– 127 –

Kim Il Sung / Mausoleum (1994)

Great-Leader-Honoured-One-President-for-Life:
Have you brainwashed even death
of all doubt? leaving me
blinded by cameras bursting
from the eyes of earnest pilgrims.

They troop wall-eyed
through stately pronouncements and
an empire's denouement and
though you've with held the epilogue
their faces glaze with a certainty
that bars me:

How to explain this weight that keeps me from you?

It's more than that fence
of red-draped rope
or those silver-tipped guards told to
definitely not smile;

It's more than the sight of your
pickled flesh made eternally benevolent
in death as not in life;

Maybe it's this dingy room,
somehow stuffy against all expectation,
vacuum-sealed with the promise
of a legend gathering speed
—But no, it's not even that.

– 128 –

It's the fact that your little technicians
conferred upon Mao's coffin, saw
a quarantined cave,
‘A good deal of living’

and then dawdled over your own
installation, lingering details on that
shatterproof
UV-filtered
perspex panel
that almost convinces me

you've revealed the whole story

– 129 –

The Revenge of Fu Manchu

Facing certain death at the hands of MI6
the inscrutable Fu Manchu
exhorted of his only-begotten son:
Hold awhile.
Beside you beckons that timely chute,
deathly-sweet escape route
for young petals and hands
and through it you must fly and
leave me to
hold awhile
the chatter and jab of Empire's justice.
For we will die like mirrors
and vanish
though you in later years
And so I say:
Eat of My Knowledge
Drink of My Bile
and learn to accent
the words of those foreign devils
’mongst which I cast you to
Eat/Drink/Remember

But from the son in tow
no tears were spread
of all-consuming loss
or filial piety.

Perhaps his shaking hands were anticipating
the flat ductility of English sentiments
or the longed-for grain of those
glowing
pallid
pots of British flesh