TOH HSIEN MIN

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WHAT WORK FULFILS

Imagine that you were a Trappist monk.
Your order sought to separate from secular society,
and to revive the austerity of the early Cistercians
and their convictions on the rule of St Benedict.
Over the years you labour in the fields, raising horses,
cattle, hogs, sheep and chickens, sowing barley,
wheat, oats and corn, planting potatoes and carrots,
grinding grain into a fine dust in the old but functional
hand mills. You work the butter churn and the rennet.
For under the rule of St Benedict, you must live on
the work you create. If there is a participation
in the creative fuse of your God, you see it
coalescing with the curds, smell it wafted from
the oven where your bread is pregnant with yeast,
and feel it in the refreshed ache in your biceps,
from turning the churn, sixty times a minute.
In this way your products gladden your heart,
when you partake of the bread and the liquid bread
also. From mattins through to evening prayer,
you sanctify the land by what you gently
skim from it.
You are an office worker however.
Trapped in a six-by-six cubicle forty floors up
in prime, Grade 'A' Republic Plaza, where
you send invisible packets through an invisible
gateway through invisible networks to
invisible functionaries, you cannot help but glaze
over the windows at the view once dotted
with semi-conical sampans, now shiny,
like sheet metal, with a sun you do not feel.
You sit in meetings where your boss tells you off
in front of your clients, prepare papers that will be
marked with red ink like your seven-year-old's
exercise book, pick up the phone to lie to people
who could just as wearily decide to commit
a sum that is a quarter of a percent of the budget
for that financial year to your stewardship, even if it is
eight times as large as what appears on the coloured
rectangle that represents all that they have done in that
cold month. You know that it is never anything
to look forward to, you pass it on as quickly
as you can, like a shame the bank your scapegoat
accepts. That paper gestates, and gives birth to
more paper that you can store, carry and wave around,
to pick out boxes upon boxes of nothing that
resembles food, in the chilled section of your local
NTUC Fairprice.
What were your expectations
for this work? Sometimes you seek out the hidden
green patches, like Mount Emily and Labrador Park,
to colonise a bench and try not to regulate
the fluid and mild electricity of the morning air.
You remember the article you had read, somewhere,
on a breezier day, how college students at Dartmouth,
where BASIC was invented and terminals abound,
sometimes went out of campus to their own organic farm,
to tend lettuce and red cabbage and sweet peas.
You can almost see the salad in the cafeteria,
topped off by red wine vinaigrette. There are streaks
of colour, like rose essence on lemongrass, a carpet fair
in a souk, colour blindness tests. Basil jelly on almond
cream. Beethoven on speed. Velvet on sponge.
Here you lay claim to what should have been yours,
unsheltered in a town you negotiate through enough taxi-rides
to suggest that the conduct of your reassignments
isn't yours; but for a moment you can put behind you
your demiurgical negation, in a space of your own creation,
somewhere in between the vacant pocket-money and
the rich gold piercing your eyelids in a throb of blood,
which in your living room would be coming in
through the windows, and the slits of blinds.

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SOLITAIRE

Now I have rediscovered how to give
You up, not give up to you, I will stare
At my cards. We were so competitive
That we competed even in Solitaire.
We had to beat each other, and would love
The other for the truly hurtful losses.
Is it surprising that we nearly drove
Each other mad, bearing each other's crosses?
Now though we're apart it hasn't ended:
It soothes my hurt to know you hurt as badly.
I wouldn't take away this rough and rude
Dynamic even if your life depended
On it, though you know that if I could
Do anything for your good I would gladly.