free poetry

The dove carried back the olive branch across the waters of Flood.
Noah knew that land would be hard to starboard. The great god
Poseidon tugged gently at the reigns of his horse, the porpoise,
Leviathan. The creature in response averted its gills to swim
in the directed way and gyrated its flippers to augment its speed.
Noah cracked his whip – “Faster you brute! Faster!” Leviathan bashed
its nose on the shelf that led up to the desert island, destined
someday to become the rocky peak of a holy mountain.
Two trees stood in the sand – of life and of knowledge.
Noah got out of his boat with his animals and his family.
He set the craft adrift in such a current where in days a meteor
would fall precisely from the sky and smash it to a scattered mess
of flaming smithereens. He trained the monkeys to climb the trees
and send the family their fruit down. Hungry, they ate everything
including the seeds, which when they shitted out sprouted
into baby trees. The desert island in decades became a forest.
Under canopies of five hundred foot leaves, the chosen people
chopped up the originals with sharp, heavy flint hatchets
and used the logs as firewood. Both life and knowledge burned
equally well. Seers saw prophecies emerge out of the smoke
and then in the ongoing embers after the death of the flames.
The old man throughout all this time was walking down
the ebbing shoreline, observing the waters of Flood abate.
Once the altitude had sunk enough, the peak of the mountain
became cold and inhospitable. The forest that had flourished
in centuries turned to stone. With nothing left for the people
to eat, they carried out an exodus downward to the coasts.
Some set up ghost towns, old fishing villages, Cape Cod
in the offseason. Some got stuck and never made it beyond
the plateaus they would have had to cross to get to the ocean.
Societies were raised. Hierarchies ordained. Caste systems
put into place. Nomads roamed and thieves lurked everywhere.
Alchemist pirates, whose gold was the soul, growled,
“Rrr me mateys. Now here methinks is a fine bunch of stout,
lean-hearted buccaneers!” These men never shaved;
were missing prominent teeth; had hats on imprinted with
the insignia of the skull and crossbones; wore diamond-
studded eyepatches. On their shoulders sat perched
red, blue, and green parrots that occasionally, apropos
of nothing, squawked out with, “Polly wanna cracker,”
at which request the bird’s host would shove a stale chunk
of bread into its worm-tongued beak, mumbling, “Shut ahp.”
Robin Hoods did in those days abound, American Che Guevaras.
The long-haired straight-faced revolutionary, a red star
in his black beret, poses for propaganda, enjoying a foot-long
Cuban cigar. Robin is a fox in Disney. He pulls out an arrow
from its sheath and sets it to the string of his bow.
He winks, aims, shoots… He wins! “Hooray! Tree cheers
for our hero Robin Hood: Hip hip…” The sheriff of Nottingham
is a surly lion. He is upset that that mysterious archer
who took away the grand prize used the reward to stand
everyone in the village pints in the pub. “The people
are supposed to pay liquor taxes for their drinks,”
the lion laconically whines to his cohort, the snake.
“Ssso true your majesssty.” “Majesty?” the lion feigns
humility, “Why, sir snake, do you insist on addressing me
as if I were royalty? I am merely the Sheriff of Nottingham.”
“Not ssso, my lord, if I may be so bold as to contradict
your eminence. You are king of divine blood, at least to me.
And someday soon you are bound to fulfill your dessstiny.
You will be an idol in the minds of these ignoramuses,
the English, and all the far-flung colonies…” Meanwhile,
in the new world, Che is organizing a band of guerillas,
Native Americans in pelt skins, armed with bows and arrows.
“First we take back Manhattan!” he says to them in Spanish
through teeth clenching in his mouth his trademark cigar.
His hands are not free to hold it, as he is using them
to demonstrate the proper handling of a Soviet AK-47 rifle.
His buffalo soldiers reject firearms. They say, “We must not let
our spirits sink to the level of joining with the gringos’ machines.
