Chinatown is so beautiful. Like
sooooo beautiful.
I wanna awesome talk
with everybody
wearing purple wigs
for the new movie in a language
I can't understand.
Me and Ulyses ate forever
food in a plastic box.
Every flavour of chicken
and pork
and shrimp
onion ring and prawn cracker.
The man in front of me
at the forever food
has been here a million times
because the fat on his neck is
pushing his ears towards the sky.
In the anime
of life there are large boobs
and hair for miles.
No human looks human
and their sparkling eyes
are a cruel joke
a curious inversion
of the epicanthic fold
we all know and love.
All art aspires towards the condition
of music. All music aspires
towards the condition
of beauty. All beauty aspires
towards the condition of fireflies
by Owl City
which I'm listening to right now
and crying.
I remember a day I was 9
hours early for a movie
crushing my whiskey and energy drink
until I dashed into every bubble tea
joint to relieve myself.
The toilets smelled
peppermint. I hate itwhen I'm in a toilet and there is piss on the seat and it's like great
now I'm responsible for all this
piss.
I can't tell where I begin
and where I end
in Chinatown. The kaleidoscope
catching a case of the swirlies.
Sometimes I feel the mineral
form of joy, a glowing rock despite
a shard like a tooth broken
on a fortune cookie hardened
slipping between my ribs
bleeding in my whimsy.
The they/them at the inclusive
working meeting tell us we are
all complicated land mammals.
We're asked to think about examples of unconscious bias and I think about the guy who goes to
Heaven but it's Chinese.
I have never been to Chinatown
with my girlfriend. It feels like I'm hiding
something important from her.
All of the signature red
of the lanterns, twinkling like
pixels, artefacts of data compressed
by algorithms in our eyes, reminds me
of the tattoo of a koi fish
I saw on my neighbour's lower back.
We are all living in the pop remake
of the grunge song. We are all
remastered in the city.
On the cement I feel
heroic sake snaking my
triple watermelon Chinese
flavoured chemical dopecloud.
I realise Chinatown can't defeat me
no matter how beautiful.
Still I see the world anew.
So dystopian it's utopian
like dream technology.
Every mistake glazed
sweet and sour.
Drunk in Chinatown.
I'm not wearing my heart
on my sleeve, I'm wearing
every organ.
I turn myself inside out
in a metropolitan hotbox.
I thought thoughts in autofiction
until there was no auto.
All of this fiction was deeply
worryingly manual.
I can't even read the words
in the language I used to speak
through the tears welling
in her baby browns.
Chinatown is just a tiny jpeg
blown up extremely large.
