I have known many great rivers in this world. I have known the Tigris and the Euphrates, fallopian cradle to human civilisation. I have traversed the vertiginous lengths of the Iguazu and the Parana, as they discharge the untamed heart of South America into frigid waste seas at the end of the world.
Garden State Palimpsest explores Singapore's constantly changing landscape and its residents' relationship with the land.
We called him Cubbie
Because he was found in a cupboard
in my in-laws’ driveway.
Singapore intimidated me what with long-declared dogma that any personages caught chewing gum—which was banned after vandals had mucked up sidewalks and keyholes and mailboxes and railway doors—
The birds are conspiring again.
An open field means an open agenda,
collusion with the sky.
My mind raced to all the flora and fauna in the world. What if they were dissatisfied with how they looked and tried to be something else? Mutilate their feathers, chop off their rhino beaks or bleed themselves to be redder and louder than their pale petals? Would not an entire species go extinct?
Dead wings or living feathers,
he counts them in flight
against skies wrung with pastels
and traffic babble. Black-naped orioles
are yellow pips in tree-stubble.
By experimenting with differing combinations and possibilities that each material presents, my works offer the audience possible narratives and ways in which to look at and think about the relationship between man and nature.
Desires, fears, surprises, illusions
chop-chop-chop
sold for rupee, dollar or pound.
They all cost the same.
One radical belief that I have is that love, compassion and sympathy are ways to resist the slow, catastrophic destruction of our public and private lives.
When the brown tongue of water
rises up to meet us here,
the house will be gone.
As the day mellowed, the honeyeaters
sang out and we braided a future
from stalks, knowing, once more,
that endless summer brought cold comfort.
It is almost evening. Wind-woven birds call
over the fields, the sky turns a gentle grey--
Mother’s voice a low melody, her footfall
on the chalky steps speaks of the fleeting day…
