Young man kowtows to a rigid cane stained crimson,
dates and instructions seared into his wrists, devoted
to the brand of Confucius, Mencius, Lao-tzu,
reciting their strictures through gritted teeth.

Young man waits for the moonlight to spill through
the windowed lattices of the structure, for milky ribbons
to mend the cuts of his labor. Silently, he listens
to the crashing tides of construction work outside.

Young man lets his tools collect dust in his office,
miscellaneous debris strewn over unfinished drafts,
centuries of letters, towers of parchment, preaching
the dogma of his family before him.

Young man climbs into the old man’s ancestral bed,
bathed in familiar moonlight. The foreman is gone,
another sun has set, and the pale light coats the catharsis
of his sleep.

Young man floats in the blackness of his dreams,
caustic and crisp, searing his body,
flooding his lungs. He wields a pickaxe in his large, calloused
hands, pretending he’s raising a structure from the rubble.

Young man’s shoulders are tired, he seeks relief,
he wants to bring the pickaxe crashing down
onto the foundations of the structure, seeing its ancient columns crumble.
But the old man forbids it, and the young man listens, as he always has.

Young man sighs, knowing
his hands do not belong to him and that his motions are mechanical,
winding down to the start of a new shift, like a perpetual calendar.
Still, he has hours before daybreak, almost alone in his sanctuary.

Young man dances, relishing the theatre of his mind,
leaping between steel beams, exposed, rough stone scraping
against his arms. He is young, strong, resistant to decay, but less so
than the structure, and when he tastes the night air, he tastes only concrete.