Journeys
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Tuesday
Jun162026

One Born & One Dies

One death. One birth. This happened in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Jasmine gave birth to a baby boy at 12:30 a.m. 3.9 kilos. It’s her and Kun’s third child.

I am on the balcony at 6 a.m. hearing him cry. Tears and lungs, breath, release. Sleeping after his nine-month water world journey. Every day is a celebration.

I walk a dusty path and across the Highway of Death to Jasmine Lodge. People gather to celebrate the passing of Jasmine’s grandmother. She slipped away during the night after eighty-four years.

She was healthy and happy.

Friends and relatives gather under a pavilion to pay their respects. They visit the frail Buddhist monk with a monetary gift. He ties a red piece of yarn around their wrist.

The ceremony lasts three days. Women teams prepare vats of soup releasing vapors. Grilled meat and fish aromas curl through bamboo meeting music and the melodic chants of singing, chanting monks.

Tomorrow is a procession to the pagoda for her cremation.

Led by six monks in orange robes 200 people followed the rolling wagon carrying the wooden casket in blazing heat along The Highway of Death. After two kilometers we entered the pagoda.

A bus of kids and nuns arrived.

  

 

Her casket was carried up the stairs and placed on a metal platform. Her husband led a procession of monks and family members around the tall tapered white and blue building carrying her picture and yellow flowers. They stepped back to allow attendants access. They opened the casket so family members could leave something personal inside.

On a pavilion monks chanted. A man read a final tribute about her life. The family expressed their love. Men put small logs into the casket. They closed it, rolled it inside and piled more wood around it. They lit the fire and closed the metal door.

People sat silent, whispering, drinking water. They observed the top of the tower with four serene Buddha faces and exhaust pipes. A wisp of black smoke escaped into clear blue sky followed by heavier billowing gray and white snow.

Everything burned for three hours.

Her bones were collected, placed in a family urn and returned to her room. They created a human figure on banana leaves. After 100 days her bones will rest in a family stupa at the pagoda.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

 

 

Friday
Jun052026

Perception by Zeynep

I patrol a new planetary manifestation. Compassion discovers abstract letters expressing the madness of art. A work of art is never finished. It is abandoned. A wild ink master.

Being correct is never the point. I’d rather be real than right. Be sincere.

Humans take themselves too seriously. They need to play more. It is impossible to take anything seriously. Hang around listening/observing anxiety, fear, loss, beauty and truth and  ...

How do you express a sensation a gesture, a fleeting impermanent lapse of consciousness, a smile, a tear, asked Rita, manifesting as a young singing girl waters dust in Cambodia as sunlight filters through palm trees casting golden rays and long shadows.

 

I am a dust collector, said Tran. I’ve collected dust in Vietnam, the Sahara, in Ulus, Turkey with Errol the antique dealer and the carpet man teaching his son thread repair. While climbing toward Drepung monastery near Lhasa one brilliant frozen morning. In Korla, an oasis along the Silk Road where yellow is the original color produced by the silkworm’s saliva.

One thread is 300 meters long and stronger than steel.

Swirling dust in Cambodia is a deep rusty red, said Rita. My path is a watercolor pigment traced by footprints grooving new tributaries of passage.

Walk softly as if your eyes are on the bottom of your feet, said Tran. 

If your legs get heavy walk with your heart, said Devina.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

 

Sunday
May242026

Celebration

In a Hindu cremation ceremony on Bali in an archipelago surrounded by oceans where every day is a celebration I released Martha Ann. She never experienced 14 of anything.

Blessed by her spirit.

Free form, free spirit in a free world,

Where will you finish your journey?

After rubbing you down with holy water, rice flour

turmeric, salt, vinegar, sandalwood

we put shards of mirrored glass on your eyes

pieces of steel on your teeth

a gold ring with a ruby on your mouth

jasmine flowers on your nostrils

iron nails on your four limbs

symbols of your perfect senses

reincarnation will bring you back

stronger, more perfect

wrapped in tight ceremonial fabric

we laid you on a straw mat tied to a bamboo platform         

placed in a tower representing

the underworld, the visible world, the heavens

behind a rattan Black Bull beast

village women

balancing offerings of fruit,

rice, vegetables

led you through the village of Pedang Tagal

carriers laugh, sing, dance, spinning you

in circles to confuse spirit ghosts

crowds throw water on the ancient Bull

they cut the bull open at Monkey Forest

place you inside

Brahmin priest in black cuts

white binding string

pours water from clay pots inside

smashes them on the ground

sprinkles flowers, soil and family items inside

replaces the Black Bull’s back

final fire begins

you float to holy sky united to karmic force!

is it true this maya this illusion

this transformation this celebration

Her spirit dances beyond the great beyond. I spread her floating ashes on the sea.

Accept loss forever.

 

 

Grief is the origin of poetry

The Greeks knew the three most dangerous goddesses were the Fates called Moirai.

Homer called them “spinners of the thread of life.”

Clotho the birth goddess spins the thread of life.

Lachesis measures the length allocating the amount of time to each person.

