Martha's Zen Card

I am a short story.

You are a novel.

It never occurred to Matt to buy indigenous cultural music while traveling.

Martha his girl friend considered it essential.

Music made her edgy and alive.

When she heard music she danced.

She returned to her primitive self.

She danced naked.

Ballet. Flamingo. Tango. Cha-cha. Lambada. Waltz.

He wrote naked verbs. They loved naked. Naked cherished syllable skin music.

They wrote, danced and lived like they were dead.

One day they would be. It's now or never.

They were free. It's the way to be.

Culture is what you are. Culture means you can forget.

Nature is what you can be.

People are nature's tools.

Passing through Body Sat Quiet in Asia on a three week, “Look, don't think” holiday from frozen Europe they happened into an 8th century tourist town music repository.

They smelled music before they saw it. Seeing music is an art form. Synesthesia.

In music like life, the end of the composition is not the point.

A music boy handed Matt an orange book. Write your melodic request here. Matt opened the book. A vignette floated free.

A Cambodian orphan girl popped out of blank pages: I am sorry. Goodbye and good luck to you and your family. These are our famous words. Big vocabulary. Tongues speak. Small life. Big chance. Yeah. Yeah.

Hunger Angel watched 24/7 in the big leagues.

Sanitation workers in green environmental vests with broom music swept streets for the New Year. Make it new. Make it new.

We should be so lucky to have crystal clean sheets.

Every day is anew year.

One day is like a minute.

One minute is like a day.

That's relativity. All my relatives are dead.

Never trust an atom. They make up everything.

When you know what you don't know you realize moral character with social intelligence, integrity, and courage.

Courage is an unknown word in our head and heart. Running away is our way. Everyday I have the blues. No one loves me but my mother and she could've been lying too.

You absolve in the rhythm when you have adequate life experience.

Silence and hunger are identical naked twins.

Fear and Ignorance produced Expectation & Greed.

I am good at two things:

Eating and sleeping.

Fighting and fucking.

Laughing and crying.

Reading and writing? That's for idiots.

The less I do the fewer mistakes I make, said Insecurity.

The fewer mistakes I make the less I am criticized, said Fear.

We know the essence of survival. Keep your fucking mouth shut.

One day, Bliss's part-time lover said, buy me a TV.

NO.

You have a job, a TV, a mother, a 12-year old daughter, two brothers, no father and no husband. I gave you money to buy a bike for your daughter and she lost it, money for clothes, money for medicine, money for food, money for temporary naked lust and currency sobriety. You play me for a sentimental fool. You're fucking crazy.

Her arrival was sporadic at best. She visited randomly at 8:37 for a shower, fucking and another shower.

He explored her lips, thin neck, small ears, crest of skin throat, narrow brown shoulders, pinpoint breasts with tongue talk, flat belles letters, long legs and played his way into her valley of potential.

He loved giving her oral pleasure.

Edging rose lips, long and deep. Slow and sweet.

Little man in a boat sang, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

She reciprocated playing his bone flute.

Riding the pony, priming her G spot grinding hard and fast she exploded with precision and extra ambition whispering, Give me a baby. Give me a baby.

He deferred chromosomes. Fat fucking chance, there's no way under the tropical son I'll give you anything but short time, small money, temporary love and the high hard one in your strike zone with runners in scoring position.

Here's the pitch.

She stayed until 9:45 and left for work at an upscale spa wearing aromatic Grecian urns. He gave her 10 bones. Feed me.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Get out of my life, said Telepathy. You are subservient and I am stupid to put up with this shit. He creased her indifference into a cumulus cloud. It rained goodbye and good luck.

She sat on the bed with her back to him. Sniffle, sniffle.

Her fake tears formed rivers named Regret and Hopelessness and Indifference.

Fish behind twelve Laotian dams financed with Chinese capital to provide electricity to Thailand fed 60 million Asians downstream in deltas.

