tomorrows

they laugh.

what do you see? i see a man carrying one red brick. he’s looking for a place to put it down. he is confused. he had no idea his day would involve carrying a brick AND making a decision. 

he needs a woman to tell him what do. this is rare because men, in his culture, are the boss and tell women what to do. usually they tell them to lie down and get ready for the big thing. 

he is confused about loss. his wife wears the pants. she is the now. 

i see an exuberant extraordinary solid particle cow patty land-mine in the middle of sunday’s broken pot holed road. it’s a steaming green mountain. 

it smells like an art project. it will be discovered by a speeding SUV leaving a trace of aroma past sweeping weeping women. it will spread itself over the entire olfactory landscape.

it will create new tomorrows. 

the village barber had a customer. a white haired war veteran. he’d fought against Thailand, Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge. he didn’t talk about it. he survived and that was his conversation. his legacy. 

he sat in a solid steel chair staring at his reflection. he saw a thin serene brown face and wavy white hair. a long mole resembling an inverted Buddhist pagoda hung down from the left side of his chin. the mole saved him from the Khmer Rouge executioners. they were superstitious peasants and said he was the Devil, an evil spirit. they’d let him go.

a housewife in a rural village. her task is sweeping dust into piles of dust outside her bamboo shack. she has all day to complete this arduous task. repeat.

dust to dust. dawn to dusk. poetic ramifications in the theatre of the absurd. a housewife has a house. she is a wife. she has 10 children. having children is her DUTY. sex for her is nothing but a DUTY. she is a duty free outlet. her price tag has expired. everything must go.

many children gives her mother and extended family someone to love and play with and yell at. yelling at kids here is abNORMAL and healthy. it nurtures their self-esteem and neurotic adolescence with punctuation marks.

her husband is sleeping. he loves sleeping, eating and making babies, because he doesn’t have to carry them around for nine months and experience hormonal feelings. he sleeps forever dreaming of a hammock in a bamboo forest.

naked children play with trash. they set fire to the forest.

fire is their great fun and games besides Yelling and Whining.