Donate blood - TLC 19

Experience, a wonderful little teacher nowadays said, giving blood helps someone who needs it more than you. Survival luck. Giving blood gifts life.

Living safely is dangerous.

Lucky had rare A-. He donated after receiving permission from Ankara medical authorities. Yes you may, blood is no argument.

The blood bus sat near a busy downtown intersection. He walked past pretzel sellers, cascading water fountains and shit covered statues of hero soldiers firing rusty guns into cobalt skies.

Paying attention he heard imprisoned Turkish journalists crying, begging, and pleading for free speech in a totalitarian Deep State of Fear.

A voice in the wilderness cried out, “The application of Articles 6 and 7 of the Anti-Terror Law in combination with Articles 220 and 314 of the Turkish Criminal Code leads to abuses. In short, writing an article or making a speech can lead to a court case and a long prison sentence for membership or leadership in a terrorist organization. Together with possible pressure on the press by state officials and possible firing of critical journalists, this situation can lead to a widespread self-censorship.”

Dissent is terrorism, said the angry frightened Prime Minister, slapping a Soma miner for booing him in public. Oh the shame.

Lucky climbed on the bloodmobile express.

A smiling Bulgarian nurse asked health questions in broken English. Another nurse took blood pressure. She attached a tourniquet to his left arm. “You have excellent veins.”

She swabbed one and slid a needle in. “Open and close your left hand.” Blood river flowed.

Outside tinted windows in blinding sun Turkish, Armenian, Kurdish and Syrian parents gripped children’s wrists. Fingers never touched. Scraggly half-starved men unloaded boxes of tomatoes from a truck. Light reflected off cheerless sunglasses. Savage salivating salvage teams folded and loaded crushed cardboard boxes into metal carts.

Sad affective-disordered businessmen spilled black market Iranian nuclear fission material and Syrian VX chemical liquids into Ankara’s water supply. Sharing is caring.

Suchness, a heavy responsibility weighted lives.

Nurses waved goodbye, “You brought someone luck by donating life.”

“It’s a small powerful gift. One stranger helps another stranger.”

101 people lined up to donate platelets. “This should be fun,” a girl said to her mother, “I love needles.”

Tears flowed into The Dream Sweeper.

landmine survivor

“Are you with us?” pleaded a Cambodian land mine child survivor removing shrapnel with an old rusty saw after stepping in heavy invisible shit, “or are you against us?”

  She‘s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper ironing imported Egyptian threaded 400-count linen. No lye.

  The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food. She’s one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by land mines from forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate 110 million land mines lie buried in 68 countries.

  It costs $3.00 to bury a landmine.

  It costs $300–$900 to remove a mine. It will cost $33 billion to remove them. It will take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200–$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines. Cambodia, Laos, Angola and Afghanistan are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

  40% of all land in Cambodia and 90% in Angola go unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee.

  She hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove metal from her skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin. The technical mine that took her right leg off that fateful day as she walked along village rice paddies expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second. Ball bearings shredded everything around her heart.

  It may have been an American made M16A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range was 328 feet.

  Or maybe a plastic Russian PMN-2 disguised as a toy. She never saw it coming after stepping on the pressure plate. Fortunately or unfortunately, she didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding, checked her pulse and injected her with 200cc of morphine. Strangers in a strange land all carried morphine.

Lao Please Don’t Rush is the most heavily bombed country in history.

25% of villages in Laos are contaminated with UXO.

Upwards of 30% of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to detonate.

80 million unexploded bombs remain in Laos.

More than half of the UXO victims are children.

Cut the heavy deep and real shit, said a Banlung shaman.

  Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled.

Fear is ignorance.

A Century is Nothing 

short odds

kick boxers attack green mangoes

chopping white ice while

shifting gears after school in wind

cradled infants

dying of malnutrition

wail at the cambodian hospital

for a free blue placebo pill

(an orange pill is $1.50)

smelling charcoal fired waffles

a boy pedals his bike seeking

recycled trash

before wicker baskets say hello

spare change searches for user value

collecting cardboard images in a squall

red ink meets onion paper at an intersection

whispering secrets without speaking 

Reading in Mandalay

talk to me

A young girl wore a permanent tear on her left cheek. She was not smiling. Her t-shirt had a picture of a skull and bones.

Danger! LAND MINES!

She said: Here I am. I communicate my reality to the world. Do you like my shirt? Can you read words or do you need a picture? How about a picture of a picture? I don’t know how to read so I like to look at pictures. Mycountry has 14.5 million people and maybe 6-10 million land mines.

Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Many more have died because we don’t have medical facilities. Mines are cheap. A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000.00 to take out of the ground.

I’m really good at numbers.

26,000 men, women and children are maimed or killed every year in the world by land mines leftover from ongoing or forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate there are 110 million land mines buried in 45 countries.

It will cost $33 billion to remove them and take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000. Cambodia, Angola, Iraq, and Afghanistan are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40 percent of Cambodian land is unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians are amputees. A prosthetic limb costs $3,000.

Talk to me before you leave trails to explore the forest. It's beautiful and quiet. I know all the secret places. I showed my picture to a Cambodian man and he didn’t like it. They call this denial. He said it gave him nightmares. He’s seen too much horror and death in one life. So it goes. My village is my world. Where do you live?

sacred contracts

When she was ten she was forced to witness a relative torture her cat to death.

The cat was put in a bag and buried under her house.

She had never been under there.

One day she crawled under the house and found the soft dirt. She left it alone. 

Later, she was the victim of sexual abuse.

As a woman she dreamed where, as a child, she was surrounded by women in a sacred circle until she lost all her fear, all energy to them. 

She knew she chose her parents in this world. She carried their pain.

As a child she forgot by looking forward.