Yang Chu's Poems # 148

Yang Chu’s Poems 148

Living in a stump land, longing for the voices
Of forests and its symbols, its twigs that talk
A silent, tactile language of truth, not the lies
Spoken in the language of popular opinion,
The language that is the people’s opium,
Living in this land when and where
The advice of the older is venom,
The advice of the young conjures violence,
The advice of the middle aged is “I-They” slavery,
Living in this location, I seek another language,
A language of non-dual perception, a language
That fuses the binary opposites into a new force,
A language that abolishes the separation
Of subject and object,
of the ordinary and the mystic.


Duane Locke

Posted over on Numinous Magazine

In “The Poems of Yang Chu,” Locke writes through the character of ancient Taoist philosopher Yang Chu. In his introduction, Locke speaks of the historical vs. the poetic Yang Chu -- a distinction which makes this volume of over 300 poems even more astounding.

Now, my persona Yang Chu in my book “The Poems of Yang Chu” in real life was a Taoist, but he was called a renegade Taoist. He lived about 300BC, but in my book, I write his poems, which are actually my poems, as if he were alive today. During his life, I don’t think the real Yang Chu ever wrote any poems. We only have fragments of his philosophy, and what attracted me to use a fictional Yang Chu as a vehicle of my expression was the real Yang Chu’s philosophy that expressed the body had never been properly understood, the body and the soul were not separate, the soul was a function of the misunderstood body, and the soul was not a distinct entity or essence that could be separated from the body. The soul is the neural functioning of the body, and of course, the neural functioning of the body has never understood.