Been digging up poems! I wrote this one in February last year, during my very first week in Hanoi! Sleepless in Hanoi Sleeplessness descends quietly and settles. On the rooftop there are cigarettes and broken lights, there is the sadness of wasted space and the lack of imagination. The Hanoi air a warm electric wet, the grey cough of the skinny man I am forced to live with. Tonight the sky is a grey cough too. There are cats making battered calls across the night, there are the endless concrete heads of buildings knocking together, naked and plain like old men ashamed to have lost their looks. There is you, somewhere, bending over something in the UK, perhaps a book or a piece of work, and you are scrubbed and cold and squeaky with soap and snow and I can almost smell you, your coldness, your soft cleanliness, your soft sheetedness, your polished skin... and little me all ragged, brown and bruised with the motorbikes in my lungs and an aching body, a body that aches with a day of walking the wildest streets, of wet dirt slapping against my calves, of the thunder of bikes and the hack and spit of the sellers who call and chase me as I wander Hanoi. And now midnight and the still grey air and the yellow cough and the lack of you. Feb 2013
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 12:56:41 +0000
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