The weather report persuades the weather
to obey reality’s ideology: the red deer
obeys the maze of deer trails. Thundershowers
hurl plastic bags to earth back
of the transfer station, the new district resembling
half a box of leftover food, hissing exhalations
add vinegar and oil. The ideology of
rapid swelling: do away with datong, the Great Community,
ship off the old society and assemble the new and different.

Suburban fields, insomnia weather:
train rails pumping it out photocopiers
leaving no space to live, light sleep
often sometimes already occupied by plastic bags
swimming with people, shoving, pushing back, seizing ground.

The hermit heads into the city, compares himself to a wastepaper basket:
a camera obscura containing the unlucky, each and every fate suspended within.
Wastepaper insomnia, to copy datong
insomnia is to be unable to copy wu wei or perhaps even the Tongzhi Emperor.

Washed ashore in a plastic bag Buddha
sheds his swimsuit really
it’s just underwear: the elastic band’s bitten deep
into his fat impressing its mark: the old villages
the sole ground of memories come and gone.

(2011/6/20 Manzhouli; 2011/8/5 Shanghai)