Samuel Lee (b. 1992)
SELECTED POEMS
Ideology
Standing on a park bench
a boy declares his war on love
and tries to kiss every passing strangerbecause the action, having gone through
a series of pointless and random transactions,
would have as much meaning as leftovers
slow dancing in a microwave.Love is ideology, he chants,
and our shackles eat at our ankles.Farther away, a balloon animal explodes
in a child's rose-blossom face. Its petals withdraw
into a tight bud of fear and profound longing.There are only two things on my mind:
how mild the day has been
and how slowly the sun edges its way
down the gaps in the blocks of flats.Walking beneath the trees, I recall the happiness
my best friend carved onto his face,
with a flint, saying, Yes I have a new girlfriend,
naming this conflation of duty and embarrassment,
conquest and consumerism,
Love, even if it seemed a catalogue
of various disasters to come.Meanwhile on the television screen
a news presenter, dizzied by passing time,
laughs and reshuffles her papers, and I, too, saw myself
reordering speech to profess something neutral and pleasing.We pronounce the names of things
vainly anticipating the slightest possibility
that we can slide our fingers down their contours,
understand their shape, manage desire.
We fill them with desecration, colouring them,
making them whole.
