Spittoon U Corner gives students the opportunity to showcase their creative writing.
The Double Essence of Our Love
I met you in a dream,
You were my poison and my cure.
I met you and heard you scream,
Between this world and someplace obscure.
Twisted bodies danced in shadows,
Drowned in raw, blissful pleasure.
Starving eyes found their peace
In the darkness of our nature.
I wanted
To penetrate your soul, rip your skin and find shelter beneath.
I wanted
To drown, in the ocean of our sins.
Beggar’s tunes started beaming in my head:
Be my mirror, my church, my dungeon.
Hold me, screw me, baby, make me crawl.
Gentle lover, let the bud of our madness bloom.
Pure and filthy,
Devil monkey, quiet dove.
Iron red and crystal blue,
Like the Essence of our love.
–
Absent presence in Beijing
I look for you in poetry lines,
In the morning mist, milk-white liquid
Poured on this restless city.
I look, I yearn
But you are not there.
Your presence lingers
In the fragrance of coffee mugs,
In the colors of the sunset,
In the quiet stillness of my room,
In the red and blue
Floating shadows of neon lights
Glowing over a hutong bar.
Cara la mia bastarda
You left
Me, hanging like a yellow ginkgo leaf.
Slowly fading like a dream,
Your presence lingers, hunts these streets,
Bitter-sweet memory.
Commentary
“Love is not a possibility, is not due to our initiative, is without reason; it invades and wounds us.”
– Levinas, Time and the Other.
I remember reading this quote and thinking that anyone who ever experienced love must reckon it to be true, love being this irrational force resulting from the encounter between our self and the other. Moreover, how true it is that love “wounds us”. And yet, in our consumer societies love is constantly being positivized. Ads and apps push us to believe that love is supposed to be “consumed” and generate only pleasant feelings. Love and positive feelings are so well knitted together, that if you Google search “love meaning”, of all the nuances this word carries the only one definition given after “affection” is “to like or enjoy”. What about the power (and the need) for negativity though? I believe negativity is the second half that serves to animate love, the irreplaceable element that allows us to experience love as a whole human experience: odi et amo. Love as such only ever makes sense as it heals and wounds us, gifting us, and the other, with the possibility of change. In my poems I like to explore the dual nature of love and to reflect upon my own experience, mixing both the physical and metaphysical elements that take part in it. The objects, colors and even the city itself serves both as figures of speech and as elements of the experience itself to be found in the external world.
Magda (司马炟), born and raised in Italy, moved to Beijing in 2015 and is currently doing a master’s in Chinese modern literature at PKU. She has a thing for street lamps, languages, and IPA(s). Recently obsessed with the notion of “identity” or more precisely “identities”, she is fascinated by how we are constrained by them and yet eternally dependent on them.