Rickshaw Face

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There are special expressions on the faces of gap year students in rickshaws. They know not why they are there. It is an expression which has fallen greatly into disuse in the last century or so, mainly through the diligence of Gandhi, the Mau-Mau, Sun Yat-sen and other hooligans, or ‘terrorists’ as they are now know. It is smug, bemused and bored.

Sometimes the gap year boy and the gap year girl will steer their faces in unison towards some chosen curiosity: a peculiarly attached air-conditioner, perhaps; a patch of mould that resembles a kangaroo; a shop sign incorporating a word like fûk, wán-që, shiht or cóhk; a man having a shave; a caged bird seller; a monkey on a stick. One will point and the other will engrave a smile-like arrangement of features across its face. Or a frown for the monkey on the stick. Or the two faces will face oppositely outward, hopelessly seeking, not anything interesting or beautiful, but merely anything at all to justify the degrading spectacle of a useless arrogant alien and the pointless conceited invader it fucks, moving amongst the dull world inhabited by funny foreigners who do thing differently. Look at that! - What? - Over there. See where the paint is peeling? It looks a bit like a kangaroo. - Amazing! I never imagined so many motorcycles! - Gee, imagine if everyone rode motorcycles in Minnesota! -that would sure be weird.

Remind me again, for I have grown old and have chopped my trousers off at the knee. What are you doing here, in Hanoi, as a human, on this planet, alive, on its gap-year, eating noodles and fish, looking at things, being bored? You should fuck. Fuck in the rickshaw. Because that is/ all you are and all you aspire to: to muddle your genetic soups together and pray that resultant bag of mixed-up genetic-pus will, through the good auspices of your wit and wisdom, hard won on so many rickshaw rides and the 9 o’clock lectures yet to come, muddle its own genetic scum with that of another and thereby ejaculate increasingly minor fractions of your self into the void of the future. The humans on the street would find the sight of you two fucking both repulsive and interesting, which is more than you find in them.

Here we go round the Old Quarter
Old Quarter Old Quarter
Here we go round the Old Quarter
At eleven o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Gap-year
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the sixth form
And freshers week
Between the A-level
And the matriculation
Falls the Gap-year
Life is very long

Between the womb
And the world
Between the top
And the bottom
Between the pass out
And the drop out
Falls the Gap-year
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
With a bang in a rickshaw.

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