High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese

How would you say Aberdeen in Chinook Flip your loonie for a sitkum dolla Translate the signs High Muck-a-muck FW

Does this cul de sac remind you of your old hutong Street after street with no return FW

Read it please don’t try to understand it as a form of structural domination A city’s language is just a measure of a neighborhood’s domestic scale FW

Retrace the water snake as purple on the spirit duplicator Another menu of surprise you’re even here, lucky FW

We imagine things are not so fixed

but far away

A saffron robe somewhere is easily understood

And get lost, Forbidden City’s another ideogram of history

Still on your way

Each road numbered as a radical for history

To something new.

The sign is clear

The signs are clear, come in and get placed anyplace

Read it where you are

This is the River Road to Forbidden City

We’re all still hungry and we want to get home

Vast concrete plinths, yes let’s make it out of concrete

Another middle kingdom sculpted from cement

Remember granite overlapping the archipelago of immigration

RICHMOND Page after page of boundary turning Sandblasted crane of the blue heron highway Free subliminal neighborhoods wired home Without the rest of the world Khenko’s serenity is heavy weather Does this cul de sac remind you of your old hutong Street after street with no return No cranes, but Could that blue heron be your ride to heaven They have not deimperialized themselves to history How you say Aberdeen is how you say Sitkum dollah Our stepping stones of duplication, just ‘cuz we’re hungry Call to work out a way to live, just call out the “wretched” How would you say Aberdeen in Chinook Flip your loonie for a sitkum dolla Translate the signs High Muck-a-muck A saffron robe somewhere is easily understood but far away We imagine things are not so fixed and integrated into waterfalls Public art is always so much someone else’s multicultural intention That is fantasy ocean we all children live at the edge of The dragon here’s domestic art Like Pender Street protected by the fires of intention Another middle kingdom sculpted from cement We’re all still hungry and we want to get home Vast concrete plinths, yes let’s make it out of concrete Remember granite overlapping the archipelago of immigration Retrace the water snake as purple on the spirit duplicator Another menu of surprise you’re even here, lucky through the same mouthless anger arriving there, here and back again stopped stunned and caught in this double-bind of other information, Chinese-Canadian, China Chinese tongue-tied vacant humming smoulder deep that anger at not having language itself, never mind the words — that much anger, at the empty, emptied, voice except behind your eyes the absence clouded shuttled ocean washed up along your brow just another line of chippy foam. Wave. Whoosh. The star of Chinese Checkers, how can you forget Taiwan The diaspora jumps and scatters all its citizens The counterbalance to a Mainland not so main at home Just multicoloured dragon eggs mass-produced displacement of the heart The signs are clear, come in and get placed anyplace And get lost, Forbidden City’s another ideogram of history Read it please don’t try to understand it as a form of structural domination A city’s language is just a measure of a neighborhood’s domestic scale The sign is clear This is the River Road to Forbidden City Each road numbered as a radical for history Read it where you are Still on your way To something new. CALL OF DUTY: DREAMAfter Fleetwood Mac Is this the Dream? Mm… Mm… Now here we go again I say I want my freedom So what’s the fuss to keep me down? It wasn’t right I had to pay my way you know it. But listen carefully to the sounds of my loneliness, like the boat that brought me here In the sadness of remembering what I’d left, and what I dream for, and what I’d left and what I dream for. This shallow life is not what I was dreaming Deep down inside the emptiness is screaming Other women they will come and they will go If the glitter turns to gold I’ll know, I’ll know. Now here I go again, my trans Pacific vision American as apple pie It’s not just me who looks for freedom in a dream, that liberating dream I’ll have to buy. Days of loneliness Empty dreaming drives me mad In the sadness of remembering what I had, and what I lost, and what I had, ooh what I dream for. This shallow life is not what I was dreaming Deep down inside the emptiness is screaming Other women they will come and they will go If the glitter turns to gold, I’ll know. Oh, this shallow life is not what I was dreaming Deep down inside the emptiness is screaming Say, women they will come and they will go If the glitter turns to gold, I’ll know, I’ll know, I’ll know, oh, oh, oh, I’ll know.