I work at Angkor Wat. I've been here 1,000 years.
poetry holds things that ordinary language cannot ...
history ... social change ... wisdom & insight ...
awareness we are human beings ... roots of poetry are oral ...
diversity of experience goes into making one solid whole ...
poetry speaks to universal need ...
reminds people to the diversity of experience that makes life so rich ...
How about your town, asked Leo.
Red dust roads in Banlung are paved with blue Zircon, Amethyst, and Black Opals (nill) reflecting Ratanakiri, or Gem Mountain. City women of means wear blue Zircon, gold necklaces, rings, bracelets, sparkle bling. Rural women do not wear this wealth. Married women wear strings of red beads. They fashion yellow, red, blue, green, glittering plastic bangles on wrists.
Here it’s about food and honoring Earth spirits. Animists believe taking stones harms the spirits, creating an imbalance in the natural order of things.
Thanks for the education, said Leo. I’m going to have a look-see.
See you later, said Ice Girl, returning to crystals.
Red dust town turned windy. Swirling quality gem stone particles and degrees of indifference spiraled through air. Redwood slats covered open sewer drains.
Locals watched Leo with curiosity and suspicion. They stared from a deep vacuum. When he made eye contact they glanced away with fear, uncertainty and doubt. They didn’t see many strangers here. They listened at 49% saying yeah, yeah with panache. Leo discovered his questions were constantly repeated.
Questions grew tired of repeating themselves. This is so fucking boring, said one question. We are abused. We are manipulated and rendered mute. Useless. Think of it as a test, said another question. Patience is our great teacher. I’ll try, said another question.
Yes, said a question, these non-listeners have a distinct tendency to say nothing and say it louder when they’re leaving, when their back’s turned away from eye contact and potential real communication. Echoes drift around silence and ignorance.
I’ve seen that too, said a question, who, until this moment was silent. My theory is that it’s because of the genocide and fear and ignorance. It’s also a delicate mixture of stupidity or indifference, said another question. Why is the most dangerous question, said one.
Can you explain, asked a question. Sure, people ran away to survive. People started running and others would ask them a question like why are you running, who’s chasing you, where are you going or what’s the matter or when did you become afraid or why are you afraid, or why don’t you stay longer ...
and the one running would keep going trailing abstract question words behind them like memories of dead or missing families or disembodied spirits or hungry ghosts or molecules of indifferent breath. I see, said a question. That explains it. Yes, said a question. Being correct is never the point. I never take yes for an answer.
Ice Girl in Banlung
Gonzo journalism. Creative nonfiction. Jazz prose poetry.
Systems analysis. Social autopsy. Storytelling.
Five kid friends learn, share, explore and grow in China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Turkey and Vietnam.
Everything you need to know is in this book.
This volume contains material suitable for +18.
Having no destination I am never lost. - Ikkyu (1394-1481)
I just want to celebrate
Another day of living
Vocabulary of touch
Pleasure principle sensuous femme fatale guide
Mutual satisfaction
Release tender tension
You stash your bags in a simple bamboo room
cut through a distorted distracted disrupted deserted
zone of empty rattan chairs to the beach
It stretches from Sin City to expensive southern resorts
M/F teams rake mourning sand
Grains complement musical melodic waves
breaking the shore day after day
Enjoy a slow walking meditation on a long empty beach
Breathe in - out
Water music laps ankles
Yellow dawn streaks sky
You salute the sun
Celebrate another day of living
Three green islands float long ago and far away on an event horizon
Bright red, blue and yellow tourist boats plant anchors
Engines hum fuel songs
Day unfolds. A lotus grows from mud.
Angkor Wat
Two pale female French tourist conspirators plotted their narrative near the Khmer gardener.
Colonizing this hell hole we gave them baguettes, war, illusions of freedom, top heavy dull administrative procrastination tools, fake NGO bureaucracies, wide boulevards, legal beagle systems, an eye for an eye, corruption potential, designs of egalitarian ideals, morals, ethics, principles, values, faded yellow paint and French architecture.
Yes, said her friend, this IS the old brave new world and I am lazy and passive and my stomach comes first. I am starving. Let’s eat our sorrow and be grateful we don’t live in this depressing country filled with compassionate Buddhist people. I’ll never understand their intention to do nothing with mindfulness.
It’s the hardest thing a person can do.
She was a super thin model of anorexia boned with stellar constellations. Her grim hawk faced rotund lesbian lover had flabby upper arms. She scribbled serious fiction-memory and sense data entitlement in an unlined black notebook with one hand while massaging her forehead to increase creative blood flow.
They examined a microscopic map of Angkor Wat filled with unconscious alliterative jungles, gold lame Apsara dancers, 232 species of black and red butterflies, 1.5 million anxious tourists in a big fat fucking hurry, Chinese, Japanese and Korean robot tour groups, crying elephants, super tour buses, 125cc motorcycles, tuk-tuks, begging children speaking ten European languages hawking gimcracks and whining predatory adults with an 8th grade education accompanied by miles of flaming plastic garbage, narrow boned white oxen pulling carts, 18 million attention deficit disordered citizens addicted to simple minded FACELOST entertainment diversionary cell phone adolescent sex text nonsense and 1,001 laterite cosmic Hindu temples stretching across Burma and Thailand into Laos and Vietnam in a circular boomerang dance evolving from the stillness, letting go of outcomes as the French ladies whispered, Where have we been, Where did we go, What did we see, Where are we, How do we feel, Did we discover the intuitive third eye of enlightenment or any wisdom in this totality of mystery, devotion, and sublime splendor?
They’re trapped in SEA. One described fragments of her short life history with an animist talking stick.
The other cut out brochure glossies, ticket stubs and bleeding hearts to paste in her book. A future visual memory of her ear and snow.
Her attention span was shorter than a tour at the Genocide Museum filled with 2,000,000 smiling skulls.
Here we are.
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