“mong kok, october 2019”
A Poem by Xiao Yue Shan
the unimaginable day was still watching
at the scene of our surrender. love was a small country
with borders made reckless. paiyang, I remember you
like this. because of the many things
that could talk, but didn’t. the sky occasion.
the birdlike occasion. the starting of desire with
blindness blissfully after. and all the other things with no afters—
petrol, tear gas canisters, your face between my hands
small as if telescoped through centuries. I fell
into that open mouth like colour. the musical
collapse of ordinary things—nothing held its shape,
not glass, nor metal, nor nighttime, nor language and its conspiratorial
loneliness. when in a burst of time a new world
appears, I was still there in that warm middle
dissolving. it is so wonderful what one can do
with the unfearing knowledge of nothing
when tomorrow is a ship full to capacity
in victoria harbour scalding. paiyang, it lit
your hands into a firing thing. you will cry
because we were not able to change everything, but no—
listen, the voices are rising, and they are singing,
they are circling in a strange new formation
I’ve never seen before, an ocean-like current that dragged
the dead out, and returned back to the shore
startlingly living creatures, insatiable.
