Loh Guan Liang
FEATURES / TRACK CHANGES
Choices [and Revisions]
Written by Loh Guan Liang
Dated 19 Jun 2020
Transparent Strangers
A gentle rain falls
like snow, dusting the
lazy sunday curiosities,
filtering from the leaves’
heart-pressed isolation.It falls like an apology
in the incomplete spaces
between these lines. Hands
open with the practised brevity
of strangers passing
each other to receive
the thunder thawing afterrain.
“Transparent Strangers”, the titular poem in my debut collection, was published in 2012. Eight years on, much of the world has changed, including me. It thus felt apposite to revisit “Transparent Strangers” and the heady infatuation that led to this piece. However, when I tried to summon the smitten young man who penned the poem, my mind drew a blinding blank. Like an overused chalkboard, parts of my past lose definition, leaving in their wake pale ghosts haunting a dark wall. It is this sense of time passing that I sought to express in the revision.
Transparent Strangers Again
What shape or form, then, should this poetic revision take? Twin cinema was one option. It provided a scaffold to juxtapose my current self with the budding poet who wrote “Transparent Strangers”. Structuring the revised version in this manner yielded three poems: the original, with its wide-eyed, bushy-tailed naiveté; the addendum, delivered with distant, deliberate weariness; and the entire piece that gathered in reconciliation different parts of myself at various points in life. As a first attempt at writing a twin cinema poem, the finished product sounds clumsy in some parts. Nonetheless, as far as revisions go this will suffice—for now.
