Bell

Once upon a time in a green garden of light speckled green, shadows danced on silent red flagstones.

A bird in a mango tree sang about freedom, sky, friendship and dreams of peace.

A brown leaf departed the tree of life fluttering, singing, dancing down all the days ... reaching earth.

A green brown lizard sat quiet and calm.

A woman in yellow sitting on a cement bench stared through the quadrant of stone slats toward the law offices.

She has no concrete idea what goes on in there other than people paper and conversations about issues and matters she doesn't understand or comprehend because she showed up on the back of a motorcycle from an obliterated distant village and perhaps it's a member of her surviving family in there or a stranger from another galaxy - a time traveller disguised as a homo sapien wearing a tie ...

Another leaf leaves the tree of life in a wild flight of confusion and joy ...

Discussing Ukrainian war crimes, a slow genocide as 4,000,000 refugees struggle forward with babies and the elderly whispering, singing, telling stories about new futures all bright and beautiful in their lives after leaving everything behind, all the fear nourished by desperation and fate.

The woman on the bench feels a soft breeze and hears a small bell ringing as a woman pushes her ice cream cart along pavement. Both women smell the fragrance of purple yellow white orchids and they know everything will be peaceful. One day.

The bell's melancholy echo is long ago and far away.

Ukraine light, strength, courage, humanity, peace.

Rice

“Writers are shamans. We go into the mountains and come back with visions for our tribes. Our holy assignment.”

*

A Turkish train chased moon, seawater and oil freighters. Two veiled lovers held hands at a station. Heavy green and purple grapes draped fences around barbwire stations. A sad man waiting for his life to unfold stared at the ground.

He’s married to his mother and her tomato-based history of love, regret, unemployment and zero opportunities.

A commuter ferry sailed across the Bosporus in elemental light. Visions of a Blue Mosque, spires and silver domes sparkled as blue waves swelled hearing artists carve Churning The Sea of Milk at Angkor Wat in the 9th century.

A heavy Chinese rain mutes voices with refined elegance. Moisture softens edges where words slash and stab, committing heinous crimes inside the imagination of lovers stranded in the long sad misfortune of falling water.

The moisture is a blessing for farmers huddled below brown and yellow ponchos planting rice in geometric rows as shallow water stalks reeds.

Rice steams in cauldrons being stabbed by steel spatulas as 15,000 university students stare at empty bowls. Farmers don’t know them, see them or begin to imagine the spoiled ravishing eaters with heads bowed over chipped white rice bowls, not in gratitude but in hunger’s anger being never satisfied and talking with their mouths full spilling grunts of MORE.

The farmers plant rice. They walk along brown dirt dikes inspecting a precious state owned agrarian middle kingdom as pouring rain music bounces off the surface, slides down leaves, collating green feathers.

Twilight’s heavy mist collects in thick clouds rolling over green forested Utopia mountains caressing valleys, streams and rivers, layering fields where silent men and women plant rice stalks one by one becoming invisible. It’s a poetic Tang landscape painting.

Book of Amnesia V1

Earth Speaks

Earth is a spinning rock with a core, mantle and crust. It is cold in the winter and hot in the summer. It’s round, wet and crowded. Fortunate humans live 100 years. A blink of an eye. Just be kind.

The core is 1,800 miles below the surface. The inner core is 750 miles thick. The temperature is 6700F. It is a dense ball of iron and nickel.

The outer core is 1,370 miles thick. The mantle is above the core. The mantle is 1,800 miles thick. The crust is 3.14 or apple Pie. A genius said, ‘there are lies, damn lies and statistics.’

Deep inside the core fire burns through levels of shifting Teutonic plates, shuddering massive pressure, blathering hot embers, fumes, mixing gases, molten silica and impatient promiscuous sulphuric acids.

This natural evolutionary pressure creates a gigantic orgasm, spewing, releasing, exploding, melting through the mantle to the crust, surface and into the atmosphere.

My volcano blasts ash cinder and molten rocks the size of small projectiles into the atmosphere where they fly, float, fall, dance and evaporate in wind.

Curling tsunamis wave goodbye to land.

Nature is a gigantic, sublime, violent experiment. Nature is an awesome, beautiful, terrifying and magnificent dramatic teacher. Magma at work. Do not disturb.

