So, yeah, I have a slight man-crush on China Mieville.
This was first read at Esoterotica back in. . . 2012? I think it might have been the first piece I read there, and my punmanship has only improved since.
Digging to China
by Zach B
Being a rather bookish type, I get much more sensation
from those who tend to offer intellectual stimulation.
That’s why when with my girlfriend, by whose physical charms I’m taken,
my mind drifts to the picture on the back cover of Kraken.
It’s not that I like guys, I think, but her rhetoric can’t compare
to that erudite London fantasist, even if she has better hair.
She lacks the New Weird turns-of-phrase which put him o’er the top,
and make me fawn for dialectic post-Tolkien agitprop.
Could I pack up and leave her wondering where I might be,
while I’m outside his flat with a sign, “Iron Council less than three”?
But why should I even have to choose? They’re both, in their way, pretty.
If I marry them both, I could honeymoon in The City AND The City.
But that’s not fair or prob’ly legal–I guess we’ll never be.
I’ll just sit here dotting the I’s with hearts in my library’s copy of Railsea.
So now you see I’ve written this to express my odd frustration:
I’d be awkward if drunk near the man who wrote Perdido Street Station.
Be my Mievillentine!