MY CLASSMATES 同學們
   By Ah Sheng 阿盛
   Translated by Darryl STERK 石岱崙

As a shadow hangs, suspended on a blank wall
Swaying like an old piece of clothing
Silent in a brand–new hotel closet, emitting yesterday’s stale   bodily odor
Time begins to drip, a gradually
Saturating stillness

From far below, the sound of footsteps rises
Along the dusty stairs, sneezing
With inspiration
In the palm of the hand the ornamented banister etches symbolic
Language, endlessly circling, ever onward
Bumping and thumping around in the boxes of syllables,
  searching for
This room
The height we must reach

A pen is softly inserted in the rusty keyhole
Ready to prick and pop the
Dark, a balloon inflated to bursting

An oversized metaphor, the magnificent sea wells up all around
The colonist’s sampan rocks
Compass and nautical chart fall, the small oars of
Fictive reason are lifted in a rhythm—in line with the ocean’s   meter—forward
Into the distance, toward a small island
A waiting name

The surface of the table rises to form land
Listening carefully to a train of writing
From a pen as it rumbles across
A savage desert, a jungle covered with long green hair
Combed, deep in a dream, continuously drawing out
The most original, the most strongly desired
Destination. Two burning hot iron rails rest on
My forehead, stretch without end
Into the sleepless night

The drumming continues to build, the strong–willed
Colonist continues to forge the illusion of home against
The cold–colored backdrop of a foreign land, drawn into
Summer lanes, one after another

A traveler enters with a guidebook, looks up
Discovers childhood sleeping soundly by a window
Travel is nothing more than a grow–up dream
When the hours fall in an unbroken rain
This room, in response, lifts the umbrella of its ceiling
Hears and amplifies all the world’s heartbeats
Amid the repeated dialectic of rain and window
I feel I am slowly being written
Wrinkled, pressed, soaked and dried in the shade
Like a blurry postcard mailed
To a distant place

I open the window
The motorcade of life roars from the road below