Just Bitchin: Transported

1.
A punch of sound (from Roberta Flack
tuned between stations
sounding like trash metal) and I'm up,
shower, brush, dress, eat—keys,
scent, phone, pad, cards, wallet, change,
socks, shoes—door.
Silence fills the space. Birdsong blue light
empty from my car. Alone,
with a million others,
racing into the day.

2.
I'm too nice.
I let a Green Saga pass
but that Prado doesn't
stop. Stop!
I slam
brakes and swear.
With windows rolled up.

3.
A Saga-ful of kids enters
the alley of Radius
and Au Yong Association
and out each passenger
window sticks a head
looking down, judging
ounces of pressure to
push gas to
squeeze past a Waja;
their shoulders indoors,
the amount of space so small,
the car is propelled
forward, a rowboat,
by the heads of the kids
and the strength of their necks.

4.
At the intersection of
Changkat Raja Chulan
and Jalan Raja Chulan,
impossibly, a pothole
squats, so deep
an underground pipe
becomes a spring. At
first, a rubbish bin
covers the hole to warn
drivers—the surrounding
rarmac strips fast!—and
then JKR
appears one night with
a pump to suck
the water out.
Today I see this spring
bubbles, bubbles still.

5.
If I don't drive KL
I lose myself—
the roads forget me like
monsoons forget the earth—
I must remember
Jalan Yap Kwan Seng—
sweating fists, I push
through a flow of cars
into an appointment.

6.
Sitting on the bus,
my window hand
over my mouth,
my eyes follow
a pale wrist to
a duffle bag, to a
pair of sunglasses, to
a bus window that
sits a woman.
A woman with a
taut mouth who
turns, first, with her
body to disembark
the rival bus, who
recedes as my bus
guns it. As we pull
away, my heart is
caught in her hair.
 

TEXT Tshiung Han See PHOTO Shermen Mukhtar