Shanghai in February smells tin-stiff,
like a coldpot trapping breaths fused in millions
enough to dull the landing.
assault of past pain.
and millions move to perpetuation,
stellar roles to bonding enterprise
while I notice my imprint in the equation, and our family, closely
chronolised, twelve years, they divide,
like the cracked plates of my '93 soul - starved for belonging.
There's a crisp pine wood in Pudong, a grey oversight
reclining against the history and mythos of its civilisation, struck
by skyward nostrils of industry cultivating our essential toxins, the
newspapers confirm, we are development's revolutionaries,
leap-frogging hi-tech faster than moneyman over paper hearts.
Clutter of skyscrapers, bounderless narcosis
containing backwards, forwards, diagnal routes, until any
space at any time captures some displacement,
a surname, a fortune, an x-ray to the genesis cells
compelling inexhaustable life, where earliest memories
latch onto 14 storey apartments,
how the balcony surveyed catacombs of dwellings,
over-travelled water, beaten furniture, the confines of expiration.
Twilight the order of a young dominion, invertebrate
and free-moving, beautiful as a bad moon, indigo-mooded,
unpressured by father of the day, son and wife in his pocket,
their nucleus - under claw scratches of stepmother.
..suffocating.. as this club - smoked by the electrons of forgetfulness, laboratory for the desecration of censorship, marriage, patriotism.
Upon the crown of Pearl Tower, people covet the transparent
values of a material city. but I revere the structural prodigy
of a teetering metropolis - Han's ashes buried under the deep
marine of east china sea, ancient as my grandfather's
own war stories, bluer than my heart had been,
seeking a pilgrimage to the dynastic coronary,
extended, adopted, all included.
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