Cambodia Bladed (1)

DSC_0165 - Greg Bem - Boeung Trabek, Phnom Penh

Spiral gaze. I was given a handset. I was given a pair of grip. I was given gloves to protect from the sun that I couldn’t keep from my eyes. My mind took spin through slick. My tongue through thick. And there I be, there I’d been, the same way as now. Scythed into fragments. Cubes like the beef, or the mud, or the shorn antique wood in dull lengths. Crawling on fours, sound of the motors aching across the pounding of the drum of the ear. Strange script but not so foreign, colas crisp, served on ice.

DSC_0166  - Greg Bem - Boeung Trabek, Phnom Penh

Twin through then the blade does caress: hollow out, gut out, empty out innards. Insides foolish. Silver-haired venom touch. I’ve learned through decay a nurture most dreamy. I’ve been empty palmed: no coins, no hands, no guns, no hair. No skin flakes between finger tips. No scratches or pinches or presses or pokes. No prods or ticket stubs. Long stride with heavy sandal. Probably a prolapse. Probably a relapse. I’ve got the jugular by the jugular and I’m coughing ghost diseases that flee left and right.

DSC_0167  - Greg Bem - Boeung Trabek, Phnom Penh

Perhaps there was more but we couldn’t get over the lip. Touch bruised, wet lips with thumb and stare like fool or trumped child at the bitten of the nail. All to sourly stick between two rows of alligator-flesh-colored teeth. I’ve a mind for a blow to the head. I’ve a phantasmagoria full of collisions and empty rooms. There are jewels in the cracks, I do swear it like I did look at her beyond, around the corner, lingering, dust checked like baggage, my head sweating like legion, computer hacks in pockets.

DSC_0170  - Greg Bem - Boeung Trabek, Phnom Penh

Trip up and take the girl back to her home but pass back and forth the gaze. Like a yoyo, or a French kiss, there is exchange. I willingly writhe at the sight of the endless ribbons of filth. Is this my offspring? Is this my sweat, my caloric excision? My hands as bleached as the sun’s fizzling burn. Birds do not chirp. Rats do not gnaw. There is only the fallow hand of the challenge. No one has mocked me since. I’m thinking of the bottling center. I’m thinking of a hot place called Maine.

DSC_0179 - Greg Bem - Boeung Trabek, Phnom Penh

With each cart and with each stanza, a stand. A stamp like a letter or a brand like an iron and there is pumping. Absent weights but legs! I have been pimping these calves along these flooded streets for as long as I have needed to. Drink the drink. Walk the walk. This is the simulation: dodging and sidestepping and stressing against moto or Lexus. Turning a key into a door to unlock to discover what hasn’t been moved. Letting the droplets of the hot shower slowly enter my mouth. Never swallow.

DSC_0181 - Greg Bem - Boeung Trabek, Phnom Penh

Stepping out of bound too and the people with me were always in charge. Charged full of legitimacy. An intimacy. Their life, not confused, rising and falling. Never quantum. Never a series of equations meshed together inappropriately. The blood of the world swiftly churns blending all. Collage as purposeless entryway. Portal into the true bludgeon: a bleeding worth a thousand lines, all the same, because all connected. Like sand under microscope. Network crises buried through undulation.

DSC_0183 - Greg Bem - Boeung Trabek, Phnom Penh

You’ve been yearning for me. I’ve been smacking myself in the face with naps and long dribbles spilling out of my mouth. White rice spilling into the streets. Tons upon tons. The chickens going nuts. The eggs cracking and exploding. Motos turn to demons and eradicate. Or eviscerate. I sit in the corner, the imported statue. The great land mass. Cambodia’s been exporting its sand for years now. How much land belongs to the coffers of the Other? But not this other. This one here sleeps.

DSC_0184 - Greg Bem - Boeung Trabek, Phnom Penh

Inwards and outwards like a stomach when the human breathes. Like stomachs when the cow breathes. Does the water buffalo breathe? Does the ridged, spiky horizon of bovine skeleton give, just a little, to the pressure of the breath? I will wait and I will see, like sword cascading through air, slicing down, dissecting the scene. Like bastions or bastards, the flecks of blood will contain us. Our leather shoes made of rubber like that of flip flops, rubber of the Northeast plantations, of which we weep.

End of (1)

(2) can be found here. (3) can be found here.

Submit a comment