John Lennon

This didn’t scare the old woman. She was from the ancient school.

“Hmm. Well then, I shall make a small gift for you. Take this.”  She handed him a piece of cloth. It was a coarse, mottled, brown and white checkered wool with faded symbols running the edge.

“Thank you. It’s beautiful.”

“Carry it with you and only use it to clean the mirrors,” she said. “It’s older than sand.” She rolled it up and gave it to him.

“One kindness deserves another,” I said. I rummaged into my pack and pulled out a piece of kamben gringsing cloth.

“Here, this is for you. It is a magic cloth woven on another island. They use bark and roots to make the dye and the cloth is for all their social rituals from birth to death. It will protect you from evil vibrations and, if you ever get sick, soak an edge in water and drink the moisture. It will cure you.”

“Wonderful. Many thanks. Travel safe and look after yourself. Before you go I will reveal a small future to you,” she said. “After Tiglin you will ramble across country to the Killarney hostel where, sadly and unfortunately, you will be awake in the predawn morning of December 8 hearing a BBC news announcer tell the world about John Lennon being shot in New York.

"You will turn your head to the wall and cry. Later you will take the black push bike down narrow wet twisted streets and meet a nun opening heavy steel black church gates and you will tell her what happened. You will push open the heavy wooden doors, genuflect, cross yourself, walk the length of a cold aisle and light votive candles in silence.

"Then you will ride into town and go to every news agent to buy every Irish paper with the screaming black tabloid headlines full of desperate black ink and grainy images of death personified before retiring to a pub to sit by a peat fire drinking, reading, and sadly, quietly remembering John’s creativity and his words Imagine and Give Peace a Chance.”

A Century is Nothing

Beauty & Respect

Tell me about the village. It is a microcosm.

Simple happy people live, work, breed and die.

They know desire, anger and ignorance exists outside the village.

Inside they practice compassion and meditation. They love singing and dancing.

They cherish nature with beauty and respect.

They accept responsibility for their choices and actions with free will.

A free people they practice gratitude with an open heart-mind.

Kind and loving they walk to the pagoda or wat

daily to make offerings and receive blessings from the monks.

They sit in meditation together. Their calm heart-mind is a lotus blossom.

A monk rings a bell.

Echoes flow to the village and beyond. Frequencies and vibrations dance.

Symphony

Night waves crash into foam silence

Ebb tide sings invisible musical interlude

How it feels after Kampot cement, cycles, horns,

Symphonies of process down all the days

Winging free swiftlets sky

The sea churned all day

Blue green

Fragments of gray blue clouds cover a thin horizon line

Near horizon it was purple

Silver ran inland to meet green blue floating waves

Energy flows toward white brown sand rolling energy

Created banks of white waves

Whitecaps roll tumble crash curl wearing atoms and molecules

A gentle mixture of force and calm eases into sand land

A band of sunset pink tongued with purple sails west into high cumulus

Beach town quiet

Growing empty at May’s end

Long mass of gray clouds dances on horizon

Light fades as swimmers run jump dive into waves

Beach walkers stare inland

Their eyes are lost if they see sea

It’s too much to comprehend

Too vast

Too immense beautiful and complete

Clouds gather mass

Rain song

Waves curl dance

Empty beach

Sandcastles

Meditation

In dreams begin responsibility – W.B. Yeats

*

Grow Your Soul - Poems from Laos & Cambodia

Author Page

Up River

Banlung is a gateway to isolated animist villages up river. The Tonle Srepok River is the river of darkness. The Apocalypse Now river.

The river overflowed with extended tedious years of silence singing a slow meandering song before being punctuated by random acts of violence, gunfire, and exploding land mines swallowing eternal cries for mercy as innocent men, women and children were slaughtered in fields, homes, and villages along twisted dirt jungle paths ...

or murdered inside animist cemeteries wearing crude carved wooden faces remembering the dead with ceremonies, laughter, animal sacrifice and rice wine hearing the low dull roar of high altitude B-52 bombers releasing enraptured napalm canister lightning bolts through clear skies rendering humans, mountains and jungles obsolete, accompanied by the steady rhythm of a girl sawing ice.

Someone said there was a war, she said. My mother saw a plane. She thought it was a bird. She wove the image into indigo cotton with yellow, blue and red silk thread. All the women weave here. Men don’t have the patience. They love hunting and killing.

