Psycho

translated by Xi Nan

I: Depression

If you hide into my childhood and cry
I am your tears
The childhood in a black and white photo
The thin figure cut by a street lamp

Has been stretched longer and longer, from the faraway hometown
Stretching to today. Ah today
I’m hanging on your sorrowful face
Gradually cool in the poor night breeze

Please don’t, wipe me out
Do not stain your spotless handkerchief
Today, I have to fall by myself
You need to close your timid eyes

Falling, not a temptation from the earth
But obsessed with my sinful worries
Like an inside-rotten apple
An irreparable sigh

Falling, in the accelerated dizziness
You need to close your timid eyes
Hand in hand, let us feel together
The freedom that’s betrayed time

Return today to the faraway hometown
The elongated figure retracts back into the photo
I splash like petals
Wet the childhood of bowing and silence

II: Obsessive-Compulsion

About to return to my body
Sit in the darkness and wash slowly
At a place near the heart
Use blood instead of water

Wash them, over and over again
To prove the innocence of the hands
I will be wasting the remaining youthhood
In a simple ceremony

The darkest place is also the purest
Why the washstand inside the chest
And the hands longing for redemption
Sink into the blood

To wash in the blood, on the palm
The map of destiny gradually blurred
Sitting in the inside darkness
I have lost the courage to departure

The pursuit of purity
Will only make the hands dirtier in the wash
Ah, no, it’s not that I’m washing
But the hands are ravaging each other

Left and right hand that hates each other
Two hungry mollusks
Before swallowing the opponent
I can not separate them anymore

3: Dissociation

Not this one. Not that one, either
I am another one. His face is
Buried under me. Look at every photo of a single person
It’s our group photo

Look, facing the forgetful mirror
How to distinguish from illusion
Me and him, who is the other
Who is young and depressed, who is decadent in middle age

Who else, go behind the time
Staring at a missing person notice
In front of a telephone pole in the gloomy street
He is not you, and I am another

Look at the face on the missing person notice
It lives in a lost expression
He seeks me, I seek you
And where did you and him ever meet

The forgetful mirror is broken again and again
One night breeds more nights
One face becomes another face
He doesn’t know you, you don’t remember me

Burn it, our group photo
You look at it twisting under the tongue of the flame
Oh, the distorted face, for the first time
Being shown so beautifully and authentically

4: Delusion

Right there, keep staring at me
His eyeball rusts in my body
Dig! Can’t dig out anyway
This bullet of resentment

My pain is his pleasure
Reach my hands into the wound, the deeper I dig
The more satisfied he is. Too deep
Any deeper is going to tear my soul

Any deeper, I can’t help
Admitting this fictitious fault
But he is real, right there
Behind that dirty mask

Who is he? The face is like an anonymous letter
The crumpled puzzle, makes me keep guessing
Keep digging, from the letter paper
Digging out poisonous words

Digging out rusty resentment from the words
Dig! Can’t dig out anyway
This stubborn bullet
It’s wriggling in my pus and blood

The wound gets bigger and bigger as I dig
Sets a painful trap in the fate
Oh, I am his prey
If the road to heaven is darker than it to hell

5: Autism

A drop of rain had imprisoned my youthhood
Oh, you are that raindrop
Following the handicapped lightning
Slowly moving through the dark clouds in time

Whatever words were rotten inside
Are the humiliation buried in my heart
Every bitter raindrop
Is the tightly-closed lips of fate

Falls from the future to the past
Aging comes from the recollection of youthhood
Every dark raindrop
Is the regret that scratches the memory

Every regretful raindrop
Is the self-abusing youthhood
Is a seed that was afraid of germinating
Had sealed the flowers and seasons

Oh, the long term of imprisonment is
Stretching the fragile nerves of the youth
Why does every self-abusing raindrop
Become my original sin

Hold it back, keep holding it back
The oppressed pain of youth
You will let the earth take in the loneliness
I will spend my whole life in the rain

6: Paranoid

Let a dog guard the chest
I am the gateway to hell
It roars in my lungs
To every attempt of breaking in

Wind passes through me, blows towards the darkness
It also identifies in the wind
If the praise and laughter from afar
Are hiding sources of hostility?

