Ventis: Wielder of the Philosopher’s Stone
Under the star-lit night sky
The boy picks up a petty pebble
Aims at a tree
And tosses it
The petty pebble weakly lands onto the dirt
The boy picks up a great rock
Aims at the menacing moon
And chucks it
The great rock heavily crashes over the tree
The bold white circle shoots a spotlight onto the boy
A young aspiring alchemist in the vast land of Aeria
Ventis gathers his belongings and turns back
To his hometown, where there is terrorizing fire
A civilization engulfed in its own creation
Only Ventis can save the day
With his created rock, a rock of creation
Running past the crowd
Ventis breaks onto the scene
With a clench of the Philosopher’s stone
The fire is dissipated and transformed into smoke
But from within the smoke,
A homunculus appears,
A creation not divine
A creation feared by God
But rocks have always been Ventis’ obsession
In his right hand he clenches a hard round rock
In the other he holds a smooth & slippery pebble
With magic the stones bend into weapons
Ventis fights and fights
And the homunculus falls and falls
Only to never rise again
He then reconstructs the fallen buildings
Making them bigger and better than before
After a rejuvenating night’s sleep
Ventis awakens to another fine day
Venturing back out to his usual spot by the river,
Ventis reaches into his plush pockets
For the special rock
For which is not there
No matter: he will create it again
Just like how he created homes,
How he created dreams,
How he created his name
The wind picks up the words and carries them away
Under the sun-lit blue sky
The boy throws the pebble
The boy chucks the rock
The common one falls into the strong tide
While the right one makes it to the other side
Introduction to Quantum Superposition
Certainly you cannot be in different places
At once, nor can you have different true
Selves in the same place, but the Monkey King
Can do both on his journey to the west (supposedly
In quest for the authentic Buddhist scriptures): simply
By pulling a thread of hair from behind his ear
Chewing it, and then blowing the broken
Pieces out, they will become as many
Monkey kings. Got the idea? Few of us understand
Quantum superposition, nor do we all
Really need to, but aren’t we all evolved
From monkeys? So we can chew our inner beings
And attain many identical versions of our selves:
As a quantum state, it can be represented
As a sum of multiple other distinct states; otherwise
Just choose another self on the stem cell of your mind
And you will see what you can never imagine seeing
Swinging
Push. Up there you saw
The horizon above your childhood
As wide as your vision
Pull. You faced backwards
Close to the playground with
Footprints messy on the sand
Push again. Higher up you hope
To fly like a kite with a
String held in a human hand
Pull again. Your mind became
Confused as if everything could
Be withdrawn beneath your body
La Lutte Finale Or Last Trial
All rise [les damnés de la terre?]
Oyez, Oyez, Oyez
With neither jury nor audience
Who is to win man’s case
Nature or God? [ L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain!]
No Medusa
Ignoring a name call during the return is like
Ignoring a flirtation from Fox Spirit in Pu Songling’s tales is like
Ignoring the chase of a Frankenstein is like
Ignoring the whim of a Faust is like
Ignoring the challenge of a Pushkin for a duel is like
Ignoring the declaration from a George Bush is like
Ignoring the request from a Revenue Canada is like
Ignoring the invitation from a University of Saskatchewan is like
Ignoring the rejection from a New Yorker is like
Ignoring the ignorance by a Helen is like
Ignoring the notice from a Vancouver Library is like
Ignoring the judgement from a being above
Bionote
Allen Qing Yuan (born in Vancouver in 1995), author of Traffic Light, is a 2-time Pushcart nominee and one-time Best of the Net nominee. A former co-editor of Poetry Pacific, Allen is currently working as an intern for CRA. Since grade 10, Allen has had poetry appear in more than 70 literary publications across 16 countries, which include Cordite Poetry Review, Literary Review of Canada, Poetry Scotland, Shampoo and Spillway.
Allen is also the co-founder of a popular clothing brand Above the Movement. For more information, please visit his websites:: www.facebook.com/Above.The.Movement ; www.abovethemovement.com ; Twitter: @ATMovement
No comments:
Post a Comment