This commission is killing me   
   I am waiting for my liberation

   like peasants before the revolution

   and patriarchs after the revolution
    would I like to say something about colonisation?

          yes! I would love to be colonised! I grew up colonised!

                we loved the conquerors! my dad loved America and he

                        got me to read quotes by Western thinkers . . . Lincoln, Napoleon
Bonaparte, Plato, Pascal, Rousseau, Churchill, Derrida, Foucault . . . even Nietzsche
                                   and he said there was no future for Hong Kong

                         the pigeon cages and landslides, no one will want

                  to live here . . . learn English, go to Australia

            the land of comfort, where the conquerors

   are thriving still . . . alas here I am

neither black nor white
              the Switzerland of Asia . . .
oh God—
      I don’t want to write another vain dull hopeless song for the editors

                it is so tiring to sing for others . . .

                          it’s like a cheap pop melody

                                         without mythologies . . . 
                                                                   if nightingales were paid to sing, would they???

                          if the gods had to go to work, would they have bothered making the world?
                        editors of the great magazines

                              I love you
                                    but are you truly                    happy?
I am depleted

     so depleted I resorted to using a poetry generator . . . (don’t laugh)
            the following words are generated by algorithms and I think
   they are

better than my poem:
                 DEATH TO THE EDITORS
                 I cannot help but stop and look at the dead words.

                 Now doomed is just the thing,

                 To get me wondering if the action is stillborn.
                 The devastation that’s really hellish,

                 Above all others, is the annihilation of bricks and letters.

                 Down, down, down into the darkness of the annulled,

                 Gently it goes—the unholy, the diabolical, the evil 
                 Hatching like a bad egg.
                 Just like an insurmountable hill is the pain.

                 Pain—the true source of happiness.
                 I cannot help but stop and look at the fat sorrow spread upon my dinner

                 plate.

                 It was fried with lard and tasted like dog piss.

                 Sparrows roasted on the spit, country style.

                 Heavy feelings . . .  they overflew the page . . .
                 Dark clouds, they ask no questions.

                 Moonlight, I murdered my wife.
                 Why would you think the assassination is helpful?

                 The assassination is the most hopeless hatchet job of all.

                 It won’t solve anything.

                 Never forget the despondent and bad assassins who fail at their work.
                 What is worse:

                 The editors may live.
                 Oh troubles without end!

                 They are fatal beyond belief.
                 Damned forever are the Bards!
                 Bad things happen, will always happen.

                 Now hate is just the thing,

                 To get me writing, wondering 
                 If the word, trouble

                 Is mortal after all.
                 . . .
the wreck of rain

too dark to see . . .
     I set to work, the loathsome editing . . .

           great unhappiness awaits,
                 while the Russian tanks

                       never cease to attempt to unite the Slavic race
                             and the Chinese Communist Party does the same

                                   and sends the People’s Liberation Army, the Poet’s 
                 Liberation Army of editors
                      to liberate me—
from?
             ???
Oh great souls of the literary army,
                    I once spoke against you

I once fought,                                                  though my heart was not in the fighting.

                            But now, but now

                                      I love you,

                                      How I love you,

                                      How much I loved you!

                                      And I love you still, perhaps forever!

                                      I love you like the running stream at the choke point, fellow

                                      revolutionaries, my comrades!

                                      I love you like the Western Plains overwhelmed by so many tears from

                                      the gods,

                                      I love you like the colonised columns broken by an axe, my axe I

                                      kissed with my lips of submission,

                                      My country of typhoons and tycoons, Zhuangzi and Laozi,

                                      unsurpassed unenlightenment and the Luohans beating up the

                                      Buddha,

                                      cleansing him, changing him, preparing him for the current

                                      curriculum:

                                      the language of simplicity!

                                      Books of hours and years lost,

                                      new memories replacing the old,

                                      Books of loneliness, ugliness, emptiness,

                                      I love, I love, I love—

                                      The death of my life, the birth of my death! For you alone
                                      I am Switzerland!
                                                                                                                                 Sydney, 14th July 2022