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The Front Lines of the War

by Scott Ezell • Will Klingenmeier

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  • Cassette + Digital Album

    The box set includes a numbered print of the limited edition, sound art cassette, a re-release of the original chapbook “The Front Lines of the War,” as well as hand-made materials and inserts. The coda is included as an insert, hand-printed on natural fiber paper made by an indigenous women’s collective in Chiapas, Mexico, and a unique distressing process for the cassette boxes, which parallels the element of randomness and glitching that is central to the production ethos of the album.

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1.
The Front Lines of the War and other poems Shan State Suite i. Hsipaw Arrive Hsipaw after 12-hour bus from Mandalay, army trucks carry soldiers and guns through the night, a teenage mother drives a motorbike through the diesel haze, one hand on the throttle one hand holding a baby to her breast as eighty miles away a rebel army digs into the hills waiting for a government attack waiting for the generals to cough soil their underwear fall down drunken in a brothel with flies buzzing above unmade beds— meanwhile, international observers pass a hat collecting accolades for a peace process in which bank presidents and foreign ministers are politely asked to pull their cocks out of the earth, refrain from filling villages with seeds of their ambition which sprout into nothing but hunger for the sake of some accountant’s bottom line. Strip-mine consciousness, lay open landscapes like parting a pair of thighs guided by market imperatives and cash agendas, twist a tourniquet between your legs, still the hammers fall to earth bang bang bang to build another façade another bloom of concupiscence a looped dream we can’t awake from. In the morning, streets are gray with mist, a wrack of twigs and leaves along the river bank above the quay, vestige of high water months ago in the rainy season. A soldier in dirty fatigues sits in a tea shop, his AK loose and easy between his legs, he looks around with a lazy grin, and why not, roads and towns belong to the regime. The serving girl tightens her sarong and brings a lighter for my cheap cigar, thanaka daubed across her cheeks, totemic fingerpaint design, pale yellow against her earth-brown skin. I sip my tea from the saucer where it’s spilled and try not to meet the soldier’s eye, Pay two dimes for my tea and cigar, then walk back along the river where the water continues to fall, pack my bag in my guesthouse room and wait for the call to tell me where to go to meet my contact for a ride to join the rebel army in the hills.
2.
ii. Moitessier Take the beauty of antennae towers and gravel crushers, compress it into a pharmaceutical formula, panacea for a life of boring equilibrium, mix tongues and mythologies with bitumen to roll out a roadbed so we can lumber forward like prehistoric beasts towards inevitable extinction, everything sticks and stalls wheels ideas ideals borders drawn with algorithms of authority steadied by whisky and soda to anesthetize animal grief the pain of subjugation. Moitessier sailed around the world navigating by the stars and the slant of swells across the surface of the sea, forsaking land even to fill his pockets, slingshotting rolls of film to passing freighters, trusting some brotherhood of sailors to send them to offices in London. Me too! I never rounded the southern capes, I have no sextant, no knowledge of the stars just a bestial faith in waves, magma and breath empires and extinctions pass through me, continental plates drift shore to shore beneath my ribs and clavicle, beneath the crust of earth, as they rise as they subside.
3.
iii. Lashio I am probably drunk without feeling it. My contact calls five times from five numbers, tells me to wait at a crossroad for a white car. Well, half the cars on the road are white. I buy a shot-bottle of whisky at a sundry shop, then another, drink them without tasting anything and suddenly feel I can never go home, so buy a pack of cigarettes, home a distant abstraction I never arrive at anyway. Instead of a white car a moon-faced man gestures from a motorbike, I get on behind and we drive down a strip of beer wholesalers to an auto detail shop where a crew is prepping an SUV which looks to me like an easy target for the regime, gleam of money moving through this landscape of farmers plowing fields with buffalo. They bring a tray of meat to snack on while we wait, and I’m glad I gave up vegetarianism, I’m glad I restarted smoking, lighting butts up end to end— the moon-faced man motions to me and we are on the road in seconds, he hands me a cap to cover my head, a vain gesture of disguise since I hulk like a yeti in the shotgun seat, he buys a satellite phone with stacks of cash in a plastic bag then we accelerate past a series of billboard ads for banks and farm machines on the way out of town. We drive an hour then turn onto a track of rutted mud, hump forward five miles an hour east through the corrugated earth, karst hills hunch up from the plateau, villagers pour bitumen over a crushed rock roadbed, corvée labour paving the way for army trucks and guns. At a government checkpoint, a pickup rounds a corner two soldiers in back with legs spread wide behind a mounted gun, we shoot forward and skitter by two wheels off the road don’t look back and no bullets come smashing in to catch us from behind. The driver motions me in back and covers me with a tarp— he slows to a stop and I hear interrogation voices in Burmese. We drive half an hour more he pulls over and uncovers me— I emerge to rice and corn fields golden in the sun, haystacks twenty feet high and limestone karsts in all directions like breaching whales rising from the plain. Palaung women with solid silver belts walk down the road, Shan soldiers in baggy uniforms stand by dugout bunkers, automatic weapons resting on their hips— my driver breaks into laughter buys me a foamy beer from a roadside shop and shakes my hand, repeating our half-dozen words of shared language, an incantation of gratitude to the gods of the road that we were not detained, not shot and left for dead, as if the world had been given to us as a gift forever as if we could never die as if we could never be anyplace but home.
