Satori Blues (Excerpts)

What fails to be reined in
pushes out, freezes, breaks off—crashes.
No telling who might place a chunk
in their mouth. (Who wouldn’t pay to watch them
taste it?) Some protrusions merge with air, but
not before melting a little, flowing everywhere
within the self, hardening in places it never
meant to make a home.

*

Fields of emptiness between the wild arc
of electrons and every atom—a vacuum not
nothing after all, but the purest form
of something like compulsion that fixes
us into being, stopping the self from
coming, no, flying everywhere apart.

*

What we talk about when we talk about loss
are the catastrophes: walls collapsing
and the terrible flood. What we forget is what
we fail to detect: the line opening like an eye
from one end of a dam to another;
a startled look and the averted vision
at a wrong word at yet another wrong time.
Loss is an ever-growing thing. The same
is true of how we win.

from Satori Blues by Cyril Wong

Cyril is a singaporean writer known for his lyrical poetry. View more of his work here at http://cyrilwong.org