Love Songs Of A Bull Frog (Centennial 2015) Poem by Andrew Lee

Let us go then, you and I.

Let us go then, you and I...

For a hundred years, this line echoes

around the rims of the ears of poets and anti-poets,

not because it's true or untrue, visionary or revisionary,

but because I never say 'I am I'

and you never echo you are you.

Did we talk to women smiling over a pantless Michelangelo?

Did we finger-smell a young lady's perfumed lips?

Did we kiss her dawn-colored eye-brow?

Is she the epitome of life warped by cruel random forces?

Please don't rationalize your lust or hide a lurking death-wish.

Just stare at your hypocrisy, dark sexual loves, inner fights.

Better to be a self-critical Socrates than a self-deceiving Reverend.

No mortal can outgrow his last shadows.

But you protest, saying your hundreds of hours of meditation

have buried them under the hefty scriptures.

Sure enough, in the middle of the night,

when we ghost-floated back into half-consciousness,

their greenish, smirking eyes lurch out to embrace us,

kissing us all over again... with the stubbornness

of a poodle. Perhaps this is what makes Eliot an immortal:

The strangeness of life in the form of Mr Prufrock

looking honestly at himself.


(Jonathan / Merton Lee, Singapore)