Modern cities have grown into giant tombs
that caught and buried the Chinese nun
Zhenru’s “pure breeze and bright moon,”
having wholly scraped the sky and stars!
But what then happened to the clouds transmuted
into women’s skirts that used to unseal downwards
towards blooms and buds and florets set to scoff—
at concrete blocks of the remorseless and soulless?
Didn’t they raise the bar in dingy downtown taverns
or fly off as corporate leaflets about season sales?
What makeup is to women, to politicians are the words
or rather those familiar phrases they are paid to evoke
so that they can put our innate divine minds to rest,
these Bipartisan Gravediggers of the Good and Souls.
