Deeper

‘Quick! Into the tunnels!’

They sat sweltering, crying, still. Hearing the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel and iron napalm canisters thudded, this tremor, shredding forests, fields, homes danced into flames. Heat soared over tunnels bathing them in sweat. They went deeper. Deeper, following hollow carved earth trails. The earth swallowed their breath, their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.

The sweet silence, save all the crying and wounded after all the foreign devils packed and left, fleeing in terror as peasants streamed down from the mountains, out of caves and tunnels, poling rivers, attempting to escape, walking on water, drinking all the oceans in their creation myth, draining lands of blood, driving them into the sea. A blue green sea danced red.

This easing down of their voice flowing between crumbling sand, crushed red bricks laid haphazard. Cement walls blocked everything but the sound of their anger, frustration and repressed bitterness in life’s twisted fateful reality.

Their memory was a fiction and this fiction created their memory.  

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