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Gamble 2 (prose/poem)


MrX

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The train from Bangkok stops at Surat early in the morning disgorging travellers.

Generally they have not slept well some keeping others awake.

Touts swarm selling rides to the three islands

Fewer and fewer go to Koh Samui, backpackers disdain

Searching out the real thing

 

We were five

Two adults, thee kids, falang and Thai

Eating breakfast, ignoring the admonitions of smoking departing buses.

An elderly Benz sedan purring at the taxi rank would take us to the pier

The exquisitely weathered driver crouching over her, polishing what already shone

 

The road there starts wide and funnels rural toward the port though the jetty is new.

 

Mercedes, my friend has an estate on Chaweng

Settling into her condos, two wood lined rooms each

Coconut fronds drape the jambs

Enormous symmetrical spider webs spanning hooks for clothes

We went out to collect provisions according to our ethnicities

 

The next day was real adventure

 

Eating breakfast seaside

A bull elephant careers alone along the sand

Some leathery muscles striated by the effort of its pace

Mahouts in the wake,

Rivulating sweat, carrying sharp hooked sticks

 

That late afternoon we frolic in shallow trophy waters

 

A heavy falang woman is bathing

Slowly the geometry of her aquatics disturb

They are spirals diminishing around us

I would but can no longer discount intention

The children alarm

?What falang do?

I gamble wrong

?Baa? I say

?I am not mad? her angry accent flecked mid-European

I gamble 2 with a growling protection

She cannot swim well enough

To encircle us in deep water

I know the kids are like fish too

Head together for the point

A scuttling shoal

She makes to follow, before turning back for the shore

 

 

We leave the water behind the rocks, returning home via a stony path

Which burns our soles, innocence briefly rent

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