Hanoi Alley Bell

It takes courage to raise kids with integrity, respect and authenticity. Sex is fun.

Responsibility is a duty.

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

He knows the echo because he made it. He mixed the fine sand and quick dry cement. He slathered it over broken red bricks in a circular abstract desire to create art lasting for eternity which is how he thought of it the day he trow welled the paste.

Life gave him art and he used art to celebrate life.

His voice manifestation expresses human auditory tendencies in a tight space near a gigantic liquid plasma television permanently implanted on a blank cement wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent reality soap shows ...

about life next door where a hunched over family sits on cold red floral tile slurping from cracked rose bowls and shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost mouths while yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with their gigantic plasma television ...

featuring dancing bears and pioneer patriots devouring rubber plantations, beaches for golf courses and farmland for glass and brass designer hotels with a double blade axe singing, in a high Greek-like chorus, the national anthem about survival and rampant greed ...

on land, sea, and air as water pianos played by a young wisp her fingers a delicate blur of fast incantation musical channels

dance near a woman garbage collector ringing a bell at 1655 alerting people in Dave’s neighborhood it is time for them to bring out their daily garbage.

Remove the evidence. Bag it and tag it. Autopsy material.

Mrs. Pho hears the bell. She’s ready. She’s willing. She’s able. She’s arranged her family’s daily consumptive waste into two plastic bags. One pink. One white. Orange and yellow fruit rinds went white, shreds of fat pink. She didn’t waste a thing. No one did. 

Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle she reflected bowing in front of her parent’s faces, dead, gone remembered forever with their stoic black and white ghost images living above eternal electric Buddha bulbs pulsating red, green, blue, and white on the family altar.

Plastic flowers, daily fruit offerings, burning incense - spirit food.

Let’s eat.

Weaving A Life, V1

String Theory

Hanoi.

Twisted alleys and side streets were clogged with speeding manic motorcyclists texting lovers, women hawking apples, bananas, greens, meat, tofu, used clothing, used condoms and tongues babbling incongruent incomprehensible musical tonal frequencies.

Language is music.

Music is the fuel.

Words play a poor second violin or cello compared to music.

Boys sew heavy yellow plastic tarps. A woman behind her mask paints bicycle chain guards with a green spray. Men grind automotive parts with decibels and electrical impulses. A boy riding behind his friend on a bike spins out a universal red yo-yo string theory.

I sat in a red kindergarten chair near a curb at an artery eatery. The woman serves delicious grilled spring rolls filled with veggies, cold white noodles and a plastic container of greens with chilies and sauce. Using ivory chopsticks from Shanghai I dip noodles and spring rolls in sauce. I smell, chew slow and swallow. It’s cheap and filling. Great taste.

Across the narrow noisy street men drink beer. They accept you being a little stranger than yesterday. Food mama stays busy doing only the lonely lunch. She’s gone before dusk when a woman selling apples takes over the prime real estate sidewalk space.

Street pedestrians dodge speeding motorcycles and women lugging baskets of bananas balanced on bamboo staves past merchants selling goods from ground floor flats. The sidewalk is life’s marketplace extending from long dark narrow dwellings. Kids piss in the gutter.

A motorcycle kills a dog. A man drags the carcass out of the street and leaves it in the gutter. Death is fascinating. Silence covers the dog.

Mechanics hammer metal fixing bikes and broken appliances, salon girls cut, wash and dry, old women gossip how the younger generation is wild and crazy, young boys haul bricks on a deranged frayed rope pulley system up to a flat undergoing renewal, older men in pajamas playing GO slap scarred wooden pieces on a board while drinking beer or tea with friends as children scamper through the maze.

At dusk a sex worker behind a mountain of broken red bricks fondles a construction worker relieving him of fluids and Dong.

Pajamas are the national costume. Cute teddy bears, little animals, pink, red, floral designs. All-purpose all day all the way.

Knowing you live here no one bothers you. Other foreigners are not crazy enough, lost enough or blind enough to discover this dense narrow vibrant rabbit warren neighborhood filled with families and ceaseless racket.

A slouching cafe owner watches family soap opera dramas about love, hope, betrayal, and deception on an entertainment box with rapt attention. Everyone has a box here. It’s the BIG diversion, all entertainment all the time. Loud and louder.

Life During Wartime - Talking Heads Live

Death Worship by River

Rumors of intelligent life in Hanoi is an exaggeration, said Leo. Rumor control reports existence.

Take my neighbors Sam and Dave for example, said Tran, Sam is the kid, Dave is the father. Their names and roles are interchangeable. These are not Viet names. If they were, they’d be named Binh and Thin and New Yen, like new Yin or old Yang.

Dave had kids so he and his wife can yell at them. So they will have someone take care of them in old age when they are lying or dying on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 wafting kitchen smells.

It’s an Asian thing. It was an arranged marriage after a three year courtship. Her parents demanded $50,000. Cash or no deal. Virgins have high value in the marriage market. They are have been sequestered behind fear and insecure superstitions and trapped by hovering in-laws and outlaws for centuries.

Marriage is legalized prostitution.  

Father knows best. You don’t marry the girl in Asia. You marry the family.

Cash gives them security. You pay and get the girl. The fun begins. Grandparents need kids to support them in old age. When you’re young pregnancy is always the only option. The tyranny of motherhood.  