Nature informs humans in clear non-negotiable terms, you adapt, adjust, evolve or you die. You die anyway, said Death. No Exit. This is natural selection.

You have a brain and a big toe. You are destined by natural selection to walk many journeys as a storyteller. Simple as that …

Nature said, I have no plan, agenda, flight plan, schedule, meeting, economy, government, or boarding pass. My departure gate is the crust.

I have total power … I am unpredictable … I am violent and benign … I am gentle, kind and generous … I giveth and I taketh away … Humans with their limited intelligence will never control me, manipulate me or own me … I create and I destroy. That’s my Nature.

Now I become Death, the destroyer of worlds, said Oppenheimer witnessing an atomic test blast on the Bikini Atoll, according to Vishnu.

Another manifestation is Mahakala, the Tibetan Lord of Time.

Humans are naïve and lazy. They don’t pay attention to Nature until I shift plates below the Tibetan plateau causing an earthquake or rattle their sushi along The Ring of Fire. Blast off!

Humans use fire to cremate bodies. There are not enough vultures to eat the remains.

Ash, a natural by-product, goes with the flow.

Dummies

Death Worship by River

Rumors of intelligent life in Hanoi is an exaggeration, said Leo. Rumor control reports existence.

Take my neighbors Sam and Dave for example, said Tran, Sam is the kid, Dave is the father. Their names and roles are interchangeable. These are not Viet names. If they were, they’d be named Binh and Thin and New Yen, like new Yin or old Yang.

Dave had kids so he and his wife can yell at them. So they will have someone take care of them in old age when they are lying or dying on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 wafting kitchen smells.

It’s an Asian thing. It was an arranged marriage after a three year courtship. Her parents demanded $50,000. Cash or no deal. Virgins have high value in the marriage market. They are have been sequestered behind fear and insecure superstitions and trapped by hovering in-laws and outlaws for centuries.

Marriage is legalized prostitution.  

Father knows best. You don’t marry the girl in Asia. You marry the family.

Cash gives them security. You pay and get the girl. The fun begins. Grandparents need kids to support them in old age. When you’re young pregnancy is always the only option. The tyranny of motherhood.  

Accelerate production comrade. Many procreating humans have more desire thinking about providing offspring for their security than the physical pleasure of sex. So it goes.

Sex is a DUTY. It ain’t about pleasure. It’s easy to have kids in the 13th most populated country on planet Earth. Get on. Go for the ride. E jack U late. There are 90 million hard and fast parenthood rules according to the popular Vietnamese Party book, Produce & Consume. Get married early erotic pressure is on and off, on and off. Savior a small death in 8 seconds.

You do not want to be unmarried, sad, lonely and forgotten. Loss of face and shame haunts singles with vengeance. Fear of loneliness increases the possibility and probability of heart attacks, strokes of genius and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and social instability in a socialist society. They’ve taken their hormonal cues and social control systems from Uncle China.

Extreme pressure is on girls to find a husband. Sapa females in the NW, a future fragment of this tale, illustrate the value and necessity for rural girls to marry at the ripe old age of sixteen and produce genetic replicants. Petri dish. More Y chromosomes. It takes courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, and authenticity.

            Humans crave less suffering and neglect and more love.

Dave’s voice releases anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend and expand the sound. Dave is startled to hear the sound of his voice ricochet off cold molten gray interior Hanoi cement or is Ha Noise the block wall? His life is one long cold cement wall.

Echoes dance through his brain like 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 red bricks with coherent circular logic fulfilling an abstract desire to create 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 wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent dancing drama programs about life next door where the family sits on red rose cold tile floors hunched over with spinal deficiencies ... slurping from cracked bowls shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost desperate mouths and 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 a high Greek-like chorus their national anthem about land, sea, air, water and big profit with peasants as small players.

            Everyone’s being played.

Book of Amnesia, V1

20 Years

Once upon a time there was a man in a village.

For twenty years he went into the mountains searching for gold. Everyone said he was crazy.

One day he discovered gold. He took the gold to a bank and exchanged it for money.

He bought some rope. He tied one end of the rope around his waist.

He tied the other end to the pile of money.

He ran through the village dragging the money.

Everyone said he was crazy.

He said, "For twenty years I've been chasing money and now money is chasing me."

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre