Shit Detector

Lucky explored cobbled Turkmen streets alleys and dead ends. Mothers buried in headscarves observing street etiquette extended manicured necks beyond balconies. They swept, mopped, stirred apartment dust, shaking molecules over blood stained escarpments.

They married consecrated relatives during fifty-minute Encounters designed to use the target language in the context of remembering. The thrill of remembering in Technicolor imprinted new linguistic impressions on synapses watching Pay For View.

Learning is easy. Remembering is difficult. Use it or lose it.

Silent ivory piano keys waited for inspiration’s fingers. Feeling tension, point, counterpoint, hammer strings and resonance, chromatic silence whispered, do not go gentle into the good night. Rage against dying light. Solitary notes of forgotten strumpets wailed across an abyss ignoring civilization’s discontent.

Creased faces ironed red roses petals. Faces eating masks embedded themselves on blank pages in Zeynep’s black notebook. “I don’t know which of us wrote this,” she said.

Two shy Turkish women with beautiful faces and humongous rear end collisions after eating a full course meal of self-pity and loathing buried ancestors in a tomato based culture.

Water exploded off iridescent pools as happy hour birds swimming nowhere in particular heard homo-sapiens shift erotic labia gears while assembling French cars at an eco-friendly green plant in a Bursa industrial zone.

“Were you punished for being a dreamer?” said Zeynep.

Ankara

“No, I survived the tyranny. My family understood my peripatetic nature. They respected my need for solitude, creativity and independence to a point. I received sadistic whippings with a fishing pole by my polio-diseased mother trapped in her karmic wheelchair and beaten with a leather barber’s strap by father for insolvent insubordination. Welt city. He made me eat dirt when he came home from work if the floor wasn’t clean enough. Now you know why I love linguistic gardening. I shut down my feelings. Mother and father demonstrated hard love in a perverse abusive way.”

“I see,” said a blind beggar.

“Wipe your glasses with what you know,” said James Joyce, arranging seven words..

“I was born to be a poet like a bird is born to be a musician,” said Lucky.

“Sing high, sing low, sweet chariot.”

“Brilliant.”

“In finishing school we learned to say fascinating instead of bullshit,” said Zeynep.

“You have a well developed built-in shit detector.”

“That’s the fucking truth. Everyone needs a good shit detector like writers and Cambodian/Laos landmine survivors. Truth is a value-based meaning factor. Can you create believable documentary fiction from memory?”

“It appears. So.”

Lucky and Zeynep passed an imaginary double identity theory at Oz-man Homogenized Gazing Metro station.

Two gravediggers in long black overcoats carrying umbrella projectiles stepping into unknown futures stabbed cement in cadence.

Weaving A Life, V4

Lombok

I climbed through the center of Bali

inside magical light

past a sacred volcano at Lake Batur

with a small portable typewriter

a map carved on narwhal bone

a roll of scented four-ply toilet paper

codices or painted books and texts

on bark paper called Amate

and cactus fiber including

palimpsest animal skins and dialogue of Mayan origin.

My hair caught fire.

Gathering flames I lit a piece of bark for guidance.

I mixed volcanic ash with water creating a thick paste of red ocher, a cosmetic balm of antioxidants.

I applied this to my skin to gain entry and passage through the spirit world of ancestors.

Land Mines

Below 5* hotels at the House of Blues filled with wailing songs of loss, betrayal, welfare, neglect, abandonment, misery, hope and have mercy on slide guitar backed by a harmonica in the key of C in her crying heart, a 10-year old Cambodian girl stared up at mirrored skyscrapers watching the Wheel of Life flash prisms into sky.

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper working with imported 300-count Egyptian threaded linen. No lye. A thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage.

She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food. She is a quadriplegic, an amputee with one leg after discovering a land mine on her way home from school. Her t-shirt screams:

Beware of Land Mines

She wears a permanent tear on her left cheek.

She said: Here I am. I communicate my reality to the world. Do you like my shirt? Can you read words or do you need a picture? How about a picture of a picture? I don’t know how to read so I like to look at pictures. 

My country has 16 million people and maybe 6-10 million land mines. Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Too many died because we don’t have medical facilities. Mines are cheap.

A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000 to take out of the ground.

I’m really good at numbers.

Talk to me before you leave trails to explore the forest. It's beautiful and quiet. I know all the secret places. I showed my picture to a Cambodian man and he didn’t like it. He suffers from denial. He said it gave him nightmares. He’s seen too much horror and death in one life. So it goes.

My village is my world.

My village is the other world.

Where do you live?

I am one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year in the world by land mines remaining from some ongoing or forgotten conflict.

I love unpleasant facts.

I am a walking, talking, breathing encyclopedia of knowledge and wisdom.

Reports from the killing fields indicate there are 110 million land mines buried in 45 countries. It will cost $33 billion to remove them and take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines a year.

Cambodia, Angola, Afghanistan and Laos are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia and 90% in Angola go unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee.

I hear children crying. Doctors struggle to remove pieces of metal from my skin. I cannot raise my bandaged hands to cover my ears. Perpetual crying penetrates my heart. Blood tears soak my skin.

The technical mine that took my right leg off that fateful day as I walked through pristine rice paddies near my village expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second as ball bearings shredded everything around me.

It may have been an American made M18A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range is 328 feet. Perhaps it was a plastic Russian PMN-2.

I never saw it.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding and shot me up with morphine.

All strangers in a strange land carried morphine.

Standard issue.

