Poem for Thursday

Banned Poem
By Yang Lian
Translated by Peter Forbes

to die at thirty-five is already too late
you should have been executed in the womb
like your poem no need
for a sheet of white paper to be your grave

children are not permitted to be born
lock up their hands in crime
fingers rot like snakes coiled in winter sleep
eyes rot escaping the tempest that bites
your face at first touch is a current of water
bones tracing out white scars line by line

it’s a shoal of eels down in the deep waters of the flesh
threading through white seaweed
among still-paler shouts you hear only darkness
coldly wiped clean by another hand
coolly turned into a misprint
placenta wrapping you ever tighter
your last words dying with you

to die today
is to be turned into a stinking news story

--------

I don't have a lot to say that other people aren't already saying. Other than, I'm also angry about the FCC giving away our airwaves and internet to big telecom corporations. I'm angry about Ruth Bader Ginsburg being the only Supreme Court voice arguing for women's rights. On the one hand, I am thrilled to see fandom so mobilized about something with larger political and social implications, and on the other hand, I keep realizing that if fannish escapism was not at risk right at this moment, lots of people would be just as happy to choose that escapism over worrying about things like the internet censorship trends we've seen get worse and worse as big corporations have moved in. (In case anyone has somehow not heard about by now, go join and be counted so Six Apart has some idea just how many unhappy customers they're facing. I bet a higher percentage than average of us are paid accounts, too.)

I rarely use MySpace, but the one thing I did post there was a Common Cause complaint that they refuse to run ads critical of Rupert Murdoch. I have a permanent account on LiveJournal and a great deal of photo storage space here, so I'm certainly not going to delete this account in a huff, and I long ago locked everything that I believe could get me in trouble (though if you happen to notice anything in my interests or public posts that you think is a risk, please alert me). This all does affect me personally -- I'm a member of , I've posted there, and I co-mod fic comms that could easily be targeted under clauses that restrict sexuality and sexual expression (none of which have anything to do with underage or incestuous fan fiction, but teenage Fred/George fic doesn't have anything to do with real life pedophilia, either). I was sympathetic to the LJ terms of service people when I thought this was all a panicked response to a legal threat, before I read this (thanks ) and discovered that all the warnings people sounded when Six Apart bought LiveJournal, suggesting that corporate censorship was likely to follow, have come to awful fruition.

made it home from New York despite the van overheating on the highway on the way home from the airport, so things are quiet on the home front. Here, have some cows, cats and cuteness:


A cow on Culp's Hill at Gettysburg National Battlefield. (Are we allowed to show udders around here?)


Hanover is mostly horse country, but Gettysburg has its share of cattle.


This is one of Hanover Shoe Farms' cats. They seem spectacularly unimpressed by horses and people both. But then, they are cats.


Every trip I try to get a photo of my in-laws' very old beagle, Ginger.

So, not really planning to vacate these premises, though I do need to dig up a mailing address where a permanent account holder can send an angry letter. But in case other people are migrating, I do have several other accounts, and have for quite some time, at GreatestJournal, JournalFen, InsaneJournal, DeadJournal, Twitter, MySpace and Blurty (Vox is also Six Apart, so the heck with that). Feel free to friend me wherever. Looks like GreatestJournal is the hot spot of the moment, but I strongly suspect that if they get too much bigger, they'll start enforcing arbitrary Terms of Service too. JournalFen is fan-owned and fan-friendly but age-restricted and often very slow. I don't think there are ideal solutions.