You navigate by skyscrapers labelled high above the horizon:
Pan Pacific, Dynasty, Legend. How do they fill them all?
The architects’ liberty:
reshape the skyline, make beacons
for the world: come forth and occupy.
Below, the sewers
and waterways open off the pavement –
a city unafraid to expose its insides.
                                      A Western child might get hurt badly
The lesson here: Watch your step.

Fabrics: a thousand colourful headscarves echo
the flags draping down from the medians of thoroughfares,
red and white stripes below
a star and crescent, a grinning cyclops.

A silk shirt, your mistake today,
                                                          so light and airy,
in fact, the weave too fine to breathe.

You simmer in air sweet with
exhaust and hawker stalls and fallen fruit
solid around you, harsh
like cheap liquor at the back of your throat.

In the shadow of the Petronas Towers,
the world’s tallest free-standing building,
you shop in a mall
like your life depends on it,
a mental calculator converts everything in sight
concludes that life is cheap for foreigners and locals
but in different ways.

Your purchases:
delicate Chinese teacups inscribed with a poem
about spring growing old, clean underwear, cheap CDs.

In a country with a lesser economy, you allow yourself
to remember everything you’ve wanted to buy lately
and have made yourself forget.

So why are you angry
when the cabdriver tries to charge you diamonds
in the sudden downpour?
       Prices rise with demand
or desperation, the rain is fresh, taxis are cheap as water
you’ve drank heavily already, why not one expensive vodka
at the hotel bar?
   After all, the shopkeepers smiled
so sweetly,
        you’ve won your bargains
the city is safe:
Anwar under trial for sodomy,
the Prime Minister’s former favoured deputy
swept aside to clear away moral corruption.

The wall of the city prison, airport
entry and departure cards, radio, television
all declare: Drug traffickers will be executed.

The evening ends at the Blue Boy Disco,
tourists ventured out from hotel rooms.

Jonathan, born in Newcastle-on-Tyne, last twelve years
in Hong Kong. You negotiate: Your place or mine?

 He is too rough in his pleasure.
     The harsh morning sun
makes you squint your eyes into a shape even
more Asian,
an intense scent of durian in the air,
you notice his fingerprints the colour
of starfruit on your skin.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia