Drunk as fuck, flying from Scotland to Japan with a twelve-hour layover in Beijing to save cash. The bus driver asks if I enjoyed my trip and if I’m going home. I tell him “China.” He says, “Too many Chinese for me, no thanks.”

On the plane, the CCP provides the entertainment. A Chinese grandma watches a state-approved film where a kid gets his arm torn off by a harvester. She panics, smashing the monitor buttons, trying to stop it.

I’m too goddamn hungover to fill out the immigration form. The woman assigned to help me smells the dried piss on my pants and watches me sign my name wrong in three different sections. She curses me out in Chinese, calling me a dirty American dog.

Anyway, I figure the whole kill-you-for-disagreeing thing is probably overblown by the American media, right? They pull my dumb poetic ass over because I brought The Party Train: A Collection of North American Prose Poems into the country.

They have a team of heavies going through it, checking for propaganda, and I’m thinking, “Mom, sorry. I’m going to be killed for the most useless niche of literature ever.” Thank Christ on a cross, they hand it back and tell me I’m clear to go. But they add, “Robert Bly is shit!”

– Erick Lima