Once used its limbs to run around
Avoiding leather boots, sticks and stones
In the dangerous crowd
I am the gateway to hell

From my festering mouth
It sticks out its weak and soft tongue
This dirty rag is
Wiping the same dirty soul

More stubborn than the tumor of memory
It is watching in my chest
Every imaginary intrusion
Is the reason for its revenge

When it eats up my flesh and blood
I will become its stand-in
Bite into the throat of fate
Go mad in the thrill of suffocation

7: Fetishism

No, I do not love you
I only love the smell of your body
Love your trembling clothesline
The boundary of my desire

Need a gust of wind to help me cross
Oh, when the wind blows
I love the mess on your clothesline
The shaking moon and lateen sail

I love your long hair that withers in the wind
It tightens my breath
Sitting in the painful alveolus
I imagine the soft and exquisite waves under the silk

Follow your plastic sandals
Walk into the memory of early summer
Your toe-petals
Are my treasured relics

I love the records you’ve listened to
The sceneries you’ve seen, the dreams you’ve had
Love your squandered gold
My life was wasted for you

When you die in the memory
I will use your bone ashes to build a goddess
Oh how pious, I worship you
But still, I do not love you

8: Masochism

Whip! I am one
Nidering animal, under your crotch
The exciting and muddy torrent is
Screaming in the waves of asthma

Brutally, whip! Every welt
Is a curse carved on me
Ah, this cursed happiness
The deadly inflammation caused by pain

Bumping, follow the rhythm of pleasure
Spurs are cheering on the cruel leather boots
The tighter you close your legs
The more presumptuous my hooves are

Spirit vast, body turbid
Wearing an exquisite muzzle and collar
I gallop freely on the earth
Ah, this arbitrary freedom

It is the rein in your hands
Sometimes tightened or relaxed
Causes the intermittent psychological cramps
The cycle from sinking to pleasure

Whip! Please use your whip
To rescue my plagued soul
The fear of desire
Has made me a slave to desire

9: Exhibitionism

I will fight the zipper
By means of the moon and alcohol
Present you the secrets of the body
Ah, the confession of the flesh!

If you are a bright mirror
Please accept my shameless innocence
Through the narrow gaps between the fingers
Witness this ugly masturbation

If you scream and break
I am the gate to illusion
You please, open me
I already can’t hold back my keys

In order to present you more
I also have to compete with the belt
Fight every button
I am a confessional letter written for you

Remove the absurd envelope
There presents a scar, that I will also tear apart
To let you see how my pain
Has become a comfort

The more thorough, the more satisfying
Tear, tear it! Tear the skin
Then tear the flesh, let you see
My evil, my loyalty

10: Voyeurism

Steal, steal with the eyes. From the eyes
Crawl out, your tongue
A thin and long worm
Licking my skin

My every pore
Is a deadly flaw
Like the bloody, cracks in life
Lick, you lick my blood

You creep into the cracks
Lick the pain hidden in my heart
Lick my every day
From the decadent menopause

To the youthhood
The more licks, the more exciting
But this still can’t satisfy you
Your hands also stick out from your eyes

In my brain
Stroking the naked thoughts
Stroke it! When this arbitrary caress
Can’t produce anymore pleasure, either

Your bloated body is
Twisting, crawling out from the eyes
Crawl into the darkness inside me
Masturbating, while sighing

About the Translator

Xi Nan (西楠), born in China, writes and translates, indie publisher, author of different genres. Some works of hers are published in English. Her translation work of ten poems (originally authored by Fish Lu in Chinese, English version published by Terror House Magazine) was nominated for the 2020 American Pushcart Prize. Her Twitter is here and her Facebook is here.