The Imperial Pilgrimage of Yuan Shi Kai

If you stare long enough at another's face
it shifts,
changes,
flows like melting wax,
becomes another face,
another person,
you feel an itch at the base of your skull,
there is something wrong.

You are not yourself!

You feel inconstant desire,
a tidal surge ruled by the moon
like your face is ruled by eyes,
eyes gazing across a plaza littered with bleeding statues
see completion in rubble,
totality in entropy.

Can you ever understand another's emotions?
ever know the deepest content of another's thought?
You grasp at symbols as a drunkard grasps the bottle,
hunt for archetypes in bewildering fecundity
under the canopy of world jungle.

You awake as Yuan Shi Kai on a cherry blossom morning,
but the Imperial pilgrimage has ended
and you will never occupy the Dragon Throne,
you are the skeleton of a warlord,
with vacant eye sockets which never see the lotus;
an insect skimming across a stagnant pond,
separated by surface tension from the muddy depths,
above divided from below,
the face in the mirror is not yours.

You pluck pieces from a mosaic created by unknown hands,
your fingers bleed,
cut by splinters of worthless glass,
a window closed to that distant world,
once so near,
now lost to your mind,
you are not me,
I am not myself,
not yet,
not in this fragment of feeling.

Perhaps you are Akhenaton replying to the mayor of Byblos,
Eternity waits for you to die the true death,
misunderstood,
forgotten even by the pale rays of dawn.
But no!
you are not Akhenaton,
he has long become one with the dust of millenia,
you are not Akhenaton.
You are not yourself!

The vine hangs heavy with sorrow,
your instinct is to hack and slash,
money is your machete,
your structure is a complex problem in organic chemistry,
your creed an open-cut mine,
a containment pond overflowing with the last flood of misery,
your tears are sulphuric acid,
your saliva strontium 90,
your heart is public property,
there is leprosy in your soul.

Your life is a flowchart with branches always leading to the negative,
avenues of negatives lined with crucified dreams,
the no, no, no, of yourself,
endless denial of yourself,
infinite reflection of infinite regress,
bottomless pit of Being.

Is it ignorance or complicity which attracts punishment?
If despair has many faces can innocence sleep in peace?
You, me, and a song on the breeze,
a name called from dreams,
is this a foretaste of pain or the lick of astringent pleasure?

If the promise of the future is a poisoned apple,
can you identify with a grape?

You must stay in a difficult equilibrium,
buoyed by the minor victory of life
and the absence of personal death,
then slink back to that unearned solitude,
relieved of responsibility,
free to be nothing but the scent of a rose,
the hum of a bee.

You are the winds of change,
the mind of God,
a journey without purpose,
the destination without substance.

If you stare long enough at another's face
it shifts,
changes,
flows like melting wax,
becomes another face,
another person.

You are not yourself!

(c) Tony Foley 2006