By Rafael Tsao
He is our regular collaborator from Shanghai but this time he has sent us seven poems arranged in chronological order. They encompass a period of five years and his poetic deals from evocations of the void, Chinese fire rites and life as a prolongation of death to notions of discriminations and acceptance
Baphomette: November 20, 2019
Awakened,
expelled from the sweetly oneiric siesta
the world struggling in my perception.
Raindrops dried out on my window screen morphing into some signs
Keeping outside the withered sky and moaning tree.
Dark cloud concretes time
I share with, you,
whomever reading this bit 1000 years later,
atom
produced innumerable solitude and void.
Air becomes cold wave
only through my ardent flesh
A whiff chillier than this boring afternoon.
Look Baphomette,
my stupidity and illusion are dissolving,
I don’t daydream liberty for my soul
because I refuse to cry for tragedies yet to play out.
Take away my sunshine,
my memory, even my cigarette
tomorrow is more of a relentless darkness
than today
Where is the fire more relentless than darkness?
Those revolting you
those you revolting
all returning from the midway of their journeys.
I have opened the door
and God has opened me
“What did you say to the man strangled to death from back
last night at the garage?”
“I told him,
better devour your bicycle seat
dipped in shampoo
than listening to any ‘hymn to life’.”
Baphomette,
your limp is steed
of your head,
your body serves antidote
for your soul.
Never more diaphanous
is your silhouette
than at night.
When I was about to
die in my mom’s womb,
a woman in her white petticoat
with the flower of disaster draped over her torso
passed by
and uttered something.
When the north punished,
we shall reunite along the southern seabed.
Pray for the prohibited fruit
resuming into seed
and let’s retreat
as if
at the corner of the Eden.
§
Homage of Interval: July 19, 2020
(On Wolfheart by Moonspell)
Despite renounced your monopoly of darkness
ALL passengers capsized earlier than their boat
Blossoming over your skin
is the flower to supersede death
Out of your ears
flowing music feeds the inferno
Now, everything behind me
My shadow in your hands.
Wolf of the wasteland,
running faster than fire
further than the star.
Closer and closer,
are you to the city in night peak:
money, spectacle, family,
cancer, ennui,
ten kilometers, eight kilometers.
You slaughtering lives in elegance
lives of every poet begot you.
Terror this beautiful
Slaughter me one more time.
Woman is eye
Needle is face
Corpus is limp
Seeing an angel devouring his own wings
All of sudden my madness losing all its value.
Autumnal wind deflowered the world,
you and evil dancing under trees
will never be cut down.
Bring me along!
I have no name, no rebellion, no freedom
but also desiring to be the
noble slave
serving lowly masters.
§
Post-Human: February 6, 2021
(On “Fire Refinement”: an archaic Southern Chinese fire worship rite still practiced in Pan’an County of Zhejiang province. The climax of “Fire Refinement” is characterized by worshippers holding steel blades, dancing their way through “firing” mountains at midnight of certain important dates on the Chinese lunar year calendar)
What else must I do
to be your subject?
See man half naked
Listen to devil laughter.
Have my captives upholding blades defend the inferno
Slay into my soul the fire that never been put out!
Flesh blessed in the midst of burning
Blazed is the coldness greater than moon
My colourless shadow is the new visage of fire
Let the children of fire to select wisemen
for the next millennium.
Infants awakened now,
whose first sight meets smoke, siquidem,
will be immune to insomnia
for the rest of life.
All pains are exposed to the
penetration of their nerves.
Spider web as swaddling,
ash as frankincense,
we quietly awaiting
you to sway darkness-blessing
constellation!
In the name of fire,
I expound time as a mere fabrication,
let men virgin like fire
to chair the trial of
the Creator hasn’t
run away in time!
My life is a prolonged death.
Living off but dirt though,
you elegantly subdue all creatures
obsessive of their own stupidity.
Whoever survives your punishment,
like you,
would be immortal
like you,
would be unworshipped by the herd.
Me, on behalf of them,
just got one question to render you,
why a hymn easy like this,
wasn’t authored by anybody
earlier?
§
Bei: April 27, 2022
(Bei is the homophonic translation of 被, a preposition indicating passive voice in Mandarin)
Whoever wants to love me,
must make me feel
I’m becoming a snake
Tap, pinch, net, cut
huevo, nervo, fundo.
Now it’s me ruling,
You either go to sea
Or
go to dance.
§
Beatriz: May 9, 2022
Succinct as it gets:
A chicken wing bone
on top of
a plate
A woman back
with
an utterance
in Mandarin
“Well,
according to the law of this hour”
I abhor sunrise
because it takes darkness
from my arms
Something take the wrong path
They should have occurred in reality
right now swarming in dream
§
Anti-Second: May 18, 2022
Coming out of closet
I don’t love her
I love her madness
Time is not a finger of mine
it won’t screw itself
Let your next meal
do the thinking
in place of me
Cough, repent, abort, do something.
Do something, okay?
§
¿Existirá la música?: June 30, 2024
(On Prometheus: The Poem of Fire by Alexander Scriabin)
I am so very small,
mientras
la cruz hirviente no me pertenece.
Way too many conquests
Way too old poems.
Me lo dio el mundo como si fuera suya,
un juguete
donde silencio es más morado que furia
¿Qué hostia yo le debo
al tiempo?
He named “death” somebody else
So I took love as another fancy blasphemy
Penetrate me through this bone-like nude
Make sure nobody returns.
As
I am yet to be heard
by myself
Se me burla mi costilla
Olas tras olas,
olas de caras
sin ojos
acaso tampoco orejas
sectoriales
alargados
definitivos
desde dentro
hacia fuera
la soledad intacta.
To my right,
emerging one sanguine ant eye
from this churning darkness.
To my left,
looming one emerald beam
over this constellation of fire.
I predate every genesic downpour,
because only my right index finger
and that sierra-begetting piano
are of the same God.
Now, everything begins,
God has half of his mouth bitten off,
so people take his laughter as roar
God, and
many fright me
But not Scriabin.
Un piano tocándose a sí mismo
“¡ Ni pienses en besarme!”
Un hijo olfatéandose
su madre de ese piano.
Piano, madre, Scriabin.
Yo.
Uno contra tres.
Rafael Tsao is a Shanghainese young poet, cinema critic as well as a translator. He is Perro Negro’s exclusive correspondent in Shanghai and a writer commenting on the myriad intersects between art and culture. Presently he is working on a translation of Que viva la música de Andrés Caicedo.
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