Two Worlds Poem by Raj Arumugam

See me in my confines;
see me in my space


(i)

See this little beige-walled
and white-ceilinged
world of this unit
in Holland Street, Toowong. See me here in bed,
confined like a patient drugged and sedated.
This little unit with its
dirty orange carpet and the unseen mites teeming
and green-curtained sliding doors
to a balcony closed in with metal vertical blinds.
See me here sitting in my rented gray sofa, before
the walls lined with brown cabinet doors and
behind a narrow room that is the toilet
with cistern, brush, pipe and green-fern papered walls,
that close the space on either sides
of the constipated man seated atop his bowl.
Outside this is a world. A wide world.








(ii)

There is a busy road out there
connecting to busier roads
and the postman cometh on weekdays and
the ice-cream man rideth on Saturdays.
The garbage man on Friday mornings, so forget not
to push your garbage bin
on to the pavement on Thursday evenings.
(What the postman bringeth the garbage man taketh;
the receiver therefore collecteth and transferreth) .
There are traffic lights, a petrol station,
countless units on hills and slopes
and in legacy environment
and then a coffee club, and the news vendor
and the rail and the cashiers with a happy look
and a quick and efficient
How are you today?
dispensing pleasantries as quickly as they rid
the queue of one more customer.
And then officers and co-ordinators
far and wide from whose invisible and
sanctified confines
emerge papers and notifications
offering a feast of nomenclature
and whose silences coerce you to join in the game
of correspondence with bureaucracy.




(iii)

There are two worlds,
the world of the unit and the wide outside world,
and between the two a tenuous connection.
An anti-transactional link
that maintains a language and distribution system
that ensures the two worlds don't meet.
A discourse that excludes the other.






(from The Migrant notes of a newcomer (February 1997- July 1998))