Title: Railway China

Author: John Newton

In: Sport 39: 2011

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2013, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 39: 2011

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Taking leave was a sickly matter, like the fantasy of one’s own funeral, a drawn-out, onanistic fore-pleasure. Visitors played their assigned role with poems and flags.

My goods were bestowed on deserving friends.

page 133

The ritual trash-fire gobbled my abandoned manuscripts.

If I travelled as bones and bare sinew then Asia would restore my flesh.

On far Okinawa, where the old live forever, I would swallow the toxic fugu fish and death itself would spit me out like Jonah from the maw of the beast, inoculated, alight with vision, bloodstream fizzing with sugar and oxygen.

I would raise my trembling lips to the liquor that dripped from the bamboo pipe to the stone.

I would gaze slack-jawed at the neon pagodas and ride the mechanical bull at the Pinkerton Chophouse.