The Prison In My Heart (By Yan Li) Poem by Denis Mair

- translated from a poem by Yan Li

In the prison of my heart
There are no inmates escaping through my pharynx
Or soiling their pride through repulsive sewer pipes.

They were voluntary inmates since the dawn of civilization
Who outfitted my heart to be their prison,
And even after I die,
Will continue their incarceration in my coffin.

They have not come along for a free ride;
They produce a commodity called reflection.
Money has not devised a route for such transactions,
But I have a knack for promoting my goods,
Because my heart-prison has plenty of poets.
They strew hours over the road, like a handful of sand,
For free people to bend over and pick up on Sunday.
This is candy without a boss putting you in his wrapper;
By whim of your natural clock, you savor your own sweetness.

Inmates in this prison have no long-suffering relatives outside,
Their bloodlines are broad, long and unimpeded,
And when they make a prison break, they go further inside.
I've often wondered if this is a river,
Because I like being a fish in the current of my own blood.

I too, countless times, being urged by expediency,
And drunk on the air of peace, for which I've paid a pretty
cork-popping fee,
Have wished to tear down my heart's prison, and bulldoze it into
a city square,
But the inmates didn't want to be doves with wings stuck on
their backs
Or balloons adding hoopla to a certain session of government.

What can I do?
In my heart are a bunch of convicts who don't want to join the crowd.
They have commandeered jealousy for themselves,
Beauty is the sole transgressive fire they are left with.
Gradually, on my aging legs, but with youth's velocity,
They walk toward the heart of the world.
In passionate expectation they peer through the grate.

Setting out for the universe's prison, there is an even
grander statement:
When I find myself within so many monologues
At the heart of skin colors that all have their own worlds,
It makes me wonder:
Perhaps the prison in my heart shares a mother with the churches
outside?

Ah.
This is the scene of some sort of violence,
And God appears when I bully myself,
And the Church is where mistakes are dumped
When God recycles his creation of Mankind.
Even this vile and unrealized inspiration,
Is carted off together with me, by God in his church.
I rejoice to find my heart's prison a church within a church!
Before it becomes trash to be buzzed over by flies,
It gets locked away to revel in profundity of its own moans.
Such a good hearted prisoner!
You deserve inner nourishment that nurses you to Godliness.

Who else is among the inmates?
The grammar locked up here lacks writing to protest for it.
So who else would you have it be?
None other than the farmer who clears fields inside this prison,
A butterfly paintbrush dancing along the outline of plants,
Introducing drift into the clouds of a canvas.

Anyway,
Whatever its skill in execution,
This hand has reached a certain place,
Not to be belittled or envied in terms of height.
I take a new approach to the tourist trade
And walk barefooted from a well-stocked shoe store.

I have seen plenty of spermatozoa
Bought and paid for, taking places in the human lineage,
Plenty of ovae with price tags, doing their part for human
reproduction.
Although literary passion, now and then, may have its bastard forms
of birth,
The prison in my heart can leave no legacy.
In the eyes of the Buddha and the Gods, I realize
In the eyes of the Lord in Heaven or E.T.
I am simply a piece of meat,
But inside of this meat, I have my blessed prison.