Andrew Lee

Two roads diverge in a mellow wood
with rugged paths and uphill roads further ahead
that are dim or half-hidden.
When I try to glimpse ahead, the paths snake away
...

In the middle of the night, a poem walks into a London fog,

watching a train that runs along a grey track.
...

Blood dripping from the pages of history books,

wartime pictures, dried bones, graveyard stones,
...

Much depends
on recalling,
seeing
those times and days
...

Twenty grey pigeons, swallowing raw rice, half-staring at me?

Twelve long-necked swans, basking in the sun, ignoring me?
...

The bougainvilleas become molecules of memory with red petals.

They run around like our ancestors' blood.
...

My mother is a fish, William Faulkner sings.

I ponder from 1 A.M. to 3 A.M.
...

A few friends jokingly label me 'John Donne of Singapore.'

I wish I can qualify, in some small way.
...

Let us go then, you and I.

Let us go then, you and I...
...

Our eyes dark with hunting, we ignore the place

where the sidewalk ends. But the green garden rests quietly there,
...

Something hits the green pond and repeats the froggy plops.

Please don't hear things, unless they are snarling
...

I hugged my young child closely.

Tears dried the dirt
...

May She keep close.
Closer than our translucent skin.
She comes from the sky within,
consoling, faceless, but appreciates more faces
...

Part I

The pebbles have no names or status divide,
and appear religious in their special way.
...

I squish the flesh, rind and pulps of an orange, tasting the juice, talking quietly to Bloom, who specializes in probing the psyche. He whispers a few jokes to himself, to drive away a rising lake of gloominess. Someone is kissing his wife in the evening light behind a veil of pink curtains. He turns his head away and says, 'Well, I should be happy for her.'

Maybe he's old beyond his biological age and struggles to be a sort of big-hearted follower of the Buddha. In the meantime, the flavour of his wife's perfume lingers on the tip of his nose.
...

My Heaven stretches its arms across the beach and inside the smiles of hippie girls at Karom Beach, their hippie glasses and varnished nails paint a glittering picture of Phuket. Soon the waves become rows of orange cupcakes that appear and disappear near sunset and I continue to daydream...

With a shock, I realize I've been taking pictures of tsunami-stricken spots. And all around those spots, the roots of trees have elongated ears and spidery fingers that clutch at the exoskeletons of crabs, spinning webs of shadows for the living and the dead.
...

Inside my Singaporean dreamscape in the dress of a haiku,

there are no blocks of HDB flats and no concrete forest.
...

Where's Happy, my poodle that leaps, rolls and sleeps

near my feet for eight years.
...

Can a haiku grow up in a nonconformist season,

not listening to the count of syllables and political slogans,
...

A warrior slices a grape into two pieces,

spilling blood onto the forehead of a bullfrog.
...