Scarlet Letters

I know we need to cut back, but why are morals always the first to go?

People of Britain,
your government grants you
the Freedom to Aspire.
You are free to want whatever you want!

Students are free to dream
of enlightenment and saving lives,
while gaining the intellectual tools
to work off their debt before they die.

To the homemaker
the right to dream of
grafting and scrimping for a decade
to buy and make a home,
and afford the IVF you will now need
to make somebody to put in it.

In Aspirant Britain,
everyone gets what the market decides they deserve.
Chavs get knifed and
sluts get raped and
refugees get a fiver a day, in Tesco vouchers,
if we decide they're not just making it up.

Those who feign persecution, sickness,
mental illness or disability may deserve an Oscar,
but the feckless and the indolent, of whatever stripe,
do not deserve to live on our dime.

So the poor get thinner
         and thinner
and thinner
until finally,
poverty disappears entirely.

The ceiling fan churns heavy air.
I lie awake, on sweat-slicked sheets.
Insects tangle above my head,
jostling vampiric mopeds at rush hour,
rebounding single-mindedly off mosquito netting,
seeking shortcuts to my blood.

Legend has it
that three sweet, sweet bites
will restore them to their human form.

But when an enterprising bloodsucker
succeeds in breaching my mosquito defences,
he usually doesn't stop at three.
There's good bite in this bottom,
and too few other humans in this bed.
So I tend to doubt this tale.

Tomorrow it is Sunday,
so the man upstairs will be hammering tiles
into his floor, my ceiling.
Renovation, installation or fetish?
He starts with the roosters
and doesn't stop until I am raggedly awake,
crowing with weary resentment.

The sky tears
and clatters on tin sheet roofing.
The air cools
and, at last, I sleep, with the city coiled around me.
Somewhere, in my dreams,
I can feel it exhale.


PS I'm in Laos. I'm writing about Vietnam. I don't know why, either. Catharsis?

Current Location: Lao People's Democratic Republic, Pakse

It's Christmas on West Lake, and Ha Noi is out to play.

Through flotillas of festive balloons,
the lone cyclist catches glimpses
of shadowy, elaborately coiffured
Duran Duran extras, cracking sunflower seeds
and scanning the crowd for pretty girls
to put on the backs of their motorbikes.

For this special day, the elderly have
abandoned crotch-thrusting
in favour of a stately waltz.
Beyond the grace and its audience,
a small boy in a Santa suit
is pissing purposefully, joyously, against a tree.


Merry Christmas!

This is a poem I wrote for a friend who was leaving this crazed, cracked city. It looks like I'll be leaving too, so I should follow my own advice and get exploring!


Leaving Hà Nọi
 
For Jacqui
 
In a season made for wandering,
colours and corners newly uncovered
are more alive for being found
on soon-departing feet.
 
Following tangled wires
down shuttered lanes,
grappling twisted weeds
to unearth secret mansions.
Farewell photos against fading numbers
of time-worn xe-ôm drivers.
 
No need of them,
feet press on.
A park, our very own lake,
coconuts and shuttlecocks and
 
Five in a row
with uncle Hồ,
Smile sweet but eyes afire
with time-honed killer boardgame instinct.
 
We lose, in game terms,
but our feet must move on.
There are ladies running rings around Lenin, backwards.
 
In Hà Nọi
some days
like Moses parting the mopeds
everything goes your way.

After a too, too long week hacking at the educational coal face, I felt the need to be taken apart and reassembled, minus accumulated muscle dust, by a (genuine, blind) masseuse. An added Hanoi bonus is colonial splendour, all dark-varnished wooden floors and high ceilings, lazy ceiling fan providing ambiance, if less than effective cooling (a far less evocative AC wheezes gently away behind a curtain not far away).

Ushered serenely into such surroundings, out of my Hanoi-encrusted civvies and into white cotton pyjamas, muscle knots being gently teased to the surface... it's easy to drift off into reveries of sweaty days and sultry nights in the inscrutable Orient, the chatter of the masseuses redolent of Confucius, of ancestor worship, of lotus pods and plastic shoes, of ladies in ao dai reciting zen koan from the backs of water buffalos.

What ancient secrets are they discussing? What is the sound of one hand clapping? Is the truth truly in the lotus?

Only a longer-term resident, with deeper insight into the language and culture, can venture an answer to these timeless questions. And the answer, in my case, was this:

How long is yours?
60 minutes.
60, huh? Mine too.
What time do you finish?
4. You?
6. I'm hungry.
Mmm.

Teaching critical analysis gets me down...

I am not credible.
The statistics used to support me are out of date.
And I am a Westerner,
so I may be biased.
There is no logical connection between my ideas and
my purpose is not clear.
It may just be to entertain.
in which case,
I will have no citations.

