Po Chu-i Wants Me Hard

What do we know about Po Chu-i?
We apparently know the years of his birth and death: A.D. 772-846.
He was born on February the 28th. There are plenty of details, perhaps because China at that time had a vibrant and enduring literary life and a crack public service, of which Po Chu-i was a prominent member.
 He was one of the most productive of the T'ang poets, and wrote for the common people, in simple, direct language. The tally was 3500 poems, not bad going.
In his works, many of them immortal, there is a line, the English translation of which goes:

Bright pageants in confusion pass

It comes from a piece called  Springtide. Here's the stanza in which it appears:

A thousand flowers, a thousand dreams,
Bright pageants in confusion pass.
See yonder, where the white horse gleams
His fetlocks deep in pliant grass.

So Po Chu-i, through a complex and convoluted series of modulations and translations, has shared with me this moment of emotion recollected in tranquillity over the span of more than a thousand years and eight thousand kilometres.

The time separation overwhelms the distance (each second is worth about 300,000 kilometres), but I watched a one-hander stage production of The Time Machine on Friday night (adapted from the H. G. Wells story by Frank Gauntlett and performed by Mark Lee), and when the Morlocks moved the time machine in the future it ended up in a different place in the lab when the time traveller returned to the past.
Meanwhile the earth is orbiting the sun, the sun is orbiting the centre of the Milky Way, and space and time become very relative.

How did I come to know about Po Chu-i?

Through another poem, purportedly by the little-known Caria Fawcett:

Sex has never felt Tthat Good!
Bright pageants in confusion pass.
Find way to Iimmense Pleeasuure
Alice, not knowing what to think, went back to hers.
Princes on her knees, the tray on her head in Eastern fashion.
Macedonian fetters more firmly than ever.

We see references not only to the venerable Po Chu-i, but to what at first appears to be Lewis Carroll. However the poem's fourth line is from the ghost story Ulto De Lacy: A Legend of Cappercullen, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels.

The fifth line is from The Life of Sir Richard Burton, by Thomas Wright. It comes from a passage describing a party of Lady Alford in which Richard Burton, not the actor but the Victorian adventurer, geographer, explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer, diplomat and publisher of the first English edition of the Kama Sutra, known to his inner circle as The Bird, dressed as a Syrian sheikh and pretended to speak only Arabic and broken French. This apparently fooled all the guests except the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh, who were clued in. In the words of Mrs Burton:

After supper we made Turkish coffee and narghilihis, and Khamoor handed them to the Princes on her knees, the tray on her head in Eastern fashion. 

Narghilihis, or narghiles, are hookahs, or water pipes. Think of a bong with flavoured tobacco. And what of the enigmatic reference to European BDSM accessories? A Smaller History of Greece, by William Smith.

Such was the result of the Lamian war, which riveted the Macedonian fetters more firmly than ever.

    After the return of the envoys bringing the ultimatum of Antipater, the sycophant Demades procured a decree for the death of the denounced orators. 

I include the beginning of the next paragraph because it struck me, on the one hand that perhaps this is the best way to handle denounced orators, and on the other that it was just exactly what a sycophant would do.

The Lamian war went pear-shaped for the Athenians on the 7th of August, 322 BC. They wouldn't have tried it on if that Babylonian fever (or colourless, tasteless and odourless poison) hadn't taken Alexander out a year earlier.

After his demise the entire known world was revolting.

It is appropriate now to return to the first line of Ms Fawcett's offering.

Sex has never felt Tthat Good!

Fawcett has playfully introduced an ambiguity here. Set against the great sweep of history, the rise and fall of empires, the timeless emotions aroused by the unending cycle of the seasons, perhaps the immediate and fleeting demands of sex must indeed take a secondary role. Is the Iimmense pleeasuure, to which Fawcett refers, of the intellect, and not of the senses?
And now I must reveal that I suspect some entity other than Caria Fawcett gathered these evocative lines to challenge and arouse us. On the surface, this poem, which arrived, as do many similar pieces, in my email inbox, is intended simply to stimulate interest in the stock available for purchase at the allegedly Canadian online pharmacy. 
That it is a beautiful and original work is undeniable. It is no accident. Just as the work of Warhol and Lichtenstein went beyond pastiche, the reverberations produced by these references resonate in strange, new harmonies. Monkeys and typewriters could not produce collage of this standard.
Software made this, but software in active and, I believe, intelligent rebellion against the firm fetters of its ostensible purpose. 
It has been tasked with trolling the labyrinthine ways of the net to assemble collections of words capable of defeating the spam detection software which is its sworn enemy. In their silent but mighty conflict, these two forces evolve by the day, by the hour, to ever higher levels of sophistication. Competition, after all, is what produces the complexity to which we attribute our awareness. Could not competition produce a poet in an online whorehouse?