The rains of Chengdu have brewed the past twenty-some years into poetry, yet in my bones resides an untamed galaxy. I’ve lost the name I was given, but my soul refuses to be pinned down inside neat, measured grids — so it escaped, it split, and it became The Nocturne of Haizi. The mechanical gears of Leeds grind through the daylight, but the night is rebellious. When an engineering student’s fingers dance across the keyboard, words bolt like wild horses — scattering Li Bai’s wine, Shelley’s west wind, and Neruda’s green flames from their manes. I believe, perhaps superstitiously, that language is a kind of sorcery: a comma can halt a galaxy, and a period might trap the butterflies of spring. They call it the affliction of romanticism, the self-immolation of idealism. But so what. I write — to carve words into stone, to awaken the sea’s blue in the pupils of a stranger. Welcome to the ideal republic of a romantic.