Mao of Love: Preamble - The Poem

Mao of Love: Preamble

by Azly Rahman

March 5, 2011

I had a dream

Of reading a Rilke

Whilst in a Rimbaud state of mind

Unfinished was my reading

of the Duino Elegies

of terrifying angels and of love

In that dream too

In-between my readings

I looked yonder

Three teens

In broad daylight slowly climbed up an apartment building

Scaling the height

To burglarize

And they took only umbrellas

Three beautifully crafted ones

And they opened the umbrellas

And together ... through the window

Smilingly, they ascend to the ground

That image: like a freeze frame of a postmodern clip

of The Matrix

In that dream

In a room

Full of people I saw her

In red cardigan

Or was it a turtleneck I was not sure

As what dreams give me: benefit of the doubt

In her lies a childhood

A landscape of raw emotions

A tapestry of dialiectics

Amidst the world of growing materialism

Dialiectical materialism ... of love

I woke up

Time collapses

Persisting like a memory still, like a Salvador Dali

Flashed in front of my unseeing eyes are the words:

Mao of Love ... Mao of Love ..

Forcing me to seek inside of me

This strange sensation of love

That constructs and deconstructs and reconstructs

That is a thesis and an anti-thesis and synthesizes and the cycle continues

That proposes and disposes and recomposes

That lives and dies and reincarnates

That loves and hates and reconciles and comes back in forms anew

That walks and marches tens of thousand of miles and sacrifices for the Mao of Love

That has no fear to abandon love of materials for higher love

Mao of Love I was writing

Beyond the Tao of Physics

I too was contemplating

Out of the dream that came a-visitin'

These words repeatedly I was chanting

My chants of the Mao of Love

Brought me back to my dreamstate

As every cell in me chants the mantra

incessantly

Like the wise one under the bodhgaya tree

Becometh of me was something I have never seen

A body and soul there is --

yet without boundaries

There are only words inscribed unto my entire body

Like tombstones glowing in a wasteland of warm lights aplenty

Like a apparation in front of me

I saw myself like clouds moving

in a pompous ceremony

Entering the room where the one in red sat alone

In the smoke-filled room

With multicolored strobe lights dancing

till eternity