Bone script

Greetings,

Once he started, establishing a voice, setting and characters in the human condition on paper surrounded by illiterate simple, loud, noisy, volume addicted humans with royal blue ink it was a joy.

He sat at a warung, a cheap food place - plain white virgin rice, spicy chilly, egg, green veggies, tempe, tofu, deep fried crackers - on the other side of the Berlin Wall. He'd escaped from the tyranny of noisy educational sad robots trapped in their expectations of perpetual childhood.

A village woman piled her trash near a grove of banana trees and lit a fire. Roosters, hens and chicks scattered. Smoke curled around a man pushing his chipped blue plywood cart loaded with plastic dishes, cheap cloth, simple tools, brushes, mops, bags, hats, and basic household goods. Rolling the wheels through neighborhoods.

Cumulus clouds gathered momentum.

Nearby were the yelling village people. A tall thin woman with her 3-4 year old, monkey boy child. Pregnancy was her ticket out of hell, loneliness and misery. In a village you traded sex for security.

She and her mother tormented the kid. He cried. They laughed at him. They created a mini-monster. A boy who hated women now and later. He was dependent on them for food and affection. Mother and daughter uttered primal grunt sounds. The mother combed her daughter's hair scavenging follicles for nits and lice. Protein.

Crying children. Perpetual distractions.

Time-death.

The primordial darkness. Cosmic birth. The cave of inner being.

He saw her through a window when the metro pulled in.

Alone and cold, she waited for the green metro door to open.

It was late. She wore a thin black sweater and long gray skirt.

She was slight...olive pale skin, black hair pulled back, around 45.

She limped into the car dragging her right foot. Her left foot was normal. Her right foot looked like a case of elephantiasis. She sat twenty feet away.

She bent over and slowly raised her skirt from around her ankles. The burned and bloody skin damage ran three inches across and ten inches high. Either first or second degree burns. A layer of skin was exposed, red, lined with white. Bare and exposed. She needed medical attention.

Two men across from her stared and diverted their eyes.

She sat, fingered a phone and grimaced. No tears, just a stoic face.

The metro rolled through night. It passed a river, a neon bright Everest furniture store, fast food emptiness and an expensive private hospital filled with antiseptics, bandages, lotions and potions and patients with money.

She inspected her ankle, touching an edge of fried skin with a white tissue. Clear cold air sent shivers through her central nervous system shutting down pain receptors.

Two old women balancing collected piles of scrap wood on their heads took a shortcut through village mud.

A perfect white and yellow winged butterfly danced in a slight spring breeze.

Metta.

Kurdish whispers

Greetings,

“We are understaffed and overworked,” lamented a brilliant happy personal tutor. Her name was Zeynep and she came from Kurdistan. She spoke English, Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, French and Esperanto. She collected magic stones from the Black Sea where she lived.

Her grandmother told her stories in Kurdish. Her language was out loud. It was outlawed by the scared politicians in Ankara. Kurdish people whispered.

In an unprecedented wave of support, millions of sad, yet strangely serene women facing callously arranged marriages filled with empty hopes and vague promises of love and happiness enlisted to engage strangers on distant borders.

This wave of support resembled the open handed movement in the moment, the long fare well gesture a mother reluctantly gifted her daughter recently before watching her disappear into the teeming stream.

"Be well my love," sang the mother. Her daughter joined a band of women, singing and sighing.

Metta.

Before

Greetings,

Before planting MK 69 

between a wild bonsai and bamboo he regained consciousness around 5:18 a.m.

The village was dark. "Twilight in reverse," sang the full throated song bird. It was in a large tree nearby. It cautioned him to be diverse, peaceful and open. It warbled one short trill, paused, trilled a long solitary note, paused, trilled short and silenced.

He heard it. Clearly. He lit a stick of Tibetan incense. He unlocked the front and back doors as a floor fan fanned new air. The bird trilled, hearing bolts slide open. He stepped out. A series of open white and purple orchids shared their aroma dream. Inhaling smells and bird songs he scattered bread crumbs on a path.

He whistled in return, establishing a connection.

People in the village woke before dawn. Young servant girls swept leaves from stones. Dark eyed laconic girls wrapped linens around skeletons, wringing their flesh, their fibers before hanging them on portable stainless steel collapsable folding structures to dry inside gray flowing fumes of billowing smoke from burning trash dancing over a chipped sky high wall decorated with gleaming shards of green glass and rusty barb wire - plastic bags, boxes, banana and coconut leaves, clothing, feathers, Styrofoam happy meals, cardboard, plywood, textbooks, comprehension checks and balances, monetary social addictions and so on.

