Beijing
Imagine being a Bejinger.
If you drive across the city and peak out of the window –
you will only see the same cars moving with you all along.
The chirping, dirty sparrows are perhaps the only “wildlife” you'll ever see.
The smokey rusty apartments are filled with people,
while the names of your neighbors remain a mystery.
Indeed, you'll see tall fancy buildings, one mounting over another
in a place called the Financial St. right next to where you live,
but they remain as cold and stony as an igloo for the outsiders.
As a tiny you walk across the shadows casted by these formidable giants,
you are belittled, trivial, like a dust; invisible, like the air;
you melt and dissolve then disappear into the wind.
We have the fourth largest city square in the world,
yet standing in it there is no such thing as personal space
all you see is people, monotonous faces, the grey sky...
while being pushed and compiled to move along
by a frantically flooding throng.
Such a big city, with so much for the eyes to see,
eyes that are infinitely confused by the changing scenes,
unable to rest their focuses on just one thing.
This is my city, the 500-year-old imperial capital,
where too many people bustles around like bees without heads,
while the city's scope continues to expand like crazy.
Even though there are so many faces,
they are overlapped and distorted in time and space,
you don't really see anyone of them clearly.
Perhaps under the cover of all that noise and fanfare,
is just a core of a very, very lonely city.