the mandalay gazette 1885
women continue to gaze west and walk east
men, when soused, croon tom jones’ sex bomb on karaoke,
when sober, tom waits’ better off without a wife
scam and flimflam duel in gory sword fight
tattooed members of the missing pinky gang haunt korean restaurants
privacy remains the biggest issue, even in the outhouse
as amateurish bigwigs go clownish willy-nilly
professional jesters get in-your-face-under-your-belly
more than ever, tv antenna cables are in demand for suicide by hanging
soft-voiced armenian cemetery makes tourists wish for death
fire escape ladders are lethal whenever they collapse
a mort floats in the palace moat, still smoking a havana
researchers identify three types of power-outage stress disorder
type-a who complains all the time
type-b who does nothing about the outage, and
type-c who is above the outage
a gold medallist in badminton and pingpong
doesn’t make you a champion in tennis, claims a sport scientist
locals continue to fear the nearer sword
the poor eat dogs and the rich worship them
in the business quarters, only unwrinkled yens are legal tender
foreign investment law asks investors to outjesus the jesus
thou shall not steal, thou shall not outburmese the burmese
true believers no longer know what comes first in their faith
the mad monk or the flighty boat
the porous border or the birth rate
the whoring media or the pimping state
buddha, dhamma or sangha
father, daughter or holy spirit
buy me, get my country free
i told you there’s a fire
what’s the difference between a temporary
camp and an emergency camp, this is going
to be an in-depth interview, the lighting is not
that good here, could you move a little over
there, the connection is bad, can you speak
louder please, hello, hello, hello, what a bummer,
this has to go online this evening, we’ve gotta
be ahead of them, how many children, how
many adults, how many women, how many
men, the death tally must be accurate, is this one in
any causal relation with communal clashes past, is there
any instigation, did you say you had to flee for life
with all your ancestors and descendents on your shoulders,
members of police and armed forces, rescue and
rehabilitation committees, since the gentlemen in
sunglasses came by helicopters, that line sounds
good, don’t miss it, in south african tradition, damn it,
this keyboard is stuck when i need it most, do you
really long for law and order of the past, can’t they
do anything about rule of law, is that simply the
rage of the dispossessed, this time even the wild cat
fell victim to forest fire, according to the report by
the investigation commission, you can’t speak as a
mob, you can’t speak as an individual, you can’t speak
at all, lootings are common, someone must have thrown
things together, latrine problems, we’d been squatting
here since the middle ages, just when my business was
taking off, this shall be our nation until the earth shatters
into bits, i’ve donated more than 40 lakh, no apartheid
at all in the distribution of rice, cooking oil, potato, salt
and fish paste, look … they are handing out food packets,
why don’t you stay for lunch?