4.
iv. Scenes from the front Drinking Myanmar beer in the conflict zone where the Myanmar army is the enemy, a pickup passes by Shan soldiers in back driving to the front assault rifles raised like scepters kings of the moment for sure when any moment breakfast could spill from their guts through broken skin, no helmets or flak jackets, everybody squinting at the sky for signs of fighter jets. ❖ Hilltop outpost, looking down upon a valley, rice fields quilt the earth between the army lines, .50 cal. machine gun pointed at the sky waiting for God to appear in the form of a helicopter gunship and fill everyone’s belly with stars— a soldier sits on a crate of ammo, grenade launcher between his knees, stroking the comb of a rooster, its wing metallic orange and green, eyes half-closed his lips touch its beak fingers circle its neck like he wants to take it with him when he falls through the muck and trash of the perimeter trench to a vault of eternity— but he opens his hand, sets the rooster on the ground
walks down a slope and takes a spit of meat from a burned-out fire, pulls a piece off with his teeth, and sits down on the ammo crate to chew. ❖ Riding shotgun in a pickup to the front, a dozen soldiers in back bristle with automatic weapons, a naked pregnant woman walks down the road, matted hair, black peeling skin, cackling to some god or ghost the rest of us can’t see. Her insanity makes perfect sense to me in this sanitized genocide where villages are bombed, monasteries strafed, the government mounts systemic rape campaigns, and Chambers of Commerce lobby to have sanctions lifted, to open markets as if a greater volume of extraction, trade, consumption is all we need to put the world right— an old woman with silver hair in a blue Shan tunic sweeps a farmhouse yard as troops march by in clouds of dust and a livestock truck groans by, three oxen in back, a Batman sign cut in the hood as an engine vent— driving between the army lines, moving animals from the war that comes like fog devours everything then moves on leaving bones and teeth. ❖ Sitting with an officer, half a dozen grenades strapped to his chest, speaking pidgin Mandarin drinking whisky eating roast pork in the shadow of a gold pagoda beneath a banyan tree, government troops 200 yards away, two kittens, one tabby, one black, play in the grass by my feet, as we wait for airstrikes that haven’t come, a quiet day in the war— he offers me a tin of Danish sugar cookies, fills my cup and says, “It’s too late to fight today, have another drink!” Farmers take their oxen out to graze on short stiff stalks of harvested rice fields, bells around their necks toll in the autumn air between two lines of hills between the front lines of the war.
5.
v. The front lines of the war I was on the front lines of the war I saw soldiers eating dirt and grass I saw the women they left behind and children with flies in their mouths Livestock wandered through the battle zone Metal made nests in trees Mortars and machine guns were pointed at the sky Soldiers made love after dark Kitchen boys ate scraps and waited naked for their uniforms to dry I heard the arms manufacturers laugh over paté and wine I saw them clean blood from their teeth with matchsticks I saw hair and clothes on fire while governments sat at 5-star tables to negotiate I felt wind and water flow across my body My skin was an embrace of unknown forces warm and liquid moving through me The generals comb their moustaches on the way to the press conference and spit into handkerchiefs Their teeth fall out Their lips and tongues fall off Their faces fall off Till only a neck remains Handlers rush to mold another head with a doleful expression to stick on the bloody stump The general coughs into the microphone and says, We are following the will of the people As his mistress gives birth to an angel with bat wings And his wife buys a thousand dollar purse on Champs-Élysées I saw grass turn gray like hair I saw monkeys snug neckties and drive to work to pick fleas from each other’s fur I heard rain on a metal roof and animals howling in the slaughterhouse I heard earthworms chuckle in time with a symphony of machine gun fire I saw that to presidents and generals the earth is a piñata Beat it like a prisoner till sweet treasures spill first one to break it open wins I figured I should try to win the race I discussed mortgage rates with a loan officer and calculated percentages I moved decades like checker pieces square to square I tracked financial security through the scope of a sniper rifle and on the radar of a fighter jet I wanted others to surrender to quit fighting for what was mine I forgot that armies killed for what I have and whole continents died for the idea of ownership I bought a lawnmower on the installment plan it came with a lifetime guarantee that nothing would ever change I held an M-16 in my hand it was light as a plastic toy I visited temples with shrapnel scars across the walls I sat on a hilltop watching for gunships to appear waiting for rockets to bloom across the sky I met refugees who fled with nothing but memories of rape and murder their houses burned by soldiers animals cooked and eaten daughters go missing and don’t return During a lull in battle I walked across a field between government and insurgent lines Villagers were harvesting rice carrying sheaves of grain on shoulder yokes sweating in thick hot sun the guns were silent on both sides At the dinner table an officer inspected a rifle and shot a hole in the ceiling I thought of Frank Stanford and his shotgun and the three bullets he fired into his own heart I heard news reports about a cult of personality— The new leader could only talk of leadership and the need for others to follow but no one had anywhere else to go or a voice to raise above the sound of marching boots I heard water flowing in a stream I remembered everyone I love I remembered my father how could I forget since he now fills my body I traveled to the conflict zone and now it travels in me brother to the worms eating their way through earth Nothing is distant in miles or history Feedback loops of taxes and invasion dance in time with imperatives of perpetual war You don’t have to pull a trigger or open the bomb bay doors refugees and bureaucrats presidents and secretaries bank tellers and factory hands plumbers and golf pros rice farmers and fashion models everyone is on the front lines of the war.