Fear sang her song accompanied by a young girl spoon feeding Chinese children before they were stolen by a gang of traffickers from the coast. A young boy's value was between $3,500 and $5,000. Negotiate.

The one-child policy created a desperate daily search for heirs. Losing face in the village was tantamount to public humiliation.

Before a girl swept she wept.

Metta.

more...

The sun is hiding

Greetings, 

After watching emergency crews pry a suicidial man from below Asian Minor subway engines after being struck by lightening, I walked through an old expansive cemetery. It was spring. Wild flowers, white headstones, names, dates, and memories rested below tall pines and thick evergreens.

A woman sat on a grave pulling weeds. Tending soil. Nearby, her friend, her sister, her mother, aunt and grandmother from Asian Steppes speaking Tamashek whispered to a child, "She is cleaning the spirit entry. She is drumming, remembering."

The child sang to the woman on the grave, "Auntie! Auntie!" but the woman didn't say anything. She played the soil like a drum. She was sad and remembering her son, father, husband, uncle and grandfather. Their love and kindness.

Her tears watered red, yellow and white roses. A thorn pushed a white haired woman in a wheelchair along a path inside a humid rain forest covering 6% of the planet.

Smoke from a fire created by bamboo and coconut leaves circled it's veins through a heart's four clamoring chambers. Smoke and love echoed from the Forest Floor to the Understory, rose to the Canopy and emerged through the Emergent.

This is where the Bird of Paradise, Eagles and Macaws live.

I walked on, passing chiseled stones wearing Arabic script.

Suddenly there was a quick explosion of metal on stone. An old man with a sledgehammer pounded a collection of memories around a grave. He paused, removed fragments and slammed his sledgehammer again.

The sun went into hiding. It rained. A woman played musical notes.

Metta.

Dance

Greetings,

As a Japanese monk said, "You are always a fool whether you dance or not. So you might as well dance."

The Moroccan girl with wild brown hair tied

back is not on the train as it leaves a white station.

She sits on her haunches. Her bare feet

dig soil, grip small earth pebbles as exposed root structures dance with her toes.

Her toes are her extended connection where her shadow lies forgotten. It spreads upon vegetables. They wait below her. They prowl toward late winter light.

She is not on the red and brown train that zooms past green fields where her sheep in long woolen coats eat their way through pastures after a two year drought.

She is inside green the girl with her wild brown hair pulled tight. She is not on the train hearing music, eating dates, reading a book, talking with friends or strangers, sleeping along her passage, or dreaming of a lover.

She does not scan faces of tired, trapped people in their orange seats impatiently waiting for time to deliver them to a Red City in the desert.

Her history’s desert is full of potentates sharpening their swords, inventing icon free art, alphabets, practicing equality, creating five pillars of Islam and navigation star map tools, breaking wild stallions, building tiled adobe fortresses, selling spices, writing language.

She is not on the train drinking fresh mint tea or consulting a pocket sized edition of the Qur'an. She does not kneel on her Berber carpet five times a day facing Mecca in the east.

She does not wear stereo earphones or listen to music imported from another world, a world where people treasure their watches. Where controlling time is their passion for being prompt and responsible citizens to give their lives meaning.

She is not on the train and not in this language the girl with her wild brown hair tied back with straw or leather or stems of wild flowers surrounding her with fragrances.

She is surrounded by orange blossom perfume beyond rolling hills, cut by wet canyons along yellow and green fields, where her black eyes penetrate white clouds in her blue sky.

In her open heart she hears her breath explore her long shadow, causing it to ripple with her shift. Her toes caress soil and she is lighter than air, lighter than a feather of a wild bird in the High Atlas mountains far away.

She smells the Berber tribal fire heating tea for the festival where someone wears a goatskin cape and skull below the stars.

It is cold outside. Flames leap from branches like shooting stars into her eyes and someone plays music. It is the music of her ancestors, her nomadic people and she sways inside the gradual hypnotic rhythm of her ancestral memory.

She is not on the train. She is inside a goat skull moving her hoofs through soil. She moves through fields where she danced as a child seeing red and yellow fire calling all the stars to her dance and she is not on the train.

Metta.