Me and Britt.
Franklin Pierce University, Rindge
Beards
Baseball
Lemmy
Keegan
Chicken Bus
35 hours
from nowhere
to nowhere
old American school bus
possibly stolen
riding hard
bad road
no suspension
bumpy shit
drunk driving?
cant write
or think
watch
your
bags
man
thieves here
suck balls
…
Did you see?
the driver
only
has
one
eye
shit shit shit
…
is that a shrine?
on the bus?
in case
we
crash
and
die
shit shit fuck
crazy ass Catholics
…
guidebook says
fucking
chicken
bus
part of the experience
the thing to do
the man hanging
from the side
when we got on
threw bags on top
said
two dollar fair.
por favor
amigo
…
two dollars fair?
fuck no
let
me
of
to walk?
here?
Guatemala?
Alone?
fuck no
They have machetes
Crazy Mayan Bastards
stay on
…
hell
stuck legs crushed
no suspension still
constant ache
Guatemalan heat
sucks
sweating balls
must
we
wait
for
the
rain
to
come?
Shit
Shit
shit
Pickpockets took my fucking bag.
The war was over, in the land of the river
I thought of the butterflies today, bright shattered glass
leaping from the road to hit against the red
of my Khmer scarf
As we thundered through the jungle in our truck
I sat in class on a plastic seat, in America Now
with views of pines from closed windows
No longer perched on a pile of landmines
Defused, broken, abandoned, to eat my lunch
Cambodia when I remember it now
The conflict dried up
The children still maimed
Homeless dogs on dusty streets
Of the Killing Fields
There is small sign, if one cares to look
In the thickets of palm trees
Where white skulls sit still in the shade
This is no longer the country
Of death and decay
Where schools were prisons
And doctors knew nothing
Instead the land of the River
Spreads itself down tired
As if the war was a day of work now over
And goes to sleep in the shade
The fact remains however buried
That I am forever scarred
Those feeble traces of the Shadow Death
Coming through night and dream to meet me
Of colours and smells
Of sounds and loud voices
Raised and lowered like waves
I think when at last sleep reaches me
Cyclo drivers peddling
Ever faster on hard concrete
On the roads that the Kmer Rouge
Once marched down, guns triumphant
The soft sound of your padding footsteps upon
Wooden floors in old guesthouses
Where little old ladies
Sit silent
Sitting with you, outside Tol Sleng
with open mangos held in dust coloured hands
As we eat, and laugh, even after seeing children’s writing
On the walls of the school, then prison, now shrine
Hammocks swing in the shade,
Sleepy buzz-cut soldiers
Of a New Country
Their guns held tight as infants
Plates of rice still steaming,
Whole courses of food,
Waiting beside a politicians family
As they laugh, baking in the sun
There is a pagoda now,
On the sight of the death pits
Many small levels inside
Stacked full of human skulls
Frozen glasses of beer,
Behind which lies the balustrade
Of the Foreign Correspondents Club
Where once the talk of death was heard
We walk there together, in my thoughts
Though you were never with me, in the land of the River
And if you had been, hand in mine,
The skulls in the pagoda would not haunt me now
above it all the sky
beneath it the mighty river
My Mekong, in dream
Holding a country, together
The Forgotten
Lonely rusting hulks resting on what once was prosperous
Baby birds in a nest of barely used bin bags and cigarette butts
Rocks left behind from the metaphorical glacier WE choose to travel on
While they growl No in silence.
Used up, Washed Up, get-a-job
Grey-fleshed and demanding that WE give,
Out of guilt or pity but never without cynicism
For who knows if
The want of the blue–veined-silky-sweet -relief
is somewhere in the decaying mansion
of their consciousness?
Spring
Trees sprung, upwards
From mulch and decay
Ice receding, backwards from blue water
Buoys, white plastic, freed from entrapment
To bob alone and quiet, until
They are used again
By boats, and boys
In brightly coloured swim shorts
Soon though the still and sluggish
summer will be here,
Then fall of leaves
And crunching quiet
Before winter
Settles in once more
