To be read in the dark, by the first light of morning.

better than glamour: / midnight rain falling softly / upon the black earth

~|~

I attended the Social Star Awards at Marina Bay Sands tonight. Though certainly enjoyable it felt somewhat alien to my own field of experience: this social scrum of media and celebrity, filled with people trying to convince one another that what they’re doing is awesome and amazing and worthy, a world of hype and manufactured excitement hiding something blasé behind the toothy camera-ready grins. It was certainly worth going, and I have no doubt that all of this matters somewhere, somehow. This is where careers and connections are made, part of the great entertainment engine that brings colour and delight to our everyday lives. I love pop culture, and it was good to be a guest there. But at the end of the day I was happy to remain a guest: this is a world I like visiting, but it is not my own world.

And walking home later along the quiet midnight roads my world came back to me, like a dog stretching in greeting and waiting to be petted. At night my vision is poor but my senses of smell and hearing feel sharper, and I walked through a world alive with the scents of rain and grass and earth and flowers like sweetened green tea upon the night air; also rubber and petrol, and urine and beer, and exhaust fumes and something that smelled like origami paper taken fresh from the packet. And through it all the rhythmic click-click of my footsteps on the pavement, and the rustle of canvas, and faint music and vehicle engines dopplering along. Now and again a cat, minding its own business. Beneath my feet the cracks of everyday wear in the ground, and in my head the first lines of what might one day become a blues poem:

I’ve been walking for miles over concrete and asphalt and tile.
Yeah, been walking for miles over concrete and asphalt and tile.
The heat of the day rises wet like the ghost of a smile.

daylight’s book is closed — / now the grass is full of monks / chanting their sutras

This is what I wanted, a long time ago: to sit untroubled in a quiet cafe after sunset, excellent music playing at just the right volume over the bass-heavy speaker system, a book of poems in my lap. Coffee decent. Cars flashing by outside. Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?, sings the voice of Lana del Rey, and the answer is of course perhaps. Life has been full: work, music, laughter, dance, all the pleasures of this world; but it has contained little of that special introspective listening which leads to poetry. This is the challenge of my life now: amid all of the busyness and colour, in the middle of the dust of it all, to make room, to make space for the words to enter in. How long has it been since I actually sat down with a book for its own sake, when reading wasn’t just a way of using time on the way to somewhere else or while waiting for someone else? How long has it been since I simply sat and watched? There are many ways of writing poetry, but a large part of it for me always came from my ability to listen to the world. When the veil of things becomes opaque, then also I am nothing, in spite of wealth, skill, opportunity, companionship, delight. Now it is time to seek it all over again. In poetry there can be no substitute for spirit.

I don’t know why I keep hearing kingfishers calling everywhere around me. I recognize the cries of two different species now, the Collared and the White-throated; their voices are distinctly different from each other. Last night, from the shadows of the trees beyond the blazing white lights of my grandfather’s wake — the old man passed on at ninety-two, full of years — I heard a collared kingfisher shrieking, high and harsh, its voice like white sandpaper across the air. And early again yesterday morning, in the darkness of the city, the same bird, though a different cry. And now outside my window, close by, a white-throated kingfisher is trilling its high whistle of lament. Birds whose voices I never used to notice, now shivering luminous upon the air.

Perhaps it’s because I was working on a kingfisher poem earlier in the week; synchronicity is a natural thing. But whatever the cause they are auspicious birds, harbingers of fair tidings and better days. I hope those days come soon. It’s high time the universe turned in my favour.

Adding their voices now are the merboks and terkukurs, birds my grandfather loved but has not kept in twenty years. Still they call, cooing through the heavy monsoon air, free from their cages, perched on the rooftops.

High familiar cries
shiver through the morning air,
and the sharp grey scents
of tyres and tobacco
spill into the waking day