Once we do, the cause of our revolution is lost forever
to the white man’s perdition.” They mobilize in the Battery.
At the preordained sun stroke, they burst onto the floor
of the Wall Street Stock Exchange. An arrow pierces
the chairman’s throat. He collapses over the edge
of the balcony, still clasping the hammer that was to ring
the bell that would open the market for that trading day.
His skull smashes on the marble floor, spilling his brains.
He is unconscious as he dies of asphyxiation on blood.
The killing was symbolic. The good guys do not want
to harm anybody. The guerillas hold obsidian knives
to the collared, neck-tied pudgy jugulars of every executive
who works for a financial firm or government bureau
in New York City. They demand a pow-wow with Power.
The president of the USA broaches in, holding up
his hands in the sign of surrender. He begs the leader,
“Take me instead. Kill me if you want. But please return
the country back its beloved executives. I am their chief.
Accept my life as a sacrifice.” Che laughs heartily,
the gutteral paroxysms of the proletariat’s stentorian
icon, who happens to be a heavy smoker. “Nonsense,”
he speaks in broken English for the president, who knows
not a word of Spanish, except maybe for “hola,” “cerveza,”
and “hasta la vista baby.” “We demanded to talk to Power.
You are nobody but a coward. The proletariat isn’t stupid.
We know that you were forced by those who really rule
to turn yourself in for the sake of these enslaved slave drivers,
businessmen,” he grits the word, “and that if you had
refused they would have tortured you beyond the threshold
of pain. Whereas we anarchists kill seldom and when we do,
humanely. You stink, pig. We don’t even want to have you
as a hostage. Get out of the People’s Stock Exchange.”
Che kicks the rear-end of the president, who is now down
on his hands and knees, pushing him toward the exit.
The rulers consider the situation serious. Che is invited
to meet with the absolute master based on two conditions:
that he come alone, that he bring no weapons, and that
he refrain from smoking. He is led by a chthonic type suit
through the wreckage of the World Trade Center bombing.
He is feeling apprehensive already since he stubbed
out his last cigar on the sidewalk of Church Street.
He hankers for nicoteine. His worker’s boot crunches
over the charred skulls of the firefighters who were
victims of the calamity. Uneasily, he looks up to the sky
where the historic Twin Towers once rose, and – Flash!
- he is inside a building gazing at light fixtures in a ceiling.
Thanatos leads him to an elevator. A bell dings. Doors open.
Thanatos gestures to Che that he enter. A button is pushed.
The elevator ascends rapidly. Several seconds later
he is eighty stories up. He looks down at the marvellous city,
astounded by the height of the view. “Come forward!”
a deep echoing voice commands from behind a cubicle
in a shadowy section of the otherwise sunny office space.
“But I thought,” he says in Spanish (his exact words are
“Pero pensaba…”), that the World Trade Center was destroyed
on September 11, 2001.” “It was a hoax, Mr Guevara,”
The voice pronounces the revolutionary’s name wrongly;
‘Gwuh-varra,’ “designed to conceal the nerve center
of Emerald City behind a curtain of empty space, so that
we who are in power could do business with less transparency.”
“A hoax? But all those people killed…” “Digital imagery.
No one died. Those who cried that they lost loved ones
in the false disaster were brainwashed and/or bribed
by the secret agents of Oz.” “I must say,” Che replies,
“I am impressed by the thoroughness of your evil plot,
despite that I detest you. Congratulations on this facade.
In financial terms, Oz has been quite successful. Kudos.
Anyway, I am here to declare that the Native Americans
are taking the power back. We will slaughter your executives
if you do not capitulate to our one demand: Cede to us
California. The land was never yours to begin with.
You stole it from Mexico. We will let you keep Arizona,
New Mexico, western Texas, but we want the Golden Coast,
from Baja to Alaska.” “What are you going to do with it?
Organize a mass cult of hippie pot farmers?” “Mas o menos.
We are going to reestablish the worship of Wakan Tanka.
