Pinnochio

Pinnochio.

Wake up, Wake up,
For your brain is the soundless murmurings
of a million atoms
and death is only as far away
as sleep
as wakefulness
For you were never truly alive.

Wake up, Wake up,
For You and I are but mindless machines
replicating after heated mixture.

Wake up, wake up,
For even the Greeks decked their halls
with vulgar colour
and those that we worship
are but the crushed remnants
of their bare
bleached
bones

Wake up, Wake up,
For you are the millionth mongrel son
of Adam
and Eve
and that apple in your throat
spits the truth
every time
when it says you were never truly free

Wake up, Wake up
for the world
is a million vibrant colours
waiting to run you through with ecstasy

Wake up, wake up
and you will discover
that once you were alive
and now
you are dead.

By : Zeng Tianchen



This is the best poem I remember reading for a long time, for the intriguing and vivid imagery that the persona uses to describe mankind.

'Pinnochio' has all the characteristics of a modern-contemporary poem, from the dissonant, non-rhyming lines to the free verse stanzas and the brutal tone of illusion versus reality. It plays on the theme of human fraility and the farce of our existence, and although an extremely overdone topic, it is the original imagery and metaphors that I really love.

The title has an intriguing double meaning - Pinnochio being a puppet granted life at a fairy's whim, a parrellel is drawn between Pinnochio's false consciousness and our temporary existence subject to uncontrollable elements such as death or fate. Too, Pinnochio is a puppet who lied from birth, which implies that mankind deludes himself from the very beginning. With each stanza, the persona beseeches humanity to 'wake up', to open their eyes and look through the illusion of their lives. This strong emphasis on the idea of the 'matrix' embodies the cliched, yet ever brought up question : what is the purpose of our existence?

The imagery that really impacts me is the demeaning of the human race, the reality of basalness beneath the facade of a 'sentient being.'

The human brain, the source of our soul, emotion and memories, is reduced to a 'murmuring' mess of tiny 'atoms', and death is not so far removed as we think; infact, helpless as we are, death is as near as 'sleep' - expected, needed, part and parcel of life.

The process of sexual intercourse, intended for procreation and reserved for humanity as an act of pleasure, in fact reduces us to being 'mindless (and) heated'; wanton and instinct-driven, like animals.

"We worship (the) crushed remnants (of) bone" - To me, this phrase describes the our habit of deifying historic events and figureheads - Confucius the scholar, Julius Caesar the greatest emperor of the greatest empire, the Greek Gods on mythology, and so on. We remember these people because of their accomplishments and their legacies, because they are as marks and milestones in the progression of the human race toward 'social and cultural development' (as it were). Ironically, history is often altered over the course of time such that the winners re-create events as they wish. People's acts and characteristics are tweaked to suit a human ideal of a 'hero', a noble 'act of self-sacrifice'. Unable as we are to really acertain the truth for ourselves, all we can worship are their 'bones' - dead, dry, nowhere near a testimonial to the actual living body it once was.

Here's my favourite line : "...you are the millionth mongrel son of Adam and Eve..." - a distinctive jolt from the all claims that humans are a race above animals, the only species truly and feeling. I love the word 'mongrel' - It's especially so especially degrading and blasphemous in the context of religion or culture - it conveys the mixing of blood, 'pollution' of the human 'pedigree bloodline' through (perhaps?) inter-racial / homosexual relationships - and if you think about it, 7 billion descendants of Adam and Eve are all related and breeding with their own relatives. And thus the inbreeding continues and even as we erect greater and greater stages of 'accomplishment' to fool ourselves into 'progress,' so does the inexorable decline of mankind go on.

And, the 'fruit of truth' from the Bible, taking the shape of the 'apple' in the poem, shows us the reality that even Adam and Eve, the first ancestors of men, had neither the complete joy nor freedom associated with life - they were constrained by rules, and thrown out of Paradise for disobedience.

Finally, the colours in our life that incite us to ecstacy represents the vibrance of the world around us, and more importantly the myriad of emotions and memories that we experience. I find it interesting that the phrase 'run you through' is used as it signifies death. On deeper thought, what is life but colours, experiences and thought parading through our minds, fading yet renewed every second, and what is death but the end of these sensory images? The 'ecstacy' of life is not only delight but also angst, fear, sorrow, triumph and defeat, the heightened awareness of ourselves that only humans experience - and without which we are no more than mindless machines.

I would love to go deeper into the structure and effect of free verse, but as that's not my forte, I shall leave at at this.

Awesome job, Tianchen!