Bangkok Noir

Written Thursday, May 12th 4:00pm - AngThong Thailand

It's raining again.  A welcome reprieve from the energy-sapping heat rising from the sois here in Angthong, sois covered with dirt and grime and fish guts.  The rain reflects my mood, thoroughly affected no doubt by the current book I'm reading called Bangkok Noir, full of the things that never fail to seduce us: sex, drugs, betrayal, criminals, murder.  Nobody in these stories is innocent, and I feel, well, as the word "noir" denotes, dark-obfuscated-blackened by the smell and stain of evil humans and evil spirits.  The stories in this collection are fictive, but if you know me at all, you know I don't believe in fiction.  Fiction is most often times our deepest realities, and our lives are played out in our heads like fantasies we make up to pass the time.  We play them out so often that they become hard as the concrete in that scene from American History X.  Hard as the nails of the ghost Nick told me scratched his back when he lived in that haunted room at Military School. 

I usually try to stay optimistic, but the rainfall encourages my brief foray into the morbid mud of life today.  As much as I love this country, particularly Bangkok, there is no way around the parasites that feed off the greed of slimy people, the consumerism, the open display of flesh as easily sold as a basket of fried fish heads or dried squid.  The smell of rotting fish.  I hate that smell, but every now and then I will breathe in a big waft of it on purpose, just to remind myself that life itself is generally unclean and naturally raunchy.  Your ideals count for nothing in Purgatory.  It is what it is.

Most houses here have a miniature house on a pole in the front, to appease the spirits and provide them offerings of strawberry fanta or cinnamon raisin tart sold for five baht at your local sweets stand outside the 7/11.  I'm thinking about getting me one of those... or visiting a "song" - a gifted human who allows a specific spirit to possess their body for a time and give those stuck in the living world advice about their fortunes, aches, and pains.  I've always believed in the supernatural, and this is surely the place to cultivate that vague feeling that other dimensions are watching me, piled upon me sheet after sheet as the years go by, and I'm never as naked as the day I was born.  The pure, clean, blank slate of a baby ripe for roughening. 

Here is a rather mediocre poem I wrote after reading one of those short stories. 

"Bangkok Noir"

Charcoal heart noir
In a black Bangkok luxury car
We hadn't gone far
But the smoking stars
Fell two by two
Leaving rusty scars
As the ashen blue
Sparked fire.
Each rubber tire
Worn bare
By the roads that conspire
To share
Their paved-over grief.
Thailand is a thief,
Pilfering deep
Opium sleep -
Mud-caked feet
On bungalow beat
Never retreat
To where they are from.
Home is null and numb,
Dull and dumb
To the crumbs that make full
Some fat Buddha
On a black consul.