I thought I’d caught a glimpse of me
at the eye of this storm.
I’ve lost touch with myself,
taken another spin in hell.
I saw my maker’s hollow eyes,
crushing it all from above.
I know those eyes are so like mine,
and when my fuel of unrest drain,
when I have fallen to the floor,
pierced by my tears and despaired in vain,
poisoned by monetary stench in the rain,
I know, I cannot sustain
as a modern idealist, self-proclaimed;
that underneath this skin of madness is a nihilist flame,
and tomorrow stretches long and thin like a muddy stain.
When arriving at the translucent horizon, I only fear
that no body shall feel my anger,
no body shall know my name.
Someday, they say,
I’ll become one of them.
The snide, the servitude, the institutional brain;
reaping, rising from a golden pile of disdain,
disguised as thinkers,
chanting the fraudulent refrain:
“It’s ok to be deaf to their pains;
it’s ok to be insensitive and sane;
it’s ok to idolise those who put us in chains;
the imperial venoms of the past shall rise again.”
But if I still have my wits about me at forty-three,
I know who I don’t want to be —
just a regular human being
in this rotten age, selling
Yunzhi Pan 