Accelerate production comrade. Many procreating humans have more desire thinking about providing offspring for their security than the physical pleasure of sex. So it goes.

Sex is a DUTY. It ain’t about pleasure. It’s easy to have kids in the 13th most populated country on planet Earth. Get on. Go for the ride. E jack U late. There are 90 million hard and fast parenthood rules according to the popular Vietnamese Party book, Produce & Consume. Get married early erotic pressure is on and off, on and off. Savior a small death in 8 seconds.

You do not want to be unmarried, sad, lonely and forgotten. Loss of face and shame haunts singles with vengeance. Fear of loneliness increases the possibility and probability of heart attacks, strokes of genius and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and social instability in a socialist society. They’ve taken their hormonal cues and social control systems from Uncle China.

Extreme pressure is on girls to find a husband. Sapa females in the NW, a future fragment of this tale, illustrate the value and necessity for rural girls to marry at the ripe old age of sixteen and produce genetic replicants. Petri dish. More Y chromosomes. It takes courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, and authenticity.

            Humans crave less suffering and neglect and more love.

Dave’s voice releases anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend and expand the sound. Dave is startled to hear the sound of his voice ricochet off cold molten gray interior Hanoi cement or is Ha Noise the block wall? His life is one long cold cement wall.

Echoes dance through his brain like sugarplum fairies. He knows the echo because he made the WALLS. He stacked red crumbling bricks, mixed the fine sand gemstones and quick dry cement.

He slathered it over red bricks with coherent circular logic fulfilling an abstract desire to create a work of realist art lasting forever which is how he remembered it the day he trow welled the paste. His voice manifestation expresses human primitive guttural sounds in a tight enclosed space near his gigantic liquid plasma television.

It is permanently implanted on a wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent dancing drama programs about life next door where the family sits on red rose cold tile floors hunched over with spinal deficiencies ... slurping from cracked bowls shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost desperate mouths and yelling over each other in tonal decibels ... competing with their gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and uniformed military pioneer patriots devouring acres of rubber plantations, palm trees, teak forests, beach front property and farmland ... with a double bladed axe singing a high Greek-like chorus their national anthem about land, sea, air, water and big profit with peasants as small players.

            Everyone’s being played.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Hanoi Memory

A shattered mirror reflected Pho’s fragmented identity.

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with stranded rusty brown bard wire encircling his social network domain avatar easing over shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter.

Chinese introduced barbwire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. 

Vietnam massacred them back to Manchuria.

The French introduced excellent wines and installed intricate glass mosaics in Dalat garden walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them as fragments of glittering glass composed minuscule myopic minimal musical microcosms and colonial ideology.  

At Dien Bien Phu in 1954 Vietnam slaughtered the Frogs back to De’ Arc of Triumph.

They kept the language and baguettes. Yellow colonial buildings aged along Rue This and Rue the Day. 

Then the Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction, death, suffering and chaos unleashed their blind idiotic military-industrial ambition on peasants gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels below the surface of appearances.

Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family through dynasties encroaching on walls and shrines inside meditative brown temples celebrated silent stories.

During the day they worked paddies before evolving underground when nightingales brought carpet-bombing and napalm.

Agent Orange extended misery for generations. 

“Horror has a face and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.”

- Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

“Quick into the tunnels. Run.”

Sitting, crying and praying they heard the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel canisters thudded tremors shredding forests, jungles, paddies and lives. Bamboo homes danced in flames. Heat soared over tunnels bathing them in sweat.

They traveled deeper following interior earth trails until their unconscious became conscious. Earth swallowed breath. Their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.

Sweet silence comforted the crying and wounded after foreign devils fled in terror, guilt, shame and loss.

Survivors streamed down mountains, emerged from caves and tunnels, poling rivers, walking on water, drinking oceans in creation myths, forcing devils into the sea. Blue green seas ran red.

Vietnam forced Americans back to Guam in 1975.

Voices in Hanoi flowed between crumbling sand and haphazard red bricks. Cement walls blocked wailing anger. Frustration's repressed bitterness adapted survival instincts in the reality of life’s twisted fateful truth.

Their memory was fiction.

Fiction created their memory. 

Weaving A Life (V1)

Hanoi Poem

Humans need less suffering and more love.

Little Man's voice releases streams of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend and expand the sound. 

He is startled to hear the sound of his own particular voice ricochet off substandard cold molten gray interior monologue of Hanoi cement or is Ha Noise the block wall?

His life is one long cold cement wall. Echoes dance through his brain like little sugarplum fairies.
He knows the echo because he made the WALLS.

He stacked red crumbling bricks, mixed the fine sand gemstones and quick dry cement. He slathered it over broken red bricks with coherent circular logic fulfilling an abstract desire creating a work of realist art

lasting forever which is how he remembered it the day he trow welled the paste. His voice manifestation expresses human primitive guttural sounds in a tight enclosed space near his

gigantic liquid plasma television.

It is permanently implanted on a blank wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent dancing drama shows about life next door where the family sits on cold red floral tiled floors hunched over with spinal deficiencies slurping from cracked rose bowls shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost

desperate mouths yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with their gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and uniformed military pioneer patriots devouring acres of rubber plantations,

palm trees, teak forests, beach front property and farmland with a double bladed axe singing in a high Greek-like chorus their national anthem about land, sea, air, water and big profit with piano concertos.

Everyone’s being played.