Metro Casket Express - TLC 43

The five-car Express pulled into the central underground Ankara station every midnight.

On the Departures platform were 1,001 soldier boys in pitted iron helmets carrying black gas masks, silver water canteens, golden rucksacks and rusty rifles.

David carried a slingshot.

A sergeant-at-arms played a bagpipe dirge.

The Arrivals platform fronted 1,001 weeping women.

The women, informed by a faceless totalitarian desk jockey handed the inevitable task of notifying next-to-skin, came to claim. Wives, mothers, daughters and sisters wept for death.

Orange and black doors opened on both sides. Soldiers rammed spines to attention eyes straight ahead. Scottish notes reverberated off tiled walls.

Each car held 1,001 wooden caskets. Boy-men spit on hands hauled them out and stacked them below Big Brother Is Watching You eye-spy cameras.

Weeping mothers, daughters and sisters surged forward fighting and grasping. Women rummaged in caskets seeking clarification: an I.D., a photo, a necklace, a ring, a shred of admissible evidence, a glass eye, a visual epiphany. A memory.

A woman keened, “Where are you now my blue-eyed son...my darling young one...”

This captivated an audience of transparent inoculated passive ambivalent idle Turkish bureaucrats hiding behind piles of shredded fake treaties with ISIS, Greece, Armenia, Israel, Iraq, Syria and 49.5% of the Turkish population among falsified bills of lading for African ivory, Burmese jade, Iranian oil, Central Asian natural gas and sleeping tigers.

Men finished unloading caskets. Women scavenged.

Boy soldiers sang, “We’re off to the Kurdish/Syrian twilight zone to meet our destiny. Front and center, Sir.”

They marched into cars. Doors closed. It departed.

Despondent wives, mothers, sisters, grandmothers, daughters and strangers waved goodbye. Women dragged caskets home for a broken hearted family farewell before carrying them to a cemetery to join a woman drumming soil and watering roses with her tears.

A gravedigger spit on his hands. My job is never finished.

The Language Company

landmine survivor

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

Lao Please Don’t Rush is the most heavily bombed country in history.

25% of villages in Laos are contaminated with UXO.

Upwards of 30% of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to detonate.

80 million unexploded bombs remain in Laos.

More than half of the UXO victims are children.

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

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

Fear is ignorance.

A Century is Nothing 

trust

Sanitation workers in green

Environmental vests

With broom music swept streets for Lunar New Year.

Make it new. Day by day. Make it new.

We should be so lucky to have crystal clean sheets.

Every day is anew year.

One day is like a minute.

One minute is like a day.

That's relativity. All my relatives are dead.

Never trust an atom. They make up everything.

When you know what you don't know you realize moral character with social intelligence, integrity, and courage.

Courage is an unknown word in our head and heart.

Running away is our way. Survival.

Everyday I have the blues. No one loves me but my mother and she could've been lying too.

name

"What can you do. You get a name, and it stays that way for the rest of your life. And if at some point you go for a walk in the woods, and someone takes a photo of you, then for the next eighty years you're always walking in the woods. There's nothing you can do about it."

 - Thomas Bernhard  Read more…

go up river

It is a gateway toward isolated animist villages up river. Up the Tonle Srepok River.

The Apocalypse Now river.

The river overflowed with extended tedious boring 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 faces remembering the dead with ceremonies, laughter, sacrifice and rice wine, hearing the low dull roar of high altitude bombers releasing enraptured napalm canister lightning bolts through clear skies rendering burning mountains and jungles obsolete, accompanied by the steady rhythm of a girl sawing ice.

Her frozen bright future dream evaporated.

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.

She saw a whirling bird, a helicopter. She wove it along with our traditional motifs; weavers, people carrying water, harvesting, dancing, sitting, resting, flowers, fields, cows, chickens, ducks, birds, banana and palm trees, rivers, sky and nature. She weaves our long story. I weave after ice.

Animist village people believe in the natural world. Every living thing has spirit energy.

A shy local woman shaman smiled after performing a family ceremony healing sacrifice. She’d smeared chicken blood over a sick infant’s stomach. Village people are superstitious and trust her.

Bored dead eyed humans wandered red dust down river in Banlung.

One prolific business in town is mechanical. Along and adjacent to the one east west paved artery are huts and shacks of rough brown wooden slats and rusting corrugated tin.

Single men or teams of laborious boys hammered, welded, pried, manipulating iron and steel, adjusting belts, guided grinding gears, solidifying particles, firing cylinders, filing metallic blisters, reworking tired 125 cc 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.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Village shaman.