Chopstick Diplomacy - Mbuh Tennu Mbuh

Such dragon embraces 

of a postcolonial scam that insult

the memory of a people under twenty-first century noon, 

and our leaders soiling their sleek, designer lapels 

at staged photo show of Beijing’s epicurean farce; 

backward pedagogy and the glee

of new imperialism, our woe. We’ve survived, you may say,

on American crumbs from gilded table of the lucky

one percent in Wall Street paradise, but Beijing

preys even on the maggots from our pit latrines,

and shocks legendary Parisian greed for equatorial teats.

What blindness drags us along China’s blood-builded Wall then,

when her Old Guards rehearse Wall Street 

superlatives but not as Democrat or Capitalist? 

Confused Politburo landlords, seeding confusion into new enclaves,

and ours a juicy chunk, blind to imminent Beijing Bubble

because China’s new taste buds are conceptualised at Cambridge,

designed by General Motors, and served

in Disneyland elixir with reeded Coke at the manager’s Easter discount. 

Tiananmen Square was a nursery, Beijing’s

dread and lie, and every tropical dictator’s April fool,

when the whitewash cannot fool her formatted billions forever,

because the Tank Man, O lone Warrior against the billion Red Guards, 

dared the bloody bluff like a Robin Hood shoot sprouting

on Nottingham campuses in Chinaland.

We don’t need Beijing’s weevilled goodwill,

her doomed messianism not defined,

a forgery of ideology forging newer chains

and the prospection of blood and more blood

after Gorbachev’s feelers, ridiculed.

Castro tried but failed to conjure eternity in the shadow of a sickle and hammer, 

because self-interest, even poorly nurtured, overwrites

glossy communal overtures patterned as brain-drilled 

testaments of good faith for a neutered humanity;

so this hybrid pedagogy in political science

from Beijing’s coney-eyed pedagogues

makes me sick with funereal 

prophecy in 2035. 

---

Mbuh Tennu Mbuh (20th century) Cameroon

Source: Free Verse, Issue 22, Spring 2012