Paradox, Change (rewrite)
The city's crackdown on "illegal working" is still on my mind, particularly after several musician friends got caught in a sting. This is a rewrite of a previous poem, in light of some new info.
Paradox, Change
My foreign friends are being detained
for playing music. All day my brain’s
firing post-rock instrumental riffs
making no sense of it. A military parade
is upcoming, or a rival mid-sized venue
has dialed a hotline. Or the new police chief has,
as they say, started three fires upon taking office.
Meanwhile, the foreign ministry promotes visa-free entry.
I got away with being a cheeky little rocknroller for way too long,
said David, who was deported.
He was sentenced to two weeks and did a month,
maybe because he was American. Maybe for no reason.
Fifteen years of accumulated Beijing luck, spent.
What happened to li, meaning reason—
act within it and morals can be circumstantial,
graft can be forgiven. Crackdowns are lucrative,
but they violate li. They suck. Sometimes
there’s no better word than the word most obvious.
I remember David swaying in Timekeepers with his
waggish grin saying, You’re my kind of people.
They’ve taken much but we’re still here.
He was talking bar closures but I got it, I get it.
Many foreigners who have done time stay to tell about it:
The open windows during summer let in humidity
that overpowers the air-conditioning; rooms can fill
beyond capacity, fifteen into a cell with nine wooden beds
pushed together. Every day we are overwhelmed
by ephemera and likewise we’ll all be forgotten
but we had our moments. We had music
like you wouldn’t believe.
Another day, four days before the parade
to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the victory
in the War against Japanese Aggression,
I am heading to Modernista when I hear loud beats
pouring out of a different club into the street,
the words, It’s a love story baby.
I pull open the door and squeeze through black curtains
to a room packed with young Chinese throwing up their hands
and screaming, Save me, they’re trying to tell me how to feel.
And when the singer, who is Chinese, says in English
the next one will be Lady Gaga, a Chinese woman
with Finnish-blonde hair shrieks as if she just learned
about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement.
Two foreigners are watching in the corner,
one of them with arms crossed, straight-faced,
trying not to like it. It’s not bad, I can imagine
one of them finally sighing as the room
belches to the rafters that they want ugly,
they want disease, everything as long as it’s free.
What if it never means more than what it is,
the parties off the rails, the immigration cops
tired of their work, the extra responsibilities,
the internal competition, but no way out of it,
all the fiscal audits and fusty traditions and
ordinary remora, all our fraught exultations and
guilty felicities, our charged skittering across
the wires of a political machine powered by money
and relationships, no matter how it churns
or who gets flattened, how it marches on all of us,
even you, no matter how much sense it makes
or doesn’t, how we rationalize or how often we write
paradox, change?
