Bell

Once upon a time in a green garden of light speckled green, shadows danced on silent red flagstones.

A bird in a mango tree sang about freedom, sky, friendship and dreams of peace.

A brown leaf departed the tree of life fluttering, singing, dancing down all the days ... reaching earth.

A green brown lizard sat quiet and calm.

A woman in yellow sitting on a cement bench stared through the quadrant of stone slats toward the law offices.

She has no concrete idea what goes on in there other than people paper and conversations about issues and matters she doesn't understand or comprehend because she showed up on the back of a motorcycle from an obliterated distant village and perhaps it's a member of her surviving family in there or a stranger from another galaxy - a time traveller disguised as a homo sapien wearing a tie ...

Another leaf leaves the tree of life in a wild flight of confusion and joy ...

Discussing Ukrainian war crimes, a slow genocide as 4,000,000 refugees struggle forward with babies and the elderly whispering, singing, telling stories about new futures all bright and beautiful in their lives after leaving everything behind, all the fear nourished by desperation and fate.

The woman on the bench feels a soft breeze and hears a small bell ringing as a woman pushes her ice cream cart along pavement. Both women smell the fragrance of purple yellow white orchids and they know everything will be peaceful. One day.

The bell's melancholy echo is long ago and far away.

Ukraine light, strength, courage, humanity, peace.

Tantric Eye

Living in Utopia, Leo carried buckets of night soil or shit. It was the price he paid for questioning Authority.

-why, do we have to read the little red book, it’s mush for pigs, he asked Authority.

-because you are a tool of the state, said Authority.

-this shit stinks.

-here, said Authority. Carry some more.

After that melancholy loss Leo didn’t take shit from anybody. He burned through levels of existence as an exiled ghost. He slept with shamans in cemeteries.

He didn’t suffer from PTSD. He didn’t prowl life’s perimeter at midnight with bandoliers of munitions and Howling Wolf, his M-16 on full automatic. He wasn’t a suicide bomber hijacking ambulances in Gaza or Baghdad or Karachi or Damascus.

He wasn’t blowing up cafes in Haifa or Spanish trains of thought watching children and adults fly through the air with the greatest of ease in the Greatest Show on Earth. He did not attend flight training school in Florida on a secret mission of revenge and miraculous destiny.

Being a worthy asset with nonofficial cover he was quieter than a mouse. The second mouse gets the cheese. He disembarked, disabled, distributed, declassified, delineated, discussed, and detonated unconscious trip wires. He was a silent night hymn, a predator practicing silence and cunning with his tantric eye wide open.

I am a camera, he said to Ice Girl. Like you I see the big picture. We are ahead of the future. Wandering storytellers accepted my willingness to walk point. It was the Tao of insight, intuitive friendship and leadership. I don’t sweat the small stuff.

It’s all small stuff, she said. God, the Devil and Allah are in the details. Checkmate, said Death.

In Cadiz, Spain a well-dressed bald man with Gypsy blood wearing polished black wing tipped shoes used the financial section of a daily rag proclaiming a 33% unemployed human statistic to collect his dog’s shit off a Roman cobblestone chessboard. He dumped it into a metal trash basket nailed to a postmodern yellow splattered wall.

Five minutes later an obsessive-compulsive cleaning woman in her ground floor flat yelled, “What’s that smell?”    

“History.”

“Are you with us?” pleaded a Cambodian landmine 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 landmines from forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate 110 million landmines 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.

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

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

Fear is ignorance.

Ice Girl in Banlung - Author Page