Hong Kong: Songs from the Rooftops
“In these shaken times, who more than you holds
In the wind, our bittermelon, steadily facing
Worlds of confused bees and butterflies and a garden gone wild”
--梁秉鈞, Bittermelon
II. Lan Kwai Fong: wet season
This is the season of damp hearts and arid throats, lovers left behind with their dreams in corners back-packed with tokens, paperpock books, dog-eared hair and bruised lips, a time of green rain and copper stains, the Juliet balconies upon which folk weight themselves down by the gift of gambolled loss and precipitant clouds, they carry and barter and frame themselves in the light of neon, long before social media replaced authentic, melancholic vanity and doubt with pixelated confidence, the mimicry of clocked confidence in the shadows of pebbles, all that scampering, the buzzing of lost language and shadows buzzing beneath mercury, argon and helium—the elemental you.
the taxidrivers hung out of windows like damp cigarettes who gawk at the young women whose slide-drag temper dread the city’s hunger and the Gweilo bedeviled underneath the weight of their own expectation, long misplaced in their tuggin inside their carriage, broken Queen’s English and a poor pupil’s salivating Cantonese created in a HK Dollar-less giving, expending accounts, and are you too weighed down and bullied by the gravity of desire in this quarter, bagless and electric from the gift that marks the walking, invisibly. Or is it?
To find purchase in the weight of bargained arms pitched into a clever, seasonal shopping, a moment shirtless and electric from that gift that marked your walking, invisibly.
To find purchase in the weight of free arms because you gifted them with wonder pitched into a clever, seasonal shopping bag. Your hair pulled Leontine in the sailors fist, leaves swept into the gutter.
Body language all graffiti and continent of wirld words surrounding, leave a divestiture,worlds alight here along the street cars and ghosts, éclair saints and egg noodle, tart, hearts and red balloons
My looming along the spine, Fermosa rooms, mahjong spun, call the rhyme, clack the crack in the tea cup-Teetering,
an old man cries in the teastained sea room and his daughter balks, a thumb nail falls away bruised and blue as her shorn eyebrows in the slanted morning light, and between them ink up like elderly syllables,
lotus-soaked and innervated, the calculus of a wobbly talk, touch this:
kite, cart, bone-glass and the sea still sentient and seen.
Listen loved ones, are you still, still running wild and assured, still picking up the pebbles in your pockets, still gambling the ghost bones on the tables, still drinking up gone gaps, still taping up the broken parts, still a part apart from all this?
the darkness rhymed with ringing:
bead against wrist, tooth against tongue
and the boom of your heart click, swaying.
Alas, it could be you.
