someone
bless their beating heart
stenciled
my iconic image
on a cambodian
river town
wall
i smile at the masses
celebrating my ignorance
devour my little red book
it's a Brave New World
in 1984
eat grass comrades
45-60 million died of starvation
black is the night
cold is the ground
My name is Li Bow Down. I am in charge of the Tibetan Monastery Re-Education Through Reform with Severe Consequences pogrom program. My masters called me out of retirement.
I was playing mahjong, screwing concubines and enjoying Fujian tea with friends at the Shanghai-FreeLand resort.
Authority ordered me to get my old ass back to Lhasa and take care of THE problem. Back to the future.
They gave me a fire extinguisher to douse flaming monks. Ah, the ignobility. Fire is the essence of life.
Give someone a match and they are warm for a minute.
Set them on fire and they are warm for the rest of their life.
Here’s an uncensored image of what we do to people in the program.
Li put an image on a table.
See this woman, he commanded. She is denouncing her family, friends and most importantly, herself in public. We are big on shame. We are the masters and they are the puppets.
“Shame on you!” yelled 1.6 billion puppet people.
“Shame! Shame! Shame!”
This is one of our more popular and effective methods of creating a harmonious society. It works wonders, because if memory serves me correctly and it does, mind you, serve me well, we’ve been coercing people for 5,000 years. Pick your favorite dynasty. We used to put them in wooden stocks with their crimes painted on paper necklaces and parade them through town. They confessed. They had to.
We call it self-criticism (samzen) re-education and reform. Big buzzwords. They were denounced in public. Talk about blatant social disapproval.
Maybe you think I am joking, making this up. Well, I didn't make it to the top of the system scrap heap by bowing down to big nosed foreigners telling me how to maintain control in Tibet and keep the monks and serfs and slaves in line.
As you know the monks in Tibet provoked the armed, young, naive, scared People's Reactionary Liberation soldiers on March 10th in Year Zero.
The rest is history, well, not really history because we rewrite that when it suits our propaganda purposes. It’s easy and convenient.
Life is cheap here. More tea?
Down dream street in Turkish reality
an unprecedented wave of egalitarian support featuring millions of sad, serene women facing callously arranged marriages filled with empty hopes and vague promises of love and happiness enlisted to become engaged to strangers on transcendental borders. This wave of support resembled an open handed gesturing in the eternal present as a mother reluctantly gifted her daughter a long fare well wave watching her disappear into life’s teeming stream.
“Be well my love,” she sang. “You will always be in our hearts.”
Her daughter joined a world tribe of singing, sighing women. They lived their dream, making sacrifices with clear intention, motivation, determination and focus. The entourage of waving, singing women danced through valleys, climbed jagged Eastern Mountains named Regret and entered a no-name village where males pounded war drums and hammered plowshares into word swords.
Marginalized poor angry males killed each other over pita bread, olives, fresh tomatoes, kebabs, women and geographical dust while studying imaginary maps.
“The map is not the territory,” said Visualization, a cartographer.
“Where is this place?” asked a woman leader in a strange village on a strange planet in a strange solar system in a strange universe.
“It is far away,” said a gravedigger with vast earth moving experience. “It is a dysfunctional place where bronze statues of fallen soldiers, warriors, politicians and testosterone fueled fools rust and congratulate each other on their mutual stupidity.”
Wind whispered to women, “Go home, return to your children, your families and friends. Live in peace.”
Women listened with heart-mind.
“It’s tough living in dystopia where women are beautiful and sad,” said Visualization. “Millions don’t know whether they are coming or going, going, long gone. They’ve fashioned well-defined living death masks from loss and hopelessness and confusion and uncertain doubts selling tears wrapped in silence. Millions of us wait for an arranged marriage.”
Potential husbands gathered to draw lots. They drew with ink and pastels and charcoal. The charcoal came from a deep black shameless unconscious well of tears where women, tired of waiting, sang, “Give me a child, give me someone to love and protect and carry forever and cherish and spoil with benign neglect. Give me your future. We don’t really truly honestly care about adverbial love, it’s all arranged. Everything has already happened. We just need to experience it. Love is a blind whore. It’s an impossible love. It’s a matter of practicality. Marriage first love later.”
