You walk wild-eyed down Wu Dao Kou, clothes covered with weeks of day dust and numberless nights of sleep dirt, hair matted in brambly black spikes, Face soot-smudged blacker than the charcoal brick peddler’s, who pedals his cart past you, like hundreds of others he won’t pay you a second look. Your pay? The same everyday – Nothing more than what you can scrape up from grimy ditches and street drains. Your job? Pretty much a routine – Drift to the tracks near Xi Zhi Zhuang, wave your empty plastic bag and whittled stick and wail for the train, so you can guide it on its way. Bramble headed Beijing winds’ waif, which chair do I take, and where’s the score of this brief passage of human want, of human shame?
You walk wild-eyed down Wu Dao Kou,
clothes covered with weeks of day dust
and numberless nights of sleep dirt,
hair matted in brambly black spikes,
Face soot-smudged blacker than the charcoal
brick peddler’s, who pedals his cart
past you, like hundreds of others
he won’t pay you a second look.
Your pay? The same everyday –
Nothing more than what you can scrape up
from grimy ditches and street drains.
Your job? Pretty much a routine –
Drift to the tracks near Xi Zhi Zhuang,
wave your empty plastic bag and
whittled stick and wail for the train,
so you can guide it on its way.
Bramble headed Beijing winds’ waif,
which chair do I take, and where’s
the score of this brief passage
of human want, of human shame?
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