Myriad Things

Wei Ligang-Myriad Things Examined: Autumn-2016

In the primal chaos
Before
Time and things

A split second
Of stillness
Silence

Condensing into a point
Almost disappearing
Smaller than a drifting speck

Of dust
Yet somehow vaster
Than all dimensions

Rushing to fill
The remaining real estate
This is the one

The way
Tao
This is the only

All opposites reconciled
All contradictions resolved
A magistry beyond measure

The integral harmony
Unity in its perfection
Desired multiplicity

Engendering the two
Who fought and loved
Birthing the three

That emanated
All the myriad things
Beneath Heaven

A floating world
Of impermanence
Fleeting phantasies

Transitory thoughts
Nothing so-of-itself
Yet longing for ideal
A oneness yet undivided

Dust

Hokusai-The Tengu Goddess, Mystical Bird 1760

---

For a few seconds a stray sunbeam
Makes visible the dance of dust motes
Swaying, trembling, swooning then falling
I have been granted a glimpse
Of harmony in the floating world
For the moment I am deeply content
Eyelids heavy, chin dropping towards chest
I dream of angels in a distant Heaven
Languidly embracing in the shallows
Of a limpidly becalmed pool.

Another Country

Someone Else’s House-George Shaw 2018

Somebody should have told you
That there was never any future
In lying supine,
Idly dreaming
Of your lost glory days
The vanished grandeur of your imperial passage
When you subdued the very waves
And subjugated the nations of the world
With boots pressing downturned faces
Further into the mud until they choked,
Striking accords and treaties
Then perfidiously reneging
Carrying cargo requiring whips and chains
A-looting and a-raping
Destroying and acquiring
Wholesale pillaging
But you know, all for their own good
A civilizing mission of course
Truth be told it was all a bit of a burden
But somebody had to do it and who better than us?
Quite quite but can you see the future
In dreaming of a past that was actually a nightmare
And how it poisons your present
Making your current decline
Take on the bouquet of a corpse
Your empire resulted in beaucoup bad karma
And a backlash that reverberates and echoes
Not only did you oppress and degrade the colonized
But we dehumanized ourselves in the process
Turns out that your manifest destiny
Was to be exceptional only in dissembled aggression
Yet you still wrap yourself in the flag
Butchers apron, a filthy bloody rag
While cultivating a loathsome air
Of detached superior nonchalance,
Fundamentally supercilious
Undermining any attempts at seriousness
With a deadly withering irony
A scornful reproach of all decency
Yet we are still surprised
When we encounter all the hate
Displayed by neighbours and others
Further a-field, all over in fact
Can’t they see what we did for them
All those ungrateful so and so’s
Can you believe that they think of us as some
Stricken beast too stupid to know that its dead?
Well we will show them one day
If only the enemy of the people
Those traitors and bleeding hearts
Would stop talking us down
If only we could rouse and wake up
Then we might dream
Of starting over again, though this time
We would make sure that the sun
Never ever never sets

OR

Man Ray-Woman holding Giacometti’s Disagreeable Object

Choose one from the following:

---

This is the beginning of something

Or

The end of everything

Or

A continuation of a whole lot of nothing

Or

Stop right there I have heard enough
I don’t care for the menu
Time to move on wasted enough already

Or

And or but
Into the fog
Maybe the smoke
If it is the conflagration after all
Either or neither
Nether ever never
Wood coal pour some oil
Cant see the forest for the trees

Or

I saw you for the first time again
You seemed different somehow
Though I had to admit
That you looked so good
I just had to touch myself
Forgetting that your kisses
Always left their mark
Bruising and wounding
Ah well what’s sex without pain
Love always requires some seasoning

Or

Will you ever….
You make everything sound so dirty
Though you will probably take that
As some form of obscure compliment
After all you wrote a pornographic reprise
Of Aquinas’s Summa
But I’ve come here to bury you
Not to praise
Are you listening
Do you catch…

Or

Come now cough ante pony up
No thing like a free
Take a look at the fork
We are all exposed
In some form of fashion
What a season
Hell’s got nothing
Here is the variety
Nauseating horrific exhilarating
No time for the honorific
Down here while I describe
With disgust my various
Beautiful disguises

Take Me Tomorrow

Salvador Dali-a Miserable Flat (From the Marquis De Sade Suite-1969

Forever the sensualist, pursuing the pleasures
Of the flesh and the transitory moment,
Every passing chance and fleeting lust
With your oh-so debonair, cavalier
Devil-may-care-can-take-me tomorrow attitude,
Never paying heed, feckless and reckless
Following every bizarre whim and contrary impulse.
You never know why you are the way you are,
Though upon any given day you may blame
The father for passing on his rogue genes
Designed to self-destruct whenever
You gain an instant of clarity and collected calm,
Or the mother for expelling you from the Eden
Of the womb into this world of sorrow and woe.
But why stop there, surely the impersonal God
In the vast unreachable fortress of the Heavens
Deserves a share for even thinking and therefore
Emanating all the demiurges and demons
To fashion this perfectly flawed creation
With its built-in obsolescent as the unique selling point
Yes the guilt and the shame has to be theirs
For the urges that you always have to act on
Regardless of consequences and the possibility
Of a whole universe of hurt and pain
But can anyone take the weight of such responsibility?
At times like this, better to drink deeply
And gamble on the possibility of redemption,
Within her encircling arms lies salvation
The pressure of her hand on your thigh
Hints at an all-encompassing bliss
An unsurpassed re-capturing of the holy moment
If only she holds on tight and doesn’t hold back
You could die right now looking into her eyes
But one moment escapes into the next
And this night, like all nights, has to end:
The sun breaks the magic circle
Ending the eclipsing spell
Returning you to the sleazy here and now,
The dishevelled bed in this pallid light
In this foetid atmosphere heavy with sex
With the bitter taste of a fulfilled desire
Turning heavy and cold in your mouth.
The time is now, I think,
Tomorrow has come
Your party is over
That race has been run
You sinned in such haste
Time now to repent
At, of course, your leisure
For Hell is forever.