Mahling

Rural Burma.

Blindfish heads whisper The Sea, The Sea. Silver scales reflect light.

A woman hacks chickens. Blood streams down circular wooden tree rings.
The gravity of thinking sits on a suspended handheld iron pan scale.

A white feather sits in the other pan.
Balance.

Twenty-six varieties of rice mountains peak in round metal containers or scarred wooden boxes.

Horse drawn cart traps unload people and produce. Neck bells tinkle: Star light star bright first star I see tonight, I wish I may I wish I might get the wish I wish tonight. Well. Fed horses paw dirt.

Ancient diesel tractor engines attached to a steel carcass hauling people and produce bellow black smoke.

Old wooden shuttered shops with deep dark interiors display consumables, soap, thread waiting for a conversation, stoic curious dark-eyed women, others laughing at the benign crazy traveler. 

A ghost-self sits in meditative silence, absorbing rainbow sights, sounds, colors, smells, feeling a calm abiding joy.

Wander and wonder.

Two new teachers arrived for three weeks. One tall relaxed American male has serious eyes. His Irish female’s unhappiness confronting the hardship assignment masked emotional distress and deep bitterness.

She lived at the girl's dorm fifteen minutes away by dusty footprints. I feel isolated, she lamented.
Cry me a river, said human nature.

Hardship and deprivation develops character, said an Asian child.
Don’t give me that crap, she said. I have twenty years of teaching experience and this is hell.

Hell is other people, said Sartre.

Be a good Catholic girl and make a confession, said Personal Problem.
It’s life lesson #5, said a child.

Yeah, yeah, said the whining adult eating her frustration and anger garnished with succulent tomatoes.

The world is a village. 

Simplicity

Tattoo decision - Maori tribal arm sleeve
Clear simple clean
Four sessions - 22 hours - 500 bones

Memorize orange sun caressing clouds with brilliant intensifying radiance
Solitary signal before full moon zoomed celestial heartbreak

Soma in the classroom
Daily dosage for students

Writing:

simplicity
brevity
clarity
accuracy
humanity

Floating boats
Flowing waves
Laughing children

Snaking roots
Disappearing shadows

Blue horizon
Radiant clear free pure
Luminous

Grow Your Soul

Prose & Poems from Laos & Cambodia

Two Hearts

After detox and affirmations in Tacoma I accepted a new tennis teaching job at a Richland athletic club in the high eastern desert.

I lived between the Hanford Nuclear Reservation leaking toxic waste and a military high-grade uranium destruction site.

Sweet earth. Delicious water.

Glowing in the dark improved my writing visibility at night.

Clean and sober I wrote a small children’s book about trust and love.

Two Hearts On A Grand Precious Adventure has The Prince of Yogurt and the Princess of Chocolate on a quest for the beginning of the ocean. I self published it as an e-book.

I turned my attention to big work. I sifted through worn travel journals, old letters, faded yellow evidence papers, typed manuscripts, stories, fragments, poems, and photographs gathered from wandering Earth.

For two years I wove threads into a non-linear draft of epic adventures entitled A Century is Nothing.

I murdered my darlings and rearranged sentences in the farrago. They were stories about people telling stories about people in stories experiencing courage, transformation and impermanence.

I researched markets. I mailed out the synopsis with query letters. Fifty rejection letters from literary agents sang a refrain. “Sorry, doesn’t meet current mainstream needs. Too edgy. Needs more heavy, deep, real, personal Vietnam insight and growth. Fewer characters. Bottom line: I can’t make my 15% selling this.” Wallpaper. So it goes.

*

One morning I went to the Richland P.O. for stamps.

Taken from the Hubble Space Telescope they were named Eagle Nebula, Ring Nebula, Lagoon Nebula and Galaxy NGC 1316.

I enjoyed a stimulating discourse with a young unarmed postal woman about the amazing galaxies and how incredible it was to contemplate them living five miles away from fifty-five million gallons of buried radioactive waste left over from W.W. II seeping 130 feet down toward water tables along the Columbia River.

“Fascinating,” she said.

Editing material for my book I read a faded yellow page marked Top Secret Evidence.

“It’s called Technetium, TC-99m,” said an Indian scientist on a shuttle between reactors. “This is the new death and we know it’s there and there is nothing we can do to prevent it spreading.”

