Advertising short skirts, smiles & rippling abs: Photoshop yourself onto yourself in your dream of your dream of yourself always happy here-as-elsewhere

Undone, unbidden, unsought, yet bang! all up in your face & cute as hell, star calligraphy, strips of water delivery service sticker ads torn off light posts

Look, listen: this is a record of the same returning to itself again & again just enough to meet you in mutual change, arising & decay (coffee?)

Stuck in traffic near the mudflats by the river

                                                                 I am on the Metro headed home

Joking with old men smoking

Shanghai’s transit well, the old railway station

A bird today, it’s possible, in a cage singing, talking

Traffic lights through warped French windows counting down

Markets blooming round and all the people feeling capital

Made & shifted before the War and after, wafting in with flowers

The makeshift bathroom of the makeshift half Deco house

Celadon flex-Styrofoam beds and the smell of lice shampoo

Raw cashews and roasted pumpkin seeds shrunk-wrapped

Two tall Super “Dry” Asahi silver cans. “KARAKUCHI.”

On a Thursday evening buying Sichuan pepper peanuts

Cut from the alluvial plain buoying up Shaanxi Nan Lu

I’m doing this somewhat the wrong way; I’m not emerging from underground

I am APAC and graying temples in Uniqlo Heattech™

Generator motor oil pools in outdoor lathe shade

I am a green FOTON dump truck heaped with delta soil

Rapt palms                              mudra, gold leaf, mall, temple, ornamental palms’ foil-wrapped trunks, streaming screens five stories high

                                                                                              — take us into darkness

Great abundance, canopy, citadel, a great group leader — then (coup) two changing lines

Thinking through ˈpɹɒd͡ʒ.ɛkts (possessive) rare sun rays with PM 2.5 at 134 on the app

Migrant worker improv laundry lines criss-cross yellow rapeseed field (demolished city block) through elevated train window (smear)

I can only speculate, and badly, given my terrible Chinese: Is selling magic cards to a foreigner the slightest bit dangerous?

Who’s protecting whom from what and who knows whom or what to fear about whom or what other than oneself?

In inevitable error, geomancy, a local matter now gone global, is perfectly right only when nothing’s left

Terminal changes from end of the line to today’s improvised heart of things, “chance” always yields

Just before all the markets crash their weathered steel roll-up security gates down over stuck-dust displays

Phones call themselves into existence from futures where Smart meets Extinction & flips us (answer or don’t)

Lay of the land: “Between the ticker and the mind lies an air-block of wind” whinges the voice in my head

Logic meets Earth again & again, future meditations’ rapid flow into this moment’s pinhole pupils

Ceaseless construction’s counterpart: demolition — 拆迁 chāiqiān 拆迁 chāiqiān — piledriver

Magic shop on the south side of the station facing the improvised public square rough-rendered

Observed certainty in obverse: Shanghai Railway Station’s Exit x?: packed Metro mall, kluged pedestrian tunnel labyrinth

Blonde woman smiling in triangle pose atop a blue-sky oceanside overlook above every Metro entrance

Migrant worker improv laundry lines hatching golden rapeseed field (rubbled block) from elevated train window (CMYK smear to gold, green, black)

A woman doing yoga (advertising surfaces), school kids in red kerchiefs, a massive bare calf, palm, cheek

Open to error as method

Door to lane to gate to complex: Old folks pass through hospital halls like Metro ads, aquarium fish, Candy Crush tiles, Dreamworld teens

ZZ asks whether students care about what we teach because it’s all falling apart (Zixia set Lǔbān straight with the Classics, they say, then build this?

