At night I sneak to a foreign place; I drift along
currents of consciousness and hide amongst dark caves with
half-faded Buddhist paintings, which still shimmer when the
moonlight caresses their smooth skin: every inch of
their worldly bodies clutches memories of the
solitude of monks centuries ago, who sat—
while Augustulus lay on his deathbed—beneath
their own sacred figs, not unlike those which first clothed
man and woman in the garden of four rivers.

Sometimes I hear the sounds of flutes floating amongst
ships sleeping in harbours, sprinkling childhood memories
onto cargo of fossilized fruits and cut down trees;
the sounds lift up my legs and I dance on mountain
peaks, whose fresh snow brings purity without
Spring, between palpable clouds and transparent stars,
twinkling pearls in dark oceans.

The moon guides me home: its light shines on rivers that
rival empires, where currents push and pull
my wooden boat between pebbles and pyramids,
(not those made of dust for listless afterlives where
gold is the same colour of water); none will
damage my empty bags for they will blow down the
river—by wind currents that pushed Zheng He and
Columbus into hurricanes with no eye—blind from salvation.

I slip back into bed; the sheets rub against my legs
but nothing burns like the moon without the sun in
caverns unexplored by learned people, caught
between stalactites and stalagmites, left only
with the drip-drip of a peaceful insanity that—
through my blinds—is reflected in the stars, which pull
me away, between dreams and mirrors,
indistinguishable past lives haunting empty
rooms where it is too dark to see the walls shimmer;
the last breath breathed, the fruit rotten, the rivers dry.