Leaving Casablanca

Slanting light wrapped its arms around someone gathering raw unfiltered and uncensored material on their journey.

Light cut the sky, severing the white village, stone paths, Moorish brown doors, idle men, shifty eyed one armed merchants, unemployed dissatisfied immigrants surviving with poverty and despair.

As a Wandering Ghost he traversed light, space, and time near vaulted arches. He kissed everyone on both sides of their extended faces while shaking hands with everyone confirming his flight. Your exile dream vision.

All the adults were tired, wasted, beat. Moroccans walked, stopped, looked around with this hesitancy, this delay, this boarding card question.

Their visa stamp bled through their indigo robes piercing shirts, blouses and delicate woven craft work designed by millions of minimum wage children in twisted alleys without a visa. They needed a bread visa, a scrap of meat visa, a tea visa. They craved freshly cut sweet smelling green boiling tea to mix their life’s colors with dust.

They taxied down the runway as rainbows illuminated western clouds. The moon danced in cobalt blue sky. Above clouds thunderheads formed a white billowing future, all air and water,
an infinite dream machine.

Zooming over Canadian ice fields toward Seattle and heightened U.S. military airport security and stateside psychosis he wrote to Imane in Marrakech, the Red City.

“Dear Imane, - Faith in Arabic - my dearest friend in another earth orbit time zone, a Heart Space. Imagine meeting you on a train just by chance. We trust our instincts to experience the truth.

“I am flying over ice fields, Canadian white with blue water cracks, down below stretching to the northern horizon. We are above the clouds whispering winter’s knowing. Spring will find white ice melting.

“We are above frozen rivers looking for strength inside it all to flow.

“Orange and jasmine fragrances in a Marrakech courtyard welcome your eyes surrounding you with sensual delight. I am trapped inside a metal container above frozen white water. I need to jump into the cold water and scrub off old airport noise, dust, sound, people pushing their lives toward inarguable conclusions.

“Yes, I will jump down onto white ice floating to meet you on the other side of a reality where sand lies shimmering beneath the blue sky and a warrior’s life is strong.

“Spring is coming, you see small tight winter trees waiting to explode in Holland, such a pity, such a tragedy waiting to happen, this season shift as if someone put 2 and 2 together in some grand equation.

“Billy in the Spanish Sierras is 3 weeks older than before he was born which doesn’t have anything to do with this memory yet contains everything because he is a lovely boy and calm. He saved their relationship you know; Mo, the desperate English woman who cheated on her English husband after producing two lovely daughters in Graz, an old Roman village in Andalusia. She took up with Pedro, and yes, Billy’s conception and birth saved them forever.

“I will always remember watching Pedro, an old hippie turned anarchist turned leather worker, one morning when we shared breakfast. We were in his old white stone home along the back ridge of narrow tight Roman cobblestone streets below Penon Grande mountains.

“We enjoyed toast, cheese, olive oil, garlic and tomatoes. Pedro gently sliced red skin and spread each tomato seed on his brown bread.”

A defining moment. Each seed itself a small world of life and future. So small yet so significant. We never wasted anything. We weren’t poor mind you just paying attention to the details.

“Back to us. Our Marrakech train conversations were the magic of being still, hurtling past abandoned mud homes, villages where women ride donkeys miles to wells looking for blue water, children without education tend flocks, men hammer their sharp knives through mint tea while laughing with the sky.

“As we sat in Jemma space watching black hooded cobras dance you were beautiful with a fine laughter and our time together was sweeter than the smell of jasmine in the afternoon and now I see ice cracking into blue water falling from the blue sky and winter sleeps below us.

“Just as the Sahara sand blows south for the winter, ice retreats north to it’s spring and it’s austere, nothing at all, a blank white, perhaps like a huge, gigantic white blank page in an old black sketch book with a broken spine spilling watercolors, stories, poems, releasing old visions of butterflies in micro fauna extremes.

“I survived these adventures and I ramble onward and tell you now when I am in the air it’s good to be moving like standing still in the frozen river of dreams. We are a cloud of blue water dancing with white ice seeing this amazing world of ours. Specific images from these moments.

“To be precise when I grow a little weary of all the moving, all the standing silent inside the language of silence white clear and slow the smell of jasmine in the garden penetrates my heart.

“I would like to rest my head and heart there just now, just for the smell of knowing red dust, water bells, chimes, singing birds, oranges, lemons, your laughing eyes again and this is enough.”