Mother saw a whirling bird, called a helicopter. She wove it with our traditional motifs of weavers, people carrying water, harvesting, dancing, playing music, sitting, resting, flowers, fields, cows, chickens, ducks, birds, banana and palm trees, rivers, sky and nature. She weaves our long story. Before writing after cutting and selling ice I weave.

Animists believe in the natural world. Every living thing has spirit energy. A shy woman shaman smiled after performing a family ceremony and healing sacrifice near the river. She smeared chicken blood over a sick infant’s stomach. Villagers are superstitious and trusting.

Bored dead eyed humans wandered red dust.

One prolific business in Banlung is mechanical. Along and adjacent to the single east west paved artery were brown wooden homes and shacks of rusting corrugated tin.

Single men or teams of laborious boys hammered, welded, and pried, manipulating iron and steel, adjusting belts, guided grinding gears, solidifying particles, firing cylinders, filing metallic blisters, reworking tired 125cc engines and formatting hard drives as spokes on crude machines sang.

Repair and restoration work implied basic life skills using eye-hand coordination, communication theory modules with colleagues, decipherable brooms, grease, balloons, laughter and a high degree of universal understanding and empathy.

Freedom worked 24/7. Under a broiling sun tempered by a soft breeze they carried buckets of cement over boards, pouring it on red dirt. Freedom shoveled 21 muscular sandy efforts into a wheelbarrow. Freedom pushed it to a new world order construction site filled with profound expectations and poverty’s paradoxes.

After dark Freedom caressed a hungry $10 passive lover inside a plywood shack along a dirt road removed from neon, Zircon and the tooth fairy. Dirt floor, bed, and OK condom.

Her clothes hung on rusty nails embedded in exploitation. Stale perfume, lip-gloss and mascara sang lost memories. Her dead eyes said, plow my field with no emotional connection. She stared at a brick wall as Freedom assaulted heaven’s gate grinding desire.

After 15 minutes longer than forever she joined five girlfriends sitting around a fire below stars. See who shows up, said one, the night’s young. We are tools, said another. We are fools, said one applying gloss. I don’t give a shit, said a sad one remembering her mother and siblings upriver. Fuck it.

The fat male mafia moneyman slouched in a porch hammock watched reality reruns under a red light special.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Author Page

Write

“Write naked. That means to write what you would never say.

“Write in blood. As if ink is so precious you can't waste it.

“Write in exile, as if you are never going to get home again and you have to call back every detail.”

-    Denis Johnson

22

Out past massage girls waiting with white sheets on brown tables under red umbrellas resting on golden sand as floppy hatted cuticle management women walking sand looking for needy nails,

lost fat White Russians slathered on UV 30+ staring inland at young backpackers their eyes down on phones fingers flying TEXT ME lonely baby of my heart soul mind rapture

one lone swimmer back strokes in calm blue green water as a small boat engine hums toward a green forested is-land floating away on the surface of reality inside a dream bubble laughing in the divine mystery

Imagination

Observation

Experience

Present moment

Ink me laughter

Waves light nature's song

Riding a beam of light through space

Tribal energies

1 M

Magic wave light

Wushu movement

Yangon Burma brass bell

Signifies

Present Moment

7

Otres to Kampot adventure

Memory of old yellow hospital

Slow easy corroding iron bridge connects land

Between an object and a concept

Between knowledge and wisdom

French architecture remembers history, families, whispers eyes

Stories inside stories

Where I polished The Language Company at Epic Arts (9-12 a.m.)

& Bliss guesthouse (3-6 p.m.) daily for five months once upon a time

Zen butterfly in slow river town

How's it feel this gentle Tao?

Karen’s touch with conversation’s widow

Splits profits with mama san running the game near old market

Fancy pants decor, tourist souvenirs

Abandoned Art Deco movie theatre

Ha

Feels good exploring Kampot dust

Sensing the transitory beauty

Peace

Secret

Strength

Life

Love

Sorrow

Multiple Selves - We

Keep your own counsel

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can

It’s what you find in the corner

Circus people live on the edge

Sunset swift lets fill orange sky with magic

Mental hypothalamus

Unconscious

Grow Your Soul - Poems from Laos & Cambodia

How many more full moons will you see?