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Poetry

from Pee Poems

Mar 9, 2022 | By Lao Yang | Translated from Chinese

Lightly tap the space bar once

To disappear

致某久未回復的女詩人

 

硬著等你

 

To a Poet Who Hasn’t Responded for a Long Time

 

Erect, waiting for you

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the swelling, sleepless me

Rolls around in red dust

 

*

 

I want to explore your openness.

I want to enter you until you’re open.

I want to poke the wall until it opens.

I want to make in the sky an opening.

I want to make a sky-sized opening.

 

I’m so ridiculous.

In the end,

I only made a hole in the ground

That’s the size of myself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lightly tap the space bar once

To disappear

To make way for things

 

Between walls

Between people

Between words

Is outer space

 

*

 

Emerging time and again from the boiling plucking-pot, spreading out the body’s featherless meat, balancing on the board as on a sharp knife’s blade, the sharp knife-like heart demonic, the sharp knife-like heart silent as the four quadrants of a field, silent but for the relentlessly howling and loping wolves, breathlessly advancing, breathlessly careening toward the end of life, pitiable life and death, right and wrong having nothing to do with me. In winter a basket of Chinese cabbage, pickled slaw in summer, revisiting old haunts, rolling back into the burrow, rootless underfoot and without a single strand up top, even the greens’ salty taste cannot stall the descent into nostalgia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A meteorite

Burns for the burning human world

 

The stars are set so deep in the sky

 

*

 

The lonely seek out the lonely

Time encrypts time

 

The vain search for the vain

Space decrypts space

 

Light gathers darkness

Power vibrates strings

 

So

Who are you

 

 


Pee Poems is forthcoming from Circumference Books. Published here with permission from the publisher.

Image by Antonio Carrau.

Author
Lao Yang

Lao Yang was born in northeastern China. He founded one of China’s first independent advocacy spaces dedicated to experimental music and sound art in Beijing. A recipient of a Jean-Jacques-Rousseau fellowship, he was a resident at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, and he has performed at venues and festivals around the world.