Her chance

the woman at the metro
with a burned leg - you remember her clearly
how she sat after dragging her bad leg
into the car, into the compartment
this image of her
alone
cold
scared
in pain
how did it happen? why is she alone?
on a late night in a flimsy sweater

her skin below the knee
running to her ankle
all burned away
exposing blood red lines

her abstract expression
her sacred scared distracted face
watching night fly past windows
where blue televisions and children kept an eye
on each other

how the woman kept going
on the metro past a stop
where the expensive private hospital on a Roman
hill gleamed its extensive intensive pensive care
ward and her treatment was delayed,
forgotten, useless
here
because she is poor
so she stayed in her seat
anxious now feeling her pain
wondering where she would go
where she would end up on this night

as a stranger studied her anxious, passive
expression feeling burns, violent burns
inside sensations fire and heat
nerve impulses darting through, along sensory
channels where signals are blocked by
neurotransmitters shutting down
her chance

The Burned Woman

He saw her through a window when the metro pulled in.
Alone and cold, she waited for the green metro door to open.
It was late. She wore a thin black sweater and long gray skirt.

She was slight...olive pale skin, black hair pulled back, around 45.
She limped into the car dragging her right foot. Her left foot was normal. Her right foot looked like a case of elephantiasis. She sat twenty feet away.

She bent over and slowly raised her skirt from around her ankles. The burned and bloody skin damage ran three inches across and ten inches high. Either first or second degree burns. A layer of skin was exposed, red, lined with white. Bare and exposed. She needed medical attention.

Two men across from her stared and diverted their eyes.
She sat, fingered a phone and grimaced. No tears, just a stoic face.

The metro rolled through night. It passed a river, a neon bright Everest furniture store, fast food emptiness and an expensive private hospital filled with antiseptics, bandages, lotions and potions and patients with money.

She inspected her ankle, touching an edge of fried skin with a white tissue. Clear cold air sent shivers through her central nervous system shutting down pain receptors.

Peace.

Shame on You!

My name is Li Bow Down and I am in charge of the Tibetan Monastery Re-Education Through Reform (TMRETR) program.

My masters called me out of retirement while I was playing mahjong and enjoying tea with my friends at the Shangri-La resort and told me to get my old ass back to Lhasa and take care of THE problem. Back to the future.

Here's an uncensored image of what we do to people in the TMRETR program. This woman is denouncing her family, friends and most importantly, herself in public. We are big on shame. "Shame on you!" yell the people.

"Shame! shame! shame!"

This is one of our more popular methods of creating a harmonious society. It works wonders, because if memory serves me correctly and it does, mind you, serve me well, we've been coercing people since the Middle Ages, or, to be precise, for the last 5,000 years. Pick your favorite dynasty.

We used to put them in wooden stocks with their crimes painted on paper necklaces and parade them through town.

They confessed. We call it self-criticism, re-education and reform. Big important buzz words.
They were denounced in public. Talk about blatant social disapproval!

Maybe you think I am joking, making this up. Well, I didn't make it to the top of the scrap heap by bowing down to the big nosed foreigners trying to tell me how to maintain control in Tibet and keep the monks and citizens in line.

As you know the monks in Tibet provoked the armed, young, naive, scared People's Reactionary Liberation soldiers on March 10th. The rest is history, well, not really history because we can and do rewrite that when it suits our propaganda purposes. It's so easy and convenient.

Peace.

Metro magic

The Chinese government spin continues in Tibet and now Xinjiang. First the Tibetans and now the Uyghurs. Han economics, heavy handed military police state and repression of human rights.

Here, you are sitting in a blue plastic chair in the metro. It is zooming along above ground through a gray raining morning - the mountains are hiding in clouds, fast moving white above green and down along rocky forested slopes.

You see mosques, spires. You see out. Passengers are, (except for for two cheerful talkative women close to you) cold, distant, lost, bored, going somewhere important. It must be important or else they'd be home, asleep, dreaming inside their magic.

Then, suddenly the metro track slopes down and edges of concrete blur, as the trees disappear and the sky edge becomes indistinct, sliding into darkness as florescent light becomes quick and natural sliding flashes of light
on steel tracks with a long stretch of black
click clack then the station immediately with tiles,
a machine holding bagged sweets.
Women in scarves, eyes downward, heavy territorial shoes,
gripping plastic bags;
a green and yellow uniformed man with a broom
pushes everything
in front of him and the metro automatic voice calls out a place.
Doors open - people in, people out. Doors close.

Enjoy the ride. You're only on it once.

Peace.

Once A Fool...

Greetings,

Here comes the garbage truck! Yes, the overflowing amount of data, information, sludge, grime, slime, prime-time rubbish, lies, distortion, hubris, and unlimited broken dreams is amazing.

Can you say it slowly? A-maze-ing.

What people absorb in their daily diet of propaganda sleaze if you please, is utterly downright incredible.

Consider the old guard in Peking now, for example. The survivors from the Cultural Revolution 1966-1976. They didn't get to their present position by being nice guys all sugar and spice and what not. No, they turned in-on-at-from everyone. They executed their rivals. They saved their thin skin. They purged and regurgitated slogans and harmonious social alphabet soup.

Politics in the BIG C is a deadly game of power and control. The haves and the haves not. Big Brother is watching you. All day and all night. All the time. In your dreams you drag your monkeys through the streets past a pregnant woman on her knees begging for mercy from strangers down at the crossroads.

In China it's all about relationships.

"No class, no struggle," said a Chinese business university student cramming for exams.
"Now it's all about money." In June there will be millions of new graduates chasing hundreds of jobs.

"You should just blend in," said a Chinese teacher to a foreign fool. She was one of them, the informers. He was an untouchable.

The leaders and teeming population are waiting for the imaginary torch of legitimacy, the golden flaming Greek ideal of fair play, old sport, good on ya and razamataz...to begin it's long arduous trek through the hinterlands across 135 countries toward Eversee Everest, the pinnacle of their land grab a bag of bones will ya...no fooling.

Peace.