The waste approached 250 feet as corporations vying for energy contracts with D.O.E. discussed containment options and emergency evacuation procedures.

Scientists read Robert’s Rules Of Order inside the organized chaos of their well order communities. Hanford scientists, wives and children suffering terminal thyroid disease ate roots and plants sprinkled with entropy.

As the postal worker and I talked, a frantic mother yelled at her daughter, “DON’T touch the stamps!” because at her precocious age, curiosity about the expanding universe developed her active imagination.

Holding a Nebula space dust galaxy in my hand I told the postal woman how we are a third the life of a 13.7 billion year-old universe. She handed me change and said, “That’s interesting. I never looked at the stamps before.”

“What happens next?” said Plot.

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Ethnology Museum, Hanoi

Hanoi Memory

A shattered mirror reflected Pho’s fragmented identity.

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with stranded rusty brown bard wire encircling his social network domain avatar easing over shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter.

Chinese introduced barbwire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. 

Vietnam massacred them back to Manchuria.

The French introduced excellent wines and installed intricate glass mosaics in Dalat garden walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them as fragments of glittering glass composed minuscule myopic minimal musical microcosms and colonial ideology.  

At Dien Bien Phu in 1954 Vietnam slaughtered the Frogs back to De’ Arc of Triumph.

They kept the language and baguettes. Yellow colonial buildings aged along Rue This and Rue the Day. 

Then the Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction, death, suffering and chaos unleashed their blind idiotic military-industrial ambition on peasants gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels below the surface of appearances.

Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family through dynasties encroaching on walls and shrines inside meditative brown temples celebrated silent stories.

During the day they worked paddies before evolving underground when nightingales brought carpet-bombing and napalm.

Agent Orange extended misery for generations. 

“Horror has a face and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.”

- Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

“Quick into the tunnels. Run.”

Sitting, crying and praying they heard the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel canisters thudded tremors shredding forests, jungles, paddies and lives. Bamboo homes danced in flames. Heat soared over tunnels bathing them in sweat.

They traveled deeper following interior earth trails until their unconscious became conscious. Earth swallowed breath. Their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.

Sweet silence comforted the crying and wounded after foreign devils fled in terror, guilt, shame and loss.

Survivors streamed down mountains, emerged from caves and tunnels, poling rivers, walking on water, drinking oceans in creation myths, forcing devils into the sea. Blue green seas ran red.

Vietnam forced Americans back to Guam in 1975.

Voices in Hanoi flowed between crumbling sand and haphazard red bricks. Cement walls blocked wailing anger. Frustration's repressed bitterness adapted survival instincts in the reality of life’s twisted fateful truth.

Their memory was fiction.

Fiction created their memory. 

Weaving A Life (V1)

Tranquility

Sandman flow waves
Flat line horizon
Tattoo queries with That Song in Sin City

Dancing orange sunset light
Collapsing blue waving rhythm
Flow

New water sparkles light waves/particles
Sparrow wing free flight wing seashell

Gauguin’s primitive visions - imagination

A shudder passed through his body tingling every nerve cell.
It was predicted by a long deep slow meditative breath

this inhalation staring at blue green gray waves

emanating from a flat purple horizon line.

Every afternoon is the same after four winds dance waves

Glitter, details, flow, tranquility, Wushu focus

Wind dances waves. Turbulent music.

Chinese visitors hide under umbrellas

gripping wrists walk the shore staring blindly at white Europeans on sun beds sucking beverages.

Dazed and confused by everything

shrouded women wear gaily painted floppy hats, sunglasses,

face masks devour their faces, shawls, long sleeved gloves and blind terror.

Self easy foam at the mouth.

The sea waved. Two white jet skis danced twirled and exploded over waves as wind pushed water.

A Khmer woman balances a large bamboo platter on head.

Light reflects bananas, mangoes yellow pineapples.

A man with a tray of sunglasses walks past with visual acuity.

In cheap mass-produced red and white soft-soled squash shoes

Tourists abandon exposure to ultra violet radioactive light

running into hard fast shade. Safe at last.

“Protect my fair skin,” they sang saving face,

a fear greater than death. Shrill echoes.

Grow Your Soul - Prose & Poems from Laos & Cambodia