Poem
White Bastard
A thread through life — one of the many pulled from the tapestry
Sent to school
in a too big white skin
expected to perform
fresh from the garden.
I am someone’s son?
scrabbling to learn tricks
I draw myself with a pencil
an IQ on a stick
making black and white moves
I can’t catch, throw or score
in sport or life
cricket, javelin, football …
Cycling legs escape,
fields of sneezing oil seed
growing sunwards,
I imagine sunflowers.
Walking under the moon,
astronomy,
a starred sky
the lonely painter
Spots of paint,
self-portrait or camouflaged
in landscapes without people
houses muffled by curtains
who am I with my uncut ear?
listening to a first kiss
wet with cigarettes
a tightrope
Suspended, dissociated
between flight and delight
pants on the ground
intellectualising
rotating around my penis
dizzy with gravity
orbit or slingshot
matter or doesn’t matter
Red-haired entanglement
of quantum states
special relatively.
Don’t collapse the wavefront
Do gravitons exist?
Reduce me to a distillate
find my spirit
drunk or sober
Are you holding my hand?
mother or lover
our grandmothers have died,
yours is an inspiration.
Broken child
feeling the pieces
with numbered fingers
before the coming of Ikea
I’ve come from Legoland
with piles of bricks, but no plans.
Buckle-up —
I’m wearing the Van Allen belt
This poem was triggered by watching the film Chevalier recently on a flight. The initial inspiration was triggered by a small boy, the illegitimate son of a French plantation owner and a slave woman. He was being delivered to a posh school to get an education — distant from his family.
Across the aisle of the plane, out of the corner of my eye, I was also watching Barbie on someone else’s screen — and my writing turned into a stream-of-consciousness piece about my journey through life — which could have been easier if I had known more.
© Pablo St. Paul
English writer in Indonesia