Lǔbān, god of carpentry and masonry, a bad student back in Spring & Autumn as we slip again like ice toward warring states

Lǔbān, god of builders and contractors, invented: a naval battering ram, a flying wooden bird, a wooden bicycle, and his wife invented the umbrella

Lǔbān, god of carpentry and masonry, invented the saw, the square, the planer, the drill, the shovel, the cloud ladder (for sieges), grappling hooks

Yet with time enough to wander, I take the Metro to Luban Lu; I later learn that Lǔbān 魯班 is the god of builders & contractors, I learn online:

Zhen 屯: “Birth Throe” (Hinton); “Beginning” (Huang); “Difficulty at the Beginning“ (Wilhelm), and I do indeed struggle to compose legible lines later

All predictable enough, given time, data & material: ZZ generates zhūn 屯 with his I Ching app. Zhūn 屯: “Difficult birth,” Minford suggests

June 3, 2019, cool & cloudy, global atmospheric CO2 415 PPM as we surveil & are surveilled: ZZ pulls up an I Ching WeChat miniprogram

ZZ says, “they should take that global society class when they’re seniors and know something. How about your poetry?” I show him my iPhone

I say “Diogenes the Cynic” & “cosmopolitanism” & “mindfulness” & “neuroscience” & “soft authoritarianism” & “Buddhism” & “climate change”

ZZ asks whether students care about what we teach them because everything’s falling apart: Do Chinese freshmen care about the humanities?

ZZ is on university leave to devise AI solutions that will drive innovation & growth for retailers & service providers & clients & customers

ZZ runs an AI lab for AMZN, ZZ is friends with poets from his ’80s culture fever 文化热 days, ZZ knows a lot of poetry & history & code

ZZ says “depressed” when I ask how it’s going and “this war” as who why and “oh, the trade war” when I ask “which war”?

One text says Hundun 混沌–tumultuous chaos–gives rise to form if you treat her right; an older text says fear men who want to treat you right

The Shanghai Tower’s apex skewers new moon at noon 128 stories overhead

“If the order is not good, misfortune threatens,” Baynes says Wilhelm says the Confucians say the Oracle says the “Army” says. Figures.

Eileen Chang, psychogeographer? 道路以目 dào lù yǐ mù Eyes on the road. “So you’re here, too?” “Hurry! Hurry!” “Desolation”

The rat-catching huangshulang seek to possess humans, for in weasel form they may not attain enlightenment

Thank God, my Queneau, that Le poète inspiré n’est point un polyglotte

The Vice-Chancellor is adamant that we should not allow FMRI technology to lead us down the Garden Path

Trees in landscaped strip flowering (dead flowers, the moon at noon)

We want all we touch to think and touch us

I approach the Metro, initiate the algorithm & vice-versa

Friendly cabbie, VW LPG Santana. We approach a squat brick block built in the style of my 1926 KCMO grade school (“insensible rock… sluggish clod”)

Does Earth still have some kind of code for humankind? Rutt says Zhouyi says “Beset by creeping plants and vines. Tripping on tree stumps…”

Mistake to worry grammar

Put everything on a scooter, omnipresent moto, a bus, undulating green & rust striations

Strawberries for sale! China Post lock box, talking walls with nothing much to say

Propagandandandandandandandandandanda

No connections is as bad as all connections, 對吧? Flowers galore

Reviewing the bit of quick research I’ve done on Chinese megafauna and Zhoukoudian (rhino horn, tiger bone, elephant tusk)

Does this river overlap, intersect, or take over from the Himalayas? Ancient contemporary

Should the writing seek to be quick and clear or deep and entangled, and if both, then which to what degree?

On the left like blade-split skin

                                                  whirling — the doors open

                    within flows, scum and foam

                                                                              into streaming time, under-

                                                                                        the blur you seek, the turn

I’ve got my reading, I’ve got my enhanced methodology, and the project, it comes together (flies apart)

The Liberal Arts should teach students the skills they need to keep jobs in the Second Machine Age, the Vice Chancellor says

I’m struck, wearing mask & hat & glasses, by how much I like this crazy getup

A green plum & flaked edible gold in my cold brew Ethiopian (yet more proof of a big mistake)

Kunqu opera advert: pixilated butterfly, digital lilies, deco scene in rotoscope (1935)

The ambulatory nature of hair, a platform for showing

The workers edit their gardens among the edge city towers with Sublime Text, error=me (quote style=wha?)