California under us will be a highly technological modern
libertarian agronomy. Okay, we have drawn up our terms.
We will allow you to maintain your military bases there
on the one condition that you supplement the training
of your personnel with the education which we will provide
in the liberal arts, subjects of peace. And no one is exempt.
Everyone from generals to line cooks must attend the lessons.
Is it agreed?” Oz chuckles sardonically. “No it is not,
comrade amigo, communist dog. You are not even fit
to lick the mud off the sole of my boot after I have done
a wine tasting tour in Napa Valley. You are a non-entity.
We had you killed by a group of our mercenaries in the 1960s.
As for your army of Indians, they’re even more dead than you.
No pictures of them exist, however many millions there were.”
The hero of the Cuban revolution goes pale. “Yo…” he doesn’t
know how to answer, “Do you mind if I have a cigar?”
“Yes I DO MIND!” the voice behind the cubicle boomed.
The light-weight cardboard walls shook with the low vibrations.
“You were told you could not smoke in here.” “I am not sure
I understand. Can you come out of there and explain to me?”
A portly dwarf pops out of the box. He looks less like a midget
than he does an aged, stocky ex-athlete, seen from far away.
“I am Oz, great and powerful,” the dwarf declares himself.
“You said I am a non-entity?” “Eres eso amigo, compadre.
We both are, as well as the Tower we are standing in.
That is why I appear in this ridiculous, un-PC aspect.
I have no constant form. But I, unlike you, do thrive
on the other side in the realm that is known as reality.
There California, New York, the whole fucking shitshow is mine.”
Oz smiles malignly. “But comrade, I can see you are stressing.
Why not go ahead and have your smoke?” Che thankfully
fumbles in the pockets of his green fatigues for a cigar
and a box of communist matches. He strikes one: no light.
He tries another: not even a spark. He panics. Disappears.

The Chinese do not want to buy the same things that we do.
Yes, they frequent megastores, but also traditional markets.
Housewives may purchase live hens and carry them home
squawking by the feet, their daughters’ hands in theirs.
They have no alternatives. The government is more
openly war-minded. The fascists are publically amassing.
They have no regard for our well beings. They deride our pleadings
for peace and mercy. They would rather bulldoze homes
in the countryside to carry out ambitious reforestation schemes
than let us live our lives as agrarian pagans, and see us to the city.
Here we live on top of each other, crammed in so close
that we’re forced to hear their music and animated conversations
about topics of which we can only catch a word here or there,
that I would never even think about, let alone discuss.
Ach! This small talk is killing me. I need to get out of the city.
Go back to the countryside. There I had a garden.
Mother raised me and my family on vegetables she had grown
herself and cooked in her kitchen with loving motherly care.
Mmm yum Christmas turkey! We sure love the way mom makes it!
I’m sick of running into people and having to say excuse me or hello.
I don’t want to buying anything. Exchanging currency feels dirty.
Engaging in commerce, selling labor to an employer is like
standing before someone who trusts you and telling a selfish lie.
But that is what you do here. The buildings are boxes,
the streets are squared, the ways we have to walk
are so unavoidably constricted that I have to squeeze to get by.
Suppress another shudder of visceral anxiety. I want to scream,
but I know that I would cease the incipient outcry
when those around me would think: Tsk, some crazy person.
Come on Ham, let’s get the children away from this madman.
I guess this is sanity: the ability to maintain a lid on the urge
to act out irrationally. I hear a heart beating under hot water.
The city is attacking. The slumber I fell into has gradually receded
in incoming tidal waves of waking consciousness.
The balcony I have rented overlooks a parking lot.
Out beyond, between other 24-storey apartment complexes
I can see treetops, wires, slowly rolling cars. If I don’t go soon
someone will come and call on me. And I don’t want to encounter
anyone; I’m not in the mood. I gather my things to leave.
Taxi to the art district. I stroll the streets, smoking,
turning randomly off into alleyways. The works on display:
generic. Nothing worth looking at for more than a couple seconds.
