Chinese Workers Migrate To Smaller Dreams

"Dreams cannot be realized, but everyone has a dream, isn't it? Let's not talk about big dreams, just small ones." - Chinese migrant worker at Foxconn

_________

The overcast sky is doomful and apocalyptic in its bitter majesty. The obscurity is cutting and breaks down the soul, memory vanishes at every instant under its featureless gaze. Intricate sky-trains run through the horizon and above the city outskirts, buildings are heavy with the shadow of exceeding industrial progress. Underneath the mastery of technologic ingenuity, residencies are ramshackle with a past stunted by mysterious misdirection. This is Xi’an, the ancient capital of China, reduced to a highway market under the unceasing black smog gathering above. On a dim street, I follow an acquaintance into his apartment. I reminisce on my time living in the dizzying neglect-ridden suburbs of Cairo, where once a Southern Sudanese lady told me I was tough for living there! I enter the swelling door, busted at the edges. The room is drab, yet with hard-won charm. My friend appears with the build of a martial arts practitioner. He welcomes me eagerly to enjoy his space as he exits. I am stricken with fear in this unsure, foreign nightmare. A closet door then opens, revealing a neighbor’s apartment. A man, half in pajamas, greets me courteously and comforts my anxiety with friendly exchanges. I am left to a broken television, indiscernible Chinese books and near-broken furniture. 

_________

Train

"To see a moving train in your dreams means you will soon have reason to make a journey...Freud said that the train is usually a phallic symbol and that a train going through a tunnel represents intercourse...Jung though that the train ride represented the way a person moves and behaves just like everyone else and that you the dreamer may be striving for wholeness."

_________

spurious blame...the corridor towards bristling american fame.
and glum, rock-stopping angelic veins

bellowing green mud into a ghastly, shattered dome
factory cone
rummaging into the asshole
wounded entrances of el-hind museum
embellishments veering off the possible pathway
sworn to ruining

nursed to zero wanting
defiled
rambling on the cursed block

nomad goal
always westerniz'd
to mean not-a-thing!

crazy intellect
brine
unfeeling as the dreaming vedic horse
that destroys

cruel menacing peace
in the morbid fashions of contemporary lividity

...

“seeded sickness,
martyr'd
in the glass caverns of shap'd reckoning
calling forward a landless vanishing
as the finished evocations of dynastic slavery trains the eyes
of a rat-fish
bestial love”

“groping for home,
just say...
what there is to not say...
give me a thinn'd breach of time and place,
wake me from the driveling selflessly thrash'd disorder
or invite emotional nothing,
and non-thinking
indulgent visitations."

the trunk swirld for a banish'd world
created from the nearly unmade

a timeless ocean of intent,
bespoken with visceral imagining

the spontaneous friend, as nonhuman entity
alleviating the pinkish, boring stress
coarse as a matchstick
curved with lint from a monotonous parasite of recycled minuteness.

- excerpts from "Spurious Blame"