Troy Wong is an Australian poet born to Singaporean parents. His work, written on unceded Dharug and Gadigal land, is published or forthcoming in Antipodes, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Griffith Review, Island, The Marrow, Palette, and The Suburban Review. He is the winner of The Nomad Review “Fragility” Poetry Prize, an Australian Poetry Slam National Finalist, and the founder and creative director of Bread & Butter Poetry Slam.
Back to Blacktown
Back to Blacktown where I taught myself to ride a bike
at twenty, where time’s current has parsed the streets
wider and uplifted so many houses
to the seafoam of the middle crust. You and me in a car
they’ve never seen ghosting the curve of my parents’ corner lot,
my father’s coveted Colorbond curtaining the boundary
as I remember, that same tree fruiting parched lemons
leatherbacked as pre-cancerous skin
only now there’s a carport that extends preposterously out
over the length of the sloped driveway like an upturned chin
so the powder-white brick bunker on the crest of its little hill
reads modestly palatial, though flat and void as a letterbox slot.
Here we steeped in our middle-class misery,
woke and walked out of dreams our ancestors dreamed,
immigrant nightmare in a lucky country.
We perfected resentment, developed strange buoyancies
in our salt baths of silence, sand-walked to preserve terse avoidance,
slipped behind shut doors each into our own unknowability.
You ask me how it makes me feel, this daytime stakeout.
No van in the driveway, though I can’t stop myself wondering
whose eyes may spy us through the blinds’ hairline slits.
A soldier laying down his arms may turn civilian or prisoner;
I became a deserter and remain one still. There’s no thrill
for me in any sort of prodigal return, no pleasure in visiting
again the scene of the crime. Maybe because it isn’t mine.
I release the brake, pull us up the hill and out of the haze.
MUSCLE, MEMORY
MUSCLE
There’s a part for everyone in TOTAL DEFENCE.
The sleeper agent in my housemate activates,
mimicking old military motions as the screen barks
ceremonial verses in the indigenous Malay:
SEDIA. DARI KIRI. CEPAT JALAN. BERHENTI.
In the name of the late great Lee Kuan Yew, amen.
Those collective years of youth spent running drills
in the jungles, on the beaches of the outer islands
haven’t been wasted, though I’m not sure
I can say the same about the taxpayers’ SGD.
Pre-recorded crises are crosscut with live footage of
manoeuvres executed for the crowd in the Padang.
All the army’s toys wheeled out for show and tell,
all the earnestness of kid cousins’ musical numbers
at Christmas or worse, an evangelical nativity play.
COLT, CARBINE, HECKLER & KOCH,
something called a SKYBLADE (???)
the military pantomime marches unresisted
through our living room. I think about the 90s,
the Power Rangers’ practical pyrotechnics
and dramatic camerawork and this is one way
to fortify a people, I guess. EVEN AS WE MEET
WITH CRISIS OR DISRUPTION
OUR STRONG AND RESILIENT NATION
WILL CONTINUE TO GIVE STRENGTH.
Patrols of greenfaced army men stack, then file up
the grandstand staircases, aiming their neutered guns
into the crowd. Livestreaming with fervour,
civilian phones held up at eyeline
look like tiny shields. ALWAYS READY,
READY TO STRIKE. THE UNKNOWN
THREATS HAVE BEEN SWIFTLY NEUTRALISED.
An auntie in a bucket hat waves a Singaporean flag.
MEMORY
Kevin Kwan and my housemate, a PR hopeful,
both went to the same school. I am, by slim degrees
of separation, crazy, rich, and Asian—and we both
bunked national service, I confess in a BookTok,
at which all the dormant Singaporeans activate
and swarm to warn me: BE CAREFUL,
OUR GOVERNMENT NEVER FORGETS.
But what’s it going to do, write a poem about me?
Yell OBJECTION at my wedding? I’ve had worse
interactions at the Bondi Beach Pavilion, although
I realise this too is an arm of TOTAL DEFENCE:
soldier, citizen, dead or deserter, integrated,
amputated, estranged or prodigal son, a face
can only be so greened to anonymity, so whitened
to minimise discomfort. I have two countries,
both fervently recruiting, but in my eighteenth year
when the new intakes commenced their basic training
only one of them sent a letter to insist I was its man.
[‘MUSCLE, MEMORY’ contains some text transcribed from the livestream of Singapore’s 2024
National Day Parade.]