The People's Bank Poem by Xiao Kaiyu

In the grey haze of evening the buildings of Lujiazui

hang costly heads.

The chair-shaped hall of the People's Bank

has pock-faced guards to forbid the entrance of our ilk.

We are not bankers and banker's kin,

we are not figures this bank wants to reckon.

We are just people, men and women,

in a fog but a body of joy.


The mother bank assiduously sits upright,

old and influential, swallowing strings of numbers.

O, those numbers are all astonishing,

most are the bitter flavor of a rhizome root,

a few the meteoric yellow hallucinations of cocaine.

Too many of them come from multiplication,

they pile up savagely, yet timidly,

toward a friendly, thoroughgoing bout of diarrhea.


Those afraid of the people's numbers

mount a dais, and from the meeting go to the bank.

I've said I'm a poet of the proletariat,

but am keen on strolling on the waterfront and in Lujiazui.

This riddle is like high-voltage going through a chair

subjugating a similar neural net, the spoils of war

are the silence in the aftermath.

Less than yet more than the people.