by Daryl Lim Wei Jie
Bougainvillea blooming so thick and resplendent they consume the bridge they adorn a bright pink float promising deliverance from this weary rational realm
The dragons perched on the Chinese temple offer transport to the heavens on their backs which glisten like that twink’s last night
Guanyin our mother & father gazes with a benevolence so searing I tear & say thank you thank you for just listening
Second-hand bookstores where aging books passed through many eyes and hands find themselves felt up by eager young things
& as these boys squeeze pass each other in the narrow aisles their sidelong glances linger to gawk at what’s being brought home for the night
The ice-cream uncle whose bell is a chime ringing me out of my sweaty secondary school boy self fills up a plastic cup with more colours than the rainbow & if I’m not feeling that then a bar of raspberry ripple my eyes follow the purple swirl into its natural entrancing centre
biting into it I am hit with the whiff of berry esters & its industrial comfort is all I need to get through another day of being uncomfortable in my flabby prison
In front of the dance club a hostess is doing up a kolam that brings my breathless march to a halt
telling me to lose myself in its rice flour corridors & hide forever beneath a cloak of blood red petals as the beat begins to pulsate & my evening stretches out like a willing victim before me
The oily green jungle where in the dark there is a suspicion of jostling forms
or perhaps it’s just a jaunty mousedeer escaping gleefully from the crocodiles
The Climb a sculpture with no label or attribution a shipwreck among bland functional housing blocks
on plinths that look like shark’s fins perch six boys
two of them are on the verge of sliding down
another boy grips them tightly by the wrists
yet another lies on his side exhausted
there is a hand on his shoulder its posture unreadable
the boys are looking down into a darkness they fear to return to
even though they have each other they seem impossibly stranded
Of course public toilets especially the ones with doors all the way down
& also the ones in ancient shopping malls suffused with a stale funk where my eyes linger on the patch of growing scabrous mold & I let my guard down for a moment…
Army camps whose reek’s a blend of stale sweat & hours burnt away
& my dulled self reduced to a primordial point itching against the uniform in the dazzling morning light a beautiful sergeant looms into view & all I want to do is to lick him as he forces us to do some meaningless task or other
The swimming pool where that supposed chlorine tang’s actually the smell of sweat & piss
& the showers where dripping bodies hope never to dry up
The bakery a parade of lurid creations so gaudy they banish the darkness within
which designer draped them?
which queen made them up?
who else bites into them & rejoices as the bright vanilla cream floods the mouth & overwhelms the pleasure centres?
& after devouring one why do I still crave for another bright thing?
The temple where you are leading me by the hand through the festive throng of Theemithi telling me that it’s a celebration of the goddess Draupadi who walks on fire to commemorate the defeat of her enemies the heat of the glowing coals awaiting the devotees’ bare feet burns up my cheeks & I gaze up to the gopuram and dream of climbing it with you all the way up to the gleaming gold bar of a roof
for there we will survey our hardwon kingdom & glimpse the sea the sea whose shimmer reminds us of the lesson we needed most in those unbending iron years: that every moment is temporary & harbours in its kernel
fabulous potential
Daryl Lim Wei Jie: In some respects, this poem owes its genesis to Ang Lee’s masterpiece The Wedding Banquet. When I first encountered the film, I was struck by its delectable eruption of queer joy—still, regrettably, a far rarer theme than queer pain and grief. It was then that the seed of this poem was sown.
Published: Tuesday 30 September 2025
Daryl Lim Wei Jie is a poet, editor, and translator from Singapore. His most recent poetry collection, Anything but Human (2021), was a finalist for the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize. He conceptualised and co-edited the anthologies Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet (2020) and The Second Link: An Anthology of Malaysian and Singaporean Writing (2023). In 2023, he was conferred the Young Artist Award—Singapore’s highest honour for emerging practitioners in the arts. He is presently at work on Free to Play, an anthology devoted to video gaming.