His NO created black-eyed daggers. They stabbed him with hatred, loss, self-pity, violence and starvation. Revenge is best served cold with DNA.

They put on death masks.

Your mask eats your face.

They walked out into tropical heat. Separate directions.

Waves of loneliness shuffled down a broken street. Children dying of malnutrition at a health clinic on the coroner of Hope cried as desperate mothers received free blue placebos.

The day after tomorrow belonged to orphans and lucky losers with Wabi-Sabi.

Wabi - the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects.

Sabi - to feel one's own sharp existence.

Martha and Tolerance danced through life. 

Everything you know is a lie.

TLC - Chapter 2

Lucky walked to Ankara from Fujian, China in a convoluted adventure. After Ankara he walked to Bursa.

They were invisible cities in a schizophrenic secular Islamic country trapped between past, and future being petrified ossified present on the Phosphorus.

Preparing for strenuous escapades he performed a Tibetan tantric sitting meditation for three centuries, three decades, three years, three months, three weeks, three days, three moments and three breaths. In-out. Spiritual awareness. Mindfulness.

My body. My breath. My practice.

Tibetans survived with profound sense of humor and resilience considering fifty+ years of Chinese oppression, genocide and nomadic exile from the Land of Snows.

After walking meditations in Lhasa he wandered south of Chengdu to Shuangliu in Sichuan. He facilitated English, meditation, chess tactics/strategy and how to be more human with eighth graders for a year.

 One afternoon John, a smart Chinese teacher passed him.

“Where are you going?” said Lucky.

“The Office of Morals and Re-Education. I have to copy tracts and texts.”

“Why?” - the dreaded question word.

“I’ve been removed from my class responsibilities. Not enough students passed their semester exam. It’s myduty to teach them. If they fail it’s my fault.”

“You’re a fine teacher. Duty is a heavy systematic responsibility in a dystopian Communist country. How long will you copy texts and tracts?”

“Who knows? Could be weeks or months. Maybe I will die in The Office of Morals and Re-Education writing an incomplete sentence. This is my life sentence. Tragic. The Teacher Performance Evaluation Committee will decide my destiny.”

“Good luck John. Welcome to the system.”

“Thanks. It’s my fate. I need some luck. See you around.”

on loan

Our loved ones are not given to us. They are only on loan.

The Language Company

A knife contained a collapsible battery-operated emergency room in Achebadem, an expensive private Bursa, Turkey hospital with heart rate monitors, respirators, and dialysis machines, transplant mechanisms, microscopes and high-tech life support goodies.

One engraved knife revealed The Dream Sweeper contraption manufactured in Ha Noise, Vietnam. It remembered evolutionary and revolutionary Communist nightmares surviving American B-52 bombers dropping millions of tons of ordinance on Nam, Cambodia and Laos. Hallucinations and bliss evolved from a point of light traveling at 186,000+ miles per second.

Space folded.

The efficient Dream Sweeper Machine collected unconscious talking monkey stories.

From inside narrow Nam alleys where death-worship was a constant reminder of rapacious ancestors eating incense screaming FEED ME dreams arrived crawling, flying, dancing, staggering, singing, laughing, weeping, and sighing into The Machine.

Dreams begged for mercy, clarity, understanding and interpretation. There are no facts, only interpretations.

Dreams pondered historical inevitabilities: What is life? How did I grow? How did I get here? What if I die here? Who will be my unconscious role model? Who will save me from ultimate absolute reality? Who will feed me in a Peoples’ Communist Paradise dream reality where everyone shares toilets, kitchens and spoiled whining children? Where education is considered a waste of time and money? Where bribes are a way of life buying your future?

Bored Asians with an emotional level of -7 exchanged drab artificial lives playing on Fakebook, a glorious virtual electronic frontier of equality and equity enjoying hi-tech distractions with firewalls, corroded barbwire and rusty window gratings. Dark. Silent. Black is the night. Cold is the ground.

