I'm on a public mini bus and I'm on it in Hong Kong

We're heading to Sai Kung. There is a winding hill and bowing trees, scenic things, the things you take pictures of and show to people who maybe care, but most likely don't. You know how it's done: you string all the photos together and make the whole family crowd around.

There are a lot of old women on this bus, little ladies with crooked, scrunched up faces and tiny feet. At the front, up near the driver, there is a bucket of Easy Finish joint compound (ready mix), stacked next to numerous bottles, tools, backpacks, rubbish offcuts. A pile of junk. It's the sort of thing that inspires confidence, knowing the bus could fall to pieces at any moment. ("Hey driver, half of this left wall just fell off!"- "Don't you worry, just grab summathat joint compound at the back. It's ready mix for your convenience.")

The bus stops multiple times. I get off on the last. When I'm off the olive seats for a moment, I breathe in the cool stiffness of a not-quite summer morning, then get on a connecting bus to Mong Kok. The streets we pass are thin, built up along the sides with cramped little buildings and tall, palm-like trees. We pass the sea on the left, and around it, hundreds of white tottering houses mirrored by the clean white boats below. We move through Pak Wai village. It's just a half hour ride to those big Mong Kok streets.

An afternote:
Some punk told me Hong Kong was dirty as hell while he sucked up a drag and blew it out over my face. I don't think he really saw it.

Beat on Silver

(intended for spoken word purposes)

Tiny and me
We gettin off the airplane
Long walk, tarmac
Pickin up our stuff again
Small cops, big heads
Guns cocked, all prepped
We move, we walk
Push our shit straight ahead
“Look out kid,”
the singing preacher said
with a borrowed drawl he picked up
when he was still a Zimmerman

Big hut, white doors
He polishing the wood floor
Hair all beehive
he hardly had it did in time
Tiny scoots right off home
Me and Bee smokin on
Lick along, rolling
Then he cookin up, forest things
“Get that mush
down my neck!”
Well, he says it so polite that
I barely stop to check it’s right

Tall men, they fast asleep
Beehive lookin moss green
Face clean, bow-tie neat
My airplane sailed so smoothly in
We cookin up things tonight
Well, we cookin up dreams
We makin all the plans
and then we dictate what they mean
“Let’s go off,
some darker place,”
Bee and me, eyes closed
No covers on them windows

Flying out of Bangkok

Flying out of Bangkok; the plane slowly gathering speed across the runway. And there are lights across the tarmack, tiny rows of red and blue, and green a little farther up. In the distance, there is the glittering yellow flicker of a city awakening, stretching its great dirty arms and yawning broadly, looking up to greet the pitch black grin of eight o'clock at night. I am leaving Bangkok now, Floyd is playing in my ears (Wish you were here), the song of so many lonely morning coffees and broken moments of forced nostalgia. There are surely hundreds of us here on this souped-up white machine, beginning trips and ending them, running away and running home. There are thousands of us in planes right now, pinned up pricks of light along the sky. We are going places - or we think we are. We are meeting people. Everywhere we go we are all moving the same: touching faces, touching hands, touching more.