31 flavored daze

yes, exclaimed elf, we made it through march. march was a real adventure.

what did you do, queried weary bleary eyed orphan. 

oh, i had so much fun with the kids, like us. they were young curious playful energetic experiental wild and free.

that's a long verbal sentence, laughed orphan.

life is a long laughing sentence, said elf.

can we go out to play now, asked orphan.

yes, let's take the day off and be creative, said elf.

please give me a hug, said orphan, people need five hugs a day for emotional well being.

elf hugged orphan.

orphan hugged elf.

close march

let's close march, elf said to orphan.

yes, agreed orphan, march is still a day to go such a hot furnace of yellow laos skies as farmers burn fields 

o my yes indeed, agreed elf, all this sticky humid trapped hot air mixed with flying black ashes permeates pristine air water and soil

such a beautiful mess, said orphan donning a cotton gauze multi-threaded mask to prevent malaria and dengue

what's a dengue, wondered elf, scrubbing for an open heart surgical operation in hanoi

it's the fluid relaxation of intellectual reasoning as a shaman mask proclaims, confessing to the world 

see this face

i am you

mi & mo

orphan said to elf, who's the girl with the rose?

mi. she's a black h'mong girl living in remote mountainous sapa, vietnam. she sells hand embroidered work on the street.

the street of dreams? asked orphan. more like mean life blues street, said elf.

she looks happy. 

she is. we should all be so happy.

she and mo her friend met a stranger. they played, laughed and sang together.

it was winter. they shared delicious noodle soup in the market. the girls rent a room with other kid street sellers for $20 a month. they are tough survivors.

their village is far away. like a dream.

do they go to school?

what's a school? their education is on the street. like a dream.

i love the rose.

yes, it's beautiful. everything we love dies. 

do you learn that in school? 

it's something you learn by yourself.

i see.

Walk

"There are some good things to be said about walking.

Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life.

Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who's always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting.

You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated and anyone can transport himself anywhere, instantly. Big deal, Buckminster.

To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me."
- Edward Abbey

marxist elephant control stick

An angry, frustrated, underpaid, undersexed overworked female Vietnamese teacher moonlighting as a paid Communist party member stooge admonishes her pool shark students for breaking the cue ball off green banked walls, Play the angles you idiots! she shouts, elevating her Marxist elephant CONTROL stick, stabbing them, prodding them, driving them forward, accelerating them through educational fields filled with land mines.

She pounds her stick on a bamboo podium to get their attention. She releases her repressed anger and frustration, Your fate is to put up with me! she screams. Students cower behind rote memorization rules named Fear.

Famine survives in green paddies beneath heaven’s gateless gate as emaciated farmers work steaming streaming white oxen past orphaned sex slaves selling bananas, trinkets and skin to lost scared alienated caffeinated satiated rich obese white tourists.

Vegetable lovers sleep on discarded Burmese teak furniture. Across from the restaurant behind a mud spaceship hut is an iridescent dirt playing field and elementary school. Curious disheveled smiling children stare.

In a dusty lot someone squats over a mud toilet. They shit fertilizer 7.5 miles into the center of the Earth creating earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan. Radioactive debris floods the Mississippi Delta singing the blues.