one leg

yes, said orphan, let's fly away.

elf agreed, after a month playing with spontaneous five-year young experts. 

where shall we go?

it's a small planet.

how about cambodia, we know it well.

ok. 9 months in laos learning, laughing, loving, sharing was a joy.

on fool's day they arrived in siem reap. a hustler showed up. i am poor. i need money for my family.

i remember this story, said elf.

it's an old one, said orphan. 

let's go see friends.

they walked into a gritty world, surrounded by empty glass and brass hotels.

children scavaged trash.

they passed a one legged man on crutches. what happened to him, asked elf.

he stepped on a land mine while planting rice.

displaced aggression

She pedals her New Star bike into Siem Reap for iced coffee. It's cold and delicious. Men play chess slapping wooden pieces, gesticulating at high decibels. 

Kick boxers on a plasma screen pummel each other with knees and gloves and violent fury to the endless delight of invisible millions with displaced latent aggression after a recent genocide.

WHAM! KILL HIM! KILL HIM! YES!

Saturday and Sunday afternoons are filled with masses of boys and men in cafes screaming at a television. 

KILL HIM! KILL HIM! KILL HIM!

Idle men sit in shaded empty white tourist vans waiting for bodies brushing dust. 

Looking busy is fun.

carve

in a village
a girl carves
a gourd
she creates
children
families
animals
homes
forests
flowers
skies
rivers
stars
planets
delicate
lines
spirals
universes

marxist elephant control stick

An angry, frustrated, underpaid, undersexed overworked female Vietnamese teacher moonlighting as a paid Communist party member stooge admonishes her pool shark students for breaking the cue ball off green banked walls, Play the angles you idiots! she shouts, elevating her Marxist elephant CONTROL stick, stabbing them, prodding them, driving them forward, accelerating them through educational fields filled with land mines.

She pounds her stick on a bamboo podium to get their attention. She releases her repressed anger and frustration, Your fate is to put up with me! she screams. Students cower behind rote memorization rules named Fear.

Famine survives in green paddies beneath heaven’s gateless gate as emaciated farmers work steaming streaming white oxen past orphaned sex slaves selling bananas, trinkets and skin to lost scared alienated caffeinated satiated rich obese white tourists.

Vegetable lovers sleep on discarded Burmese teak furniture. Across from the restaurant behind a mud spaceship hut is an iridescent dirt playing field and elementary school. Curious disheveled smiling children stare.

In a dusty lot someone squats over a mud toilet. They shit fertilizer 7.5 miles into the center of the Earth creating earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan. Radioactive debris floods the Mississippi Delta singing the blues.

image is everything

once upon a time in cambodia i went to the barber.

i saw some glossy pictures. handsome. beguiling. 

i want to look that man, i told the barber.

do you have any money.

yes. i showed him some paper.

you have to wait.

how long.

years.

ok.