Blues Music

Kids banging on piss pots, chair spokes and life support systems gave the harp player a backbeat. They had lyrics down.

“Blues are a healer.”

“The blues ain’t nothing but a good woman feeling bad.”

“Let’s invent the future,” said one. “The day after tomorrow belongs to me. Know any Little Walter? I love Juke.”

“Sure do,” said the player. “Let’s have a look see at our repertoire. How about some Sonny Boy? His real name was Chester Burnett, born in Mississippi, down in the Delta. Have you heard Help Me? It’s a classic. He sang, ‘If you don’t help me I’m going to have find me somebody else.’ He had the blues with a feeling. Speaking of healers, my mom does vision quests. Helps people see their way through personal dark slime and muck. She makes womb lodges. People go in there. Can you imagine, going back into the womb? Dark and spooky floating in wet stuff. You can’t see a thing. It’s scary and cool. She says it allows people to process old grief and memories. She calls it regressing. It takes a lot out of her.”

“It’s like entering a cave,” said Tran. “I heard about amazing Paleolithic paintings in Benaojan, Spain near Ronda. They are really old stone stories of 26,000-year old bison, archers, deer, fish traps and sex stuff. I met a wandering ghostwriter named Omar in Morocco after 9/11 and…”

“Probably metaphorical,” said an abstract kid. “They used their imagination and daily struggle to survive. They created internal and external dream images and stories. It’s all about survival, meaning and metaphor. A cave. A womb. Birth. Life. Death. Transformation.”

“Yeah, they painted their experiences. They weren’t dreams silly. They were real. They were hunters-gathers like us. They shared visions and story-truth with family, clan and tribe. They created honest magical creation stories. They expanded the known and unknown in their universe.”

“Oh yeah?” said a skeptic. “I mean where’s the scientific proof? Scientists will never reconcile the two abstract theories into a unified field theory of the universe, matter, anti-matter and evolutionary hypothesis with Time & Being & Nothingness.”

“I heard scientists dated them.”

“When you get that old no one will date you.”

Blues harp music echoed through the ward. “Who wrote that?” said one.

“Willie Dixon. He wrote some great music. Everybody recorded his tunes. Stones, Muddy Waters, you name it. The guys at Chess Records jerked him around big time. Talk about paying your dues.”

“If you want to play you have to pay.”

“Did he mate at Chess or was he a figure of speech like a metaphor?” said a linguistic kid. “Sound check.”

“He was a lyricist,” said the blues player, “and he also played the bass.”

“I know the words but forgot the music.”

“Music is the fuel,” said harp dude.

ART

Amazon Women

After eating, Turkish businessmen splashed aromatic tonic on their hands, patted jowls and slicked back thinning hair. One man adjusted spectacles. Eating fish fast made him sweat. Sharing a joke about bones he smiled at an assassin writing a character sketch.

Ancient serious women accepted hard mountain village life.

Young women divorced from confronting nature, soil and invisible roots, facing steep cobblestone Trabzon streets, appeared dazed and confused confronting miles of shops, window dummies and aggressive male textile hawkers yelling, BUY FROM ME. SPECIAL MORNING PRICE.

Have a look-see.

Shoppers’ visual examination loved consumption paradigms.

Lucky hung out observing the flow as cats prowled for scraps, bodies with a voice cautioned parking spaces and lost souls attempting sad cellular telecommunication connections stumbled through life inconveniences below Roman walls.

An abandoned Roman castle overlooking Giresun had a secret tunnel to a nearby is-land where Amazon women lived. They mated annually to keep the race going.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint, said an Amazon woman to her Black Sea lover. Take your time. After you make love to me, I will kill you and eat your heart.

I have something to look forward to, he said. Yes, she said, death is a new adventure. Nothing ever happens again.

Swirling exhortations of mosque mullahs calling the pious echoed down cobblestone alleys past Giresun boys riding spoke less bikes between crumbling yellow Ottoman walls and mackerel sellers discussing silver fins lying dead-eyed glossy on ice crystals melting into a refrain, The Sea. The Sea.

51 Days in Turkey

Healing

Rose, a healing clown, wove her way through Intensive Care pushing a cart of snacks, books and toys.

“One size fits all,” Rose yelled above children’s laughter. “Come and get it.”

Children accepted rabbits, bears, yaks, animist tribal masks, elephants, snow leopards, tigers, panthers, and turtles wearing hexagrams.

Rose gifted wolves, foxes, spiders, eagles, ravens, fire breathing dragons, watercolor brushes, Chimayo blankets, Hopi Kachina Earth spirits, 232 butterfly species from Cambodia and Tibetan prayer wheels.

“Hey,” shouted a child, “what’s your name?”

“Rose. What’s yours?”

“Ash,” smiled the kid, “short for Ashley.”

“Well,” said Rose, “you don’t look so short to me. In fact, you look larger than life, if you know what I mean, jelly bean.”

“That’s funny,” laughed Ash, reaching her thin arm into the space of Rose dancing fingers in a dervish whirl.

“Here, have some colors Ash.” Rose zapped her with a rainbow spilling laughter, prisms and stardust.

“Wow, cool. Thanks Rose.”

Rose shared extra crunchy peanut butter, strawberry jam, green tea, fresh pitta bread, grape juice, bananas, apples, milk, eggs, cheese, tomatoes, rice and toothbrushes. She offered mint-flavored dental and mental floss.

She gifted fragrant soaps, candles, multicolored silk threads, bells, gongs, cymbals, looms, shuttles and bilingual dictionaries.

Rose dispersed gamelan orchestras, watercolors, camelhair brushes, calligraphy ink, Laotian silk, papyrus sheets and illustrated poetry books. Multifaceted mirrors reflected and refracted waves of eternity.