The guards function more like guides, gently glancing, gazes brushing over us, the ten thousand (+/- one)

Bamboo scaffolding and waffled concrete walk

As Zhūquè 朱雀 Vermillion Bird takes flight above the elephant corpse on the riverbank to bring us fire, heat, summer bearing down ablaze

Starbucks’ Chinese rival chains, coffee economy rains, air-con, mudslides, container ports, ever more rival chains: I sit, sip and write in one

Later, an elephant laid out dead by a river in a mall where grass mud horses weakly meme cǎonímǎ 草泥马 in melon-scented kòngtiáo 空调 cooled air

The Eighth Bird? Marsh hawk? Falcon? Thin scimitar beak: waterfowl. Shanghai canal hawk: I know this because it appears to me so

The Seventh Bird, pure white crane in mud-red canal water, takes flight as I approach. (Crane, egret, heron… would I really know? I’m no ornithologist.)

Minford: “There is no body. He walks in the courtyard, unseen. No harm.” Muddy canal reflects vapor trails in milk-blue cirrus skies

Swallow’s wings, Mandarin duck body, harmonized: tweets. So why live here? Hinton: “Expect nothing from your life”

Face of swallow, breast of goose, tortoise back, tail of fish, golden pheasant head, peacock tail, beak of parrot

Bird Six, Fènghuáng 凤凰, hybrid sovereign Phoenix, posting self-as-viral GIF: legs of stag, now of crane, beak of rooster, snake neck

The Fifth Bird says Jīngwèi 精卫, dropping garbage from her beak into the Eastern Sea, racing to fill it so no more of us will drown

Bird Three roars sovereign overhead, gleaming above the desire path worn into engineered highway-shoulder woods, combustion everywhere

The Second Bird, crimson propaganda woodblock Sparrow (Four-Pests-Campaign hungry ghost) silently mouths xiāomiè máquè 消灭麻雀!

Upon this Server Earth I ask the birds their names. The First croaks shǐzǔniǎo

New Earths hurtle our way, source-flowers time-lapsing from pools of crude in old coal beds (Jurassic oil play)

We surface to the ad: pixelated nails, liquid droidoid roses, Sichuan Basin Jurassic oil play: Enter/Exit

Healthy perfection on the seaside, poised atop volcanic rock, the sun setting behind her, or is it rising? We don’t know (this is continuous)

On Line 10 instead of 1 because of simple inattention. The pure stuff

Smooth Metro voices, female then male, accented particulate English: next station retro sex gas hiss: Xintiandi

Circular saw cuts in, shreds of low cloud obscure Shangri La Jing’an’s penthouse floors, oil iridesces in the gutter

Spring is early again. Corrugated galvanized steel cladding on air-con venting site the size of a modest family home

Twin tower smoked-mirror incurved façades rise where the 人间烟火 fire & smoke of everyday life filled lilong lanes & alleys last time I walked here

Being a public nuisance comes so naturally

Blue mop woman, blue plastic mop cart, bamboo-handled stick broom, cotton mop heads dying in sun & wind

Today’s AQI holds steady in the mid-high hundreds, “a chaotic leader rising after a period of progress”

VIP dancing grannies, speakerboxes apt towers epic dB levels hi-flow hi-density

Tin tub dub reverb pebble down corrugated galvanized pipe

Sky blue, cloud white, eyes eye, downturned eyes, screens screen, masks mask, coded passage, blue sky, white cloud

Crop the face below the nose, crop the camera from the frame, focus on eyes & flowers & trees

Filter first for natural beauty and again for perfect balance and again for perfect color

Blue-coveralls clad maintenence men wreathed in smoke, chain-lighting one off another, casting butts aside beneath six-story bamboo scaffolding

Lamb and fry bread on chamois, “It’s worth thinking about the Bomb,” Mao said, so I do, this morning approaching Dapuqiao

Local reports from this moment’s end-Holocene terminal: Streaming fire diaries, plague year journals, game-addict edicts, frozen baozi

Smith: “Cleave the waist, rend the spinal meat. It is threatening. Smoke the heart.”

Schematic maps and camera eyes exit signs low green red character undertow one QR code to place everyone everywhere

Next stop is the terminal station: doors will open on the left. I go right

Naked Hub™ above the station, another cowork node: free-flow soda, filtered air, 24/7 zero-point revolution