Falling into Archetype Icarus went to wax his wings too close to fire we travel just as high and hard our godless limbs singed bellies like untouched pudding but we grow round on airport food pear-shaped buccaneers reclining in Business Class, the sun a compass to keep time zone watches in check and the dateline in the right quadrant moon a fairy tale tied to magnetic north a lover’s period and Siren tales for we are on a mission sure and clear Shanghai-bound, suitcases filled with instruction, binary confidence, green backs smuggled through gold-toothed customs that know the international high flying drill, passports at the ready, palm grease thick enough to launch ships again into the South China Sea scene of the old mischief Vietnam, B-52s from Guam dropping 2000-pound bombs at 30,000 feet, invisible, inaudible until at ear level they eliminate hearing but no matter because the game now is Cash Dale Carnegie and spirited self-improvement American piety on display how-to shenanigans putting one foot before the other, glazing at stiff right angles to the sun promising warmth, radiance green grass disposition assured by high flyers in blue suits from Proctor & Gamble who imagine 3 billion Chinese armpits, more bad teeth than you can shake a stick at enough bloodless medicine to drive a million unborn daughters into the sea, dogs on the loose for a hungry nation, Japanese whale meat chasing scrawny Beijing dogs destined for Chongqing pots destined to be soon underwater from the next Great Flood harnessed for power, Prometheus unbound sheer as the dust storms blowing across Mongolian plateaus,Titans large and small everywhere banging on tin pots, hammering armor into place, seeding the web like a rain cloud one step ahead of the gun and tax collector, goose-stepping to Western music promising a piece of the action a bite of the proverbial arc, a cut of the prize a grammar and meaning inverted an untowering Babel-like soup of words with free enterprise rising to the top of this brew scrapped off by the holy few in Beijing as they did in Moscow during glasnost and peristroika which we in Business Class fanned and funded this new Russian railroad which we do not ride but as Thoreau said rides upon us as we romp across Asia belly fed on salted fish and desire littering the thoroughfares with Coke, Big Macs, and rap music projected on electronic billboards from Shanghai to Katmandu to Seoul smartly covering cultural fault lines we capture and send home in postcards, snow-capped Mount Fuji for the mantle or underground pictures of the bog dead in Xinjiang Province fanning the Aryan fantasy that Genghis Khan was really one of them , one of us on our heavy-laden, burn-free Icarus ride that promises to wrap anima mundi in American brute hope, a Christian God, and a chest-thumping archetypal shield.
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