6.
vi. Gridded autocracy no place to set a foot beyond its border of control everyone like a fish with a hook in its gills sharp barb in every breath— this life is seawater pouring through you a quick breach of the surface breaking into light and air then falling back again— cut the metal bite through the line, turn one eye to the sky one eye to the dark heart of the sea floating and sinking in a bath of salt and sun. Shan State, Myanmar December 2015
7.
Civil War 03:29
Civil War The civil war comes rumbling through like some angelic beast fresh-fucked and smiling, an apex predator, there’s nothing in nature to oppose it, the food chain funnels upwards to its teeth and tongue, never mind the clocks and calendars its lifespan is that of the human race, detached, disinterested, never taking sides it has no favorites or enemies, everyone is equal fodder for its hunger, it will eat everything and disgorge the wealth of earth to the bankers and generals who animate it from afar in a drone game of robots and effigies joysticking human chesspieces to wherever they best siphon blood off into profit. The civil war lounges in its ursine smell of heat and carrion, fur matted with sex and death, it’s going to colonize you, spread like a cancer, fill your life with fire and shrapnel, displace you to trails of estrangement and hunger, and even if you get out of the war you’ll never get it out of you it’s going to stay inside you inviolable and sacrosanct traveling everywhere you go eating you from inside-out chewing the smiles off your face chewing like a parasite in your belly devouring your sustenance eating all you swallow or love before it can nourish or heal you.
8.
Shatter Zones In the shatter zone too long, I too become brittle, partitioned, fissured, carved by faults corrugated by mountain ranges borders divide me and I flow to divergent watersheds disconnected from any center. Roads run through me, rivers run into walls, I am displaced along a trail of cheap hotels, young girls always on offer down the hall through a doorway stained with the grime of hands— traveling without books, digesting words and miles like the tribes who wrote their languages on skins or buckwheat cakes, then ate them when on the run and starving… words become bodies, bodies become words, till every footstep sings the face of earth. I want to drink wine made by women chewing millet and spitting it in a gourd to ferment— but they don’t sell the home-made stuff in the bus depots, so I buy factory liquor laced with formaldehyde to lubricate the ruts and gears of the road as I turn like a cog in the apparatus of machine administration, as wheels and gears turn in me, a synchromesh of distance, far vectors, exhaustion, a simultaneity of estrangement and belonging, my wild desire for borders and margins to push against and surpass, and my saner, secret wish for centeredness, connection, the slow symbiosis of self into a single piece of earth, into a single love and lover. I offer my bottle to the man next to me on the bus, he drains the last few drops and chucks it out the window to the cornfields, as if innocent any concept of litter or pollution, as if human endeavor and design could never be detached from the flowing landscape we flow through, as if he knows a factory bottle is a particle of industrial production that travels through the world both discrete and interconnected, just like you and me— If I go further it’s just because I can’t be still when others are lock-stepped into forced migrations, cocked weapons of assimilation jabbed into their backs— cultures filtered through steel prisms of diffraction and dispersion, struggling against the current of automatic expansion, infinite consumption, like salmon trying to swim upstream to reach the source where they were born, but someone has reversed the flow a bait-and-switch in which displaced peoples are stranded on a stony shore instead of arriving at the home they’ve migrated lifetimes to reach. ❖ Anyway, tell me which place on earth is not a shatter zone, mosaic of cultures, languages, tribes? Where are skin and soil not cracked, broken, thick with blood and salt? If you don’t recognize the violence you’re complicit to, that’s just because it’s smoothed with petroleum butter, flattened by a steam roller for us to drive and drive as the world burns in some far place. ❖ Like a salmon I crossed the sea but I reached no sanctuary, no home, only a further shatter zone where life was a watch shop in a strip mall, seconds ticking blandly towards oblivion, gleaming with gold and jewels, memory was a blade that cut itself, a machined edge to eviscerate the past, bleed away all that was not anodyne, orthodox, while violence was camouflaged with shades of comfort and convenience, and stitched in the logo of a shirt. In the shatter zone too long I too become a continent of divisions, my only wholeness is the rhythm of the sea that carries me away in waves—but it’s just temporality, a soft-shoe shuffle, and all the guns and mortars, all the jet planes and grenades, are on their way to the bottom of the sea, sea of foam and salt lime and clay urchins and cetaceans heartbeats and heartbreak and everything between, where we abide beneath waves of transformation waves of sex and death waves of violence and the sea waves of you and me.
