things move around

My friend has gone on holiday; I don’t know how long for. Chances are he’s jetting out to Singapore, where he may have spent some years as a young man, if ever he was young, of course. In Singapore my friend will eat lizards and gizzards and spend all day hailing taxis with his extraordinary hands. In the rain he will sit under a canopy and drink Chinese beer, and in the evening he will listen to pitterpattering voices in the alley below his balcony and watch American baseball on satellite TV. Then on to Shanghai, a place where he has never been but where, he has heard, the people are full of lust. And then I should imagine my friend will return to the suburb of Kuala Lumpur where he was born, if ever he was born, and find asphalt on the streets, and a blood moon squatting over the city, speared by seventy-story skyscrapers, and a hissing sound like alka-seltzer all day long in his ears.