A Boy in Flower

By kevin martens wong zhi qiang

originally published saturday, 3 august 2024

on tigri sa chang

Koitadu | Content warning

Please first read about my writing in the Skribadorang or Writing section on the Igleza page here before reading the piece below so you have advance warning about the rather spicy things that I often like to write about, and why I choose to write about them, especially in terms of subverting unhealthy stereotypes about gay people, Kristang people, Creole people, Indigenous people, masculinity, neurodivergence, the body, healthy forms of attraction and sexuality, and using my writing to process the severe individual, collective and inter-generational trauma and abuse I have faced across my life.

And so a boy in power
is never worth his heavy-weight in gold;
a boy built like
a radiant gay muscle-bound Kristang tower
must never be spoken of, let alone seen

for anyone else to behold
in his true, natural, non-binary wonder.
Non-violently
I invite searchingly not-yet-queer eyes
to come

all over me

and ponder
what is it that shoots out from inside
my heart and mind,
hyper-pollinating tree and canopy alike.
What yonder

sky-brown Portuguese-Eurasian eyes
are these?
Haunted by farther war-fires.
By lost shores and most unusually
incomprehensible horrors

others have tried to elide?
It’s a jungle out in here
all over this clay-baked skinly-raked fear –

so come inside.
Make it wet, and humid, and clear.

And let me make you mine.
The only time
I will let you see

what truly defines
me is when I saunter,

naked and made with only the most reinvigorated
dreaming life

this once-drowned man-woman Dreamtiger quing
will ever have to bravely and so humidly offer.
You, too, want to bloom and thrive?
We’ll just have to make that sunshine

all that little bit much hotter.