9.
Opiate Consciousness drifting through mountain waves on gasoline fumes the engine a fluttering heart gashed-out hillsides and concrete obelisks a landscape of butterfly wings with time receding like a tide and metal girders marching in rust and rivet consciousness desire for a bone of joy buried in a pretty girl’s womb or tossed from heaven from the table of a feast trenches dug out with machines berms of gridded earth and tunnels drilled through stone efforts of human design virus consciousness of increasing acceleration military love engulf the world in cordite and brass one more road to follow one more border up ahead a membrane to part and enter pendulum consciousness floating on opiate wings butterfly trails night day night day turning over in someone’s dream of endless games of chance cloud consciousness rise and drift away.
10.
Coda 09:19
and then the generals unleashed their armored toys and their child soldiers to cross the border to your home they tied the snouts of the animals so they could not howl they cut the electric wires so you could not flash your messages to me I connected my memories to a car battery but they trip and stutter over the bodies face down in the rice fields it was inevitable as extinction the contract signed and sealed by the presidents ratified with the blood leaking from your mouth that you could not swallow without my lips to kiss you they threw your father in a well he was already mute and could only tell you with his eyes that our child was dead we gave shelter to the children who grew up to hold rifles as they marched to your village in truck tire sandals it was too late for me to say I love you those words only cause more pain in a time of violence the soldiers dipped your womb in salt and ate it raw I was bound with a rope made from your hair I was held across the border from you I was burned by fever even before they lit your house on fire you spent all your money on cold drinks for your father sugar and ice a token gesture of cooling against white phosphorous burns the car battery ran low I lost the signal I didn’t know who was dying me or you or both and everyone in between our world became a coral garden bleached the color of bone I was ready to cross back over the border nothing remained for the soldiers to take from me but a message came that you had gone down the well to touch your father’s lips I went anyway but I was caught by the toys we gave them brass marionettes guided by satellites and a jack-in-the-box with a weeping leer even the oxen howled through their halters immigration police locked me in a guardhouse I heard your voice through the walls but the border between us was closed closed by the earth you dug up with your fingers which you ate when you didn’t believe I’d return lime and chalk streaked your brown skin you gave your voice to your father when you kissed his lips then you could only look for me at the bottom of a well the soldiers made me join them as they razed your home I didn’t try to escape I had nowhere left to go even my memory was parted out to snipers and artillery officers I searched for a well where I could lie down in peace but earthen walls could not soothe me or heal me your lips stopped trying to find me in the dark the sky is streaked with fire high above just like the earth below you said you’d wait for me forever but no one gets that long.
11.
The Front Lines of the War and other poems Shan State Suite i. Hsipaw Arrive Hsipaw after 12-hour bus from Mandalay, army trucks carry soldiers and guns through the night, a teenage mother drives a motorbike through the diesel haze, one hand on the throttle one hand holding a baby to her breast as eighty miles away a rebel army digs into the hills waiting for a government attack waiting for the generals to cough soil their underwear fall down drunken in a brothel with flies buzzing above unmade beds— meanwhile, international observers pass a hat collecting accolades for a peace process in which bank presidents and foreign ministers are politely asked to pull their cocks out of the earth, refrain from filling villages with seeds of their ambition which sprout into nothing but hunger for the sake of some accountant’s bottom line. Strip-mine consciousness, lay open landscapes like parting a pair of thighs guided by market imperatives and cash agendas, twist a tourniquet between your legs, still the hammers fall to earth bang bang bang to build another façade another bloom of concupiscence a looped dream we can’t awake from. In the morning, streets are gray with mist, a wrack of twigs and leaves along the river bank above the quay, vestige of high water months ago in the rainy season. A soldier in dirty fatigues sits in a tea shop, his AK loose and easy between his legs, he looks around with a lazy grin, and why not, roads and towns belong to the regime. The serving girl tightens her sarong and brings a lighter for my cheap cigar, thanaka daubed across her cheeks, totemic fingerpaint design, pale yellow against her earth-brown skin. I sip my tea from the saucer where it’s spilled and try not to meet the soldier’s eye, Pay two dimes for my tea and cigar, then walk back along the river where the water continues to fall, pack my bag in my guesthouse room and wait for the call to tell me where to go to meet my contact for a ride to join the rebel army in the hills. ii. Moitessier Take the beauty of antennae towers and gravel crushers, compress it into a pharmaceutical formula, panacea for a life of boring equilibrium, mix tongues and mythologies with bitumen to roll out a roadbed so we can lumber forward like prehistoric beasts towards inevitable extinction, everything sticks and stalls wheels ideas ideals borders drawn with algorithms of authority steadied by whisky and soda to anesthetize animal grief the pain of subjugation. Moitessier sailed around the world navigating by the stars and the slant of swells across the surface of the sea, forsaking land even to fill his pockets, slingshotting