Banlung Poem

Her New World Order
t-shirt danced past...

a woman with basket of bread
a woman gently slicing then chopping bacon
a woman scaling silver fish

a woman dividing coconuts
an old woman negotiating passages with her begging bowl
a man carrying bananas on his thin back
a woman fingering REAL notes

lost humans inspecting hope despair laughter and song

girls doing a pedicure
a woman polishing red apples

shadows dancing with impermanence
spoons stabbing ice
glittering silver stars on a headscarf

reflecting elegant universe

Grow Your Soul

Take Amazing Risks

After Ankara he’d accepted a new adventure in Bursa. This shocked everyone in the capital lower case. They assumed he’d stay with them forever. Students and teachers celebrated his transition with a sparkling cake. Women cried sadness and joy.

“We are not here for a long time, we are here for a good time,” said Sappho the poetess.

One adult student who’d articulated her desire to move to Constantinople during the Ottoman Empire seeking an educational engineering job in a quality control factory school producing obedient robotic idiot children and live with her boyfriend cowered behind her futile quest for independence from over-protective parents. “My father won’t let me.”

“Take control of your life. Get a grip. Let go. Jump. Discover courage and your wings on the way down.”

*

“To do amazing things you have to take amazing risks and suffer greatly,” said Zeynep, his five-year old genius friend in Bursa, Turkey.

 “Here,” she said, “many a-dolts stay with their mothers forever and a day because they are afraid of freedom and accepting responsibility for their lives.

“They eat fear morning noon and night. They are afraid to speak their honest feelings, to express their innate desire for independence.

“They are willing victims of traditional conservative attitudes and values. Free will is a foreign language. They are scared of taking risks, letting go and growing. I may grow old but I’ll never grow up. If I grow up I die.”

“I feel the same way.”

One day while sharing lunch and drawing in notebooks, he said, “When I was 9 I was going on 50. Now I am 50 going on 9. I exist outside adult time.”

“We are passing through,” she said, lighting a candle in darkness.

Weaving A Life (V4)

The Language Company

Northern Laos

Lukas From Holland

A Siem Reap street juggler balanced a flaming stick on his nose.

Tourists owed and awed.

A traveler spread thirty watercolor pens on a table.

“Here.”

“Can I use them,” said Lukas.

“Yes you may. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Color your dreams.”

Lukas drew two blue dragons and some red slashes.

“The top one is the dragon elephant. This one on the bottom can fly. Between them is a dead fish. They are fighting over it.”

“Why are they fighting?”

“They are hungry dragons.”

Lukas drew another fish outside the battle.

“This fish likes hamburgers.”

*

"What happens to dreams The Sweeper collects?”

“They are sorted by type, category, allegory, myth, metaphor, galaxy, nebula, genus, species, phylum, irrationality and coherent sublime scientific symbolic meaning.

Word dreams live in vignettes, jazz poems, epilogues, prologues, blog slogs, musical incantations, rain drops, beads of sweat, blood, bleached human bones,

Sumerian script and 26,000-year old Paleolithic cave paintings near Benaojan, Spain

hearing hollow bells ring high ring low as a Cambodian boy in satori clapping with one hand drags his cart along fractured dusty red roads collecting cardboard. Dawn to dusk.

Composing musical symphonies he squeezes a plastic bottle expelling stale air

attracting garbage contributors and hungry literary agents in a traditional publishing casino wheeling and dealing for their glorious 15%.”

The Language Company

Writers On Steroids

“Ok,” I said to the Senate Committee investigating Writers On Steroids in Room 2143 of the grand facade off Bluejay Way. They stared at me with jaundiced eyes. They shuffled paper. An old tottering fool of a Grand Inquisitor pounded his gavel.

I remembered him from the McCarthy Era and feared the worst.

“You are accused of taking steroids to enhance your writing performance. We have evidence from editors, hacks and wan-ta-na-bees that you and perhaps thousands of your ilk slaving away like drones in the dungeons of mediocrity, dreams, illusions and journalistic heaven on word machines have boosted your word output through the use of banned, I repeat, banned substances. Say it isn’t so, say it’s all a lie, a misconception, hearsay. What say you?”

I took a drink of pure spring water from mysterious unfiltered Alaskan lakes. A naked trout started dancing on the table in front of me and I laughed.

“Ha, you're joking aren't you?” I stuttered, spitting water all over the microphone. It shorted out and I was forced to use my voice minus amplification.

“Of course I sue steroids, why, in fact, in truth of fact and fiction I sear the meat on your grill with my defamatory remarks. The pills are beautiful and come in a variety of colors, like rainbows. They open doors of perception with wonder, shock and awe. I have irrefutable evidence that your committee grooved the approval of these pharmaceutical delights thanks to the huge financial contribution by multinational drug companies to keep you in office. It's well known this country, let alone sports heroes have been programmed to ingest chemicals.”

I jumped on the table with the naked trout and started yelling. “We are ALL filled with chemicals you idiots. It's the American way of life. It's the new mantra, Run, Read, Write with Greater Efficiency and Prose the Poem with diligence and fortitude using Elements of Style. It’s the style baby, the demolition charge under your hat, Jack.”

“Order, order,” yelled a bailiff approaching me with caution, mace and industrial strength handcuffs. “Down boy!” They shackled me. The Grand Inquisitor handed down my sentence. It had a noun, verb and object.

“Take the prisoner to Cuba and give him an orange jump suit. Interrogate him and deprive him of his writes.”

I screamed in anguish as they dragged me past a pharmacy filled with promise, hope and salvation.

“You haven’t heard the last word from me. Where’s my trout?”

Hanoi Poem

Humans need less suffering and more love.

Little Man's voice releases streams of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend and expand the sound. 

He is startled to hear the sound of his own particular voice ricochet off substandard cold molten gray interior monologue of Hanoi cement or is Ha Noise the block wall?

His life is one long cold cement wall. Echoes dance through his brain like little sugarplum fairies.
He knows the echo because he made the WALLS.

He stacked red crumbling bricks, mixed the fine sand gemstones and quick dry cement. He slathered it over broken red bricks with coherent circular logic fulfilling an abstract desire creating a work of realist art

lasting forever which is how he remembered it the day he trow welled the paste. His voice manifestation expresses human primitive guttural sounds in a tight enclosed space near his

gigantic liquid plasma television.

It is permanently implanted on a blank wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent dancing drama shows about life next door where the family sits on cold red floral tiled floors hunched over with spinal deficiencies slurping from cracked rose bowls shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost

desperate mouths yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with their gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and uniformed military pioneer patriots devouring acres of rubber plantations,

palm trees, teak forests, beach front property and farmland with a double bladed axe singing in a high Greek-like chorus their national anthem about land, sea, air, water and big profit with piano concertos.

Everyone’s being played.