The Opulent Grass Eater
(A.D. 2000)
O Feast of the Wolfhound • Conte de Green
Knight • the Fifth Moon • the March to Babylon • In the Valley of the
Beast • The Lost Millennium • Merman • The Bulls of Bashan • Hunters of the Turtle • Ode, to: the Gentile Giant of Trujillo •
Old, to: Victoria
the Mad • The Web of Philosophy • The
Wanderers ••
• O
The bones of Cambodia, it’s an old story, Pol
Pot and his
devastation:
for the living to live among the dead…
A few years back (A.D., 2000) my
wife and I, we are traveling in
Cambodia
within sight of Pol Pot’s desolation of the ‘70s, where He had over a million
of his countrymen put to death our guide—Kim, middle aged, strong-shouldered,
his eyes like wide-open
sea
windows,
Very
patient, as if endlessly enduring, a slight paleness to his face,
weighty hair,
We are in a fenced-in section of the once
famous, “Killing Fields”
the hole I am looking into, twenty-thousand bodies were Thrown
into—, nearby is a glassed-in aquarium likened to a small
mausoleum: it slides open, I take
out one of its 9000-skulls, of Pol Pot’s Legacy; the whole area is really just
a fenced in graveyard,
with
military police guarding it…a sad reminder!
Bones of the dead seep up to the surface of
the soil, after rainy
day,
I know this for a fact, it had just rained, I pick one out of The soil, along
with a red part of a blouse or shirt, “This is
common,”
says Kim.
Under
the mystery of this soil that resides here, that has woken up
the world’s once kept secret, Kim sees dimly through the deep
layers of earth, he says:
“I was among them, one of them, I was a grass
eater, and it was my
only
nourishment, it was that or a merciless death (he
says this All in an opulent voice—thankful to be alive, unashamed).
We’d pitch afire, and the guards would sit by
it, watch us like
hounds in the cold—nearby, have us do certain jobs until we Dropped
Dead, they seldom fed us.
In the mornings, we toiled in the fields, I’d
run off into the high
weeds,
relieve myself amongst the wild plants and bushes, eat Grass, return, get sick
from diarrhea, malnutrition, or worse, but not
defy
the guards, for should I have shown the slightest resistance,
With a blink of an eye, they’d shoot you, but
I survived.”
Then I got to thinking: how primitive, how
primordial, he had turned
back to some ancient orbit of time,
that had existed seemingly, Everlastingly, until one day, the mind woke
up and said, ‘I never
thought I’d get down from this leafless tree’ not even knowing What took
place. Anyhow, second thought: perhaps at one time we
were
all grass eaters: now refined to: grains, breads, noodles, Cereals and beers;
but once upon a time—likened to the old fairy
tales—nonetheless, we were all grass eaters: in essence, not all That much
different. At what point did we change? Who’s
to say?
And does it matter? And for them that it does
matter, may they
scratch
and crack the pits of time—and if they
find out, to their
Surprise or dismay, perhaps they will
conclude we are a newer
found
species, newer that is, than an older lost
one: who came Of age.
#3336/6-30-2012