rolls of film to passing freighters, trusting some brotherhood of sailors to send them to offices in London. Me too! I never rounded the southern capes, I have no sextant, no knowledge of the stars just a bestial faith in waves, magma and breath empires and extinctions pass through me, continental plates drift shore to shore beneath my ribs and clavicle, beneath the crust of earth, as they rise as they subside. iii. Lashio I am probably drunk without feeling it. My contact calls five times from five numbers, tells me to wait at a crossroad for a white car. Well, half the cars on the road are white. I buy a shot-bottle of whisky at a sundry shop, then another, drink them without tasting anything and suddenly feel I can never go home, so buy a pack of cigarettes, home a distant abstraction I never arrive at anyway. Instead of a white car a moon-faced man gestures from a motorbike, I get on behind and we drive down a strip of beer wholesalers to an auto detail shop where a crew is prepping an SUV which looks to me like an easy target for the regime, gleam of money moving through this landscape of farmers plowing fields with buffalo. They bring a tray of meat to snack on while we wait, and I’m glad I gave up vegetarianism, I’m glad I restarted smoking, lighting butts up end to end— the moon-faced man motions to me and we are on the road in seconds, he hands me a cap to cover my head, a vain gesture of disguise since I hulk like a yeti in the shotgun seat, he buys a satellite phone with stacks of cash in a plastic bag then we accelerate past a series of billboard ads for banks and farm machines on the way out of town. We drive an hour then turn onto a track of rutted mud, hump forward five miles an hour east through the corrugated earth, karst hills hunch up from the plateau, villagers pour bitumen over a crushed rock roadbed, corvée labour paving the way for army trucks and guns. At a government checkpoint, a pickup rounds a corner two soldiers in back with legs spread wide behind a mounted gun, we shoot forward and skitter by two wheels off the road don’t look back and no bullets come smashing in to catch us from behind. The driver motions me in back and covers me with a tarp— he slows to a stop and I hear interrogation voices in Burmese. We drive half an hour more he pulls over and uncovers me— I emerge to rice and corn fields golden in the sun, haystacks twenty feet high and limestone karsts in all directions like breaching whales rising from the plain. Palaung women with solid silver belts walk down the road, Shan soldiers in baggy uniforms stand by dugout bunkers, automatic weapons resting on their hips— my driver breaks into laughter buys me a foamy beer from a roadside shop and shakes my hand, repeating our half-dozen words of shared language, an incantation of gratitude to the gods of the road that we were not detained, not shot and left for dead, as if the world had been given to us as a gift forever as if we could never die as if we could never be anyplace but home. iv. Scenes from the front Drinking Myanmar beer in the conflict zone where the Myanmar army is the enemy, a pickup passes by Shan soldiers in back driving to the front assault rifles raised like scepters kings of the moment for sure when any moment breakfast could spill from their guts through broken skin, no helmets or flak jackets, everybody squinting at the sky for signs of fighter jets. ❖ Hilltop outpost, looking down upon a valley, rice fields quilt the earth between the army lines, .50 cal. machine gun pointed at the sky waiting for God to appear in the form of a helicopter gunship and fill everyone’s belly with stars— a soldier sits on a crate of ammo, grenade launcher between his knees, stroking the comb of a rooster, its wing metallic orange and green, eyes half-closed his lips touch its beak fingers circle its neck like he wants to take it with him when he falls through the muck and trash of the perimeter trench to a vault of eternity— but he opens his hand, sets the rooster on the ground
walks down a slope and takes a spit of meat from a burned-out fire, pulls a piece off with his teeth, and sits down on the ammo crate to chew. ❖ Riding shotgun in a pickup to the front, a dozen soldiers in back bristle with automatic weapons, a naked pregnant woman walks down the road, matted hair, black peeling skin, cackling to some god or ghost the rest of us can’t see. Her insanity makes perfect sense to me in this sanitized genocide where villages are bombed, monasteries strafed, the government mounts systemic rape campaigns, and Chambers of Commerce lobby to have sanctions lifted, to open markets as if a greater volume of extraction, trade, consumption is all we need to put the world right— an old woman with silver hair in a blue Shan tunic sweeps a farmhouse yard as troops march by in clouds of dust and a livestock truck groans by, three oxen in back, a Batman sign cut in the hood as an engine vent— driving between the army lines, moving animals from the war that comes like fog devours everything then moves on leaving bones and teeth. ❖ Sitting with an officer, half a dozen grenades strapped to his chest, speaking pidgin Mandarin drinking whisky eating roast pork in the shadow of a gold pagoda beneath a banyan tree, government troops 200 yards away, two kittens, one tabby, one black, play in the grass by my feet, as we wait for airstrikes that haven’t come, a quiet day in the war— he offers me a tin of Danish sugar cookies, fills my cup and says, “It’s too late to fight today, have another drink!” Farmers take their oxen out to graze on short stiff stalks of harvested rice fields, bells around their necks toll in the autumn air between two lines of hills between the front lines of the war. v. The front lines of the war I was on the front lines of the war I saw soldiers eating dirt and grass I saw the women they left behind and children with flies in their mouths Livestock wandered through the battle zone Metal made nests in trees Mortars and machine guns were pointed at