Quality

Sitting. Doing not doing.

Quality

Past/present/future

Now is eternity

All the unhappy people trapped in vehicles

Laugh with fear, Oh no, you are the teacher (parent #2) we are the student

Forever young

We do our ABCs carefully printing LARGE and small.

Morning light rainbow diamonds dance

On the table

Afternoon light shimmers ice crystals

Lying on broken pavement reflecting

Brilliant light dissolving

Perception

Brain filters sensory data to survive

Is it safe?

Ephemeral data structure dissolves in the wake up

Man becomes rational

Experience primitive rich sparkling flood of senses as kids DO

Until normal training and conditioning closes door on other world for good

Feeling synchronicity

No cause and effect

Eye of beholder becomes an integral part of experiment

Microcosm of entire universe

Man is an atom in a molecule in a fingernail of a giant being

Einstein: see you are all part of a fingernail

Grasp the structure of the entire fingernail

Part of the pattern

It’s a comedy

Quality

Heart-mind

No Matter

Energy

Play chess with a French woman in a bookstore

Burma

*

Grow Your Soul

Bell

Iceman rings a bell pushing orange wheel cart down Dream Street in Kampot.

He survived The Dark Years ('75-79)

No one ate ice cream then

They ate death, fear, suspicion, doubt, uncertainty

Rice and fish paste if they were lucky
He is lucky to have survived

Now he wanders the river town

Ringing a bell

Enlightenment echoes through hearts minds souls
Survivors cherish bell’s memory music

Flowers at pagoda whisper laughter
Respect love courage dignity compassion

Meditation
Poem nature symbolic butterflies

Silence

Void wheelchair fate
Wheel of Life eats anger greed ignorance

One Hundred Aspects of the Moon - Yoshitoshi

Clowns live on the moon
Flaneur - the sacred prostitution of the soul

Projections of shadow self
Time
Space
Matter
Energy

Being

You are an experiment of the universe with a free will.

Grow Your Soul - Author page

Tantric Eye

Living in Utopia, Leo carried buckets of night soil or shit. It was the price he paid for questioning Authority.

-why, do we have to read the little red book, it’s mush for pigs, he asked Authority.

-because you are a tool of the state, said Authority.

-this shit stinks.

-here, said Authority. Carry some more.

After that melancholy loss Leo didn’t take shit from anybody. He burned through levels of existence as an exiled ghost. He slept with shamans in cemeteries.

He didn’t suffer from PTSD. He didn’t prowl life’s perimeter at midnight with bandoliers of munitions and Howling Wolf, his M-16 on full automatic. He wasn’t a suicide bomber hijacking ambulances in Gaza or Baghdad or Karachi or Damascus.

He wasn’t blowing up cafes in Haifa or Spanish trains of thought watching children and adults fly through the air with the greatest of ease in the Greatest Show on Earth. He did not attend flight training school in Florida on a secret mission of revenge and miraculous destiny.

Being a worthy asset with nonofficial cover he was quieter than a mouse. The second mouse gets the cheese. He disembarked, disabled, distributed, declassified, delineated, discussed, and detonated unconscious trip wires. He was a silent night hymn, a predator practicing silence and cunning with his tantric eye wide open.

I am a camera, he said to Ice Girl. Like you I see the big picture. We are ahead of the future. Wandering storytellers accepted my willingness to walk point. It was the Tao of insight, intuitive friendship and leadership. I don’t sweat the small stuff.

It’s all small stuff, she said. God, the Devil and Allah are in the details. Checkmate, said Death.

In Cadiz, Spain a well-dressed bald man with Gypsy blood wearing polished black wing tipped shoes used the financial section of a daily rag proclaiming a 33% unemployed human statistic to collect his dog’s shit off a Roman cobblestone chessboard. He dumped it into a metal trash basket nailed to a postmodern yellow splattered wall.

Five minutes later an obsessive-compulsive cleaning woman in her ground floor flat yelled, “What’s that smell?”    

“History.”

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

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

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

Fear is ignorance.

Ice Girl in Banlung - Author Page

Dance Wing

Butterfly shadows dance in your face
Street theater drama

Feed Me
said the capable girl of 7 in her blue skirt school uniform

to a parent or teacher telling her what to think

sitting on a cement Vietnamese bench
surrounded by green plants and yellow flowers swirling

bakery aromas of baguettes

French dialect dependency waited for her dwindling courage
Draw the future
Poetry sits with sea sky blue
Black swift lets
Dance wing
Saliva
Bird’s nest soup
Delicacy
Negotiate clouds

Calligraphy
Cut up
Less is more
Old man’s face carries future of child innocence
beauty
clean pure radiant

luminous
Dream Sweeper
Kep ocean songbird waves islands
sky rain sings green blue purple
white yellow gray sheets
clouds dance

Space is geography
Time is history
Bird song sings wings

A dying caged bird sings Goodbye Blue Sky - I never knew you ...

Grow Your Soul

Author Page

Up River

Banlung is a gateway to isolated animist villages up river. The Tonle Srepok River is the river of darkness. The Apocalypse Now river.

The river overflowed with extended tedious 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 wooden faces remembering the dead with ceremonies, laughter, animal sacrifice and rice wine hearing the low dull roar of high altitude B-52 bombers releasing enraptured napalm canister lightning bolts through clear skies rendering humans, mountains and jungles obsolete, accompanied by the steady rhythm of a girl sawing ice.

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.

Mother saw a whirling bird, called a helicopter. She wove it with our traditional motifs of weavers, people carrying water, harvesting, dancing, playing music, sitting, resting, flowers, fields, cows, chickens, ducks, birds, banana and palm trees, rivers, sky and nature. She weaves our long story. Before writing after cutting and selling ice I weave.

Animists believe in the natural world. Every living thing has spirit energy. A shy woman shaman smiled after performing a family ceremony and healing sacrifice near the river. She smeared chicken blood over a sick infant’s stomach. Villagers are superstitious and trusting.

Bored dead eyed humans wandered red dust.

One prolific business in Banlung is mechanical. Along and adjacent to the single east west paved artery were brown wooden homes and shacks of rusting corrugated tin.

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

Freedom worked 24/7. Under a broiling sun tempered by a soft breeze they carried buckets of cement over boards, pouring it on red dirt. Freedom shoveled 21 muscular sandy efforts into a wheelbarrow. Freedom pushed it to a new world order construction site filled with profound expectations and poverty’s paradoxes.

After dark Freedom caressed a hungry $10 passive lover inside a plywood shack along a dirt road removed from neon, Zircon and the tooth fairy. Dirt floor, bed, and OK condom.

Her clothes hung on rusty nails embedded in exploitation. Stale perfume, lip-gloss and mascara sang lost memories. Her dead eyes said, plow my field with no emotional connection. She stared at a brick wall as Freedom assaulted heaven’s gate grinding desire.

After 15 minutes longer than forever she joined five girlfriends sitting around a fire below stars. See who shows up, said one, the night’s young. We are tools, said another. We are fools, said one applying gloss. I don’t give a shit, said a sad one remembering her mother and siblings upriver. Fuck it.

The fat male mafia moneyman slouched in a porch hammock watched reality reruns under a red light special.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Author Page