ears

I can’t hear them. It’s a blessing. I read lips screaming I want food. I want love. I want education. I want medicine.

I had a dream.

A grandfather in Laos is an idiot. He runs his calibrated truck. It’s his solace. I love the smell of pollution on Sunday morning. His daughter burns plastic trash. Parents and children inhale fumes. Ancestor worship.

In Vietnam it’s incense. In Laos it’s exhaust and burning plastic. In Cambodia it’s cow shit.

Youngsters respect their elders. Shut your mouth. Do not say anything to venerable grandfather. Birds sing with hammers. I feel vibrations.

Their traditional silence kills them softly. Truth is a powerful weapon. Most people are afraid of truth. Hearing, speaking, realizing truth entails risk. Daring is not fatal. Truth is a deaf mute seer in Cambodia.

Everything here is a secret. Shhh fingers on my lips. I am secretly married to a false dream of going to Australia with Thorny. He is 50, married with family there. He works for an NGO in Cambodia. He builds fake bamboo homes. He plays my father figure and rescuer. 

calm joy

My lover-friend brought me pineapples, a yellow mango and passion fruit.

He was away for six weeks. I wash clothes in my silent world.

My hair is tinted golden hued now. I am ebullient. He touched my spine. Soft. I turned, smiling. 

My silent world and calm joy are disguised potentials. We share a silent clear understanding.

Our private time has no fear, no hurry. It is a gentle passion. This is my awareness of our connection on a heart-mind level of trust and authenticity. I am resigned to remembering. 

I paint my nails a shade of red-pink.

My old thin brown fingers are tired after a day washing clothes. My infinite silence no voice is all. He watches my intense angelic face focus on nails. One by one. My heart understands his sense of loss. Accept loss forever. 

one chinese girl

One joy about self publishing was selecting the cover photograph.

Her image spoke emotional honesty. She was trapped behind the steel grate, a hard grey Chinese educational formation of her childhood in the poor village of Maija in a remote area near the university. Her eyes held world secrets and potential.

She stared at the man, a stranger, a diversion in her universe. Her sisters and schoolmates pushed against her. She was trapped against the gate. It was locked. He was on the other side.

 He held a small black machine up to his eye. She heard a click. The shutter opened and closed, trapping time, trapping her image on a memory card. He smiled, thanked her and disappeared on his dirty black mountain bike.

She had no way of knowing. Her image finding a book cover. Her child eyes there for everyone to see. Stories about stories and the girl in some alchemical manifestation lived breathing and aware of her immortality. 

He’d visited her primary school to sing and dance. Speaking strange unintelligible words. His laughter and kindness were a relief after the autocratic, punishing manner of bored illiterate women teachers. They didn't want to be here any more than the kids.

No one had a choice here. You did what you were told to do in a harmonious society filled with social stability ordered from Beijing.

A long distant dream far away from a poor village where people tilled soil following oxen in dirt, mud and rice paddies. 

artificial

We decipher riddles, forecast speechless tongues sensing passion.

We accept ignorance in quicksilver’s desperate wandering. Boredom carves a niche in a soul. 

I hang laundry near the street. Memory is tempered by the slow heat of talking monkeys. Two boys walk past harvesting trash. One barefoot boy plays silent music with a long thin bamboo fiber.

The other twirls a walking stick carrying a plastic bag. His stick is used for prodding bags and garbage.

Local people mill around. Bored. They exist in their adolescent immature childlike wisdom. Passive is their inherent religious cultural nature. 

Others voice imaginary alien freedom concepts. 

A sofa attached to a roof towed by a motorcycle carries fat white Europeans to see 9th century temples.

A young man named Eternity wearing his new skin tight artificial plastic leg and artificial plastic left foot shuffles through dust. 

i am a slave

He realizes through my movements I was born to dance. 

My gratitude is stillness. There is a big difference between sitting still and doing nothing. 

I smell roses. I swallow fresh orange juice. I engage all my senses in direct, immediate experience. He cannot save me from my destiny. He can only allow the process to open.

He talks to me with non-speech one overcast day. He brought me apples, oranges and mangoes. He pretends our passion is a glimmer of want’s potential desire in the long now.

Inside my deep eyes, a mischief of strangers comfort each other without discrimination. 

I am a singularity.