the sky Soldiers made love after dark Kitchen boys ate scraps and waited naked for their uniforms to dry I heard the arms manufacturers laugh over paté and wine I saw them clean blood from their teeth with matchsticks I saw hair and clothes on fire while governments sat at 5-star tables to negotiate I felt wind and water flow across my body My skin was an embrace of unknown forces warm and liquid moving through me The generals comb their moustaches on the way to the press conference and spit into handkerchiefs Their teeth fall out Their lips and tongues fall off Their faces fall off Till only a neck remains Handlers rush to mold another head with a doleful expression to stick on the bloody stump The general coughs into the microphone and says, We are following the will of the people As his mistress gives birth to an angel with bat wings And his wife buys a thousand dollar purse on Champs-Élysées I saw grass turn gray like hair I saw monkeys snug neckties and drive to work to pick fleas from each other’s fur I heard rain on a metal roof and animals howling in the slaughterhouse I heard earthworms chuckle in time with a symphony of machine gun fire I saw that to presidents and generals the earth is a piñata Beat it like a prisoner till sweet treasures spill first one to break it open wins I figured I should try to win the race I discussed mortgage rates with a loan officer and calculated percentages I moved decades like checker pieces square to square I tracked financial security through the scope of a sniper rifle and on the radar of a fighter jet I wanted others to surrender to quit fighting for what was mine I forgot that armies killed for what I have and whole continents died for the idea of ownership I bought a lawnmower on the installment plan it came with a lifetime guarantee that nothing would ever change I held an M-16 in my hand it was light as a plastic toy I visited temples with shrapnel scars across the walls I sat on a hilltop watching for gunships to appear waiting for rockets to bloom across the sky I met refugees who fled with nothing but memories of rape and murder their houses burned by soldiers animals cooked and eaten daughters go missing and don’t return During a lull in battle I walked across a field between government and insurgent lines Villagers were harvesting rice carrying sheaves of grain on shoulder yokes sweating in thick hot sun the guns were silent on both sides At the dinner table an officer inspected a rifle and shot a hole in the ceiling I thought of Frank Stanford and his shotgun and the three bullets he fired into his own heart I heard news reports about a cult of personality— The new leader could only talk of leadership and the need for others to follow but no one had anywhere else to go or a voice to raise above the sound of marching boots I heard water flowing in a stream I remembered everyone I love I remembered my father how could I forget since he now fills my body I traveled to the conflict zone and now it travels in me brother to the worms eating their way through earth Nothing is distant in miles or history Feedback loops of taxes and invasion dance in time with imperatives of perpetual war You don’t have to pull a trigger or open the bomb bay doors refugees and bureaucrats presidents and secretaries bank tellers and factory hands plumbers and golf pros rice farmers and fashion models everyone is on the front lines of the war. vi. Gridded autocracy no place to set a foot beyond its border of control everyone like a fish with a hook in its gills sharp barb in every breath— this life is seawater pouring through you a quick breach of the surface breaking into light and air then falling back again— cut the metal bite through the line, turn one eye to the sky one eye to the dark heart of the sea floating and sinking in a bath of salt and sun. Shan State, Myanmar December 2015
12.
Civil War The civil war comes rumbling through like some angelic beast fresh-fucked and smiling, an apex predator, there’s nothing in nature to oppose it, the food chain funnels upwards to its teeth and tongue, never mind the clocks and calendars its lifespan is that of the human race, detached, disinterested, never taking sides it has no favorites or enemies, everyone is equal fodder for its hunger, it will eat everything and disgorge the wealth of earth to the bankers and generals who animate it from afar in a drone game of robots and effigies joysticking human chesspieces to wherever they best siphon blood off into profit. The civil war lounges in its ursine smell of heat and carrion, fur matted with sex and death, it’s going to colonize you, spread like a cancer, fill your life with fire and shrapnel, displace you to trails of estrangement and hunger, and even if you get out of the war you’ll never get it out of you it’s going to stay inside you inviolable and sacrosanct traveling everywhere you go eating you from inside-out chewing the smiles off your face chewing like a parasite in your belly devouring your sustenance eating all you swallow or love before it can nourish or heal you. Shatter Zones In the shatter zone too long, I too become brittle, partitioned, fissured, carved by faults corrugated by mountain ranges borders divide me and I flow to divergent watersheds disconnected from any center. Roads run through me, rivers run into walls, I am displaced along a trail of cheap hotels, young girls always on offer down the hall through a doorway stained with the grime of hands— traveling without books, digesting words and miles like the tribes who wrote their languages on skins or buckwheat cakes, then ate them when on the run and starving… words become bodies, bodies become words, till every footstep sings the face of earth. I want to drink wine made by women chewing millet and spitting it in a gourd to ferment— but they don’t sell the home-made stuff in the bus depots, so I buy factory liquor laced with formaldehyde to lubricate the ruts and gears of the road as I turn like a cog in the apparatus of machine administration, as