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( war chant )

verse i.

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he is born to this world screaming in the wake of his sister; he is infant, blood slick on his skin, grasping and reaching nothing but air. somewhere, above him, his mother is weeping, and his father is running his hands over the width of her shoulders, and xinmei is swathed in the silence she was born with.
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here is the start of the tiger and the bird; circling each other, one above, one below, and just out of reach. too high to jump atop, too sly to dive upon. they are balancing act of carnage and conquest, with the same blood, but distant soul- split points of view.
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it was no surprise only one of them was screaming; no surprise that the other refused even to cry; their parents liked to call them equalizers- holding the same weight on separate shoulders, walking forward on two tightropes bound by the same string.
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zhihao, now, calls them madness- just with different methods.
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chorus i.

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off the hilt of a sword gleams the reflection of sunlight, hitting, in every spark, a new breath of life in a body broken beyond grief. in the folds of dawn, there is the crack of heat and flying embers, spinning, panicked, away from battle. zhihao is, in these quiet moments, human melody- his gaze hardened snakeskin, his grip brutal, his teeth bared; song of the predator, dancer to the hunt.
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he is tiger, and he is leaping, leaving his teacher’s blade finding absence in echo; his own has dug itself home in mentor’s padded neck before choir stopped singing- before his feet have kissed the ground.
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after, the man tells him he looks more like an artist than a warrior-
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the old man’s lips pressed taut. “an artist has meaning in every moment-
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the warrior knows it confined to a minute.”

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zhihao was nine years of age. he could not know, so young as he was, what the minute counted for.
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verse ii.

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he is surrounded by stillness; it makes his fingers weary. his mother stiffens to statue among lily ponds. his father’s eyes are marred by duty, and his robe stained in ink. xinmei is silent, and the air around her moves only with her breathing.
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to zhihao, his home is deafening.
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on these days he presses his own fist into his jaw, watching his tea grow cold, body emptying itself out over the floorboards stained in his blood.
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( but it is not his blood, not really; simply the remnants of his grief, dying among footfalls. )
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he flinches as his cup shatters along the wall. nobody moves. his home remains untouched.
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he is falling to the floor, and there is nothing to catch him, as he lays there in his rumbling fury, experiencing baptism in a bath of his own tears, and feeling no more holy than the light masking his eyes.
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all he can remember of this moment is how pretty the tea looked, drenched in the rich walls of the sick house with the silent family, pooling back into the floor- how it looked just like his blood, only older, and less real.
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the dyed water wets his fingers too; he wonders:
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lift.

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in a house of jade-
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there are three boys, brushing shoulders but not eyes, looking at fractured imprints of trapped women banging on fragile cages. zhihao swears everything will break against their skin, while one cousin tells him this is their haunting ground ( and not to flee ), and the other curses the gilded frames to rot.
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but zhihao knows his sister is fading; there is a spattered mess of her reflection marring her left cheek, up to the inner edge of her eye. xinmei is looking at him, and at a broken image of him, in the same moment he is watching her replace her own head.
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his second cousin, with a war ready on her tongue, and a shout in her eyes, is stuck between her brothers. he can see her face behind his own sister’s; he can see the heads switch.
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the frames are cracking ( every tree in this forest is breaking ), one mirror is shattered, his cousins are blind with glass shards for eyes and burnt leaves molded to their lips-
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but zhihao watches, a minute in which the only sound in the clearing is his own heartbeat, as xinmei disappears, and meifon changes place.
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chorus ii.

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to be born a wrecked child is to be born brutal; merciless and desperate, with crystals edging every finger into a knife-
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to be born a wrecked child is to be born endless. like the earth, hardening its skin to rock and soil, shifting around a core of fire.
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zhihao has two blades now, one for each damned hand, but the old man calls him erlang: a warrior of heaven, his every movement flowing into each other, every sword he’s ever held imbued with his own blood.
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but it is in the dark of midnight, away from any noble house, that his master looks out over his home’s window, into the truthful eye of the waxing moon, and thinks of the broken boy who has claimed war as his second name. he takes out a piece of parchment; grips his quill with shaking hands; he begins a letter he will never send.
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bridge.

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he is falling, from the very tightrope his mother hung for him ( them ), into a flood of white water; he feels it used to be a jungle, before it found the ocean tide and surrendered. the only life left in this place now is a tiger with dyed fur, its back to him, and its tail loose in the river.
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in every stripe he sees a king he never was ( or could be, but never fought a war for ), hurtling closer and closer to a dynasty succumbed to its own grave;
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all he smells now is smoke, is burning flesh, is dying witches, and the water is getting closer, and it looks more like a gaping mouth than a mother’s arms, and somewhere, a man is silenced-
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he wakes to wet skin and bleeding eyes. outside, there is pouring rain, colored in the fires cupped on candlesticks. zhihao is breathing and suffocating in the same breath; he rids himself of his bed, one hand pressing sorrow to his throat, and the other cupping flame.
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he walks to his balcony, edges the door open with his hip, and the water eats away the burn, and zhihao lets it give him color; lets it paint him white.
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chorus iii.

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he knows to find the wars he has hidden in every fold of muscle is just the same as searching for reverance in a blackened church. he has learned that so intimate is the perpetuation of hurt, or the aftermath of violence, that perhaps instead he is the chains which link them.
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he looks to the wall; he sees the browned splotches of a child who mispronounced every name he’d ever been given curving down to the floor.
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above the ruins, there are blades, beckoning for his hands. they beg for him, taking his eyes and distorting their color.
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zhihao understands now what he didn’t as a boy. that the world is back to disunity; to one minute at a time. one minute of everything at once. and anything before is nothing. everything after, nothing. nothing in comparison to that
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