“Here,” said a marriage broker, “accept this man, this stranger into your heart. Just give him a child. Get to the verb.”
“We breed, work and get slaughtered,” said one woman. Daughters wrapped these constricting words around their hearts in love’s tangled jungle.
You never see women taxi drivers in Turkey. It’s a male ego thing with bright speeding tire spinning toys on wheels. It’s a Toy’s For Tots live game show. In cafes idle retired or chronically employed guys sit around all day from opening to closing playing backgammon. They slide little wooden pieces carved from youth’s forgotten toys. Young macho guys spin shiny yellow taxi wheels playing arranged symphonies in the horn section. They are the next generation of backgammon players.
Women know better. They express their feelings. They live longer.
Courageous women stood up to parents. “I respect your traditional ideas about arranged marriages, however, to be really honest heavy deep and real with you, it’s old fashioned conservative thinking. This is 2013 not 1987. I am a member of a new freethinking generation. I am not willing to be a victim, a willing victim of your narrow-minded attitudes. I will choose my friends, lovers and companions, based on my needs. I know why the caged bird sings.”
Before leaving Ankara I shared a Chinese calligraphy painting poem with students. It was an old Qing dynasty poem, a gift from primary students in a rural Sichuan village school. A visual simplicity symbolized the transient nature of life lessons.
Bright beautiful children in their radiant universe wearing red Young Chinese Communist Pioneer scarves around well-scrubbed necks sitting upright at colorful plastic desks raised hands when I asked questions yelling, “Let me try! Let me try!”
Only young brave students had the courage, the absence of fear to say this. Older students at middle schools and university were aged and silenced through tyranny and oppressive parental and educational brainwashed ideological practice. Shame. They’d lost their curiosity and enthusiasm. Only primary kids had the courage, the inherent inner freedom to say, “Let me try, let me try!”
Their beautiful black pictographic calligraphy ink read, “One day a man climbed into the mountains and reached a hut. He met some children.”
“Where is the teacher?” he asked them.
“They pointed up the mountain covered by clouds. ‘He is not here, he’s gone into the mountains to look for herbs.’”
Chinese characters were creased where latitudes and longitudes met linguistic horizons.
Grill your usual suspects
while eating chicken with shredded
lettuce not have this conversation in the abstract.
Loudspeakers resembling Lenin Park in Hanoi blare in Giresun, Turkey.
Attention Comrades!
Journalists, lawyers and acti-visits in Turkish jails, prisons and poems file your briefs.
A woman speaks about behavior control systems designed with sparkling syllables.
Children memorize grammar rules. Pass the examination.
Life is the BIG test.
It is multiple choice.
Silverman polishes red stones
semi-precious hands whisper secrets
a baker removes loaves from ovens
fish hawkers wash ice
life sea streams.
Bread aromas float past women selling cabbages bigger than lost children.
A beautiful mute-deaf woman in Cambodia scrubs foreign laundry.
She dances until she dies.
Her life dance is a slow meandering death of loneliness and heartbreak and silence.
It is the dry season in Khmer civilizations as leaders across a porous border
sell forests to Vietnam furniture and toothpick factories.
Chinese developers purchase the country for $16.9 billion and counting
The National Museum in Siem Reap is 50% owned by Thailand.
Buy a ticket.
Black Sea is green and blue.
Eat dreams with fresh yogurt minus anxiety.
Cultivate silence
Amazon women live on an island off the Giersun coast.
They visit the Turkish residency permit authorities.
If you want to play you have to pay, said Authority.
They cut off their right breast.
Arrows of time.
Bullseye!
Everything is permitted. It's already happened.
Once upon a time there was a king.
The king wanted a painting. He'd heard about a famous painter in a distant village. "I don't care how much it costs," said the king. He sent a messenger to the painter.
"My king wants a painting," said the messenger. "Ok," said the painter, "give me two million gold coins and come back later." The messenger paid.
The messanger came back a year later. "It's not finished yet," said the painter. "Come back later."
Ten years passed.
The messenger returned. "Where is the painting for the king?"
The painter grabbed a canvas and painted a painting. "Here, give this to the king."
"What, you just made it!" said the messenger.
"Yes," said the painter, "but I've been thinking about it for ten years."
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