Non-Parable of the Bodhi Tree
by PETER MAGLIOCCO
Photography ©2004 Fred Ellis

Of all things: Arriving at the Ho Chi Minh Motel in an old U.S. Army jeep (an archaic relic, really, my driver rescued from a mysterious "motor pool" years before, to use thereafter as his taxi), out of it on drugs, of course, the legally prescribed pain-dousers. The illegally obtained darvons crossed with stelazine as well, like mixing hard liquor & draft beer to chase things down. Not recognizing the place at all, this new Saigon resembling a Hanoi prisoner of war camp in my hardly pellucid mind... So what to do? Like so much else in my mistake-prone life, I was brought to a place where the Commander assured me it would be like old times. In a protected environment, much like the Camp had been years before, and we could proceed where I had left off trying to forge reconnection with a terrible enlightenment that suffering through a civil war can only bring.

"Giambi, you will marvel at the room service here," Ho said. "Remember, there are more Ho Chi Minh hotels than motels. We are an experiment, we are one of the city's few experimental motels. Here you can be anything or anyone you want to be, you've paid for it all in perpetuity & can spend the rest of your disease-ridden years here if you wish. Maybe you can begin to re-learn all the Vietnamese words you say you once knew, but have eluded memory, skirted over it with wings of exotic butterflies, or the swirling fins of the delta Devil Fish you believe exists. You can begin to envision your rebirth, Lt. Giambi."

dear Homey, you're probably thinking what a schizoid, delusional fuck I am, & always have been. To be unable to tell the North from the South, Hanoi from Saigon, my left foot from my right; but what difference does it make, now OR then. What difference did such distinctions ever make --?

And you probably believe Ho's impersonator is another one of my illiterate embellishments, that I'm sitting here really in Los Angeles jacked into a computer winging my way through a cyberspaced gigabye game called RETURN TO THE NAMSTER, that all lost time is a deceit, that the missing neurons in my soul-bodhy were never cut loose like so many kite strings from the directionless, karmic being each person calls a Self. "AND WHAT IS THAT 'SELF'?"... Commander Ho tells me (laughingly, scratching his wispy, ganglia-like beard strands) THE SELF is one big fucking illusion, an evil ego device perpetuated by a blind and arrogant Western civilization, one bent on enforcing a monotheistic deity on the far eastern world. The real gods are outside our puny skin, Commander Ho winks, preparing my lunch-time water pipe. With inimitable flair, let's add, since I've pre-paid for the ultimate treatment.  The "real gods" are not just within our consciousness, Home Boy, but are out there circl!
ing us
 like so many buzzards waiting to pick a winner from our bleached bone-brains --

Ho attaches the 'trodes to my forehead. Lovingly almost jacking me in while I suck in the sweet smoke of eternal cannabis, incense of the little warriors perhaps. Smoke of the smoggy mind. For why think about it, all the delicious tortures of the flesh & spirit bedeviling humanity since The Beginning.

Why give it a second thought? Buddha's Eve is nearly naked now before me, her skin resinous & exuding piquant odors of an eternal plant life we delight in feeding on, & despoiling as well. A simple village girl in a wraparound black dress so frayed with diaphanous sweat & sexual activity, I wondered if I deserved such a "hostess" after becoming so ignominiously separated from Delta Company. (The C.O. would shoot me himself and label it suicide for Graves Registration, should I ever go back --) The seed of sex was a blood spilling between us. The surrounding jungle was paganly biblical to me, the garden of Adam & Eve, & together we feasted on its teeming, multitudinous fruit. Laughing, singing, hugging & fondling one another in the sultry midday heat, Eve worked my member like it was her magical snake,

& THE KNOWLEDGE was good between us, despite where she was leading me. Perhaps the war was over, it was nearly 1975, if we were about to hightail it to Saigon for the great hegira, so be it... But fortune kept enthralling me to the contrary, home boy, don't you see. Really I was led back to The Camp (wherever it really existed) for further interrogation, crossed & humiliated by yet another exotically splendid Vietnamese woman, a gift from the North, no doubt from the stone regions of the Viet Cong who loved & hated my perpetually defecting corpus.

So once I was inducted (originally) into The Camp, my Vietnamese seductress evaporated as radar screen blips do after a plane disappears -- & defense mechanisms begin to erode the province of memories, turning it into an antiquated museum for your lost consciousness.

(BUDDHA'S EVE dances each time I'm able to
escape The Camp, for whatever unknown duration

she's always by
blue
or green
river water,
her flesh floating

thru orgasmic electricity
the earth harbors
as magnetic poles

children skip around
to,
singing:)

THAT MAGNETIC POLE SPROUTS A BODHI-TREE FROM WHICH ALL GOOD LIFE COMES, THE VILLAGERS TELL ME, ALMOST IN SIGN LANGUAGE

& that good Life is what Uncle Sam
came to kill...