Atropos cuts the thread.

Anyone resisting them faced Nemesis, Goddess of Justice.

Fates spin out our lives fusing art and language.

Fates dance.

Fire spirit welcomes sun, rain, life energies.

WE salute the sun every dawn. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

 

Saturday
Sep202025

Martha’s Zen Card

I am a short story.

You are a novel.

It never occurred to Matt to buy indigenous cultural music while traveling.

Martha his girlfriend considered it essential.

Music made her edgy and alive.

When she heard music she danced.

She returned to her primitive self.

She danced naked.

Ballet. Flamingo. Tango. Cha-cha. Lambada. Waltz.

He wrote naked verbs. They loved naked. Naked cherished syllable skin music.

They wrote danced and lived like they were dead.

One day they will be. It's now or never.

They were free. It's the way to be.


Culture is what you are. Culture means you can forget.

Nature is what you can be.

People are nature's tools.

Passing through Body Sat Quiet in Asia on a three week, “Look, don’t think” holiday from frozen Europe they happened into an 8th century tourist town music repository.

They smelled music before they saw it. Seeing music is an art form. Synesthesia.

In music like life the end of the composition is not the point.

A music boy handed Matt an orange book. Write your melodic request here. Matt opened the book. A vignette floated free.

An orphan girl popped out of blank pages: I am sorry. Goodbye and good luck to you and your family. These are our famous last words. Big vocabulary. Tongues speak. Small life. Big chance. Yeah. Yeah.

The Hunger Angel watched 24/7 in the big leagues.

Sanitation workers in green environmental vests with broom music swept streets for the New Year. Make it new. Make it new.

We should be so lucky to have crystal clean sheets.

Every day is a new year.

One day is like a minute.

One minute is like a day.

That's relativity. All my relatives are dead.

Never trust an atom. They make up everything.

When you know what you don't know you realize character with social intelligence, integrity, humor and courage.


Courage is an unknown word in our head and heart. Running away is our way. Every day I have the blues. No one loves me but my mother and she could've been lying too.

You absolve in the rhythm when you have adequate life experience.

Silence and hunger are identical naked twins.

Fear and Ignorance produce Expectation & Greed.

I am good at two things:

Eating and sleeping.

Fighting and fucking.

Laughing and crying.

Reading and writing? That's for idiots.

The less I do the fewer mistakes I make, said Insecurity.

The fewer mistakes I make the less I am criticized, said Fear.

It's easier to do nothing, said Doubt.

We know the essence of survival. Keep your fucking mouth shut.

One day, Bliss’s part-time lover said, buy me a TV.

NO.

You have a job, a mother, a 12-year old daughter, two brothers, no father and no husband. I gave you money to buy a bike for your daughter and she lost it, money for clothes, money for medicine, money for food, money for temporary naked lust and currency sobriety. You play me for a fool. You’re fucking crazy.

Her arrival was sporadic at best. She visited at 8:37 for a shower, fucking and another shower.

He explored her lips, thin neck, small ears, crest of skin throat, narrow brown shoulders, pinpoint breasts with tongue talk, flat belles letters, long legs and played his way into her valley of potential.

He loved giving her oral pleasure.

Edging rose lips long and deep.

Slow sweet.

Little man in a boat sang, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

She reciprocated playing his bone flute.

Riding the pony, priming her G spot grinding hard and fast she exploded with precision and extra ambition whispering, Give me a baby. Give me a baby.

He deferred chromosomes. Fat fucking chance, there's no way under the tropical son I'll give you anything but short time, money, temporary love and the high hard one in your strike zone with runners in scoring position.

Here’s the pitch.

She stayed until 9:45 and left for work at an upscale spa wearing aromatic Grecian urns. He gave her 20 bones. Feed me.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Get out of my life, said Telepathy. You are subservient and I am stupid to put up with this shit. He creased her indifference into a cumulus cloud. It rained goodbye and good luck.

She sat on the bed with her back to him. Sniffle, sniffle.

Her fake tears formed rivers named Regret and Hopelessness and Indifference.

Fish behind twelve Lao dams to provide electricity to Thailand fed 60 million Asians downstream in deltas.


His NO created black-eyed daggers. They stabbed him with hatred, loss, self-pity, violence and starvation. Revenge is best served cold with DNA.

They put on death masks.

Your mask eats your face.

They walked out into tropical heat. Separate directions.

Waves of loneliness shuffled down a broken street. Children dying of malnutrition at a health clinic on the coroner of Hope cried as desperate mothers received free blue placebos.

The day after tomorrow belongs to orphans and lucky losers with Wabi-Sabi.

Wabi - the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects.

Sabi - feel one's own sharp existence.

Martha and Gratitude danced through life.


Sunday
Dec152024

Be The Brush

Make it new day by day, make it new, said Leo sitting under a Camellia tree in a green garden.

It blossoms 10,000 pink flowers every spring  ... light shadows bamboo leaves  ... practice calligraphy  ...

Be the brush be the paper be the ink  ... Zen.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

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