Everything is unoriginal. I try to be impressed by the anthropological
significance of there being a place like this, but I am not surprised.
It’s the same as I was told about: A must-see attraction
should you have the opportunity. Yes, I can see the charm.
Still, now that I am actually here, it just all seems so… sad.
So I turn into a bird. Set myself free in a woodsy district
and fly off on my own. I was inside a tiny cage, flapping frenetically.
I was enclosed in with this other bird who had lost its will to live
and just sat passive in its own and my acid shit at the bottom
of the cage. I identified with the bird. Its avian brain could never
learn there would be no escape. After every failed attempt
to fly it sinks and non-verbally thinks: No! Wrong! I need to…
Bash against the bars! Be unable to spread my wingspan.
I gave the petshop owner a hundred yuan and ordered him
to hand over the birds with angered urgency. I turned
and said, We have got to get out of here, meaning this part
of the city, where if the birds were to be set free
they would hardly be any better off. They would likely live
in ongoing states of fright amidst this traffic, urban dwellings,
not a trace of any but neon greenery, and die soon from poison.
We taxied to where there were woods. At last I opened the cage.
Seconds were of the essence as long as those creatures
under my care were suffering… Goldfish, gerbils, turtles
and other such animals that were sold in that rotten petstore
certainly aren’t as happy as they would be in their natural habitats.
But this is where we differ, us land dwellers, to the great
beings that soar dashingly through the blue at all sorts
of creative verticals. Gravity weighs us down. And we become
complacent. We live in a cage that stinks of shit.
Our water and food troughs are filthy. We are so packed
in with one another that we can barely move, the constant contact
is sickening. We can endure it. Our energy settles
once our hopes are given for lost. The bird, however, cannot be
so easily sedated. He has the magical ability to fly!
to go anywhere he wants, as high as he possibly can.
I freed those birds from the city as a symbolical act,
but also and primarily because the moment I witnessed that bird
slamming itself about in grave desperation, I reacted
empathetically. I bought the two birds and walked
up the side of the street, furtively looking out for an available cab,
doing my best through my aura to bestow calm on them.
It won’t be long, I said to myself and repeated, it won’t be long…
I am no land-bound man. I am a breeze-blown blackbird.
Did you know that men can fly? Yes, of course, they do so
through their thoughts, which unlike other animals’
can center on the divine. As the Wright brothers could tell you,
for a man to fly it is difficult and very challenging. It takes
many persevered attempts. One must cope with crashes,
despondency, doubt, ridicule, loss of motivation, but it can be done!
Look where we are today: in Hong Kong, having been in Shenzhen,
headed for Kolkata tomorrow. O my, it’s a Christmas miracle!
Christmas – in the sense that this is the winter solstice,
a fresh and novel wave in the chronological ocean of years…
May you prosper new inventions, ideas, ten million dollar ones!
Mwhahaha, the evil in the background erupts. His laughs
fade away, strange and mysteriously… Thoughts ascend
in airy flight. They dip, swivel, and dive. They arise off our heads
like steam from a hotspring in snow. In the sunlight,
under the stars, walking, dreaming, discovering water,
getting naked and going swimming. I am a stately blackbird.
I wonder what a goldfish – Dip – feels like when it – Swerve –
swims around in water – Soooar… Can’t be anything like this,
I, an imperfect man, muse on one of my vaunts into nature.
Human nature is inextricably complicated. Disregard any easy
answer. There isn’t one. You see, we have, our minds are
possessed by these psychophysical aggregates.
How many thoughts normally course between two disingenuous
parties carrying on a conversation? No telling. Definitely fewer
the shorter the interactions get, the more we push away.
It is our dilemma that we must solve if we are to receive
our divine reward. To cope with who he is versus who he must
be in society, in relation to others, is the main preoccupation
for every wise young man. The religion of evolution
teaches that in the beginning we were muddy-minded beasts.
