Rice Paddies and Oil Fields

Occasionally, I do free writes. Perhaps this isn't the best place for them, and perhaps it is.

This was inspired by a wide array of topics discussed at a potluck I attend at my good friend Matt Scheer's place. It strays on the melancholic side, to be sure, but I'm also in my cubicle, so melancholy is to be expected.

Enjoy.

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Light flashes in slow, uneven pulses from a corner of your mind’s eye that you can’t quite comprehend.

Water flows rapidly across an uneven staircase, smoothing the sharp edges of the stairs.

Fire heats the inside of a hearth set in the heart of America, in a fireplace in Joplin, Missouri.

Earth moves around on its own volition and a hillside sprouts where flat land once stood.

Arrowheads sit untouched in deep sand dunes. Who will be the first to discover them?

Moss grows on a dying tree engulfing its scrawny white bark with a green fur coat.

What does it mean exactly to mean?

What does it dream exactly to dream?

For what is the price of rice in the afterlands of the soul?

Paddy farmers enter factories, hey o and watch their blissful robes fall to leave them naked on the throne of machinery. Gears and rotors, servos and motors, cranking out tiny iPods and little tiny speakers as they split their fingers and let the blood dry on the hands of the children under their supervision. Don’t take a break, little one. Don’t cry. Make sure you get those glass screens inserted right. The children of the First World Champions demand perfection.

Smooth pottery? Smooth gorilla glass. Craftmanship? No need, when mechanical perfection directed by toddlers who have shadows of their mothers tucked deep in their subconscious is at our hands.

Order now, and get it tomorrow. A hundred countries will work for nothing so that you might feel enlightened and powerful and well informed and indignant.

Oil has found its way into every last crease of the old man as he staggers across a sandswept dune past mastodon bones bleached white by a hard beating sun. The man wonders idly whether the oil he has harvested for the last forty years was once the skin and blood of that mastodon, whether the fuel that flows freely from his taps once flew freely through the veins of the creatures deemed unworthy of the University’s archeologists. He wonders if the ancient warriors who left the arrowheads scattered knew that they would be condensed to black blood used to fuel the pleasure cruises of petulant teenagers in top down convertibles all across America.

Dreams haunt us and tell us of a history that we couldn’t know otherwise. We see death and rebirth, destruction and creation, grotesque deformities somehow sprouted into beauty unforeseeable. A young girl cries as she sees the fate of her friends in the factories where the rice patties once stood. She cries when she sees the arrowheads left with nobody, outlasting the craftsmen who forged them and were later forged into the devil’s dark milk. Finally, the tears are too much, and she drowns in them.

We can instantaneously tell each other how horrible it is that children made the devices we use to decry their working conditions. We can do so in a poem as we turn back to the spreadsheets that have encaptured our souls in their cells.

The key to balancing what seems unbalanceable is to never stop moving. Keep jerking around left and right and up and down until it seems impossible that the pin will ever fall. If anybody ever tells you how silly it looks, ignore them. If you lose focus for a second, the whole world comes tumbling down.

Penile globes. I don’t know how to tie that in yet.

Distant memories of young love haunt us and break us into damp reckonings with our selves. Would we continue the lusts of our youth if we were given the option again?

If we are all resurrected from the past, could we all be the same? Could the young girl I loved be the same girl who cried in terror at the visions she couldn’t explain? Could we all be dreaming the same dream?

One man never stops moving. A river runs until the bed is dry, always moving forward yet constantly stuck in the same place. Near it, an old oak tree has never seen past its roots, and yet the two never seem to separate.

Who is to say whether the mighty oak or the swift river is correct?

When we talk, we make sounds, but we lose the hearing of the world around us. Does anyone listen? Is anyone here? Or am I imagining everybody in front of me? Or is everybody in front of me imagining me? Couldn’t both be true?

I’m brought back to the image of a single grain of rice, floating in the wind, travelling from country to country, down river and river, floating in the ocean, somehow never gobbled up by a stray field mouse. And yet it ends up, after years of travel, back where it began. But where it began is not what it remembers; it’s changed somewhat, and a giant dark building stands menacing over the fields where the rice grain once grew. And a long line of sad people file in and out and in and out and punch a little card to show that they belong. And the grain of rice joins them in their melancholic; for the home it once left no longer stands, and he realizes that he’s alone in the world once more.