….long banished by the newest people of the peninsula. He was slowly inched into his final refuge in tiny cordoned off mountain asylums without any say in the new country’s day-to-day operations. His polyvalent homes, spotted throughout the façade of meaningful mountains live in a parallel universe that is only allowed a whisper, a peep, and a peak into ours, every now and again. Things, things upon things consciously constructed, unconsciously deconstructing. Where once silence sat supreme, there is now the unbroken sound of modern man’s noon-day panic. A pacing implacable existential ennui awaiting us in the space just past the day’s finish line and before the next’s beginning. We lay awake mapping out our careful tip toe through life unto death, averting every corner of modern uncertainties, as we descend deeper into the trick maze. Buddha’s gong still rings in from the Korean mountains, reminding the ears walking the perimeter of their accessory to this mindfully mindless crime, while the pedestrians on the interior have become too far gone, out of reach to hear this millennia old call.

Confucius’s fate even worse…having been relegated to a subterranean apartment beneath the grid and far away off any subway line, he’s the great grandfather with pee stains in his PJs. He’s the old man fading away and buried beneath megalithic new apartment complexes with shiny TRUMP signs on their mast.  He rides the subway but is ignored. Walks the streets buts is shoved out of the way. All but considered completely senile, he’s not taken at all that seriously anymore, really, yet is paraded about every so often on certain days as to feign some respect for something that’s perhaps never been quite understood.

It’s the technicolor Jesus that’s filling the suede spiritual seat of modern Korea. The Jesus that facilitates business networkings, plastic enterprises of all sorts, and dreams of redemption from  holy folly around exciting, semented, elbowy corners under the keeeeeeeen little neons of back alley-way warmgasms. His concrete & glass palaces right off the transit lines, spreading like an urban herpes, sprouting between gas stations and faster food. The golf loving  messiah and bearer of the 401k…better get in line…the job forecast looks like a scorcher for eternity.