We have been trying to purify ourselves for the past
thirty thousand years through the process of alchemy.
The future must come to terms with itself. I don’t have an answer.
This is no utopian manifesto. I point out what needs to change.
There! I am a little girl playing the magic witch game.
On whatever thing I point my wand – a perfect stick I found
in the woods earlier – its essence is immediately altered.
Take that frog for example. Which one? There!
The frog turns into a handsome prince, his lips deliciously puckered.
Now that stone over… There! It turns into a towering mountain.
I am bored. I put my stick down. Sit on a rock by a stream
and watch and listen to the amazing water pass. I leave
the city proper. I am still technically within its limits,
but this place isn’t so overwhelmingly urban. Much greener.
Ah yes! I can fly! I am a free blackbird again. There! Now…
There! I flap upon an air current, a thought: I might pay a visit
to the energy force that orchestrates every movement in the universe
today. I head for heaven. I knock at the pearly gates.
The gatekeeper to the Emerald City peeps out a squeaky eyehole
and demands, Yes? What do you want? I seek audience with God.
Ehe? He is occupied at the moment. May I take a message?
Um, no. I would rather see Him in person. Please I have flown all the way
from the poet down on earth. I only want to pay the Energy my respect
and make a humble request of It. But if He is busy – I suppose
I should have made an appointment – tell Him I am grateful
that there exists a green section in the city, but it is vastly not enough.
I don’t know when was the last time His Excellence deigned
to check in on it, but the city has gotten completely out of control.
I suggest it be destroyed, but, and I must emphasize, benignly;
no bloodshed, famine, plague, or war. Just a purely peaceful
abandonment of that way of living. I would like to see a kind of
Great Green Brave New Emerald City Utopia of the Future!
while I am still alive. And I’m due to die by 2063, at the latest,
so the Energy better get crackin’! I will pass the word along,
the gatekeeper responds smugly, and shuts – with a squeak
as well as a bang – his eyehole. I wonder if he will, or whether
he was lying… I shrug my wings, leap off the edge of a cloud
and head back toward earth, where my head is at present.
During my descent, I decide resolutely that if I don’t start
seeing some improvement soon, I am going to come back
with an army of pacifist blackbirds and coup d’etat Emerald City.
I am intimidated. I hate confrontation. It always brings out the worst
in my ego. But I am a bird inside a cage, trapped in an onerous city,
unable to accept that there is no escape, bashing myself
against the bars. Here thoughts do not have room to fly.
They bubble up and seethe underneath ceilings, become stagnant
pools that fester. Our minds are untreated wounds; grotesque gangrene.
Ehhh, the cries of misery moan. Sounds like they are faking it,
I judge as I walk by on two strong, healthy legs. The cripple is begging
for money. Except in the hope that the sky isn’t just a memory,
that it still exists somewhere far away, the bird witnesses its first
dawn from the branch of a tree – and that is indeed not even space.
Hope… Puh! I am already under sedation. How much struggle
from internal conflict have I already swallowed without speaking
up and taking action? Mental pain is a drug. Take your antideppressant.
It will also cover your symptoms of schizophrenia and sociopathy.
Its side-effects include loss of self-identity and impotence.
But you will be able to live a normal life again. The more you take,
the further you can tolerate things being wrong. This can work
to our benefit. We can use the drug, pain, as our vaccine.
Now that I am immune, I can go undercover as an agent into the city
and not fall apart in seizures when I am subjected to its human pollution.
I can carry out covert operations, an extremely skillful spy.
The author, the Cold War-era operative, occupies enemy territory,
taking pictures for his poem-report with his camera-equipped eye.
The most perspicacious tracker, the prim Harvard man explains
to his hierarchical superior, could not detect that when I touch
my finger to the rim of my glasses, like so, a tiny camera
in the nose-piece snaps a picture. If I can just get into their central
headquarters and get anywhere near their top secret documents
we should have all the information that we need to win the war!
