I wrote this poem because I came across an album I hadn’t heard in years, it reminded me so much of Shanghai where I lived briefly as a teenager that I had this all rush into my head and I needed to get it out. So here is a memory purge of my time in Shanghai which goes hand-in-hand with the B-side Dave Clarke’s CD World Service which I was coincidentally listening to incessantly while in Shanghai on my CD walkman.
Shanghai
Rushing street lights
Streaking towards mayhem
Crowd around and push downwards
Weddings in white lace trails
And blushed rosy faces
Tourists, romantics, ancient memories
Lay waste to the tiny strip of Chinese gardens
A gaggle of grouped species
Shift and morph
Shoals of fish people move through the hard ocean of asphalt
In the carbon fibre glass walled shopping mall
Porcelain women on the big screen
Pursed luscious lips
Pale as ghosts and staring blankly
Into the future
Into the stars
While below their heavenly faces
External to the manicured clean world
Men wearing rags
Fight the pigeons for food
Light as feather, heavy as a door
Our spirits are lifted towards the neon-rimmed sky
And here’s the techno side of that album which is equally as bangin and equally as appropriate for the heaving metropolis that is Shanghai.
Content Catnip 