wheels and gears turn in me, a synchromesh of distance, far vectors, exhaustion, a simultaneity of estrangement and belonging, my wild desire for borders and margins to push against and surpass, and my saner, secret wish for centeredness, connection, the slow symbiosis of self into a single piece of earth, into a single love and lover. I offer my bottle to the man next to me on the bus, he drains the last few drops and chucks it out the window to the cornfields, as if innocent any concept of litter or pollution, as if human endeavor and design could never be detached from the flowing landscape we flow through, as if he knows a factory bottle is a particle of industrial production that travels through the world both discrete and interconnected, just like you and me— If I go further it’s just because I can’t be still when others are lock-stepped into forced migrations, cocked weapons of assimilation jabbed into their backs— cultures filtered through steel prisms of diffraction and dispersion, struggling against the current of automatic expansion, infinite consumption, like salmon trying to swim upstream to reach the source where they were born, but someone has reversed the flow a bait-and-switch in which displaced peoples are stranded on a stony shore instead of arriving at the home they’ve migrated lifetimes to reach. ❖ Anyway, tell me which place on earth is not a shatter zone, mosaic of cultures, languages, tribes? Where are skin and soil not cracked, broken, thick with blood and salt? If you don’t recognize the violence you’re complicit to, that’s just because it’s smoothed with petroleum butter, flattened by a steam roller for us to drive and drive as the world burns in some far place. ❖ Like a salmon I crossed the sea but I reached no sanctuary, no home, only a further shatter zone where life was a watch shop in a strip mall, seconds ticking blandly towards oblivion, gleaming with gold and jewels, memory was a blade that cut itself, a machined edge to eviscerate the past, bleed away all that was not anodyne, orthodox, while violence was camouflaged with shades of comfort and convenience, and stitched in the logo of a shirt. In the shatter zone too long I too become a continent of divisions, my only wholeness is the rhythm of the sea that carries me away in waves—but it’s just temporality, a soft-shoe shuffle, and all the guns and mortars, all the jet planes and grenades, are on their way to the bottom of the sea, sea of foam and salt lime and clay urchins and cetaceans heartbeats and heartbreak and everything between, where we abide beneath waves of transformation waves of sex and death waves of violence and the sea waves of you and me. Opiate Consciousness drifting through mountain waves on gasoline fumes the engine a fluttering heart gashed-out hillsides and concrete obelisks a landscape of butterfly wings with time receding like a tide and metal girders marching in rust and rivet consciousness desire for a bone of joy buried in a pretty girl’s womb or tossed from heaven from the table of a feast trenches dug out with machines berms of gridded earth and tunnels drilled through stone efforts of human design virus consciousness of increasing acceleration military love engulf the world in cordite and brass one more road to follow one more border up ahead a membrane to part and enter pendulum consciousness floating on opiate wings butterfly trails night day night day turning over in someone’s dream of endless games of chance cloud consciousness rise and drift away. and then the generals unleashed their armored toys and their child soldiers to cross the border to your home they tied the snouts of the animals so they could not howl they cut the electric wires so you could not flash your messages to me I connected my memories to a car battery but they trip and stutter over the bodies face down in the rice fields it was inevitable as extinction the contract signed and sealed by the presidents ratified with the blood leaking from your mouth that you could not swallow without my lips to kiss you they threw your father in a well he was already mute and could only tell you with his eyes that our child was dead we gave shelter to the children who grew up to hold rifles as they marched to your village in truck tire sandals it was too late for me to say I love you those words only cause more pain in a time of violence the soldiers dipped your womb in salt and ate it raw I was bound with a rope made from your hair I was held across the border from you I was burned by fever even before they lit your house on fire you spent all your money on cold drinks for your father sugar and ice a token gesture of cooling against white phosphorous burns the car battery ran low I lost the signal I didn’t know who was dying me or you or both and everyone in between our world became a coral garden bleached the color of bone I was ready to cross back over the border nothing remained for the soldiers to take from me but a message came that you had gone down the well to touch your father’s lips I went anyway but I was caught by the toys we gave them brass marionettes guided by satellites and a jack-in-the-box with a weeping leer even the oxen howled through their halters immigration police locked me in a guardhouse I heard your voice through the walls but the border between us was closed closed by the earth you dug up with your fingers which you ate when you didn’t believe I’d return lime and chalk streaked your brown skin you gave your voice to your father when you kissed his lips then you could only look for me at the bottom of a well the soldiers made me join them as they razed your home I didn’t try to escape I had nowhere left to go even my memory was parted out to snipers and artillery officers I searched for a well where I could lie down in peace but earthen walls could not soothe me or heal me your lips stopped trying to find me in the dark the sky is streaked with fire high above just like the earth below you said you’d wait for me forever but no one gets that long.

