Long Fiction Poem by Xiao Kaiyu

As you've been convicted, I'll keep your name a secret.

Nobody has ever finished reading your novels, you have no original stories

to make those strange, suffering people really fight,

and now you have gone to jail. After the villa you built was auctioned off,

all the fault lies in twenty years of liberty.


Now what you have is quiet nights leaning against a wall,

disgrace wraps a bandana round your aching head,

you never thought they'd use the worst rumors

to tack back friendship a day early. In an instant,

they sent you back into the unfortunate illusions of a novelist


And supplied you with a bunch of negative images. Beneath

a beam of light bending down from a prison window you undergo a trial of yourself.

While stating a different confession, a piece of long fiction

opens out to you. The main character wears army fatigues,

shouts watchwords, climbs aboard a train plastered with slogans.


Discovered in the middle of the journey, he is a scoundrel.

He embezzles the alternate meaning of a sentence. Not an adult

he wins the title of swindler. Like other con men

he starts to deceive himself and achieves victories: Again and again

enters prisons, attends courts, spits. As if


A hard-mouthed hero of a mistaken age. He wears worn military clothes

to the completely refurbished defendant's chair of a new era,

relating that set of over-ripe yet ever novel reasons,

officers of the law and auditors all leniently start to snore.

Truly, he is now only able to play literary games.


Is he a passe master of skills of linguistic distortion?

No. He is you. You've deceived the files,

deceived your mother, friends, self, but

from absurd logic drawn a fortune - you did it for

a hundred villas, because you believe in a hundred holidays