Jee Leong Koh

from Ungovernable Bodies 

39. Vinz 

May 20, 2007 (Sun), my place. Met on downelink.com

Was it too quick
for a sonnet
to hold and lick
the internet-

discovered trick,
the disconnect
between a prick
and alphabet?

Almost slapstick,
the come-and-get-
it, not the thick,

firm epithet,
impolitic,
and yet, and yet…

78. Kevin 

February 15, 2009 (Sun), met at Sports Bar
He came up to me. 46 yo but looked younger. Went back to his apt in Jersey City. 
Flirting & touching in PATH train. Lots of art in apt. A Roy Lichtenstein he found in the dump.

We won’t save the burning world by recycling Roy,
the incorporated world, so greedy and so abstract,
the burning so intent on slurping up all the oxygen,
the masters test-driving their rockets to other stars,

but if Marcuse is right and the death wish, hell-bent
on relieving the agony of tension in the brunt of it,
converges on the same end as the keen wish for life,
we will survive in another form, unjustly and guiltily.

Did we think we would escape with our innocence
intact? Did we think we could redeem past actions?
Did we think the world a darling and not a dump?

We’ve always been saving art from a burning house,
the cries of terror in our ears, the eye-searing images,
and no paradise, not love’s, can make up for the pain.

Jee Leong Koh is the winner of the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize in English fiction for Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an insignificant Japanese poet. He has published two books of poems with Carcanet: Steep Tea, named a Best Book of 2015 by UK's Financial Times and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the US; and in 2022, Inspector Inspector. Originally from Singapore, Koh lives in New York City, where he heads the literary non-profit Singapore Unbound (https://singaporeunbound.org/), the press Gaudy Boy, and the journal SUSPECT.