Three Essays

Below you will find three short essays. The first one is titled 

'Poetry and the sordid state of humanity'

I wish I could write, I really do. It has never been my strong suit, and I struggled greatly with the difficulty during my junior college years, of writing essays that were clear and argumentative. I do love a good argumentative piece. I read the Economist and Time exclusively for those, and I find a well-argued essay a wonderful thing like a perfectly cut diamond, cutting swathes of sparkling light through the fog of ignorance and grinding away the detritus of imprecision and indecision, pausing only to scoff as I gleefully mix my metaphors. In the same way, nothing stimulates my academic pleasure centres like a well-argued debate, although there are none to be had in Singapore. I just don't seem to be able to do them myself, and whenever I write what I feel to be a cogent argument I come back a week later to re-read it and find it floppy, imprecise, and downright shameful oftentimes. I can't say for sure if this is some deficiency or merely lack of practice, but it frustrates me greatly for I am convinced that I have ideas but not the words to express them, and if this proves to be mere delusion then all is lost, I am nothing. 

Poetry is another monster altogether. I started this in sec 2 under dubious circumstances, and like argumentative writing, I'm afraid that the current assessment is that I've never been very good at it at all. My opinion of my literary skill fluctuates often. I've re-read my oeuvre (If it even deserves the term) several times and never been able to come up with a stable opinion on the load of rubbish that it is, and finally I've decided that if it's not going to convince me then it must be tosh. But I used to, and often still enjoy writing poetry. 

It used to be free verse, because I felt it was, well, freer, but quickly you realise that if the form isn't going to force you to think you end up not thinking at all and writing the same load of claptrap about frogs and whatnot. It's not intelligent at all, unless you happen to be a paragon of brilliance like Walt Whitman. So I turned to verse, which at least gets to pretend it's clever by rhyming, and have been writing rhym-ey little things ever since. 

As for subject matter, anything goes really but there are a few topics which particularly interest me, most of which being the sordid state of humanity. I wrote :

your garden gate has never been

so green and so unseen

at eight we learn to dance and sing

at nine all bad boys will grow wings

It's about a boyish dream to get out on the road and live a vagabond's life, but it's manifestly silly. The truth is, everything we've ever dreamed about is a construction built out of our insecurities, and will fall apart. 

This is, of course, only my opinion, and you needn't go home and shoot yourself just because I told you so. 

adam