Bak Kut Teh on Wuyi Shan

‘sex, I mean. Sooner or later,
It’s all just poetry’
— ‘little miss never’, Sarah Stanton

remember how timidly you threw the word out
So casually into a conversation
about laksa 
‘because you ___ me so much!’
and then the betrayal.
It happens at all ages but the first
stab sears and then bruises
leaving an ache that can only 
laughs when our brain RAM is rewritten
in middle-age.

You said that your ancestral village
was too low lying and that 
I came from fertile inland mountains 
that grew tea that started opium wars
Yours was coastal, fishermen and merchants
who fled wars for richer lands
and only married their own
I suppose that explains your Hapsburg jaw

My village is now a tobacco plantation
but it doesn’t really matter now.