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Shan State Suite: III. Lashio

from The Front Lines of the War by Scott Ezell • Will Klingenmeier

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lyrics

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.

credits

from The Front Lines of the War, released August 10, 2021

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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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