"Hougang Green", Rocco Hu
Hougang Green you are not my mall
Hougang Green you are not a mall at all
You are a concrete madhouse
a beige bengster wonderland
you are Gatsby moving rubber melting in the tropical heat
you are char kuay teow garnished with brown feelers
you are a middling PSLE score
you are pregnancy-induced expulsion resulting from expulsion-induced pregnancy
you are council housing and violence
you are a blackmarket for maplestory mesos paid out of torn angbaos
you have a tiny McDonalds.
you are cut my queue kaninabu chao cheebye
Hougang Green,
what are these cartons in your backpack?
you are computer literacy class
taught on whiteboard during school hours
taught after surrounded by smoke, screams and light
throbbing headphones
shouts of spite
the sour smell of half-eaten cup noodles
mixed with palm sweat sweat-stained chairs
you are CCAs skipped,
school-teachers tripped
forms unformatted
report cards unreported
dotted grey lines
left unsigned
But you are also,
white beads of Oreo McFlurry spiralling down my wrist
a sappy Zhou Jie Lun love song
a girls hand, held tremblingly for the first time
slick palms alternating between damp pockets and shaking fingers
you are a fortress with a keep:
a 19-degree celcius cave with rows and rows of vapour-lined coke
into which sweat-stained pimply boys
dove as a pack, raucously, shirts sticking
to our bodies,
you are the brief state,
between childhood and 12-hour workdays
when we assaulted moss-lined towers,
chased enemies endlessly in icy mazes,
defused bombs with machine guns slung to our backs
in likenesses of the harsh white offices we work in now
so that when it's 8:30pm and outside the window the CBD hums yellow light
and sometimes at the edges of our work-blurred screen-blinded vision we see in the wavering walls, the buzzing air
the blurring of the pixels, the fuzzing of reality,
a snatch, a glimpse,
of
Hougang Green