Friday 5 May 2017

5 Poems by Allen Qing Yuan

Ventis: Wielder of the Philosopher’s Stone

Under the star-lit night sky
The boy picks up a petty pebble
Aims at a tree
And tosses it
The petty pebble weakly lands onto the dirt

The boy picks up a great rock
Aims at the menacing moon
And chucks it
The great rock heavily crashes over the tree

The bold white circle shoots a spotlight onto the boy
A young aspiring alchemist in the vast land of Aeria
Ventis gathers his belongings and turns back
To his hometown, where there is terrorizing fire

A civilization engulfed in its own creation
Only Ventis can save the day
With his created rock, a rock of creation

Running past the crowd
Ventis breaks onto the scene
With a clench of the Philosopher’s stone
The fire is dissipated and transformed into smoke

But from within the smoke,
A homunculus appears,
A creation not divine
A creation feared by God

But rocks have always been Ventis’ obsession
In his right hand he clenches a hard round rock
In the other he holds a smooth & slippery pebble

With magic the stones bend into weapons
Ventis fights and fights
And the homunculus falls and falls
Only to never rise again

He then reconstructs the fallen buildings
Making them bigger and better than before

After a rejuvenating night’s sleep
Ventis awakens to another fine day

Venturing back out to his usual spot by the river,
Ventis reaches into his plush pockets
For the special rock
For which is not there

No matter: he will create it again
Just like how he created homes,
How he created dreams,
How he created his name

The wind picks up the words and carries them away

Under the sun-lit blue sky
The boy throws the pebble
The boy chucks the rock

The common one falls into the strong tide
While the right one makes it to the other side



Introduction to Quantum Superposition

Certainly you cannot be in different places
At once, nor can you have different true
Selves in the same place, but the Monkey King
Can do both on his journey to the west (supposedly
In quest for the authentic Buddhist scriptures): simply
By pulling a thread of hair from behind his ear
Chewing it, and then blowing the broken
Pieces out, they will become as many

Monkey kings. Got the idea? Few of us understand
Quantum superposition, nor do we all
Really need to, but aren’t we all evolved
From monkeys? So we can chew our inner beings
And attain many identical versions of our selves:

As a quantum state, it can be represented
As a sum of multiple other distinct states; otherwise

Just choose another self on the stem cell of your mind
And you will see what you can never imagine seeing


Swinging

Push. Up there you saw
The horizon above your childhood
As wide as your vision

Pull. You faced backwards
Close to the playground with
Footprints messy on the sand

Push again. Higher up you hope
To fly like a kite with a
String held in a human hand

Pull again. Your mind became
Confused as if everything could
Be withdrawn beneath your body


 La Lutte Finale Or Last Trial

All rise [les damnés de la terre?]
Oyez, Oyez, Oyez

With neither jury nor audience
Who is to win man’s case

Nature or God? [ L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain!]


No Medusa

Ignoring a name call during the return is like
Ignoring a flirtation from Fox Spirit in Pu Songling’s tales is like
Ignoring the chase of a Frankenstein is like
Ignoring the whim of a Faust is like
Ignoring the challenge of a Pushkin for a duel is like
Ignoring the declaration from a George Bush is like
Ignoring the request from a Revenue Canada is like
Ignoring the invitation from a University of Saskatchewan is like
Ignoring the rejection from a New Yorker is like
Ignoring the ignorance by a Helen is like
Ignoring the notice from a Vancouver Library is like
Ignoring the judgement from a being above


Bionote

Allen Qing Yuan (born in Vancouver in 1995), author of Traffic Light, is a 2-time Pushcart nominee and one-time Best of the Net nominee. A former co-editor of Poetry Pacific, Allen is currently working as an intern for CRA. Since grade 10, Allen has had poetry appear in more than 70 literary publications across 16 countries, which include Cordite Poetry Review, Literary Review of Canada, Poetry Scotland, Shampoo and Spillway.
Allen is also the co-founder of a popular clothing brand Above the Movement. For more information, please visit his websites:: www.facebook.com/Above.The.Movement ;  www.abovethemovement.com ; Twitter: @ATMovement

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