about

The Front Lines of the War is a spoken word sound art album made with a resonance hum of civil conflict, poetry, and experimental sound. This album was created with gapless playback for both sides of the cassette. To listen to the gapless playback version here on bandcamp, and to minimize the risk for playback errors, listen to the last two tracks in the track list.

Scott Ezell published these poems as a collection in August, 2019, based on his first-person experience of a Myanmar military offensive in Shan State, Myanmar. In October 2019 Ezell and Will Klingenmeier collaborated in a performance at the University of California, San Diego, that explored issues of destructive resource extraction and civil war in the China-Southeast Asia border zone. A year later, war broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Artsakh, a contested region where Klingenmeier had volunteered and visited several times. Against the backdrop of this border war, and increasing authoritarianism and civil conflict worldwide, Ezell and Klingenmeier began collaborating on this sound art and spoken word version of The Front Lines of the War. This album is rooted in personal connections to contested landscapes and marginalized communities, as it explores the ways that global systems implicate us all in vectors of destruction and conflict, in which “everyone is on the front lines of the war.”

As a coda to the original collection, the album includes a section from a later poem-cycle, “Heat Maps,” based on Richard Mosse’s conceptual documentary photos of displaced persons and refugee camps.

On February 1, 2021 the Myanmar military launched a coup, jailing democratically elected leaders and sending militarized police into the streets and countryside. Air and ground offensives against civilians have continued until today, and despite international condemnation and a nationwide uprising against the coup, regional powers including China and Thailand have continued to support the Myanmar military. Tragically, hundreds of protesters, including a number of young Burmese poets dissenting against the coup, have been killed by the military. This on-going humanitarian tragedy sadly gives “The Front Lines of the War” added significance as an expression of opposition to authoritarian police state rule, in Myanmar and beyond.

The Front Lines of the War is being released as a limited edition cassette box set, as well as being available for digital streaming and download. The box set includes the 60-minute cassette, a re-release of the original chapbook “The Front Lines of the War,” as well as hand-made materials and inserts. The coda is included as a special edition, hand-printed on natural fiber paper by an indigenous women’s collective in Chiapas, Mexico, and numbered certification cards were typed on a vintage Olivetti typewriter. Protective cassette boxes have been individually processed with a unique distressing method, which parallels the element of randomness and glitching that is central to the production ethos of the album.

Databending, a form of glitch art, is a process in which a file is deliberately altered or damaged. This disruption is integral to the album in the way it signifies the fundamental disruption of human lives and natural ecosystems through war and conflict. Glitching introduces elements of randomness and improvisation which allow chance and surprise to become part of a creative process. The Front Lines of the War mirrors the increasing chance and randomness of life for marginalized peoples, and the ability to adjust and improvise which are necessary elements of resilience.

The final sound was realized entirely in Symbolic Sound’s real-time sound design language, Kyma. In two unique performances, one for each side of the album, the individual Kyma-created track structures were recombined and concatenated.

The album was mastered by Taylor Deupree at 12k in Pound Ridge, New York.

credits

released August 10, 2021

Scott Ezell — spoken words, photographs
Will Klingenmeier — sound

Gor Jihanian — typography
Typeset in Fern Micro by DJR

Mastered by Taylor Deupree at 12k

www.scottezell.org
www.willklingenmeier.com
www.gor.design
www.djr.com/fern
www.12kmastering.com

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Will Klingenmeier Denver, Colorado

An omnivore of sound, lover of monophonic plainchants, noise, and the dérive, Will Klingenmeier has spent the last fifteen years living as a borderline hermit developing a distinct sonic palate. He is a sound artist placing emphasis on indeterminacy, code, field recordings and synthesis. ... more

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