mouthful of pay

The publishing world is a crapshoot, said literary Agent Orange. A casino. After expanding the narrative working the brothel angle give me mythical cold blooded sadistic mega maniacs, corrupt politicians, civil servants, millions of poorly paid laconic Asian teachers, nurses, doctors and financially motivated international bankers, politicians practicing fraud, sexual harassment and NGO graft under the auspices of organized crime charities.

Give me gloom and doom global financial collapse with character arc de triumph and a fairy tale happy ending with revolutionary caviar and champagne.

Establish a narrative flow line where heroes or heroines conquer their unconscious fears, demons and symbolic metaphorical archetypes.

Keep it simple. Woman writer meets man. Woman faces obstacles: ice, money, sex, love, compromising her values, morals, ethics, principles, publishing her story etc.

Woman loses man. Woman sells more ice, gets more money, fucks man out of loneliness during a 5-year courtship, (he will save me) discovers blind love exchanging one form of volunteered slavery for another. Man promises her BIG money.

With resignation she gets engaged accepting that sex business is money business. She keeps writing. She sends her story out. She becomes an independent author/publisher after multiple orgasms and form rejections from blind agents. The independent woman gets her man. She introduces man to her poor family and eleven siblings. Family demands $5k as a minimum down payment. She is a valuable child bearing resource and baby production machine.

They give their daughter an engagement t-shirt.

My body is a work of art.

It’s for sale and it ain’t cheap.

Man facing family greed suffers an internal crisis of fear, uncertainty and doubt. He agrees. He goes to the crossroads at midnight. He sells his soul to the d-evil. If you want to play you have to pay.

Man pays for family engagement party. Man pays local greasy greedy officials for marriage approval documents. Man pays local shaman for blessing. Man pays for her sibling’s education. They are excited to learn how to read. Man pays for a water pump. Man pays for solar panels. Man pays for her grandparent’s medicine. Man pays for rice seeds, rabbits, vegetables. For eternity.

Parents give expensive village party impressing everyone how rich and popular they are with gleaming scheming status. Mother coerces daughter to produce many children and propitiate their poverty cycle. Give us someone to love. Someone who will work, breed and get slaughtered. Someone to take care of us. Someone to bury us.

Someone to feed us incense, said dead relative ghosts.

Ice Girl in Banlung

her eyes are the world

A voice was missing.

Dozing, it concealed inherent pixel images of sad-eyed curious Chinese children trapped behind educational gates near women struggling behind plows and oxen or bent over Butterfly sewing machines threading conversations and manufacturing tongues in Maija village shoe factories years away from wealthy cities and dummies in display windows. 

One joy was selecting the cover photograph. The girl’s image expressed emotional honesty with natural innocence.

She was trapped behind a hard steel grate-full educational reality.

Her eyes held world secrets and unlimited potential. She’d stared at a professional stranger and an aberration in her universe. Her sisters and schoolmates pushed against her. She was trapped against a locked gate. He was on the other side.

He raised a small black machine to his eye. She heard a subtle click. A shutter opened and closed freezing time, capturing her soul on a memory-fiction card. He smiled, thanked her and disappeared.

She had no way to know her child eyes would grace a book cover for everyone to see, breathing her immortality in alchemical manifestations.

He’d visited her primary school speaking strange unintelligible words and singing and dancing.

His laughter and smiles were a relief for the kids after the autocratic, punishing manner of bored illiterate women teachers. They didn't want to be prisoners 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, fear and shame ordered from Beijing well removed from a world where farmers followed oxen in rice paddies.

Green rice stalks revealed their essence below a blue sky in mud and meadows of reality.

A Century is Nothing

short odds

kick boxers attack green mangoes

chopping white ice while

shifting gears after school in wind

cradled infants

dying of malnutrition

wail at the cambodian hospital

for a free blue placebo pill

(an orange pill is $1.50)

smelling charcoal fired waffles

a boy pedals his bike seeking

recycled trash

before wicker baskets say hello

spare change searches for user value

collecting cardboard images in a squall

red ink meets onion paper at an intersection

whispering secrets without speaking 

Reading in Mandalay

notes from nepal

Tibetan energies. Joy. Laughter.

This joy - new beginning - transformation.

Empty/full.

At this very moment  they look and leave.

Abstract metaphorical language.

Non-attachment.

Ink whispers it's secrets of silent mystery where life is found in a desperate situation.

Balancing precariously.

Young boys stare at a scriptor.

The blind lead the blind.

Everything is Under Construction at the Source.

The vast self.

Existential awareness.

Cessation of sensation and perception.

It's a walking meditation.

Rivers, like people, only know why they were born when they reach the end.

Poverty and illiteracy. I work, I breed, I get slaughtered.

Imagined or invented conversations and episodes.

Fiction is a tool for unveiling, not obscuring the truth.

Literary fiction expounds historical truth.

The necessity of that moral choice.

Bookends of Bhaktapur. In between 90 years/moments. 90 breaths.

Non-attachment.

Sitting.

Awareness of energies.

Fleeting impressions. Images tell visual stories.

Illuminate expand invent.

Passing through.

Light, bell, crow morning. Laughing sparrow. Little wing.

Translations, transitions, transformations.

Zen path. Diamond in mind.

Haiku.

Short, fast and deadly.

Boudhanath, Nepal

Lhasa

Intention

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

The hardest thing to do in life is to do nothing with intention as it takes the most out of you as a person mentally and physically.

Some people say nothing exists. I do nothing everyday.

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

One day he brought me apples, oranges and mangoes. He spoke with non-speech. He imagines our passion is a glimmer of potential emotional security in the long now. Inside my deep-eyed mischief, strangers comfort each other without discrimination.

I am a singularity.

Sensing passion we decipher riddles forecasting speechless tongues. We accept mindfulness with gratitude in quicksilver’s desperate wandering. Boredom carves a niche in my soul.

He is a Lone Wolf with a variant of DNA comprehending my inherent instinctive needs. I hang laundry near the street.

Memory’s lie is tempered by talking monkeys. Two boys harvest trash. One barefoot boy plays silent music with a long thin bamboo fiber. The other carries a plastic bag, twirling a walking stick used for prodding garbage.

Local people mill around. Milling around is an art form. They exist with a pure innocent childlike wisdom. Passive is their inherent Buddhist nature. They’ve suppressed their ego. Ease god out.

Others voice imaginary alien freedom ideas. I am an Other. I live in my heart-mind luminous universe.

A sofa on wheels with a roof towed by a motorcycle carries fat white Europeans to see 9th century Angkor temples. A young handicapped man named Eternity wearing his new skin-tight artificial plastic left leg and foot shuffles through dust. He walks home. It is everywhere and nowhere. You can’t go home again.

I don’t know where the real ends and the artificial begins.

My lover-friend was away for six weeks. He brought me pineapples, a yellow mango and passion fruit. I washed clothes in my silent world. My hair tinted golden hued. 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 intention. Our private time contains no fear. It is a gentle passion, soft and slow. My awareness is trust and authenticity. I am resigned to remembering everything.

I paint my nails a shade of red-pink. My old thin brown fingers are tired after a day scrubbing clothes. My infinite silent no voice is all. He watches my intense angelic face focus on nails. One-by- one. My heart understands his sense of eternal loss.

I sign: I hate the French spies next door. He and his fat wife run a restaurant. He spies for Thorny. They are creeps. Before he left Thorny gave me money to stop doing massage. I agreed. The spies keep an eye on me.

In my silence only my voice is missing.