He knew not, he said, whether he was a butterfly who awoke to find he was a man or a man who awoke to find he was a butterfly. To begin in the image, he kills for in his dreams he wakes from half forgotten to the commotion of the day sealed by a story. To begin in the image, a view before the abyss from old familiar haunts what clings, where there’s neither choice nor chance yet beckons, to the impossible impasse. The Breach. Wu Ch Eng En descends the mountain of the five elements bearing the moon as his lamp forever grows longer, he muses leaving no footprints in the snow. At daybreak the view is emptiness the truth of truth is its lie, he muses to a lamp without a night. Wu Ch Eng En rested to speak with the world on emptiness. He looked at the village’s railings their fierce barbs pointing to the sky between which shadows peered as if to promise through tricks of light Mystery but revealing only bondage to landscapes in whose labyrinths you could believe you were in a place you’d never left where to return was just deception. Must not you and i be inside emptiness for we cannot both be outside but the world made no reply lost to a fleeting memory that may never return or may. Wu Ch Eng En said Day dreams the wandering mind as lonely as a cloud, flower and song but not without blood the lifeless, Terra-Cota army marches over our groundless days outwards from the tomb. Nature Thrives on Deception. Chuang Tze perched on his usual precipice and reflected on to suicide or not to suicide. He recalled he had worn a dark suit dark glasses, returned on a crowded summer’s night to a past whose memories he could no longer remember there he had sown his wild seed what had they come to now but the way of all nothingness. There are those who maintain creation is a purposeless drift those who maintain its entelechy can simulate a deity of divine attributes. Chuang Tze rocked to, fro would not such deities grow perplexed about their state of affairs traces of white fleece trailed across that blue emptiness called the sky thus in that fall from that exalted simulation believe they were immortal souls. Chuang Tze said Even the wind is flawed as it speaks through the leaves of trees the moment of history. Now caught in time evermore yet the leaves belong to the branches to make small patterns in infinity. And we, where do we belong with our swan song, as if we were going home the day after tomorrow.
*(in homage to Ezra)
Robin Ouzman Hislop is on line Editor at Poetry Life & Times at Artvilla.com. His numerous appearances include Cold Mountain Review (Appalachian University, N.Carolina), The Honest Ulsterman, Cratera No 3 and Aquillrelle’s Best. His publications are collected poems All the Babble of the Souk, Cartoon Molecules, Next Arrivals & Moon Selected Audio Textual Poems. A translation from Spanish of poems by Guadalupe Grande Key of Mist and Carmen Crespo Tesserae, the award winning (X111 Premio César Simón De Poesía), in November 2017 these works were presented in a live performance at The International Writer’s Conference hosted by the University of Leeds. UK. A forthcoming publication of collected poems Off the Menu is expected in 2020
You may visit Aquillrelle.com/Author Robin Ouzman Hislop about author. See Robin performing his work Performance (University of Leeds)