the world's very first portuguese-eurasian tank
By kevin martens wong zhi qiang
originally published Tuesday, 11 april 2023
on tigri sa chang
Koitadu | Content warning
Please first read about my writing in the Skribadorang or Writing section on the Igleza page here before reading the piece below so you have advance warning about the rather spicy things that I often like to write about, and why I choose to write about them, especially in terms of subverting unhealthy stereotypes about gay people, Kristang people, Creole people, Indigenous people, masculinity, neurodivergence, the body, healthy forms of attraction and sexuality, and using my writing to process the severe individual, collective and inter-generational trauma and abuse I have faced across my life.
I am heat-seeking,
networked and completely self-guided,
unbearably, indefatigably, vindictively
tired.
You live to fight another day.
I live to explain, yet again,
why I cannot explain why I am still gay.
You once marched me through the homeland,
paraded me in the streets.
The people planted flowers
in my mane.
Even this completely mixed-up metaphor was allowed to remain.
Now, you dare to ask if I
am insane.
And this what I deign
to say:
There has never been a force more singularly unstoppable.
A command more propellable.
A unit in a class of its own,
almighty, all-revealing,
all-vulnerable.
You say I barrel down your streets without warning;
I would like to highlight that it is your projection, every morning
that keeps me up at night
polishing my treads,
flexing my sex,
getting down to the dirty, muddy business
of how to keep this magnificent, marvellous Merlionsmonster
from trying too hard to be a machine.
I am no man.
I am no woman.
I am a lady-gentleman, as they call me in Phnom Penh;
a Flor de la Mar, as they called me before I was known to them,
and A Famosa.
One of the Two Singaporeans, as they saw us in Fiji and Vanuatu;
and, of course, your Big Bunga Sayang Kristang,
as they have called me in Chicago.
A leader power.
A hero unit.
A Terrex’s outer
limit, where muscles cannot be distinguished from mind.
512 years of trauma,
consolidated into no fury more ever divine.