Poetry Ash

"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well poetry is just the ash." - Leonard Cohen

Kafka - Level of voice, the situation, the posture, the incident, the line.

Great writing is simple but not easy.

Blow / draw blues harp. Sing alive!

Wild deep pleasure w/supple friend

Massage to sweet O surrender, laugh, relay skin talk

Pleasure wisdom joy

"Those who love with heart and soul there is no separation - distance from a lover and from time, feeling, experience ... In your light, I learn how to live. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no one sees you, but I do and that sight becomes this art. Those who love only with eyes feel separation when they say goodbye." - Rumi

Destiny

“Books are an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.” - Franz Kafka

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After a war everything is easy.

In 1969 he volunteered for the Army, left the world and flew over the pond to Nam. He walked out 364 days later with his shadow - a bag of bones.

He is a ghost driving a meat-covered skeleton made of stardust riding a rock floating through space.

Fear Nothing.

Transformed, he experienced free time in the long now.

This is what happened, more or less.

One of his names is Lucky Foot. What does that mean?

He elucidates in simple, clear, precise, concise English the language of savage barbarians.

It means, as an experience junky possessing genetic variant DRD4-R7 addicted to new adventures, he brings prosperity to merchants, rest-a-rant owners and nondescript sad, neglected, abandoned and emotionally well adjusted hot to trot red sheen women among humans struggling to survive life’s labyrinth without a center.

He gifts luck to money changers, manicure girls, beggars, banana women, landmine amputee survivors, ice and rice sellers, student-teachers, tinkers, tailors, soldiers, spies, textile merchants, weavers, artistic genius children, orphans, noodle mama, tea and java purveyors, gardeners, gravediggers, literary outlaws and craggy faced Dan, a boat captain in Hoi An who worked as an interpreter at MAC V during the Vietnam War.

Fate and destiny is the same thing.

If he grows up he dies.

Security is an illusion.

He presents good fortune to Rita, author of Ice Girl in Banlung, barbers cleaning his ears, high-heeled sandal ladies, love sock purveyors and rent-a-life companies.

HCE. Here comes everybody.

90% of life is showing up. When he shows up their day, life, fate and glittering fortunes improve. Karmic destiny.

Fate laughed with him in Morocco on 9/11. He was in the Sahara. He did not take possession of that event and perpetual aftermath. Fear sells.

Destiny danced with him on the is-land of Amnesia in Southeast Asia and exploring Turkey, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

Before returning to Nam in 2009 he lived on a string of 15,000 archipelago islands between Malaysia and Papa New Genie gathering evidence about the human condition.

Each island is a letter. If you string letters together you create a word. This word depending on your imaginary perception of truth-value may or may not have meaning for you like Beauty - your true reflection in still water.

Beauty has no tongue.

A small journey expands life’s tapestry. He’s a needle without a compass. His needle leads a thread. Threads weave a conversation.

Move like a river, rest like a mirror, respond like an echo.

The Language Company

Beauty & Respect

Tell me about the village. It is a microcosm.

Simple happy people live, work, breed and die.

They know desire, anger and ignorance exists outside the village.

Inside they practice compassion and meditation. They love singing and dancing.

They cherish nature with beauty and respect.

They accept responsibility for their choices and actions with free will.

A free people they practice gratitude with an open heart-mind.

Kind and loving they walk to the pagoda or wat

daily to make offerings and receive blessings from the monks.

They sit in meditation together. Their calm heart-mind is a lotus blossom.

A monk rings a bell.

Echoes flow to the village and beyond. Frequencies and vibrations dance.

Blindness

"We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe."

- Upanishad

 

Curious beginnings determine her artistic sense of formless form, coloring stories of her village, the other world.

Cutting, planting, harvesting completes slow rhythm of life. Her skill shines with every new expression. Her heart sings.

Her simple direct feeling is all sensation.

Art enables her this beauty. She describes what she draws. She creates what she sees. Her words fly through forests with resplendent peacocks, birds of paradise.

A blind conversation developed a through line. Turn a blind eye.

Blindness listened. Blindness heard muted laughter before intuition gestured pink floating word worlds.

Laughter danced with exhaled attachment.

Blindness danced through late yellow faltering light / penetrating bamboo leaves spreading themselves over banana baskets impaled on swinging posts.

A bike bell rang. A young Lao girl sat quiet watching the Vietnamese girl do her toenails. Cutting, and trimming, lemon / lime soak, cuticles, translucent before applying a silver hued glossy glean. Nail by nail.

