For a Suicide Poet
This sickness injures your heart and memory,
The way people claim indignant prejudice.
You see objects into their bones, you see their flesh too,
But as for human beings, you only hear the voices,
Voices memorized as echoes, void and distant.
The infantile smiles are broken arcs, shadows against the white wall,
And all the grown-ups have their tongues in the cheeks,
But you cannot see the funniness in their features,
Or hear the amusing echoes through the masks over those faces.
Your agnosia of love toward the social is taken over
By your delusion of the double, marrow-chilling.
You dare not let yourself sleep into the late night, so you hack out
A line drawing of words, with a polished meat cleaver,
And it leaves much vacuum for any other to fill.
As the winter is drawing near, when I begin to feel cold,
I begin to feel I have always loved your wife and children, in another way,
Heavily. I could embrace them, hard to the heart.
Does it ever strike you it might be your kind that will hurt them again?
It is early fall, and only occasional leaves fall
Marrow-poisoned and half-green, veins still indistinctive.
Oct. 7, 2007
Note: A Chinese poet called Yu Di (余地) cut his artery in the neck late Oct 4 night with a kitchen cleaver.
YU Di (1977-2007)脸 盲
致一个自杀的诗人
这病损害你的心与记忆，
正如人们有权从牙缝中挤出义愤的偏见。
你看到物体的骨头，你也看到物体的肉，
而对于人，你却只能听见声音，
听成记忆中的回声，空蒙而遥远。
婴儿的微笑在你眼中只是一些破碎的弧线，
而他们的背景却那么分明，是一堵白墙；
所有成人的脸颊都呈现为舌头打滑的轮廓，
可你看不到那些特征的滑稽，
也听不到人脸面具中的洞穴会传来有趣的回声。
你无法认知你内心对于人世的爱，
觉得这社会已被冒名顶替，这恐惧令你骨髓冰冷。
你不敢让自己沉睡到后半夜，所以你磨亮了
切肉刀，砍出一幅文字的线条画，
那中间留有无穷的真空，让愿意的人去填充。
冬日逐渐来临，我开始感到寒意的逼近，
我也开始感到我一直爱着你的妻子和婴孩，
以另一种方式，很沉实。
我会拥抱他们，紧贴在胸前，令我们都感到生硬。
而你赴死之时，是否闪过一个念头，
再次伤害他们的可能还是你的同类？
秋季尚早，只偶尔才有半绿的叶子落下，
骨髓中了毒，纹理还难以辨别。
注：脸盲face blindness（prosopagnosia面孔失认症）是一种认知精神紊乱，病人无法认出并记住人脸特征，甚至连自己的脸也可能不认识，但是对于物体的认知却没有问题。与此相对的一种精神疾病是Capgras syndrome卡普格拉综合征(这位法国医生最早使用的术语是l’illusion des soisies)，也就是delusion of the double替身综合症，这样的人坚持认为周围认识的人是冒名顶替的。
2007年10月7日
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