The Mercury He Drank to Live Forever (Qin Shi Huang)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You unified the script,
the currency,
the width of the axle,
the length of the road —
you standardized everything
a country could standardize
except the one thing
you actually wanted standardized:
the length of a life
You burned the books
because the books remembered
a time before you
and a man
who is building forever
cannot afford a past
that contains alternatives

[Verse 2]
You drank mercury —
cinnabar pills
prescribed by the alchemists
who promised the elixir
and the pills tasted
like quicksilver
and the slow particular sweetness
of a promise
the periodic table
had not agreed to keep
The immortality
entered your bloodstream
and did what immortality
always does
when it arrives as a metal:
it killed the body
it was hired to preserve

[Chorus]
Eight thousand soldiers
made of fired clay
standing in formation
in the dark
since 210 BC —
each face different,
each uniform correct,
each weapon real bronze
and the silence
has the specific weight
of men who were made to stand
and never told
when to stop standing
You built them an army
because the afterlife
you were entering
required the same bureaucracy
as the empire you were leaving
and the bureaucracy of death
is the one institution
you could not standardize
or burn

[Outro]
The tomb itself
has never been opened —
the central chamber
where the body lies
with its mercury rivers
and its crossbow traps
and its ceiling
painted with constellations
has been sealed
for twenty-two centuries
and the archaeologists
know it is there
and have not gone in
which means
the most powerful man
in the history of China
is still waiting
in the largest drawer
anyone has ever built
and the drawer
is the only thing he made
that worked exactly as intended:
nothing gets in
and nothing gets out
and the waiting
is the closest thing to forever
the mercury
was supposed to provide