free speech

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.

 

three kinds of people

there are three kinds of people in the world, said a boy holding his heart in his hands

sitting on a cambodian tourist town corner disguised

as the Street of Impossible Dreams...

his mother, cut off at the knees cradled an infant.

sex was her DUTY.

she performed well.

she produced more off-spring.

she was well seasoned. 

more tools. economic tools.

daddy was long gone.

it was a 125cc motorcycle culture

putt-putt, zoom, roar, rumble, dance cylinders. grind my hormonal gears, baby.

genius boy said:

people who make things happen.

people who watch people make things happen.

people who don't know what the fuck is going on.

yeah, yeah, yeah is my complete unabridged vocabulary. 

there are no rules

I didn't write the rules. Why should I follow them? - W. Eugene Smith, photo essayist.

Lens: Visual journalism.

A Nepalese man breaks rocks in Bandipur.

Music is the fuel at a Tibetan resettlement village outside Pokhara, Nepal.

clean water for xmas

Christmas is coming, Orphan said to Elf.

Tell me about it. I'm getting crazy wish lists from kids around the globe.

Give me an example of some serious needs.

Sure, here's one from a girl in Cambodia.

"Please give me clean drinking water. I have a cell phone. It's great for entertainment but useless when it comes to meeting my real needs. Call me and tell me where I can get the water. And, if it's not too much to ask, could you please give me some medicine? My grandmother is dying of a broken heart."

Whew, that's a tough one, said Orphan. What are you going to do?

Damn the Mekong River and divert a stream of life to her village. 

Sounds perfect. What about the medicine? 

Will a placebo heal a broken heart?

Take two and call me tomorrow. Tomorrow knows the answer.

push them through teol school

One of the tyrannies of formal education, said Orphan, is how it takes 12 tedious ominous years to beat creative curiosity out of a child. It's a tortuous Byzantine procedure of endless suffering.

I agree with you, Elf said in simple English. Take Turkey for example. It's all dumbed down grammar text-based learning dulling the mind. By the book. Keep your mouth shut, warn teachers conditioned by the machine using fear to control and maipulate.

Yeah, they know the grammar RULES for taking exams. That's it. Past simple, present continuous and NO SPEAK.

They love RULES.

They need vocabulary and the confidence to use it. Open head, heart and mouth. Risk.

I eat my sorrow with fresh yogurt, said a woman opening her creative notebook to a blank page. She wrote. She drew. She danced colors, dreams, rainbows, the Black Sea, caricatures of friends, flowers, gardens and butterflies.

I feel free, she laughed.

Use it or lose it, said a silver spoon dancing around brown tea leaves dissolving a white sugar cube. 

Clink, clink, clink.

Do you want a verb to get going, asked a tea man.

On the side please with fresh tomatoes, kasher cheese and black olives at Hagia Sophia in Trebazon.