Hallo everyone
Man down for the count this afternoon on the Void beneath Block 11 could only have been Jack, almost certainly no-one else. The only other possible candidate was the gnarled old karung guni formerly wheeling through those parts. That man in fact had not been sighted these four months since the return, like a number of others in the post-Covid lull. Size, colouration, posture and above all the trainers immediately suggested Jack Nasri. From 8 - 9 metres distance with eyes closed, one could not be perfectly sure. That sleeping arrangement with the improvised pillows had not been seen before. Who but J could have found comfort like that? In the section of the Void immediately before a big Indian he looked had rolled up his cardboard double at the head for his own pillowing. Young foreign workers on their lunch breaks often used half-filled 2 litre plastic bottles. In Jack’s case the trainers sufficed and the concrete was no bother. Lately Jack had said he had been feeling useless, confused, struggling with wayward thoughts of wanting to go to one end of Singapore and then the other. The last little while the man had taken up with Busker Rahim, who had slid back to his drinking, a few nights last week Jack surprising belting out some strangely impressive hoarse songs on an karaoke system someone had been bringing along to the Haig outside the bus stop. All the sleepers on the Voids and Jack included when they took some shut-eye chose a place against a pillar or wall. Though no one was likely to tread on a sleeper there, the men always chose that anchorage.
Geylang Serai, Singapore
Fresh green vegetables flown in seemed to be the added selling point on the side of a van stopped in the traffic on Geylang. Further compelling again was the interesting construction: Truth Is Victory.
Pretty right in anyone’s book.
Hello everyone
Two-three seconds after he had gone the odour of urine left behind by the Punjabi loner hung in the air. Judging duration properly meant taking the full draught, without thinking. Fully three seconds; perhaps three point something by the contemporary digital sports clocks. The last week the man had been given something on three separate occasions, a note at the last, after some further thought between times. On that last occasion it became necessary to mark the event, the pen found in the bag, an old supermarket receipt, when the last eighty days since the return there had been almost nothing to prompt any penmanship. Pink biz shirt (albeit soiled) was a surprise when the retreating figure was followed to his turn for the housing blocks; close at elbow it had not been properly taken. One morning an elderly Chinese ahma had stopped for the man and also given him a note. That was the first time there had been witnessed any contact with a single living soul. Early schoolday memories of being thrust into the hostile world that was the whole of the neighbourhood outside our low brick perimeter wall at home stuck fast.
Hello everyone
Hello everyone
 | Bill Wolak has just published his eighteenth book of poetry entitled All the Wind’s Unfinished Kisses with Ekstasis Editions. His collages have appeared as cover art for such magazines as Phoebe, Barfly Poetry Magazine, Ragazine, Cardinal Sins, Pithead Chapel, The Wire’s Dream, and Phantom Kangaroo.His collages and photographs have appeared recently in the 2020 Seattle Erotic Art Festival ... anotherchicagomagazine.net |