Ingenious, the poet smiles, very good agent Orange. Carry on
now with your child’s play… I am doing nothing for which I could
be tried or prosecuted. I am a blackmarket dealer in ideas.
And even in states where thinking along particular lines
is sacrilege and punishable by strictest law, I am still exculpable.
This isn’t explicitly forbidden. The dumb government cannot verbalize
eloquently enough to describe what I am doing against it
and label the subversion illegal. I am therefore able to go
about unsuspected, like a blackbird high above people’s heads
in the city. My totem protector, I have opened your cage.
Birds, messengers to the divine, come swarm the city like locusts.
Authority does not fear my freedom because it is quite isolate.
But if everybody were blackbirds, the myth about the power
that cages us would like past flaps of wings dissolve
into our destination: Sky! Right after the poor petshop owner,
who I harbor no ill-will against, being only ignorant, forgets
his service to the city; wanting only for himself, grabs
the pink bill I offer him: a hundred yuan for two birds’ freedom.

Golden honey drips with the wet tongue, swollen
thick viscosity, lava like the ocean from the stings it’s sustained
seethes for an entire eon, tastes sweet honey.
In the space of a pending moment the rivulets have moved in.
The surface is augmenting to occupy and erode the stone.
The flowers are growing cold. The force that is pushing,
as their colors, their reasons, this vast swathe of various
blossoms, are shade activity from a deep point,
by shade taken away within the center everywhere.
The gold glows forever; is licking clean the rolling wheels.

To be in the world in the Heideggerian sense.
My thoughts will become actions, my desires fructify,
and fears be kept in the shadows for the night
sweeper to come and remove. I touch nothing.
The environment of my present existence is false.
A dream place – I wander a composite of landscapes
where I have been and suppressed all memory from:
hills of concave mortar craters in a bygone battlefield;
generic interiors of empty houses; desert rock promontories;
seaside ghost towns that smell of salt-distended clouds.
Blown in over the waves, across an abandoned parking lot,
over ineffective barriers of hanging elliptical chains,
stands still my nightmare pursuer, a person who I can
barely make out, in my hurry to turn and leave.

At most, I lean against walls and hover over counters.
Hold notes across and receive things in exchange:
food I have not cooked, rented weapons, torch to pass
on the flame to another. The creator closes his eyes,
looking down on the supplicant, who has come
over mountains on knees, through oceans without a boat,
across vast chasms unbridged. He holds my head
against his heart. I can hear how hollow it is:
a storefront in a movie set; a business in painted wood
and decorated window. He charges me grievously.
The old crook rips me off. No recourse to retribution
or justice for this crime. The response to get away
and the resolution to lie if anyone ever asks where I was,
though in the aftermath no one does, not directly.
Sounds reach into my corner; voices whose words
I have no choice but to process. Few are in my language.
I have only the timber and tone to decipher to determine
whether their vitriol might be referring to… Arthur,
they address me. I cannot deny that this is my name.
You are expected to answer for this outrageous bill.
Who authorized you to go on a spree?
No one Lord. I did it on my own accord.
I am meted out my punishment: a dark phase of demotivation;
actions carried out with the cooperation of the body;
my taste sense screaming – This is not what I want!
O well, it isn’t so bad. The baited hook on offer hints at sympathy.
I engage them to listen to me talk about my general dilemma
in consciousness so full it sometimes distracts me from speaking
in the middle of a sentence of the utter vanity of my pitiful plaint.

A rope inside the well deeper than the light at the opening
can penetrate brushes and shocks my face, startling me
to realization that I had not been numbed by the fall,
as I had only surmised from the lack I felt of pain.
I thought I was numb, but was too afraid to try to prove it
by budging under my own will. Now I find I have hands to grip
and climb the heaven-sent lifeline – the spider strand of Buddha.
I am reciting myth: the soul in hell is offered paradise,
immortality in the Garden of the Lotus Flower.
