:: Ode ::

You are not here, not here at all.
These are the dark men, the fallen men,
The common men:
the distant dead, who once walked,
Like you.

The 7th Month of the Chinese Lunar calander. The time of year where the wake of the moon wakes the dead. The time of year where black ash flies, and red candles flame and flare to the clang of rites. The time of year where education is lost, momentarily, to tradition, and where logic cannot rival spiritual reasoning. The time of year where the dead are resurrected by superstitions, and the living calls on the collective colony of deaths: dear deaths, distant deaths and deaths that are nameless, but understood.

But then, there's your name,
Three characters in script, in death:
Love may survive mortality,
But mortality ends in theft.
So we burn for you paper money,
Because we burn brighter still with loss.
Do you hear us calling? Do you hear us mourn?

Symbols. Universal characters without a curtain call: they play their roles in life as they would in death. Money. Bamboo paper, brushed with a vague slap of golden or silver paint in the middle, folded into shapes of old Chinese ingots. Bank notes, a vulgar replica of our normal currency, bearing the face of the King of Hell, colourful with meaning and value.

Riches. Houses, cars, clothes, credit cards―fashioned after what we know, so that even in the unknown dark of the after-life, we wouldn't need to suffer the poverty of want.

Love. My grandmother's face, illuminated by the ghastly glow of light as we watched the hungry flames rip through the bamboo papers, was soaked with sweet sadness. No more black coffees. No more bickering. No more of him, yet no less of him. 'Buy all the cigarettes and smoke all you want now, with this money,' she muttered. That was their brand of romance. Undeniably practical, yet inexplicably romantic. I felt tears, hot with the memory of him, of you, and you, of Les. All of the dead, my dead.

Your firm, final decay.
No more trumpets to wake you,
No more cancers to break you.
I remember your waxen face,
And how I cried to your sleeping fingers,
No longer allowed to smoke,
No longer lively with jokes.
And you, my other you:
your prematured death, my evil―
―cannot deliver―
I bought you sweets for your crib
Milk, too, but I forgot the bib:
Sorry, baby, your karmic song
Is my failure, is my wrong.

I bruised my knees kneeling. The chants hurt my ears, an invasion of alien spiritualism, gorging out my insides. Outside the temple, where the 7th Month rites for my grandfather were held, a sallow wind was blowing. There was music in the tuneless rhyme of the chants, and the Buddhist bell punctures to the crying of my―soul. No sun. The day fell like laggard spells, chalky and cold, and old with our sour cycles: life, death, moral, sinful, material, unembodied. Perhaps there is space yet for a spiritual epiphany. But for now, I absorbed the ashes of our traditions along with the ashes of time-burnt loves, and if I'm allowed one single prayer to an omni-god, please: let me be an instrument to those I love, and be useful. I've had my causes. Now, let me seek out the effects.

Be at peace, my loves.