Artwork by Henri Souffay. Courtesy: ArtChowk Gallery.
The Missing Slate’s Poetry World Cup finished earlier this month, with more than 6000 reader votes cast to whittle the 32 poems down to just one winner. We’re ending the month with a selection of new poems from the Poetry World Cup champion, Singapore’s Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé.
d2Â is for determinacy
insomuch that frege instructed kangarewe
to cut up the pine planks in perfect shapes
angular but with sharp and distinct boundaries
like how we define the world we live in
and chart its topography the way we hike
through shenandoah national park then
drive back taking the blue ridge parkway
where a cherokee miner invites us over
to old tanasi where there is nothing at all
but memory making its trail to chota
where a cyclist points in the direction of
old copper road and says follow the fennec fox
before the first mile and you’ll be able to
determine for yourself the truth of things
and what simple elements need to be added
into the big mix to muster completeness
a definition neither inexact nor vague
e is for electric eel
inasmuch as its nest is no more than
its own saliva as if a dribble of thought
was expected of it like kangarewe’s drivel
about barthes’ exegesis of brecht
his epic theatre snaking through berlin
like the eel and its four hundred volts
like a cry of indignation from its abdomen
just as brecht wrote der jasager first as if
to say he said yes made him a logothete
but there was der neinsager where no
means no as if hating the ache of
affirmation when the dingo howls at
the moon the way the grey wolf does
and says we’re not all wild dogs
and we’re angry at the label and culling
and the tragedy lies in all misnomers
