beauty

This is my Beauty.

Fear and trust dance in stillness. I meditate. Calm. Centered. I am a stone cold Apsara silent dancer dancing inside my revolutionary soul. 

I feel like screaming.

The dancing hall at Preah Khan is where dancers don’t smile. They dance. They are slave dancers. They dance for the king.

He is the god-king. He resurrected his desire and fury creating new customs and new decrees for dancers. They dance for the mighty and powerful. They dance Khmer stories about war, conquest, harvests, seasons, sun and moon. 

They are submissive dances of life/death. They dance to celebrate life. They dance the celebration of tranquility. They dance or die. They wear tinkling bands of gold around wrists and ankles. Diamond diademed crowns and shimmering silk clothing. They do not smile. Their faces are frozen in the trance of dance. 

I dance to escape the tyranny. I’ve danced all my short, sweet life. The hall of dancers is surrounded by columns, portals and broken jumbled green moss stones. Stones whisper dance.

Thick gnarled silk-cotton tree roots crawl toward dancers. They dance through exposed roots, past Shiva and Vishnu. The preserver and destroyer of life. Dance movement is motivated by emotional expression. Dance is about itself. The freedom of creation. A playful existence. Life is a silent dance.

 

yell louder

Possible signs of intelligent life exist here in Saigon or Ho Chi Minh or Siem Reap or Vientiane or Hanoi. Rumor control reports. Merely existing mind you. ‘Mind yourself, how you go dearie,’ whispered an Irish ghostwriter in Donegal. Well remembered.

Take my neighbors for example. Sam and Dave. Sam is the kid, Dave is the father. These are not Viet names. If they were they’d be named Binh and Thin and New Yen, like new yin instead of old yang. 

Dave had kids so he and his wife can yell at them. It was an arranged marriage. 

Easy to have kids in the 13th most populated country on planet Earth. 85 million hard and fast rules of parenthood. Get married early, the pressure is on. 

You do not want to be unmarried and sad, lonely and well forgotten. Loneliness dramatically increases the chances of heart attacks, strokes of genius, and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and social instability in a well mannered society. 

Extreme pressure is on the girls to find a husband. Girls in Sapa, which is not part of this tale, only illustrates the way rural girls get married at the ripe old age of 16 and start producing genetic forms of themselves. Petri dish. Wash and tear. 

Takes hard courage to raise them with integrity, respect, authenticity and a low level of pain tolerance.

Dave releases stream of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend, expand the sound. Dave is startled to hear the the sound of his own particular voice ricochet of cold gray cement block walls. His life is a cold cement wall. Echoes dance through his brain like little sugarplum fairies. 

zero effort

yes, said the seven year young genius. here's another true class tomb saga from Laos. 

it happened like this. a foreign teacher faced 12 seventh grade homonids.

how many of you are afraid to speak? afraid to make a mistake?

12 hands shot into air. trembling arteries and armed veins exploded cortex capillaries.

reach for the sky yelled a thief disguised as an autocratic robotic local teacher. 

memorize the text. keep your big fat mouth shut. class dismissed. zero effort.

it takes 12 years of formal education to beat the spirit out of a child, sighed a genius.

bye-bye said orphan.

starvation

A man came to their village. He arrived on foot. It was on the Marmara Sea. Olive orchards dressed hills. 

A white butterfly skimmed blue sea. It’s wings created a gentle wind passing the traveller sitting on a stone in the shade of shale. His feet pushed pebbles. Waves washed shores returning to their source, rolling millions of pebbles in the current creating a gentle musical interlude. 

The soft machine of media’s old cultural myths broke down. Desperate people tried the remote. The batteries were expired. 

They created fire sending smoke signals across the reservation to Anasazi, Navajo, Apache tribes. Flying clouds acknowledged them.

An imaginary fear of poverty and starvation gripped them. White butterflies skimmed over a cresting white wave tumbling along blue water.

Kindness and compassion eased suffering. They may or may not have been really listening.

artificial

We decipher riddles, forecast speechless tongues sensing passion.

We accept ignorance in quicksilver’s desperate wandering. Boredom carves a niche in a soul. 

I hang laundry near the street. Memory is tempered by the slow heat of talking monkeys. Two boys walk past harvesting trash. One barefoot boy plays silent music with a long thin bamboo fiber.

The other twirls a walking stick carrying a plastic bag. His stick is used for prodding bags and garbage.

Local people mill around. Bored. They exist in their adolescent immature childlike wisdom. Passive is their inherent religious cultural nature. 

Others voice imaginary alien freedom concepts. 

A sofa attached to a roof towed by a motorcycle carries fat white Europeans to see 9th century temples.

A young man named Eternity wearing his new skin tight artificial plastic leg and artificial plastic left foot shuffles through dust.