• Lachlan Brown

 

(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