Blast from the Past (I)

 

No Politics today, guys! Because many have wondered if LemanPulut writes Poetry for a Living. Of course he does!! At 3 clam shells per quatrain, even Dante would have subcontracted to Leman a few stanzas had he been what he is not at the moment: dead! Well, throughout the years Leman had amassed quite a few poems – hundreds, in fact, which he once kept in a ring-binder, never publishing even a single one. Then one day, in a fit of rage of ingenuity (well okay if you must: insanity) he burnt the entire collection down! Reminds you of van Gogh, huh.  That was many, many years ago. And now he scurries back to salvage whatever had not been destroyed, and quite a few surfaced. One of them is the following Epic, written more than 12 years ago, during the teething years of the internet. It is a tribute to a great love story between my aunt and uncle, ThePertinentlyPertinaciousRahimBapoo and TheTautinglyTitillatingTipahGayut. They met online, in an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel called #Kampung, and were married about three full moons later, with the testicles of fifty Albino Alligators as dowry. Enjoy it or bust!

#Kampung: A 21st Century Cybernetics Romance

 

Part I: The Insecure Juliet

Home from work she dumps her bag and shelves her sex appeal  

Changes the clothes on her jaded body  and cleans her morning meal  

The laundry swirls, cup of coffee, she boots her on-lined PC  

Checks her mail---to no avail, then straight on to the IRC  

Her Mother gave her a simple name but with an electro-sizzling one  

She cruises bravely in the Internet in search of digital fun  

A hush now fills channel #kampung  as she joins in with a mouseclick  

armed with a touch of nymphomania attached at the end of her nick  

She taunts the guys and teases them with the eponymous a/s/l?  

And in that instance she ceases to be, a shy, cenophobic elle  

Her features leave much to be desired, fat in all the wrong spots  

But in #kampung she's drop-dead gorgeous with a vocab that is equally hot  

And thus she burns her calories that way,  a cybernetics couch potato  

cruising till she finds one whose name reminds her of an oft-sought Romeo  

And silently outside, the howling winds sweep down First Avenue   

In search of long lost souls and lonely hearts, and in search of a Love that is true  

Part II: Romeo’s Plight 

He squeezes on the gas of his bike like he squeezes his bosses' necks  

Just reprimanded for a job half-done and a little short of getting the axe  

But no worry cos it's six o'clock and usually it's just about time  

to meet the denizens of channel #kampung, so he hurries home with that in mind  

He's insecure: lowlife of the office, the very epitome of pity   

but in #kampung he suddenly morphs into a Digital Walter Mitty  

He's the butt of the office jokes, Dan Quayle of the company  

But chatting gives him a chance to be an enigmatic somebody  

He's a little behind in this months' rent, his bike needs a new battery  

but in #kampung he's a hedonistic hunk bent on throwing money   

He's a ladies' man, a gigolo, no longer an introvert  

and he loves all this masquerading till he receives a message from our Juliet  

And fate plays a helping hand (Or is that really providence?)  

For 20 hours down that fateful message they were finishing each other's sentence  

And no amount of cruising will camouflage the grim but hideous reality  

that #kampung conveniently conceals their Supreme Insecurity   

Part III: The Meeting

Upon the hour of an appointed time, Nymphogal and her brave hero  

Decides to play it game by following the tip of Cupid's arrow   

Thus our West-Side story figurines agree to meet somewhere  

East-side, Southside, Any side as long as it's out of the digital lair  

Now the first encounter goes alright, leaves both of them speechless  

For how was she to know he's got one tooth missing, and she, metallic braces?  

And then she's fat unlike the hourglass shape that she professed to be  

and he's far from what he claimed: a doppel-ganger of Sean Connery  

He forgets his Cindy Crawford dreams, forgets the fat in all the wrong spots  

With this encounter he's willing to settle for a vocab that is really hot  

 And she doesn't mind that he ain't Brad Pitt,  or Pierce Brosnan or Hugh Grant  

This guy can make her laugh, So, what more can a lonely girl want?  

There is nothing showing in Sunway Cineplex, Nothing that interest them anyway  

So they settle for some nasi kandar---some stall in downtown PJ  

And way down after the eighth morsel she decides to let her self-story leak  

She needs love, she needs company---and she needed them last week.  

He glances at her halfway down, wondering if she's a potential lay  

Hoping that she'd trade a few tomorrows with one single yesterday  

And Romeo would appreciate it very much, he says, if he can get a little appreciation  

instead of being his company's favorite anomalous little trepidation  

He squeezes on the gas of his bike, as she sits behind him snuggly  

So off they go, into the sunset, with "The End" superimposed neatly  

The moral, boys and girls, is simple yet plain to see  

If you've searched for Love in all the wrong places, you haven't searched the IRC.

Leman Pulut