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Nothing is real. If ever it was.
Were truth ever sacred, if solid rock isn't itself just another lie.
Weren't you going to tell me to believe my hundred sleepy eyes?

Write I, from far away, where the ice can't freeze my heart.
No nearer the field I sought, stomach growling with a different want,
my truth and I too far apart: I walk across this patchy lawn
where cranes once danced by the big moat,

and stare at the abandoned well inside this Castle Ruin.
Plum blossoms thrum like a swarm like ash flies.
My Midian, a sad facsimile thereof. It's unseasonably warm.
I lay my body down in the dry February grass; but my soul won't comply.

Who made me ruler and judge over them?

I've climbed the nearby mountains,
looking for cindering bushes, and found only cairns
marking the trails.

An eighty-nine year old woman had climbed down from the peak, maybe her last time.
She smiled warmly and blessed me like I deserved it.
In her eyes I saw a brazen serpent. I couldn't look straight at her, and
moved to the penumbra, cast by a Jizo statue, of her summit.

The sun emerges from behind the clouds, almost as bright as that (her face), and
my eyes water. I get up, tottering over the crumbling old walls built long ago, and
leave the castle ruin, this grave marker of what we once built on solid ground.