stir your bones

Ride Mystery every morning. The joy of dirt, red mud, dust. Explore terrain. Essential.

Remember the future.

Today is a burning body in cement block. Orange and yellow and blue.

She made 70. The wat zone, solemn nephew. She had a long life.

Many crypts. Tall trees, heat, fire, add more logs...rising waves of amok below pillars.

Stir bones.

Pedal on in silence. Know the end.

Discover a village inside a village.

Market women find onions, veggies, conversations. I take java. Ice. Shaded trees whisper. Raksa is 14, in the 6th. We bike together on Sunday.

Connections sit in shadows as her sister and mother wash dishes, doing kind and gentle English.

Market zone is a precise poem. The golden thread.

Plasma IV walks down the street with an old man.

Cold

Logical

Detached

Travel Makes You

My body is a living work of art.

It's for sale but it ain't cheap.

Food is an important part of a balanced diet.

Have ink will flow. Travel makes you.

All the mad ones burning like stars,

Flames of passion and suffering

Savor a visual glance toward endless speculation.

Walk slowly.

Peasants Day

“We are the only animals who laugh,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “and we are the only animals who know we are going to die. We imagine our death, our mortality. This fills some with dread, psychological neurosis, lack of purpose. For others it’s a release, a joy, and a dance. Freedom is unconditional. I was born laughing.”

“I was born dead and slowly came to life. Are you a clown? Perhaps a clown fish?” I asked.

“Look in your dream mask mirror,” she said. “Not all the clowns are in the circus.”

“Under this mask, another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces.”

“Let’s dance. Let’s meditate on the process of death.”

My name is Beauty. Death is my mother. I have no tongue.

Your mask eats your face.

Look Back - TLC 73

Asian survivors looked back with reinforced healthy doubt and fear rather than face courageous futures.

In Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia genocide/war survivors said more to a person’s back than their face. Leaving was abandoned. Bye-bye and good luck to your family.

Zeynep and Rita turned a page.

Rice grains in a broken bamboo basket sustained crows blacker than shadow faces hiding inside deep dark structures watching the road. Always watching. They stare with hard eyes, said Rita, their eyes dance over flat countryside covering lost forgotten patient rice paddies waiting for a drop of water nourishing green rice or staring at palm groves, coconut, banana trees surrounding stilted bamboo thatched homes as naked children playing above buried landmines sail dream kites.

They watch. They never close blind eyes. They watch for invaders from Thailand, America, Vietnam. Patient forever they wait watching for wives, husbands, children, strangers, soldiers, amputees and Apsara dancers. Their blind eyes are always switched ON observing minute cosmic details and subtle imperceptible movements across miles of flat land mined country penetrating thick green foliage.

Their eyes dance with waiting. Waiting caresses eyes as lovers feeling fluttering lids and soft retinas tremble with visual sensory information data sensing rational coherent mysteries. Eyes cultivate patience, an essential visual nutrient.

Watching without seeing is their Zen.

Their life is a sitting meditation.

Seeing without understanding is their life.

I don’t know and I don’t care.

Tropical heat destroys my DNA.

Living in perpetual internal darkness they cultivate essential immense critical survival intentions. They stare far away with telescopic acuity. This consistent hard eyed vision burns up 85% of their daily energy. The remaining 15% is used for procreation, eating, dancing making music and singing.

Eyes practice the eternal art of being silent.

They watch past another person during a conversation.

They watch each other’s back.

We survived by paying attention, said survivors. That’s life.

They face watching beyond wild where everything known and unknown matters infinitely. Everything here happens simultaneously.

         Everything goes and nothing happens.

         Everything happens and nothing goes.

One anxious dreaded moment in their life recognizes fear. Disguised as ignorance and indecision fear asks is it safe?

What if never entered the conversation.

What is the difference between watching and seeing, asked Zeynep expanding passive and active verb signifiers.

Real eyes realize real lies, said Leo.

Survivors read sky for rain. Survivors read mad dogs yapping, growling, fighting and fucking in deserted black broken streets without electricity, said Rita. Screaming yelling male adolescents and genocide survivors read kick boxers fighting on national television every Saturday/Sunday afternoon at 2. It’s standing room only in packed tea/java houses.

                                             KILL HIM!

                                             KILL HIM!

                                             KILL HIM!

Killing as Entertainment. I love this, said Death. They are really into Power, Humiliation and Revenge. Reminds me of millions shouting their anger at killing fields while murdering 1.7 million. If I kill enough maybe I will survive. No one kills the killer. You prove your ability and allegiance by killing. Don’t push your luck, said Authority.

Violence never changes only the players, said Zeynep.

It’s our latent repressed anger gene, said Rita. Denial will kill you and anger is expensive.

Women meditate talk and laugh. They live longer.

Boy men scream at televisions.

Idle youth squeezing pores waiting for Godot read acne in a motorcycle mirror. They haven’t seen the play. They are the players.

No one shows up, nothing happens.

Hungry girls wait for Freedom at night.

Destiny rested as noon heat waves reflected improbable shimmering anxieties. Sad working girls washed beige underwear in a lazy brown river. Water’s exhilaration introduced a cloud. Thunder clapped. Lighting flashed. Tears flooded dirt roads.

Banlung children wearing red and white Santa caps dragged expectant mothers toward dusty chrome plated display cases in the market. This one! This one!

“Your life is an art project. The world is one big art museum. Buy a ticket. Take the ride. Yeah, yeah,” said a UXO worker in a bright yellow Mines Advisory Group (MAG) vest fanning soil with a detector near The Plain of Jars outside Phonsavan, Laos.

The Language Company

Love is

Love is a blind whore
With a mental disease
And no sense of humor.

+

Slow.

Lesson? Sustain the art.

Siem Reap

1)    motorman sings his sad tale of "no money"

2)    the endless hard luck story

3)    rows of empty ugly hotel monstrosities line the Highway of Death

4)    being Sunday Someday, SR is more destitute than a hungry girl waiting to go to bed with a hungry man

5)    people salvage trash in the rain

6)    air is thick with moisturizer and masks

7)    Carl died. He left a young Cambodian wife and two boys, 12 & 6. Heart attack.

8)    I feel this deep loss. Profound sadness.

Needs. Drama. Story. Conflict.

Give it an edge.

Theme : loss, passion, alienation, boredom, loneliness.

One week ago he sat in a Lao garden. It rained.

Everything smelled deep, pure, beautiful.

Five months in Vientiane helping grades 6/7 be more human.

Sitting in the garden writing - polishing manuscripts about Turkey, China, Indonesia, affectionately called Amnesia.

For the last three months while playing with kinder garden kids from 8-3 he'd been involved with Ling who came from the war ravaged interior and worked the massage biz.

During the course of their pre-meditated hot sexual relationship interspersed with gestures and broken Lao-English guttural intentions, he bought her a phrase book and dictionary and English primers, and a hand-made paper notebook. He gave her colored pens and watercolor paints. She had the skill and artistic eye.

At night he read as she created in precise detail large Lao images of dancers, village life, coiled serpents, and vivid representational fantasy/reality cultural art.

He was astonished and supportive.

She was happy. They were in temporary attraction, lust, desire, passion. They shared lives. She relished the generous and serene outpouring of her emotion and creativity.

He told her he'd leave the school, town, country and her after a month.

They cried. They hugged. She painted a final picture of the holding hands, walking up the street lined with flowering lilac trees. Another had them hugging, shedding tears.

He suggested she keep her art alive. She said she would. He suggested she make a portfolio of her work and show it to galleries.

He flew away.

A vanishing point on life's canvas.

Ling's Art