Zeyar Lynn
Write me down, I am dialectic
Read me out, I am dialectic
Chests, genitalia, toenails,
Voluntary muscles, skins, teeth, bones, tandems
In the news of ‘Not a mermaid! It’s just a dolphin!’
I happen to be a trawl net
I’s bridge between the poetics
Of the senses and the poetics of the language
I’s cross that bridge
I’s drop dead and fill the gorge
I’s implode far too often
Fragments of I’s and I’s
This is no I-centric romantic lyricism
This is no sunning the sores of confessional poetry
My wet finger in the warmth of her mouth foams and froths with I’s
Haven’t I taken it for the illusion of self
Man is a little bundle of contradictions
I’ve read it somewhere
I sense with language
Language I sense
In the spectrums of language
There are more than seven colours of I’s
Between the two I’s
There are I’s who amount to nothing
There are I’s, neither fish nor fowl
I’s, no fisherman is able to catch
I’s, swimming against the tide of fish
I died of heart attack
Another I died of A I D S
Another I, of cerebral haemorrhage
Another I, of throat cancer
Another I, of Alzheimer disease
Hollow winds howl inside
My bag of bones I thought was my home
All that glistens is something that glitters
I am not gold however
Hand in hand with petit bourgeoisie revisionism
I go on a vacation on a fancy bohemian beach
My feet do not look peasantry
My hands do not look proletariat
Tell me, why should I be embarrassed about it
A warm-blooded animal I am
My bloods do not represent people
My mammalian heart just beats with
The conscience of a subaltern sympathizer
Not lucid, but there’s no way I can say ‘I am in love.’
Not lucid, but from the seemingly lucid fields of linguistics
They’ve produced I’s and I’s and installed them on me
They’ve set me up against I’s who are
‘Don’t move!’, ‘Don’t change!’ and ‘Don’t destroy!’
I am dialectic
Speak it out
I am dialectic
I am not a proposition
I am not a counter-proposition
Like you, I am a nobody
Like you, I have no less the value of an average human
Which ‘I’ of mine goes to bed first in the evenings
Which ‘I’ of mine gets up first in the mornings
Day in day out, I meet up with
A little marionette of mind, with tangled strings, and
With a machinelike penchant that calls for focus, while
Faced with the chainsaw of daily loka
What figure of speech was that
Another ‘I’ takes shelter in
The emptied shell of an old ‘I’ and
Gawks at me from the dark
‘I’ is an ‘it’, an animal, a person
I am contradiction
What I know I know is a grassland
Where not a firm shady tree grows
No ten thousand birds
Only ants, moths, termites, snakes and scorpions, branded under
trustworthy ethical standards, thrive with the inner self that
Pets on the fat roll of a nape
I’ve always been a standing passenger
On the classified file of sentiments, I see the high sign,
‘No Trespassing,’ into the privileged pleasures
Not that I want to express my pains
Yet the flesh and blood of pain
Have painfully landed again
You can read me ideologically if you will
I am not thesis
I am not antithesis
I am dialectic
Just a contradiction
Patched up in palimpsest.
Zeyar Lynn
Translated from the Burmese by ko ko thett.
Note: loka = the material and immaterial world as we experience it.