October by Rita

Affect your environment. Do not let your environment affect you.

Take the blue line … celebrate red ink with a Chopin fountain pen … see how the ink bleeds on new paper … how it feels, this dancing wind song, point and line … take a line for a walk.

Hanoi air is cool before dawn when the landlord’s dog trapped in a long cement tunnel howls at 3:30 a.m. The dog is an apt metaphor for residents trapped in long cement tunnels called home sweet home.

Elsewhere the canine is grilled and basted on a spit at low heat allowing the flavor and juices to penetrate meat for a family feast.

Someone passing through is awake seeing stars, hearing the shriek of fruit bats returning to roost in long green palm branches gathering membranes, silent before dawn amplifiers at Lenin Park sing heavy DUTY patriotic songs with yellow grumbling bulldozers moving dirt, filling in lakes, drowning algae, plankton and fish habitats before the Party Leader plugs in her cassette machine to play aerobic madness in orange light before brainwashed human-birds preen ruffled dream feathers, screw their darling, feed incense to the dead, turn on plasma televisions, cook rice, fire up motorcycles and well before women sweep leaves from night’s tears.

Who will write the history of tears?

Free air raptors and Finch, destined to die in a bamboo cage, sing. Bats sleep in deep green leaves near the balcony of a narrow Hanoi home.

I don’t remember the century. Maybe it was The Glorious Year of Reconstruction.  Men hammered, shoveled and hauled Hanoi toward a glorious future.

Night stars dream before dawn hearing heavy machines at the park. Workers truck rocks to fill in the lake. Old Russian bulldozers shove piles of granite along paths creating new boundaries in citizens’ imagination limiting their curiosity and freedom. The ceaseless mechanical rumbling of machines sounds like a broken Teutonic alarm clock with geologic earthquake Richter intensity.

Echoes of crashing, tumbling granite stones shatters stillness. Reconstruction machines have a schedule, a deadline, a force of progressive development.

Inside bamboo an invisible scripter blends into a natural environment weaving a thread with unconditional love. Music perforates starlight silence.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged