How did you feel before they were announced?

 

In manicured rows of white, yet another tree flinching
from the holes of felled relatives, how faceless logs
plunge, amputated from roots and leaves like people
in buses and lifts, bodies of transition with nothing
to chart a route between but the shadow of a sun.

 

What do you want to be in the future?

 

Each child rewritten in unscripted rhetoric, too afraid
for release, backs severed from chairs as if teetering
within a heartbeat. None shall grow up in twenty years
as planned, for the future is a noiseless spool of film
running its race with characters, not losing or winning.

 

Are your parents happy with them?

 

If our country donates all moonlighting monies
from tuition teachers, assessment book authors
or textbook plagiarists to the UN, even the most
dramatic dissidents will confess we are First World,
but only since deception is more art than poetry.

 

Local or overseas?

 

Toughest question; both sides of the Pacific are equally
appealing, though foreign professors will politely pause
after mistrusting one fairytale from another: Singaporean,
piano for males, ballet for females, converse for those who
challenge stereotypes—tiles unaligned, made for tripping.

 

Did you live up to your expectations?

 

No more distinct from rival reflections, Narcissus slipped
soundlessly under a wall of water, fusing with the flesh
of the imprisoned hero he always desired. Resurfacing
now, a mirage of five letters on a result slip—all eyes
in the hall shiver to drown for underwater prophecy. 

<<