Tang Yin's 16th Century Chinese Painting
Between brothel, tavern and temple
I hang my life
The girls play
Their music as water
Their embrace....
At tavern I drink fire
breathing dragon-breath
I fall
into a cess-pool....
The temple gong
heralds nothingness
that the master does not
talk about.
We shut eyes to sit
and see nothing....
Returning to bamboo-pen/rice-paper
I put on them a world of things:
Night shadows I see of bamboo leaves
on a paper-screen
Squiggles
of a world where my life hangs
between this and that
like everyone else's.
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