From my recent trip back to Britain.

“Sorry pet,”
she said, and smiled
as I pushed in front of her.
 
Instincts honed
or hardened
elbows sharpened
in the Hanoi scrum
 
I have become
imperceptibly, almost
alien in my own land.

This poem is inspired by the fact that, for the first month or so after moving to Hanoi, I was unable to locate my own house with any confidence.

First into the maelstrom,
the swirling tumult
of people going places
that are far more important
than anywhere you are

Then suddenly into serenity:
knowing swans
bearing furtive lovers
across a neon-lit lake

Down a tree-lined side street,
past unseen embassies
and gangly soldiers in guard posts
ringed with sunflower seed shells

Out on to Dọi Cán,
past a shoeless Santa on a plastic stool
yelling at a man up a ladder
without ever losing grip on his dog-end

Left at the pile of rubble
in the middle of a choked intersection,
scattering hooting Hondas
among the fruit and chickens

Past the hospital
and the lady xe-om drivers
who pat their bike seats maternally
and cackle uproariously
when you say no

Then the free-for-all at the gas stand,
and left-right-left down the winding street
that my landlord describes as “go straight”

Through the narrow lane
that rings with the sound of construction
and shy hellos
from upper floors

Follow the shrieks to the school and
under a spreading tree,
past eurodisco aerobics
and razor-sharp pyjama-clad badminton stand-offs

Thread through the tea drinkers
outside the second staircase
of the faded ochre building
and then up

Skirt the ping pong match
in the fourth floor corridor
and skip over the skeleton of a kumquat tree
to my front door

Please take your shoes off
and don't mind my geckos

The mood at Yangon's pagodas has not always been so serene. In August 1988 student demonstrators at Shwedagon were the first signs of a nationwide wave of protests that came to be known as the 8-8-88 uprising.

The next day, after sitting at a dusty junction for several hours entertaining a small gaggle of ladies by standing up every five minutes trying to get on buses that turn out not to be mine, I finally board and wave them goodbye. Although the road is surprisingly good, it's a long way, and by the time I rock up on the outskirts of Yangon I've pretty much lost the ability to think. After ten minutes of tense negotiation without a common language I'm put in a minibus with all the other people I was just in a bus with, and driven into the city centre.

Further discussions ensue once we near the centre, and a small crowd gathers around the Lonely Planet to figure out where I need to be. My destination, fortunately, turns out to be explicable with reference to pagodas, and thus a suitably respectable middle-aged lady is found to get off the bus with me and point me in the right direction. The city is laid out on a grid pattern, so I soon locate my hotel. Which is closed, it being 5am, so I find a plastic stool with my name on it and have some tea. Until 6am. When I check in. And am shouted at by the owner for booking the wrong date. Bemused, I head to my room to discover that my friend has arrived a day early.

I like leaving capitals until last, but having adapted to the pace of a town like Kalaw, Yangon is a bit of a shock. Cars! Crowded streets! More than one street! Fortunately I am not the only one acclimatising, and the first day passes at a leisurely pace. Equally leisurely is the evening of my birthday, despite our best efforts to find anywhere that's open past ten. Still, it does put Hanoi nightlife in a positive light.

The city has a bustle and a purpose to it that's quite different to the northern cities I've been in so far, and a lively tea shop culture that reminds me in many ways of Hanoi, only where Hanoi has herby meaty phở noodles and crusty French baguettes, Yangon has crunchy fishy mohinga noodles and slightly squashed-looking packaged cream cakes. It's much hotter down south, so I'm grateful for the chance to duck into a tea shop at any given hour.

Distracting as the bustle, the cars, the colonial buildings of the Strand Road may be, you have only to look up to remind yourself that you're in Burma. As elsewhere, Yangon life clearly revolves around its pagodas, foremost among them being the downtown Sule Paya and the towering Shwedagon Paya high on Singuttara hill, whose 100 metre high golden stupa dominates the Western skyline. Legend has it that both are over 2,500 years old, and while that's probably optimistic, legends don't have to be true to inspire belief.

Like so many other tourists, we head to Shwedagon to see the sunset, but having no minders to whisk us away we linger for hours. Entering through a quiet, shaded staircase only magnifies the impact on emerging into the light. The central stupa and its myriad smaller temples, shrines and statues burn bright gold in the heat of the day, the tiled floor baking tired feet circling, awestruck. As the sun falls they fade to rusty crimson, before turning greenish gold under the lights. All the while the temple throngs with people: young couples, extended families, pilgrims, visiting monks, photographers, a particularly annoying elderly American tour group in twinset and pearls. We sit and soak up the gentle hum of reverence as darkness falls, confident that my two dollar torch will get us home safe.

Continued here