how many lives has he lived already?

was he someone i knew in a previous existence? perhaps one of my servants cruelly misused? i look in his raw, crude face for a familiar landmark, a puckered white scar, the turn of the mouth, a strangers face.

a farmer and an ox make poor conversation. perhaps that is why we make such a successful team.

Our only similarity is that we both dream of an end to back breaking work. thank the buddha i was born an ox today, and not a man- oh to be free of boredom is a treasture, it is the great curse of men but not, I am glad to say, of the ox. It is the cause of all their self inflicted wounds and my liberation.

 . i watch him placidly, and shift slightly. Will you will be reborn a human again, plowing endless fields with your lineage of saintly oxen?

i close my eyes for a moment and thank the buddha without sarcasm for allowing me to be reborn an ox. though i cannot write, which was my one true love, i can still compose, and i do so under the yoke, with every heavy step i compose poetry in the furrowed lines of the field, in the billowing whiteness of the clouds, in the golden sparkling stream we cross each day, my hooves sinking deep into the mud.

i compose poetry in the lined face of the man that drives me, i embedd it in his cropped black hair. I string verses together in the hollow between one breath and another, where death, the executioner kneels with his headsmans axe and waits in comfortable silence for a moment to cut me into choice fillet.

All this beauty for the supposed crime of wiping my ass on a monks robe?

this is a simple existence that i follow, walking in the footsteps of the sun as it ploughs its own way across heaven, returning with the moon balanced between my shoulders.

I only pray that my lofty thoughts do not elevate me to the status of a man when i die, unless of course it be the sun of heaven himself, a position which will be most acceptable.