been sexless so long
that I was most surprised of all when I had cubs
(ferocious red-eyed furballs,
scaring blonde tourist toddlers
on the offshore playpen of a smaller island).
I don't know who their fa...mo...other parent is,
or if it's genetic engineering.
Part of someone else's baby campaign.
But offspring aside, I'm here each night,
made-up in lipstick and eyeliner,
copping the odd feel here and there.
No legs to spread? Never mind,
it's all wayang anyway.
Drowning my desires in Tiger beer.
Not with a roar but a whimper.
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| xzonk |
Posted - 23 Jul 2004 : 18:20:05
quote:
Originally posted by alf
What would the centaurs say to the merlion?
my father can eat up your father |
| alf |
Posted - 22 Jul 2004 : 16:11:09
What would the centaurs say to the merlion? |
| Hsien Min |
Posted - 22 Jul 2004 : 09:17:37
The other one I thought of last night, following the Greek characters by the Merlion theme...
Cyclops by the Merlion
Bloody hell!
There is someone uglier than me!
Cheers,
HM |
| alf |
Posted - 21 Jul 2004 : 20:24:16
TITS ON THE MERLION?
or, alternative Hellenised title:
CIRCE AS THE MERLION
I got the job because I know how to stand still
for hours and not say anything stupid or look bored
with my mouth open; just stare straight ahead, don't laugh
while the photographers click and click away until
they are happy. Thirty-odd years and still in the spotlight.
How many supermodels got that kind of track record
and without boob-jobs or having even once to part my
legs? Of course some years its been pretty rough,
been blocked, cut off, and sidelined more than once by
all these lousy imitators springing up left and right,
some so much bigger in the right places, you know?
Very hard to compete. Lucky the Japs are always coming
to watch me do that pout. Though nowadays they got no
shame, like to anyhow touch. Really, whats the world becoming? |
| Hsien Min |
Posted - 21 Jul 2004 : 18:00:39
Not to my taste - it's both dramamama and abstracted at the same time - but I guess other people might go in for this style.
I'm not a fan of the Merlion topos but your poem has nonetheless sparked something off...
Thetis by the Merlion
Even I could not have imagined myself
into something like this: this mute mongrel
perched on the perimeter where land turns to sea
with each aggression of the seahorsed waves.
Had I known it, how different might my story
have been. I had turned into a bird, a tree, a tigress,
but then he who had been subdued
by Menelaus betrayed our common weakness
to the son of Endeis, and once my arms were bound
I had to yield. If only I had been here before,
I might have transformed myself into this creature
with neither arms nor fins nor wings nor branches
to betray me, as puissance turned against itself,
held on to my purity and my unenvisionable hopes,
still become whatever I want to become.
Cheers,
HM |
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