A boy brought brown tea, silver spoons and sugar cubes.

 “Prison is a refuge and a release,” said Lucky. “Solitary confinement, junkyard blues and an environmental impact statement: No one gets out alive. I was abandoned at five.”

 “We are all orphans sooner or later. What trauma happened in your childhood?” said the owner singing circular music clinking a teaspoon, “Twinkle, twinkle little star how I wonder...”

 The Language Company

 

Ice Girl in Banlung Chp. 12

Across town a sewing woman returned to her Kampot guesthouse. She splashed water on her face, changed clothes and spit into red roses. She kick started her cycle and went to the market inside a labyrinth.

At her corner stall she keyed multiple locks. She stacked numbered wooden shutters. She dragged out her Butterfly sewing machine, ironing board and manikins.

Dummies wore exquisite yellow, purple, blue, white shimmering silks decorated with sparkling faux-paws silver stars, moons, and small round reflecting balls. Her skill designed fabrics for women needing elaborate sartorial refinement for engagements, weddings, and cremations.

She stayed busy with serious fittings and adjustments. Her sewing universe process was selecting fabric, measurement, ironing backing, a ruler, white chalk to mark pleats, cutting, pushing her machine treadle, pins, threads, trimming edges, hand sewing clasps, shiny connections, and ironing.

Threads inside a slow prism flashed light and shadow as needles danced through cloth in endless conversations. Needles talked about traditional conservative morals and opportunity-value cost. Thread followed their conversation. Together they measured precise calculations establishing a stop-loss number. All explanations have to end somewhere.

Sky darkened.
Ceremonial drum thunder sang vocal intensity.
Lonely lost suffering foreign tourists in Cambodia shuddered with fear.
What if I die here?
How will my family and friends begin to
realize my intention
to witness 1200 years of dancing
Angkor laterite stoned history
gnarling jungles revealed by natural strobes? 
Lightning flashed skies.
Giant flashbulbs illuminated petrified children
Buried inside cement caverns
eyes eating cartoon images on a plasma scream.
Skies opened.
Rain lashed humans. Some laughed, others cried. Tears dissolved fear.
Sweet dreams, baby.
Dawn.

Two arrived. The boy is cutter. He carried rope, ladder, small axe and machete.
Helper friend is coconut palm tree scout.
Here and there, he said, pointing.
Go up.
The boy shinnied up a narrow palm.
Transferring to the towering 2’ diameter palm he climbed higher.
Roping his tools.

How’s the view, asked helper.
Sublime. A wide brown river lined by cauliflower oaks reaches bamboo huts.
Orange sunrise severs cumulus wisps.
A market woman has her nails done in blue glitter.
A boy saws crystalized ice on a red dirt road.
Girls in white cotton pedaled to school.
A woman grilling waffles along a road buys bundled forest kindling.
Saffron orange robed monks sit in meditation at Naga Wat.
One plays a drum.

He climbed higher.
He chopped. Long thin heavy branches weighted by freedom danced free.
Helper dragged branches past advertisements for temples, orphanages, river trips.
He chopped.
He dragged.
He chopped.
He dragged.
He secured rope to the top. Blossoming.
He chopped.
Coconuts, leaves, bark danced down.
White interior life dust snowed.
Tree crashed.
Light escaped. 3 hours. $20.

Smashing blocks of ice inside a blue plastic bag with a blunt instrument created a symphony outside unspoken words as a homeless man with a pair of brown pants thrown over a thin shoulder sat down to rest. Shy women waiting for Freedom averted black eyes.

Aggressive women manipulated stacks of government issued denominations trusting an implied perceived value in exchange for meat, fruit, gold, and fabric. Counting and arranging denominations inside broken beams of light, cracked cement, lost mislaid wooden planks, debris, feathers, jungles, and jangled light waves they surveyed commercial landscapes with dispatched dialects near rivers revealing stories with fine stitched embroidery. Needles led thread. 

Ice Girl in Banlung