Three Poems (Marc Vincenz)

Democracy Wall

for Wei Jingsheng and Huang Xiang

Look what’s pasted here—

Poet on the wall says

we’re all dictators, despots

shouldering to get in first.

Old men

with inflated superegos.

Besides, what the fuck does he know?

He’s only a lad.

Enlightened poets carve their

words in stone—

these just whimper,

blow away like leaves

in a storm.

He might as well

scratch them

in the sky.

Atomkraft 1967

Zhong Guo means the middle country;

the middle way, the path to liberation.

Coal thieves on scooters

dig from the middle of the earth,

separate the temporal from the permanent,

burn fires that melt iron ore

and draw curtains over the skies.

The old man wished for the atom bomb,

but Stalin wouldn’t give it to him.

In 1967, he got it.

He dredged fish from lifeless rivers,

fed souls with limp clothes

and hungry eyes.

As we were told, in our Village Cooperatives

and People’s Communes,

real miracles could happen.

In 1970, he launched satellites

straight into heaven,

to give us an eye

on the world.

I’ve been told you can’t split the atom

any way but down the middle.

Monkey Brains

We ate monkey brains in secrecy

just to see what they tasted like,

as if they might remind us of you;

and although the ancient custom

was to strap the chosen primate

in a made-for-measure cabinet

with only the shaved cranium exposed,

crush the skull-bone with a golden hammer,

while she screamed and whimpered,

begging for the beginning of time;

an experience, I’ve been told, like no other,

we preferred them fried in garlic and onions

separated from the body,

dipped them in rice wine vinegar.

You got sick after that, struggled

for ten days and nights,

dampening the sheets with your toxins.

I knew you’d live.

You wanted to die.

I remember the morning your fever broke

was the morning the H5N1 virus

flamed across the country,

everyone was wearing a blue mask

and we no longer feared the secret police.

At its most basic level, Mao’s Mole is a cinematic journey through China’s last hundred-or-so years, offering snapshots, incidental reflections and moments of flux across a broad spectrum of the Middle Kingdom’s citizens and their foreign guests. On wider levels, the book poses deep questions of society, identity and culture; Mao’s Mole concerns itself with the development of icons, figureheads and modern mythology in today’s China; with the making of modern nations; with our dented twenty-first century mythologies.

-- Marc Vincenz