By Liang Yujing

What is it that dashes out of the marble front gate, galloping
…………and flooding in your direction, irresistible?
Beyond the gate, the college is a building of concrete hallucination,
…………aglow like a purgatorial furnace, encircled by a rusty barrier,
…………where you never know
what youth and love have been fused, to a melted solid & soon
…………thrown into the pool in the yard to cool down & reshape –
the apparition of the boys I once loved, those lovely boys
who shrank into themselves in the back seats in class, deaf
…………to the sermons of their professors, daydreaming of immortality,
who teetered through the bumpy alleyways, aimless and lamblike,
…………whispering into every ear of wind their icy wishes,
who got drunken at the third watch, jabbering prayers to the halo
…………of a cold moon and sat down by the path to the narrow
…………gate of their dorm, smoking, murmuring & telling tearful jokes,
who got their left ears pierced by letter-shaped sliver earrings,
…………a rachitic C, a spineless S and a scarlet A,
…………marks of sin, glittering in the light of the bloody sun,
who held mushroom eating contests at the barbecue stall
…………with a thousand empty bottles jostling at their feet, quaffing,
…………carousing, until the sight of an umbrella made them vomit,
who read Lawrence and Nabokov at dusk, debating over the necessity
…………of love-making business at midnight, playing guitar
…………at 2 a.m. & broke a string as female gasps in the adjoining room
…………burst in through the walls,
who were obsessed with a variety of mental & physical masturbations,
…………writing crabbed poems on the wall with a brush,
…………scrabbling ghostlike caricatures on the frosty windowpanes,
…………editing handmade magazines & ejaculating their magmatic mind
…………on a tissue inside their quilts,
who sat up several hours on end at night on dorm roof, contemplating
…………nirvana and democracy under the starry gaze of heaven,
…………discussing Bodhisat and Liu Xiaobo, and went down
…………to the void meadow at dawn,
…………burning a red flag in the yellow twilight of morning,
who loafed into the darkness of night, wandering from Street Mouth
…………to Hankou Railway Station, back, leaving a scent of virginal piss
…………halfway at the gate of the Yellow Crane Tower,
who once jumped on trains at the last minute, fleeing overnight to Xi’an
…………to Beijing to Tianjin to see their angels, to whom they’d written
…………a truckload of letters, and lingered a while in the visionary
…………Heaven, only to drift back with a dusty face, hollow-eyed,
…………in a wet morning casting off the last drop of their lovesick tears
…………into the roaring foams of Yangtze,
which flows east without end, a dark river of burning waves,
…………an acid stream that dissolves all the dreams and dreamers,
…………an Acheron, a Yellow Fountain, on whose bank such a herd
…………of angelic ghosts once swarmed, waiting to be ferried
& eventually got reincarnated with a newly-painted skin
…………of shirts, suits, ties and leather shoes
…………in a world of too much human flesh, standing before the gate
…………chewing over the happy days of their lost hell-mates –
the boys, those lovely boys, who were then all virgins,
…………have now been deflowered
…………by time, death, RMB and a number of women.