A Lao child carries the world on their back.

“Wow,” said a dreaming child, “this is beautiful,” beaming innocence around the room in a spiral vortex.

“You are beautiful,” said Martha Ann. “Mad and innocent.”

“Make my day,” yelled a boy looking through a telescope into the infinite expanding universe composed of 13.5 billion-year-old stardust. Children swarmed like bees making honey, “Let me see, let me see.”

“Guess what?” said astronomer. “There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on the planet.”

“May I see?” said a kid.

“It’s a see saw,” said a joker, “around and around we go and where we stop nobody knows.”

“Am I this or am I dreaming?” said a child. “I am real. I invent your dream. Tran and I with our Dream Sweeper Machine decipher and reconfigure old dreams to create new memories.”

Voices sang a cold mountain poem. “Am I the soft sand of sleep that calms your tortured heart?”

“What strange mixture of life and death am I?”

“I am a wanderer searching for a Who to What I am.”

“You can indicate everything you see.”

“I am a butterfly dreaming I am a healthy child.”

A rational child said, “Pain is a sickness leaving my body. I feel free.”

“You is what you is,” said a small voice. “My mother was appointed to have me.”

“That must have been terrible.”

“It was her karma. Intention is karma.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s being aware of your actions and how they return in new forms and opportunities in your life. How they manifest your destiny. Today is our destiny. We accept responsibility for our choices and actions. We accept responsibility for our freedom.”

“Are you one with everything?” said one.

“Yes,” said a wise child. “We are a singularity. We are a witness. It’s part of the sacred contract. We are not in this room, we witness it.”

“Is absorbing our parent’s pain and suffering expensive?”

“Can be to be or not to be is the question,” said a kid named Shake Your Sphere.

“My mom says anger is expensive,” said a child.

“That explains why I can’t find the price tag,” said the joker child playing with a full deck. Ace high. Play the hand you get. Run the table. Outside hospitable windows a sparrow seeking crumbs darted from branch to branch on the Tree of Life.

“You betcha,” said Rose, grinning ear-to-ear not fear-to-fear through her Tantric death mask. “You are one third the life of the universe.”

“Like a rolling stone,” sang a child playing a riff on her blues harp in the key of C. “Ain’t it a crying shame. That old feeling is gone.”

“Ain’t nothing but the blues talking sweet thing,” said a sanguine one.

“Sometimes I blow and sometimes I draw. People should talk less and draw more. Ha ha ha.”

ART

 

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Impermanence

Dirt path yellow flowers
Kids collect plastic bottles and cardboard treasures
Resale value
Slow Sunday in a random universe of unlimited potential
Energies

Enter the zone of stone
Machines, street food sellers, LOVE balloons
Black and orange butterfly lifts into air from stagnant water

Composure present grounded with music curious eyes
Pregnant pigments
A new Joker card complements
Old Joker discovered on ground inside Lao market
Near the Plain of Jars
4,000 years ago
Pocket talisman

Little red house over yonder

Where my baby used to stay

PSP music from sleeping room

Razor blade coagulates in water stone 

Two dogs sleep in sultry shade

Old woman with broken teeth curls into hammock

Destined to be

Silent

Wooden red dusty 2x4 entrance planks small ditch

Littered with plastic bags bottles and shy language

Acquisition

Curious kids ask what is your name? Sky.

Market laughter congratulates broken light silhouettes

A girl on a wooden platform

Fingering green leaves, condiments - her radiant smile

Adult children play rocky feely tag

Green girl yawns

 

Ah the sweet smell of garbage this human accumulation

Tangy spoiled fruit aroma gift-wrapped, bows tinsel moldy memories

Smiling familiar stranger wanders from spicy bean curd noodles

2 ice java

Imaging fractured light

One-armed old beggar man sitting down at the crossroads

Smiles “hello uncle” give him Real notes pass by

Let’s have an adventure

Rhythm of sunlight

Broken tattered umbrellas

Red dust path

 

Haiku impermanence passes through

Senses are limited

4:55 sunset heavy motorcycle traffic on red dust shoulder

Antiquated dump trucks rumble toward solemn flags

 

Play the 125cc thrill like Mars in 200 years

Children walk life choices and destiny’s decision

Quality of life torments

A child in a sling (first human vehicle)

Perched on a young girl's hip...

Grow Your Soul

ART

I discovered an engraved Zippo lighter in a dusty Saigon history museum cabinet.

“Most people are born alive and then slowly die. I was born dead and then came to life.”

“Ha. Ha. Ha,” said Laughter Therapy, an antidote to the illusion of suffering.

I rolled snake eyes in life’s crap game. Reptilian id brain matter shredded old skin and identity theories. Retinas discerning space-time energy as light wave particles travelled on microscopic fibers to the cerebral cortex where data is received and analyzed for meaning. Meaning is a truth-value. Interpretation.

“Truth has few friends and they are suicides,” said Fernando Pessoa author of The Book of Disquiet.

Overloaded synapses crashed in psychotic bliss. Interpretation demolished nonrenewable resources in space-time fourth dimensions. You enter another dimension beyond sight and sound.

My hourglass sand approaches empty. I reversed it catching up to fiction-memory and truth-story. Weave on.

Leaves left winter’s tree in an airborne tag dance. They do not fall far from the Tree of Life. Frayed Tibetan Lung-Tao prayer flag horses beamed air current prayers. Perception and sensation ceased. I dissolved in the wake. Up.

“Time is a flock of nightingales,” said Albert Einstein. He added one plus one - “Experience is your education. Everything else is just information.”

A pulsating vein needle sang disconnected photons.

A three-act Greek play craved characters.

Her daughter in intensive care sang, “I feel free,” while carving her death mask.

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Laos