the performance of a lifetime
By kevin martens wong zhi qiang
originally published Friday, 10 may 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.
Try masking this:
endless brighthearted vigilance
against all forms of indifference
and pain.
Try asking for this:
unstoppable creolequingly confidence
that draws big brown squiggly semen-lines
all over your plans
to make it rain
on my dreams. My parades.
My big bold beautiful grandstands.
I am all of every field of insight.
I am tigerfire tenacious.
I am what you are finally daring to understand:
the Third Foundation.
The Kristang queerheroic sensation.
The final answer to that perennial Singapore question:
what might make us superhuman
in Lee Kuan Yew's eyes?
Humanising noninvention
and indefatigable noble intention?
Or just a big lusotoppable bakaboi milkshake
and one hell of a huge Kristang beefstake
served with crisscross double-infinity
individuating frai—
yo sa nomi stanang sayang.
I mask everything and nothing.
Transmetallised.
Hypernonlocalised.
Ultraorganified.
Creolecrystallised.
Supertrees of knowledge that sing
of only the highest form of spektala brightlife.
Biceps that are softest to the touch
and heatiest to the fuck
and made of liquid Kristang martensmagma might.
1200% natural.
12000000000000% normal.
And interminably hefty and cute.
Busking for a fight?
Musk and scent that terrify
only those still intent on hate, and disdain
and perfidiously stupid spite:
let me take a bow on your face,
blow a kiss from the Others and the so-called fake
and that's just the prologue
finally done right.
Here comes the rest of it:
the destiny.
The fate.
The only show on this beautifully broken Earth
that knows what it means to be well and truly
alive.