Hong Kong's dirge, though never an island of saints and sages, has, to continue to appropriate

           Joyce, been sung
Ire, mine, ours, within, upon, this, this evermore estranged and estranging land
Ire and irony, irony as refuge, irony as escape, irony as ennui, as envy, as lethargy, as policy, as
           impasse
Irony
The irony of Mao dogging (catting is but a rare nautical verb) the Dalai Lama about religion

           being poison
Mao, after, and during, all, though Marx wasn't a Marxist, and Jesus not a Christian, and

           Siddhartha not a Buddhist, was a Maoist

The irony of Xi pinging (the verb, nautical and not, works) the terrorist brand on the Turkic

           Uyghurs in Xinjiang, a province itself annexed by China

Uyghurs presently must present DNA samples, for real, really, really for real, reportedly, in order

           to acquire travel permits

The irony of Cantonese, the language, not dialect, language, a language institutionally erased for,

           from, the Cantonese, the people, in Canton, the city, and Canton, the province, a place

           Hong Kong too occupies, or, rather, is, it now goes without saying, so it must be said, is

           occupied by, by Canton, meaning mean China

Erase that final qualificatory mean

It's mean

 

Occupation, backtrack a few, meaning three, three and four, lines, is a contemporary Hong Kong,

           actually, it's a contemporary pretty-much-global, keyword

Actually, actually too is a contemporary Hong Kong keyword, it marks, no, brands, me, you, us, as

           Hongkongers

Hongkonger, another keyword, one institutionalized, Oxford English Dictionarily, on the heels of our,

           yes, our, Umbrella Uprising, which we, or the some of we who would, so not all of we who could,
           are ironically disallowed from calling a Revolution, those of us who labelled it a revolution,

           I mean to mean, I mean

An uprising that itself followed on the heels, albeit not too swiftly, so not actually high on the high heels,

           of a Hong Kong University poll

Survey, I, you, we, should say survey, for poll seems, is, too too democratic, which, obviously,

           is merely a euphemism for the dogs of western imperialism

Shit, scratch dogs, it reeks of non-laissez-faire capitalism

Oh, omit capitalism, and its all too pell-mell smell and swell, as well

We, when all is categorically being said and being done, authorize 'communism with

           Chinese characteristics,' which, for all intents and oligarchical purposes, appears to

           meaningfully and meanly actually mean personality-cult authoritarianism, an ism, yet

           another in this, this lengthening list, that accepts (better, abides? promotes? endorses?

           perpetuates? exemplifies? champions?) BMWs and beggars, handbags and homelessness,

           waste and want

Block that

And, a la TVB Pearl, my, our, Hong Kong's, Hongkongers', public TV station, now half-

           ironically branded as CCTVB Pearl by a certain sum of some, by some sum, block

           Umbrella as well, since the preferred nomenclature is something akin to 'Something you Hold

           and Unfold in order to Restrain Unruly Rain and Sinister Unsmiling Sun'

Stop

I, you, we, am, are, here, now, this now, forfeiting 'faux' 'friends'

A Hong Kong University survey indicating that four-fifths of Hongkongers, a poetic ring to that,

           that four-fifths, or thereabouts, of Hongkongers self-identify as Hongkongers, as

           Hongkongers, not as Chinese

 

Permit me, you, us, we, a final nonfinal permit

‘Per-mit’ and ‘perm-it’

A permission to underscore another representative

Indicative

Telling

Yelling

Well, only if you hang banners expressly indicating that one must never hang banners

Endless regression

Irony upon

The active teenagers of Scholarism, if not of Localism, and Umbrella Revolution

           ‘Something you Hold and Unfold in order to Restrain Unruly Rain and Sinister

           Unsmiling Sun’ Uprising and near Time magazine-cover fame

Or infamy, all too too too lackadaisically dolefully apathetically

This this

This illustrative thesaurus-searched demonstrative adverbial cacophony

Of licensed silence

Of a Scholarism student leader
Just just indicted
Resound without unrequisite sound
Um, un-, yes, just above, un-, actually
This voicelessness of my, your, our Beijing-White-Paper-universal-suffrage-effacing un-right
           rights plight
A secondary school student indicted for inciting the freedom of public assembly in a freedom of
           public assembly precinct
A place in Canton, in Heung Gong, Guangdong, where China’s simplified Chinese characters
           currently threaten the survival of the Fragrant Harbor’s classical Chinese ones
That's a retronymical phrase
Classical characters only classical became once Mao's simplified ones corrupted, collapsed,
           the comprehensible, the instinctual, causal chain of connotation
And here we, we, unendingly end, nearly twenty years into a fifty-year death sentence, one that

           imperiously decrees autonomy
Meaning voice and choice and space and place
To the chockablock hollowness of hollow men and hollow sanctions in hollow stations
That is to say, which is to say, to slay to the deadly domain of the dutifully dusty
To the plexiglas cubicles of the quickly and quietly quarantined
To the engineered obsolescence of museumized muteness
To the

Sshhhh.

Jason S Polley completed his PhD in English Literature, specialising in 20th-century Irish fiction and postmodern American fiction and culture. His monograph examines what he calls "everyday justice" in contemporary American literature. He's currently completing a book project on ekphrasis and encyclopedism in Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves. Polley is an associate professor teaching at Hong Kong Baptist University and his areas of interest include poststructuralism and postmodernism. [Cha profile]