(safe break)
silent highways therefore the driver
flicks his high beams in a kind of
urgent morse code and each gap
in the traffic is either a dot or a dash
but you can’t keep track of it all because
even one wrong letter is the difference
between construction and constriction
in guangzhou’s knotted city centre
(some introduction required)
you step off the plane in shanghai
and vomit into your sleeve which
is no way to greet the past or future,
with time running on like that stream of passengers
passing your inert body, now keeled over
in the airbridge and then, when your wheeled
suitcase somehow carries you down nanjing rd
like a hospital gurney, you find the city’s voice inside your own