Jerrold Yam (b. 1991)

SELECTED POEMS

Parliamentary Business

“The Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods made 22 recommendations in all, including enacting legislation […] and creating a national framework to guide public education on falsehoods.”—The Straits Times, 20 Sep 2018

Something scurries with the deliberateness
of an online falsehood. Its tail

has been mistaken for one 
of the city’s fraying wires, its head 

a whiskered pane of misinformation. 
Committees handpicked for caging 

have not only returned empty-handed, 
but with their voices unstrung like voices

picked apart by wind. So it is instead
decided that witnesses be interrogated,

how they have come into contact 
during solitary walks in the park

or reading by the fractured 
moonlight of a grated window. 

Accounts have all been the same: it is 
what we seem to know but do not remember,

furred with doubt, eyes gleaming
like unanswerable questions, just 

about the size of any word 
darting back into the crowd.

by Jerrold Yam
anthologised in Contour: A Lyric Cartography of Singapore (2019)

 

SELECTED POEMS: “Joshua” >