Blindness solved the mystery of sight crying tears of silence.

A van labeled UNIVERSE filled with blank faced white Europeans trapped behind glass holding rampant desires and scared expectations on laps turned into a blind alley.

They fidgeted with uncomfortable languages floating into ear canals assaulting long painful strides navigating yesterday’s regrets / tomorrow’s fear / today’s dead lines.

Blindness practiced Tai-chi with precision.

Blindness exchanged blue ink for a dark shade of green.

A handheld hair dryer waved hot air over a shampooed head. Mirrors whispered empty secrets.

Elements of silence said farewell.

Eyes investigated decompression while swallowing fresh yogurt with peach slices near afternoon’s languishing empty promises intent on making it new day by day.

Explanations have to end somewhere.

In her village, the other world, the one she never left, Blindness threaded new beginnings on her loom of time feeling pressure and tightness between notes.

Sunlight dressed saliva beads blending a weave, texture and design, saying hello Beauty.

Beauty has no tongue.

Weaving A Life V1

Tall Tale

"Writers are shamans. We go into the mountains and come back with visions for our tribes. Our holy assignment."

This is a camelo, Spanish for a tall tale.

Hello. May this find you well. Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Omar. I am a Touareg Berber nomad from the Sahara desert in Morocco.

I am a blind prescient writer in exile.

This is my story about how I and other tribal members met a strange kind man named Mr. Point immediately after 9/11. He just showed up and the Sahara is a big place.

When others hear this tale they express disbelief.

“How can that be?”

Living Baraka, a supernatural energy and magic power practiced by our people, his appearance was, shall we say, expected. He is a poet, shape shifter, cosmic comic clown and literary outlaw.

Now it happened that we traveled together just like you and I now and we formed a community. We shared many tales and I have taken the liberty of including them here with some of my own stories. We enjoyed amazing adventures together.

I confess this narrative is not linear. In a sense, this is for and about children: innocence, curiosity, empathy, and playful pure intentions. Children love inventing stories and hearing them.

Stories are essential like air and water.

My friend and I love to travel and besides calling the Sahara home I also inhabit a very real magical late Paleolithic Spanish cave in Andalucía. It encompasses 26,000 years of art and history. The word ‘history’ comes from the Greeks. It means story. This explains the title, A Century Is Nothing.

Someone in our tribe said, “Imagine the earth is 24 hours old. To see a perspective of how long humans have been around, imagine they’ve been on the planet for only the last 60 seconds.”

Marco Polo, a famous traveler near death in 1324 at seventy left his famous epitaph for the world. “I have only told the half of what I saw!”

Keep an open mind and fasten your seat belt as we may experience a little turbulence during flights of imagination grounded in invisible particles of reality. In the event of a water landing your heart-mind may be used as a flotation device.

We’ll meet again. May your journey be filled with loving kindness, compassion and authenticity.

 *

Meditating, my head is held by a string. I transfer my delicate weight from cloud to cloud, disengaging from the stimulus. Incense rises from flames. I join my muse spirit in the Department Of Wandering Ghosts.

I sharpen rose thorns for my work. My muse, bless her heart, uses the thorns to make a comb. She weaves on the loom of Time. I feel sorrow and joy seeing two drops of blood on a finger after brushing a rose thorn. I pull my hand away with a thorn embedded in my finger. Old human flesh dissolves.

I’m filled with wild passion. A mind-expanding drug of wonder, delight and freedom increases my awareness of infinity without pushing me into psychosis. My power is a medicine, a sacred connection to Gaia after years of paying attention.

I observe a spider meticulously wrapping a captured insect with thin microfilaments. The spider recycles her old web on the periphery hauling sustenance to the diamond center where it vibrates in a soft breeze. Does the spider intend to create the web to catch an insect? Does the flying insect intend to discover the web? Where does instinct end and intention begin?

One instinct is to create and sit with meditative patience, another instinct is to take risks and move.

My serenity is not bought over the counter with pharmaceutical coupons cut from old magazines. No dust collects on my mirror reflecting Beauty in my heart. I experience myself as a breath of fire, a lightning bolt sacrificing my fear, doubt and uncertainty, shattering myth. Lightning bleeds off the charge. I am an unemployed fortune teller. I am the soft sand of sleep-dream calming a tortured heart.

Abracadabra!

My feminine muse hurls her lightning bolt even unto her death. She is a death deferred. She is on death row with a small short reprieve. Her tranquility is a lethal injection of travel.

A Century is Nothing