Mao of Love by Azly Rahman

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