Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, Singapore
“Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory.
Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory.”
—Jean Baudrillard
It’s hard to pen poems about goodness.
Poems shouldn’t be didactic, not try to impart anything.
More than emotion or a small image and sound.
More than a scene, that paints a metaphor, that sort of inferred meaning.
Like this gray wolf on a presentation slide, what a simulacrum.
What a simulacrum of a simulacrum, this litany of image after image.
The image is of a lone wolf, left to wander this ridge of earth.
Strapped over its muzzle is a leather muzzle, with wires for string.
The leather is thick and leaden, dark charcoal as if burnt into oldness.
The lone wolf has forgotten its voice, or that it evolved from canines.
The lone wolf doesn’t know how to walk past the edge of the ridge.
It’s a steep fall anyway, a cliff that drops into a ravine of blue rock.
That’s what loss feels like, when you’re abandoned by your pack.
It’s hard to tell yourself about transparency of meaning.
How translation and interpretation could be a sieve, catchment too.
And the writers and readers look at each other in a mirror.
Even mirrors show us only one side, that sort of authenticity.
I’m trying to write good poems, that bring about only goodness.
I’m trying to avoid the sanctimonious and sentimental.
It’s hard to pen these things down because the world denies it.
It’s hard to pen these things down, how everything distracts.
It’s hard to pen these things down when there’s so much spiritual pride.
This must be what the poem should begin and end on then.
The notion of spiritual pride, and how this, too, must go.
This, too, must disappear; watch how it leaves us without guilt.
This, too, must disappear; watch how it leaves us and the silence.
This, too, must disappear; watch how it leaves us with prayer.
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé is the author of an epistolary novel, a quasi-memoir, two lyric essay monographs, four hybrid works, and nine poetry collections. A former journalist, he has edited more than twenty books and co-produced three audio books. Among other accolades, Desmond is the recipient of the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award, Independent Publisher Book Award, National Indie Excellence Book Award, Poetry World Cup, Singapore Literature Prize, two Beverly Hills International Book Awards, and three Living Now Book Awards. He helms Squircle Line Press as its founding editor.
He can be found at: desmondkon.com