He has a way to go to get there. This is the variation
that is interesting: what thought causes this soul to fail?
Shit! Merde! Mierda! Scheiss! I was Jesus Christ
leading shadows out of a tunnel. And I could see light
up at the opening. But I… stopped and called off
the emigration for some reason.
Hmmm, the psychoanalyst looks up from his pad
and raises to an angle an eyebrow.
A reason? What might that be?
I… the mental case reflects, gosh doc, I don’t remember.
He gasps, expresses contempt. Behind the couch
I am lying on I hear papers that he has thrown flutter.
He storms out of the room. Alone, I sit out the session
for the hour I have already paid for.
The soul was near enough the surface to smell
something other than the cold moldy mist
inside this hellish well. He can hear fall the sparkles
of a fountain gushing… Why did you let go?
a former follower asks hundreds of years after it happened.
Finally, suddenly, the karma of my guilt is up. The event is expiated.
Someone can come and talk to me. I have now the lucid perspective
that suffering in perdition can bring. I am able to say ingenuously
my variation on the myth – but I cannot describe my response,
nor my fellow lost soul’s reaction. The Buddha frowns
and turns away – the creator closes his eyes.
He pets the spider’s diamond back to thank it for spinning
its strand. You will be rewarded well my little friend.
Your buddhahood has been hastened by your act of generosity
to that soul who unfortunately couldn’t take advantage of it.
The spider’s karma advances. It prospers in flies until,
at a ripe old spider’s age it dies a natural, animal death.

The baby wasn’t rescued. The savior must have been martyred.
As a child I saw a show one evening on television, supposedly
based on true events. In a backyard in Texas, a baby fell into a well.
The mother discovered the accident and, weeping, called emergency.
Crews arrived: ambulances, police, rescue workers, news reporters.
The entire drama consisted of these adults’ adventures. It was
quite a boring movie, actually. The part that was poignant for me
was when the sound effects of a baby’s screams stopped
and everyone around the well went silent in acknowledgement
of what that meant. While I knew this to some extent,
even as a youngster, now I am fully aware that although the baby
was central to the story, it was a fictitious artifact. There were
a couple of shots at the beginning and the happy ending
of some baby that maybe belonged to one of the director’s
friends, which they used for not more than half a day of filming.
But the poor baby at the bottom of the well, for whom I felt
the movie viewer’s empathy, whose screams quieted
at the climax did not exist. Just a bunch of cheap actors
dressed up as mother, defeatist policeman, heroic news reporter,
pretending to fret around a hole in a backyard in Texas.

The thought that occurs to the soul is supposed to be the lesson.
To me, the writer, I have to admit, it is a total mystery.
It is a hardship to have to think about while still involved in the cycle.
I have been in hell. I survived on only hope. I got knocked
back as the hope exploded and the shrapnel from it blinded me.
I touch nothing. The mother’s breast with which I came in contact
was a booby trap; a residual mine in the gentle country
where a bloody war once took place. I have lost limbs;
been rendered castrate. I’ve been deafened by the flash.
My mind is idiotic from having to cope with the consequent trauma.
Ornaments bedeck every available space inside the palatial room:
stupid, useless objects manufactured by slaves for the waste market
and sold in souvenir stalls for a cheap price that can be
negotiated down yet further. One is my friend, the king, who is
imprisoned under a spell. If I touch his corresponding ornament
he will be released and reestablish his rule. But they are all
indistinguishable. The jade lion, I decide. Doubt seizes me though
as I reach my hand out. If I choose incorrectly the day is lost;
I become an ornament too. Which other one then?
I vacillate between the jade lion and the pewter ashtray,
toy memorabilia, a tiny heavy statue of Manjushri,
a gun studded with gems and jewels, stone fruit,
the crystal bowl that contains the grey apples and oranges,
the plate on which this stands, the mandala in the center of which
is obscured, but from its edges looks like the Wheel of Life.