Issue 6 2010 - TLS - Victoria University

The Imperial pilgrimage of Yuan Shikai
by Tony Foley
If you stare long enough at another’s face
it shifts,
changes,
flows like melting wax,
becomes another face,
another person,
there is something wrong,
You feel an itch at the base of your skull,
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 emotion,
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 world canopy jungle.
You awake as Yuan Shikai 1 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 my mind,
you are not me,
I am not myself,
not in this fragment of feeling.
Perhaps you are Akhenaten 2 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 Akhenaten,
he has long become one with the dust of millennia,
you are not Akhenaten.
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 lick of astringent pleasure
You must stay in a difficult equilibrium,
buoyed by the minor victory of life
as 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,
destination without substance,
If you stare long enough at another’s face
it shifts,
changes,
flows like melting wax,
becomes another face,
another person,
there is something wrong,
You feel an itch at the base of your skull,
You are not yourself.
1
Yuan Shikai was military Governor of Beijing at the fall of the Qing Empire. He became the first President
of the new Chinese Republic. He later declared himself emperor and was undertaking the traditional imperial
pilgrimage to various significant Taoist locations when he died in 1916.
2
Akhenaten was Pharaoh of Egypt for seventeen years until his death around 1336 BC. He attempted to
introduce a form of monotheism based upon Aten, a Sun deity. He was the husband of Nefertiti and father of
Tutankhamen
Tony Foley is a Melbourne writer.
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