For Andrew Robert Colom against Magnetic Saviour.
We met in that watery year—羊水—when the world wasn’t damned and my skin wasn’t bad. Dead Poets near Centrestage, 13/F, 22:00, buzzed by booze and blued by mood lighting, 7-ELEVEN’s grape strong sour in your hand, glass of Balvenie Doublewood in mine, both near-extinguished. You were further in line. Had to cut you to the quick. Made a comment about those black cat eyes from which it seemed midnight itself unfurled forth, then you poked fun at my Bose headphones scythed around my neck like a 朝珠 of old. One paltry excuse later—gotta take a leak or something like that, fuck if I know now—and we sneaked out onto Nathan Road, time frigid around us, buildings arisen in great disfigurements of concrete and rebar, two shadowed specks in a city of forever lights. We weren’t walking so much as we were hovering, borne like baby Yeshuas beneath an unsteady stream of neon signs, bleary faces and doe eyes, talking about our personal filmic canon: A Moment of Romance for me, Happy Together for you.
We cleared our throats, tossed our empty cans into the eigengrau sea, promenade-strolling. And so ensued the subdued game, the social ritual, hands around waists, eyes on eyes, the why are you looking at me that way, right here, right now, what do you want, oh yeah, uh huh, sure bro.
Your taste, our night, shit, shit. Do I still remember? I’m ransacking this land before time, a minefield of memories—e-cigs and evergreen, hands desert-dry on ass, spine against railing, rapier tongues constantly parrying, boys on boys, something out of a Truffaut or a Brontë, 屌, 屌, 屌, 屌, then 深圳, 上海, Paris of the East, cabbies polite as we spoke softcore in the back, sweet Cantonese nothings, enough nothings to unfulfill any fulfilment.
On the back of the bar’s receipt, a wilted white flower, night we collided, you wrote in shite calligraphy: 天若有情, 1314-5555. Along the promenade, you handed it to me. I held it in my hand as Blake held eternity in an hour, raising it against the moonlight to get a good look, waving it around like I was worried it wasn’t real, that this spell would lose its magick. I held the flower the same way on that September’s day, death of our sixth summer. I smelled him on you in your cage home, you broke a bottle and you kicked and screamed and gnashed and weeped but we knew the score. I held the flower, Eschaton sounds raging just outside, chairs crushed, glasses shattered, invoking a sorcery long dead, murdered by escapisms with your 鬼佬.
Today, I lie on my bed in horizontal contrapposto. Cigarette in mouth, I raise the receipt, remember that queue: long line from the me I wanna be and the you you used to be. From this angle, touched by grey morning light, our flower is a white flag. 天若有情, it says.
“天亦老,” I finish it, breathing smoke, ode to our sweet Cantonese nothing.