Hardseated through the second septile of this City
Across the laundried balconies and birdless tops of trees
And distance that recedes
In smog or foggy mistery
(a metaphor for this City’s muted sense of history)
—Until, as irresistibly
As tannoy prompts are leavened in the mind
Windows refract delved darkness, doppel dimly
Trite urbanites in facemasks thumbing phones. . .
. . .we left to take line seven. First pushing through
Thronged crowds with no concept of after you;—
So simple etiquette, and strays that folk hereticate
Emerge as medleys from exposure’s loom: the bloom
Of love in public is a feigned taboo; frankness
Personally’s most thankless,
—Conceptually’s the way (so call a pig’s guts pig guts,
Sleep the excreta of the eye, nor strain to try
Devising logorrhoeas while your bowels stay dry. . .);
Also, as time ofttimes attests, it’s tasteless to assess
All promised plans as earnestly professed; and though
Deep steady drinking sure friendship expresses,
Few faux pars lewder come than boozed excesses;—
Nor should sneezing corral god blesses,
And neither need one know the names of those with whom one messes—
(The sole third person pronoun here never ever distresses)
But as eternal guest, where jokes still cause arrests
Patient curiosity is best.
. . .then past the flowers in vending machines,
The cafés that don’t sell caffeine,
The fake bamboo, the eyes that ogle you
(Foreigners they’ve all seen quite a few,
But foreigners with local girls are much ado—)
Till down the escalators on the right we go,—
Automata in fluvial flow
Flooding caverns as shuttles stow
Chthonic echoes echoing slow. . .
On such rote journeys reason sows
Its seeds of sense in rhyme and lets them grow;
In syllambles the mind then mucks hoed fun
Deflooring fertile thoughts from soiled puns.
As in
This deepest façardicity—
(The oxymoron’s apt
For a state whose bodies are in fact
In democratic trappings hardly wrapt—)
Of blackguards to nark each park and neighbourhood estate
That ever antithetic couplets brightly rubricate. . .
Here signs sublime some supposed synergy
Where west Nanjing streams east straight through north Urumqi
(The reality is rather street and city policed in symmetry,
Perpetual forces forcing perpetuity. . .)
—Since all proceeds here by ensign (meaning stabilities
Succumb to fiat or its rumourous proclivities)
So all seems fixed in space and time: always asphalt,
Never gestalt; no slopes or verticalities; no buskers sabbathly;
No furores one might meet, chanting stamping feet;—
No churchmen to ignore, no chalk-arts on the floor,
Little to ponder or to muse upon, and the rich
Tucked neatly out sight. Limpidity. . .
As of an agèd sober whore. Call it
The mind shanghaied (her crew’s implied—);
—It is all too well defined, as if the streets
Themselves paved over all that peopled poetry of yore;
Those flights of fancy through old picture-books
Are no more. These commons heed their lord. Only
Occasionally, one sees
A rickshaw stacked with scrap five meters high, or spies
A lonely Arab in his carpet shop. Hence coinage troops its trope:
Poetics become byproduct of industry. And see
Even temples have been gutted to sell luxuries—!
(Cowed Buddhists bowed when Dengists liberally
Capitalised on those murderous cultural butcheries. . .)
Yet still this silken
Porcelain’s chinked with piecemeal poesies, for in
The semi-periphery, I found
Beneath a bridge to an unused canal
A florid throwie and three tags, and further north
A road-sweeper kicking her daughter in the spine.
—Nor ought poets forget
That the shocking pity of that universally ignored
Phocomelic pauper rolling on her wooden board
Through footfall fleet, wet dusty heat
The stench of gutter oil and the open disjointing of meat
Is verse lest verse just pirouette. . .
. . .then we rose into the light
The sky a plain delight. And many the bright
Flowers planted in our sight. Whence, perambulating
Pleasantly through the gallery, whose myriad panoplies
Esteemed their cultures’ might (note that
Plural apostrophe—!) we wrought journey’s requite; then,
When weariness willed we let alight,
Wandered back into that vernal glare
And on some shaded concrete spare
We sat, to rest within the People’s Square. . .
—Lay on my lap, warm hands caressed then warm black hair;
I watched the people strolling here and there,
Old youngsters on slow skateboards debonair,
Then grabbed a book——what scene could be more fair?
Except, here comes (don’t say I didn’t warn you)
A heavy in his heavy clothes, quick from behind
Bored on the beat since morning:—Get up, not so
Rudely-as-prudely he demands, beware
The ways that you may not enjoy this air.
Well,
Sometimes somethings somewhat impair
One’s strength to patch the wear and tear
Sustained through contact with a manifest unfair
Arbitrary power one cannot forbear:— you felt, justly
A relapsing despair. But hush. . . or rather let us laugh than swear
At this absurdity of living where
Men roam the streets and earn their keep purely by being aware
Of any denizens not sitting sightly on their derrière!
—besides,
He’s just a lackey, one of those dozen everywhere.
Then anyway, being
Long occidentalised,
You lay back down. And soon enough
I caught another’s distant stare. But this time I was well-prepared:—
She doesn’t feel too well. . . I rusefully declared
(Lying about you lying as you lay in this lay—)
—She doesn’t feel so well. . .? And suddenly this human care
Triumphs over our outward form as he repairs
To trample that skating affair.
—but even so
One victory grants scant repose:— another will come
Usurp our little pleasure in the sun
Yet it wasn’t thus, when the state was young. . .
—Thither the contradictions: if the state were young
Could we be here, applauding Tosca sung
(All, of course, in perfect Italian—)?
Or on these tatami entwine gastronomies
Above an ancient town so newly travestied
That all its ancientness erodes under this sea
Of hawkers’ speakers spieling spurious commodities
To passersby who passim pause to ply posed profilitic oddities. . .?
—Syllabled symbols silent sound.
. . .should I bring a cushion? ought I pad my trousers’ seat—?
Such thoughts no longer take me as we sweep
Through tunnels of the metro, the last train home
(—you meditating by my side eyes wide where no words roam. . .)
Nor does the faintly flickering trio
Of propaganda ads and those looping roblox safety videos
Distract me from this brooding on
How much I have let go. I raise
A subscription praise for what time slays.
You must change your life.
2023