Journeys
Cloud
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Wednesday
Aug082007

Anatolia

Once upon a time there was this traveler and he left China after three years. He’d taught English in Sichuan and Fujian. He loved writing, travel and teaching.

It was Time to leave because he’d completed all the work there he was supposed to do. He was ready to move on. He needed to make love along life’s road and give birth to new inspirations. Simple, immediate and direct.

Before leaving the Middle Kingdom he had a “going away - give it all away” party. He gifted 30 books and 40 DVDs to his English major students at a university in Fujian.

“Don Quixote, The Garden of Secrets, If On A Winter’s Night a Traveller, The Poetics of Space, Journey to The Center of the Night, Nomad, The Stream of Life, The Book of Imaginary Beings,” among others listed on his Amazon book list. He knew the students would enjoy and share world literature.

He gifted 20 plants to Chinese teachers whose destiny was established long ago. Plants he had nurtured through wind, rain, sun and lightning flashes along eastern green mountains before, during and after sunrise.

After putting 2,650 miles on a Warrior bike he sold it to a tall business teacher from Holland where the land is flat and filled with windmills and tulips. The teacher would return to China after a summer holiday and needed it for his Chinese girlfriend. Spin them wheels.

Then, the traveller went to Xiamen and got on a plane to Hong Kong. He wandered around the huge gleaming airport looking at stuff and absorbing new dialects.

In a dream about flying to Istanbul he looked out a narrow plastic window and saw a brilliant severed slice of orange and red sun inside blue and white clouds on a horizon.

He closed his eyes and dreamed he landed in Ankara where he would live, teach and explore.

A woman named G met him at the airport. Blond, positive, 40’s and from Australia. While they zoomed into the hilly capital on a brilliant sunny Mediterranean day past red tiled roofed stacked apartments and brown block styled buildings from 1930 he regained his sense of perspective in a new land as she regaled him with information. He heard it all and forgot most of it because he was tired from all the dreaming.

She took him to a fine 5th floor apartment where he met a young part-time female teacher, an artist from Capetown, South Africa, named A, who'd return home in August with her husband, a film maker.

The flat had a fine balcony displaying the sky, clouds, western hills, amazing sunsets and bird shadowed wings. Blue jays, sparrows, pigeons, starlings.

The space received red, white and pink roses and delicious plants to give it color and life.

Peace.

Saturday
May262007

Future's face

Greetings,

She trimmed the end of old wood with her blade.
She is pounding
Metal on metal

She centered
the ironed steel metal hoe edge,
placed an awl into the wood -
splintering it
down
wedging it
striking it
with labor's hard
farm life determination

she hammered the hoe blade down,
caressing wood - a home, a shelter, grains
feeling steel inside fractured forgiving trees,
adjusting - pounding -
eyeing the edge, her work
done.

Across the street students shovel in the food.

Peace.

boy peace

Wednesday
May232007

One bowl

Greetings,

He gave him a wooden bowl.
“This is the traditional way. Put your choices in the bowl. We can discuss the price later.”

He accepted the wooden bowl and, to be polite, because he was a guest in their country, wandered around a showroom looking at inlaid boxes, handled daggers with fake stones, silver rings, bracelets, bangles, beads, earrings and silver necklaces in provocative gleaming displays.

In another reality he carried his begging bowl through dirt streets in the world. It felt cool and smooth in his hands as his fingers caressed a worn oval surface. The begging bowl had a consciousness.

He reflected the horror in his mirror. He re-calibrated true bearings and measured his way inside third world countries thumbing open his useful ragged egalitarian existential foreign dictionary.

It was filled with myths, symbols, images, ideographs, pictographs, virus inoculations, sliding scales, musical interludes, sonatas and vibratos. It held journey notes, sardonic Irish flies, bleeding tomatoes, broken hearts, fried home truck stops, haiku, khata scarves, pure mirror paper, type-A negative blood donor manifests, rose thorns, the game of life and empty wooden bowls.

Tiznit boys wanted him to fill it up. They wanted him to be greedy. They wanted to hear the sound of silver strike wood. They had great expectations of wealth based on his desire. He wanted to hit the bricks. He found one interesting bracelet and it clattered, spinning silver.

He became a Tuareg Berber.
“I’ll give you 100. Take it or leave it,” he said in Tamashek. The boy was shocked to hear his language, his dialect. He had no idea. They were on common territory.

Peace.

foot shavings.jpg

Sunday
May132007

Shanghai

Vapor air clouds dance
Inside particles of light
Sun's energy sends fragments
Across sea crossing

Black diamonds weave selves
Into ancient discoveries

Clear sky dances in and out -
Thundering down on female tides

We drag out
Financial negotiations
Emotional platitudes
Heartbreak hotel hostilities

Laughing fish swim in circles

Past our equilibrium into
Warlords's glancing shards

Without deception, guile or cunning
Intention
Moon slides away in clear contention

Garden book falls from bamboo chair
Legs rock on red tile
Spotted by rain dust circles

Dictionary of Symbols
Fills a tree as
Twilight locust songs
Transfer to new corners of sky

Snail's spiral edges along granite road
Bamboo leaves in shadow
Broken orange hibiscus turns brown

Insistent demanding human voices
Overcome determined purple petals
Dancing in the not knowing

wooden statue 2.jpg

Tuesday
May082007

3 poemes

Basra 1986

Among dust storms
rising offshore
there is a specific attrition

Rusty oil tankers aim
bows at sunset's burning edge

Large stone stands
accepted by wind's whisper
of smaller historical elements

Casualties wait patiently
for a hand to skip them
homeward

Solders' swollen feet
approach water border rendezvous,
waiting tanks spitting fire
baking flat Arabic bread

Mother bends her way past bodies,
looking for a son
in twilight's final gesture of futility

The wholeness becomes
an attribute of attrition

+

I want
the world
and it will not fit in my mouth
and I am not amused by many things
at this particular moment

and I want what I want
and I want it now and I don’t want anything
to get in my way

I am so full
I cannot swallow more sorrow

+

Don’t worry
you will forget
all my words and pictures
sent by telepathy
soon enough