Paradox, Change
My friends are being detained for playing music.
Paradox, Change
Sometimes there is no better word
than the word most obvious.
The flower dress on that elderly Chinese is
striking. The ping-pong players are
methodic. The garbage man has
swag. We get it right sometimes
and then draw legs on the snake.
My foreign friends are being detained
for playing music. That’s insidious.
No—It sucks.
I walk around with my brain firing
a jumble of post-rock instrumental riffs.
Pigeon whistle, stoop barber, mother cat.
In the sunlight her eyes were luminescent.
I mean amber-green, I mean they were
something.
A bank chief talks stablecoins,
the MFA promotes visa-free entry,
a new police chief tries to balance the ledger.
Crackdowns are lucrative.
On a rooftop we wore the night
(what season was it?)
and rammed Snuz under our lips.
I don’t mean our, I mean some of us,
I mean Victoria.
Our Norwegian friends, in bunads
on their constitution day, gorgeous.
The Swedes didn’t get the jokes
they were the butt of.
The moon looked lunar,
orange. Look.
My friends are being detained,
they’re being fined for working
even without pay, on stage.
I got away with being a cheeky little rocknroller
for way too long, said David the pianist.
At dawn the sky turned purple pink.
Focus is shifting from maximizing growth
to reducing debt.
Old men and women appeared
(or had they always been on this square?)
to make use of the light
and the weather, every last drop of it.
A bargoer somewhere tilts an empty glass
beyond parallel with the counter.
Fake Gucci, ironic bling, watering the streets.
I need to say again for whoever
needs to hear it, my musician friends
are being detained.
It’s not personal, probably, it’s just new
and it sucks.
Twenty steps into the Beijing alley
we are overwhelmed with ephemera
we want to label
with a word that stays. But
aunt holds baby, old man makes brush,
that’s all I got.
What if it will never mean more
than what it is—
the parties off the rails, the KPIs
for immigration cops, fiscal audits,
this, this, this
—no matter how often we write
paradox, change?
Also see this poem from last month, Endanger
A poem powerful and sorrowful, Anthony, I resonate. At least I think I understand. I feel like our existing vocabulary can no longer express the shock of these assaults on our freedom. I can find no words for what is happening here (Chinese or English) and even more so in my country of origin. The words we used to throw at such injustices have lost their force. You seem to have captured something of the indignation and malaise.
🙌