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Entries in river (21)

Saturday
Jun052021

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

 

Wednesday
May272020

Experiment

Create like a god, order like a king, work like a slave

Work like you don’t need the money

Love like your heart’s never been broken

Dance like nobody’s looking

I am a short story

You are a novel

 Her Zen like awareness

Stoic serene

Shamanic wisdom seeks wisdom

Wabi-sabi

Everything I do is an experiment

Create happy little accidents

There are no mistakes in art

Art is what everything else is not

Laughter medicine

Spill letters words phrases sentences

Chinese financed damns block flow

(One damn on the Nam Ou River north of Luang Prabang)

+

Sell electricity to Thailand

Lights are on and nobody's home

Lao suffer land fish loss

Environmental damage, economic stress

Downstream in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam

60 million people struggle to survive

Rapid spray...fresh air skin laughter

After she stopped crying

The lonely woman

Killed herself

Where is my face, said her mask

Eating her face


Waif on her own walks along Mekong

In a flow state

Bare structure angular momentum

Ballet dancer on point

Permanently poised

Dance energy sways hips

Shift down all the days walking a gentle rolling

Wu-Wei

    Live your story

Welcome to Earth

Grow Your Soul

Friday
Aug032018

River

A river sang
Please don't push me

You can't push me
You can't step in me twice
You can try
Everyone fails

I am from the source
Consider my source
When you drink me

Tibetan clouds obscure granite peaks
Climb high

Humans carry a short life on their back
Women wear love's labor
Feeling a child's warmth behind them
Harvest

Heartbeats mingle
Possibilities and potentials
Dreaming their long walk through jungles forests along a river

Be a river
Below the surface of appearances

Crescent yellow moon
Reflects hello dream

Dance on my surface
I am a mirror

Beauty before me
Beauty behind me
Beauty to my left
Beauty to my right
Beauty below me
Beauty above me

I am wide deep
I flow forever

No beginning no end

Are your needs being met

Mountain asked River
In the stream of life
Flow

Thursday
Mar222018

World Poetry Day

Language river

Brown life highway

Mountain silent

Clouds fly around

Here we go

Thursday
Jan042018

Chimaera - Ice Girl

Chapter 25. (The Beginning)

Dawn light greeted green jungles along Heart of Darkness. A Banlung mother sawed ice into manageable chunks as glistening elements dripped moisture into dust.

  Women swept red dust in front of wooden doors up and down a red road.

  Four-foot long blocks of ice were loaded on antique battered black and red motorcycles driven by delivery boys wearing baseball caps with glittering golden stars.

  Ice lives and dies every morning. Sun makes ice cry.

After school the mother’s daughter saws ice using a rusty serrated blade rescued from a genocide ordeal.

  What are you doing? Leo asked.

  Rita smiled. I am a seller pronounced with confidence.

  She opened an orange box. She picked up a chunk of white ice in her left hand, cradling it inside a blue cloth. She slammed a hammer on ice. It cracked.

Fissures of released refracted pressure, jagged lines, imperfect beautiful white lightning spread deep inside ice. She held global warming in her left hand. She smashed it with all her power and strength fragmenting ice, floe chips and elemental particles.

  A piece of cold sharp ice pierced Leo’s left eye. The sensation of pain was minimal, immediate and cushioned by the delicious cold feeling of ice melting through a retina, cones, rods, a pupil, nerve endings, frontal lobe, cerebral tissue, and layers of tissue, altering his visual organic sense as ice light transmitted new electric signals from rerouted optic nerves to the cerebral cortex following a path of synapses. 

  Leo’s enhanced visual acuity reflected everything. The stimulant was all. The world is made of ice, he reflected, seeing crystals shimmering in ice mirror kaleidoscopes.

Illusions of truth, suffering and drama danced. Long jagged beautiful sparkling universes emitted glowing crystal rivers. The world is ice. Everything he saw, heard, touched, tasted and felt was ice.

  A sibylline language of clarity.

  She dropped the small block of ice back in the box. Collecting chips in a glass, she added fresh thick brown coffee, sweet condensed milk extract, a straw and a spoon. She handed it to Leo.

  Here, you look tired and thirsty. 

  I am. Thanks. I’ve been walking all day. It’s delicious.

  She bagged a block of ice and handed it to a cycle man. He handed her crumbled Real notes.

  She sawed in oppressive heat.

  You are a good seller, said Leo.

  Yes, I am, she said. I greet the buyer and sell. I cut. I bag. I talk. I sell. Ice is moving. What’s your name? Where are you going?

  My name is Leo. I am walking down this red dusty road. See where it takes me. One life, no plan, many adventures. What’s your name?

  Chimaera, she said, handing him diamonds.

  The road is a river, she said. Like a human’s life it doesn’t know why it is born until it reaches the end. 

  This is the day of my dreams.

Ice Girl in Banlung