Sunday, April 10, 2011

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 waya 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
 

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