on the making of the poem
Every morning, my wife and I have breakfast together at Adam Road Food Centre. Without fail, the kopi uncle knows exactly what to bring us — kopi o for me, teh c for her — before we have said a word. We never discussed this with him. It simply became true over time.
I didn't think much of it until I found myself thinking about it constantly.
The order is not placed. It simply happens.
— from the poem
Woven underneath is another figure I hadn't consciously connected until the poem pulled him in: the cleaner in the blue shirt at the kopitiam near my workplace. He would clear my table without being asked, quietly, every time. I never learned his name.
One day he simply wasn't there. No explanation. The table sat uncleared a little longer than usual. I noticed the absence the way you notice silence after a sound you had stopped registering as sound.
That absence is what gave the poem its second heartbeat — the fear held in the final lines. Not the spill itself, but the knowledge that the one who notices may one day not be there to notice.
These are the gestures no one photographs. The ones that hold precisely because they ask for nothing in return — no acknowledgment, no thank you, no record kept.
On the surface: two cups, one table, a long marriage, a small accident.
Underneath: the kind of love that doesn't announce itself. The love that is indistinguishable from routine — until routine breaks, and you see how much it was holding.
I wanted to write about the people around a couple as much as the couple themselves. Adam, the kopitiam uncle, is not background. He is a witness, a keeper of the small ritual. His knowledge — unstated, accumulated — mirrors what the two people at the table have built between themselves.
The spill matters because it is the first sign of something neither of them has named yet. And her hand over his is not comfort, exactly. It is recognition. She knows. She has been watching too.
Kopi o is black coffee sweetened with sugar, the old way, from a sock-filtered brew. Teh c is tea with evaporated milk — softer, lighter, cloud-pale. That these two exist together every morning at the same table, each distinct, each unchanged, felt like the truest image I had for a long marriage.
Formica, char kway teow, tongs laid down, batter stirred — I wanted the poem to smell and sound like the place, not describe it.
I didn't set out to write about mortality. I set out to write about breakfast.
But the blue-shirted cleaner who didn't come back stayed with me in a way I couldn't account for, and eventually I understood: we build our lives around people whose names we don't know, whose presence we take for granted, and who are holding far more of the ordinary than we realise — until one morning they aren't there, and the table feels different, and we can't quite explain why to anyone who wasn't watching.
The poem is for my wife, who puts her hand over mine. And quietly, also, for the man in the blue shirt.