The Ugly American

In China, near the ousted sanctuaries
of black Beijing, streets too slippery
to safely streetwalk on, my French stepsister
sleeps with a rich Chinamen. She’s not sixteen.
He drunkenly whispers to me, as if I
were a priest, everywhere he goes
his penis follows, like an angry sailor.
She needs to be told
how much all of this is worth.
Mao’s war isn’t over. We émigrés eat rice,
wary of servants putting in pellets of poison.
For this I sleep all day, my mosquito net
and lethargy muting the smells of charcoal
and fried dog. At night I feel better:
I send out for American beer and heroin
from Thailand. Neither really helps, nor hurts.
My father, the fat, bogus diplomat,
never comes near here anymore, busy,
we are told by the papers, bribing
the locals for peace concessions.

The Yongding River is dirty and bloated,
overcrowded by taxis ferrying hybrid races
across and back, looking for work or selling
war trinkets. Last night my brother, confused
about transitory symbols of loyalty, and fueled
by homemade vodka and gravesites
of victims, blew tiny holes
into the Chinaman’s head with his shotgun.
Today, as with all other days, we wear black,
fearful of our dwindling list of mealtickets,
arrogantly oblivious to boys in Oregon
murdering boys from Ohio with lucky punches
after infidelities. These killings
lead to makeshift suicides, bedsheets
amateurishly ripped from the jail’s cots,
as if the raised dust from the rafters
did not really look like halos
pouring from their suffocating heads.

Someday soon I will steal money from my mother
and cover myself with jade, rubies,
Spanish prostitutes, because I’m bored
with the Twenty First Century. It can’t,
or won’t, end soon enough. I want it to say
to me once: I love you, I mean it,
please come back. But I remain hostile
to clarity, hating the details of accents
in this language that I’ll never marry in,
red walled churches with faded prints
of slant-eyed icons, long dead. Repeat
after me, America, you foreign pinkbitch joke:
I think of money, only of money.

My pajamas have bloodstains. As always
this goes unexamined. The next needle,
I think rationally, better hit its mark
more cleanly. There is no moral here,
even less, purpose. These are only words
about fucking and dying, not chic Chinese pictures
that after translation mean mercy.

All my life I wanted to kill
someone with my bare hands. The problem
is I don’t know where to begin. If alphabetical,
my heroes, the Chinese rebels, needn’t worry:
all their names begin with X. Sooner than later,
then, happily I will get to myself.