April 4th is International Day for Mine Assistance.

Grow Your Soul

31

See through soft eyes
Gratitude

No mistakes in life art - happy accidents

Ink dances point line shadow

Watercolor pencils
Creativity has no rules

Take a dot/line for a walk

Hospital poem story

Remember - Every story is a poem and every poem is a story.

1

Create like a god, order like a king, work like a slave

Work like you don’t need the money

Love like your heart’s never been broken
Dance like nobody’s looking

I am a short story

You are a novel

Her Zen like awareness
Stoic serene
Shamanic wisdom seeks wisdom

Wabi-sabi

Everything I do is an experiment

Art is what everything else is not

Art is medicine - a cure

Laughter medicine

Spill sounds letters words phrases sentences sing

Grow Your Soul

Rolling Thunder

One hot July day my mother rolled her living prose poem of anguish, vision, truth and beauty through Denver and beyond.

“It’s all a myth, a way of remembering the past,” she screamed chasing shadows into blazing sunlight on Broadway Street where immigrant families sat on broken dreams.

She passed devout Tibetan pilgrims walking, singing, praying, and laughing inside the Barkhor circuit in Lhasa. They threw sky crystals at karmic ravens, the symbol of reincarnation.

She rolled past terracotta warriors crashed on bags at Shanghai train stations seeking invisible unknown terminal destinations.

She rolled past Elmore James, Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Sonny Boy, Howling Wolf, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters down at the crossroads sliding their callused fingers on metal frets trading their souls to the devil.

The blues are the roots. Everything else is the fruit.

She flew past Balinese carvers edging faces for shadow puppet plays, jungle painters creating corporate butterfly murals, villagers harvesting rice in layered green pastures and landmine amputees plowing behind oxen.

Hearing Irish tinkers pound pans between villages she rolled past homeless humans dreaming of food as shadows danced on cave walls in the United States of Amnesia.

She rolled past a naked evangelist at his wailing wall forecasting human greed and global economic terrorism.

A phallic snake symbol delighted the envy of quicksilver messengers wheeling past tan cellular idiots waiting for an express bus to financial heaven.

Shifting gears, she burned past her husband’s white-haired aunt in a nursing home painting her final autumn leaf watercolor vision.

She sheared past Ashiakawa weavers threading seasons in Hokkaido, Japan and Sherpa’s brewing tea at 18,000 feet for expeditions collecting Trophy Mountains after paying hard currency to totalitarian emperors for the pleasure of suffering altitude sickness, hypothermia and high blood pressure death.

She rolled past consumers making quick money honey living on plastic debt while driving 4x4s through scarred Rockies as cock-a-roaches devoured natural resources. Land grab development bankers heard mutants scream, “Where is the water for God’s sake? We paid for our thirst.”

She sailed past her eldest son waiting for his NAM dust off chopper from Camp Eagle near Hue toward San Francisco. On the flight to Denver and beyond he became a ghost in exile.

He stayed in Colorado for a month, did eight weeks at the DOD Information School, finished his time in Europe and got out, a free man. He spent six months roaming from Germany to Finland, Portugal, Spain, and Morocco.

In 1973 while attending the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley she knew he’d face abusive rejection from some students. They’d accuse him of being a baby killer and an undesirable outcast.

He became an invisible literary outlaw.

He incorporated passive-aggressive silence. He became anonymous, a figment of their imagination. Staying away from them he practiced covert dark arts on night patrols with stealth, silence and cunning on fully automatic.

Write it down and done, laugh, and move on.

His undeclared major was Survival 101. It wasn’t in the catalog of classes. University admin officials in their cubicles screamed, “You have to declare something!” He selected Cultural Anthropology & Mythology to placate the beast.

She read his final letters home about fire fight survival instincts remembering the horror etched on a black wall in D.C, with 58,000+ names as reverberating chopper blades severed stale humid tropic air and jungle survival removed veils of illusions. He’d surrendered to life and began collecting dust.

Like an old river she careened past Arabic nomads exchanging goats and camels for pearls as oil deserted sand enveloped silk encrusted carpets. Refugees on sinking lifeboats discovered geological family strata amid Chinese shipwrecks shifting divorce paradigms.

Independent shamans played with awareness using active imagination’s free potential - exhaling a mind’s eye making B&W street photography in exile.

Women wearing exploitation’s cloth wrapped in solitude braved whirling third-world poverty as their economic fate shattered malnourished rocks along Bhutanese mountain roads creating capitalistic nirvana. Imported from India and desperate for food they lived in river reed habitats with Gross National Happiness.

Gathering speed now.

Rolling her Wheel of Life, she evaporated six degrees of separation near the Tropic of Cancer in fast rivers celebrating animist tribal dialogues hearing tongues sing air earth water fire languages by crow, eagle, raven, coyote and wolf.

She received the mark of the king tattoo from a Tahiti artist in Saipan.

Indigenous natives were surrounded and confounded by blue-eyed European’s commercial greed and cultural annihilation while calculating slavery’s cost for competition’s profit.

In silence she rolled with patience, solitude, and nature just being her doing nothing poem.

Her life created a ruptured aorta in earth, fire, water, and air with pulse platelets as red lava flowing past Himalayan monasteries heard monks chant prayers in assembly halls at dawn.

Green, blue, white, yellow and red Lung-Tao prayer flags singing wind songs welcomed her sacrifice, liberation and freedom with perfection celebrating Maya illusion wisdom free from Bardo.

ART