My native English, now I must forgo
— William Shakespeare
For home is wherever you are, my love,
And where you are is where I want to be,
Not in that Kingdom or this Republic,
Even here, on the far side of the world
To the land from which you and I were made,
On this scorched earth of bankers and lawyers,
Of smiling hookers and friendly waiters,
Friendless to me, deaf and dumb to their speech,
Separated even from my words.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxHere,
My love, am I at home with you always,
In the wrinkle of your nose, the laughter
Between our eyes, through the long acid nights,
My head at rest upon your breast, asleep
Between your thighs, my former universe
Shrunk now to the four walls of our bedroom,
To the country of our bed, this city
Of our love, in which we live together,
At home, even here. Even here at home.
— Hong Kong, March 2025
• • • • •
The title is from the Talking Heads song on their 1983 album, Speaking in Tongues. The realisation at the heart of the poem came to me in September 2024, when I was living alone in London and contemplating my return to Hong Kong. It was only when I decided on the title of my poem, however, in March 2025, that I realised I was in some respects rewriting David Byrne’s lyrics. In this respect, a poem is like a dream, whose latent content is only found in the process of trying to recall it the next morning, in that one discovers what a poem is about (if at all) only by writing it.
The epigraph is from William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Richard II (1595-96), in the passage where the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray, is exiled by the King (Act I, scene 3, ll. 154-173).
The photograph is from an ill-advised trip to the former Portuguese colony of Macao, now a designated casino for globe-trotting bankers and the courtiers that call themselves artists, and probably the most bizarre and unpleasant place I have ever been outside of a bad acid trip, from which it is differentiated only by the measure of reality.
A Communist in Hong Kong 