Tag: refuge

  • your huddled masses

    New York I am going to climb right up in your lap and press my face to your grimy heart. Where five hundred million faces have been imprinted before. The photobomber in your every selfie sweet New York. Asking scarves of passersby do you know who invented ‘photobomber’. Who invented ‘selfie.’ Brilliant language. Melted together and down in such scaldrons as New York, hell’s diner’s kitchen with menus that could make you cry.

    Chickens reared in tenements and boiled in oil with feathers still in place here and there, wispy in their tender pimpled armpits. Chickens crumbed and larded like the pilgrim invaders who thought to teach those natives a god or two in a sky already crowded with gods. Chicken homefried and served with waffles, side of fries, with bacon, with maple syrup, bitter greens. Those greens are grey. Everything green is grey. Everything khaki is red, white, and blue.

    New York I will be the umpteenth mascot for the day, with fur between her ears. We’ll be two tourists without their guns. That’s if we make it all across the ocean of Atlantis city sunk for its sin in a droning tube with nothing holding us up, my hundredth flight, the one not piloted by a male-pattern-entitlement first officer whose girlfriend left him so he watches everybody board, three carrying babies, and decides again: I will do it. I will drag the whole world down.

    Spectators at a suicide aflame: the headline, neckline, wasteline, wantline. Today we will cross the oceans intact I pray, sift on that trash heap of lilies who reap and weave incessant labour nonstop and who sleep in the street if at all and have built a Museum to the idea of Sex. A green pond. New York. I’ll be in you and you’ll be you. I’ll be dancing: the song soon, soon, soon. (That’s Korean for now. Now. Now.)

  • antaquarium

    When I went to Copenhagen on my own it was cold and windy and there were times I felt very lost and alone. When I felt lost and alone I would take refuge in one of two places: the library, which has free wifi and a cafe and people clustered around low tables on Eames chairs, earnestly chatting; or this antiquarian bookshop I found, labyrinthine and lined to the ceiling in leather books, which has been made over into a student caff. There are little tables tucked under the shelves and in corners. They make a very rich hot chocolate and they serve cheap food. I loved to sit in there out of the wind and just gaze and gaze, letting people’s conversations filter through me, feeling how the venerable books stand shoulder to shoulder, a phalanx of minds, and how their massed presence like the presence of noble clouds grounded and rooted me with a kind of magic spell. I grew sleepy and the world seemed much kinder. My ears blurred. I sat for hours as though underwater.