Sunny Side Blood Donation

Pure red life floats to the surface. A drop of blood splatters. A finger smears one drop on skin. Small swift red rivers trickle. Veins release blood volcanoes. Red-hot meteors explode on epidermis.

After Nam I became a regular blood donor every two months. Someone needs it more than I.

“Are you allergic to pain?” said a nurse in a mobile blood unit parked at Sunny Side Beach, south of Tacoma.

“Only to pleasure.”

A needle penetrated a vein drawing A-.

“Writing is easy,” said Hemingway, “just open a vein.” The earnest man wrote clear precise words.

“I wrote seven words today,” James Joyce said to a friend one day in a Paris cafe. “I wish I knew what order they go in.”

Squeezing a rubber ball I bantered with a mother of five. Blood flowed through plastic tubes out of sight out of mind into clear liter bags with an identification number. Sugar cookies and OJ. Hugs from a thank you clown provided emotional wellbeing.

I donated blood into sky.

On the shore four men and a woman stood silent on wet rocks. One man held an urn. He handed it to the woman. It was large and awkward. Death dust is awkward. Cradling it she tipped it toward water.

A river of brown ash flowed over the edge. A fine mist dressed liquid. Her dancing arms scattered a trail of someone’s life. She handed the urn to a companion. He poured ash into miniature tides.

A bouquet of red, yellow and white roses with long green stems flew from the woman’s hand into Puget Sound. The urn was offered to another man. No thanks, shaking his head.

A Vietnam veteran in shadows wearing a faded Boonie hat played a weeping guitar. Seven faltering notes ran through sand past an old couple staring at oceans beyond life’s horizon. A laughing father and son threw seaweed at each other. A crow’s black shadow landed on a dead tree branch.

My blood flow created a cataclysmic flood. Cold mountain poems melting snow fed forest trails and seeped to sleeping roots below the surface of appearances. Lotus petals opened. Earth lava blood carved canyons. Tributaries branched from the Tree of Life.

Blood gouged out rock, cleaning earth, transforming stone to sand, to dust, erasing river bottoms, collapsing banks, overpowering everything in its path, forming new microscopic celestial arrangements.

Finger paints blood on my lips and loom threads.

Luminous light illuminated weavers, gravediggers and writers. Shuttles click clack. Blood dyed threads loomed stories. Diggers cherished cemetery solitude and silence.

Soft brushes exploded seeds into rain. Laughing bones excavated stories. A double-bladed axe split clouds into Alpha, Beta, & Omega.

A thorn embedded in my skin allows a ghost in exile to realize a life principle.

Eudaemonia - human flourishing from the Greek – meaning a love of travel and a love of life.

ART

world dust

I’m broiling on the balcony of my Tacoma tree house. Getting down and dirty after years away from the typewriter.

Covered in world dust and needing oil it’s a small portable dangerous machine.  It transforms life energies by weaving adventures. Threads follow needle.

I am a peripatetic traveler and literary outlaw.

I’m lucky to get it down now and make sense of it later.

I’m a mirror in the mandala of my labyrinth. I am Labrys, from the Greek for a two-headed axe. I write with passion and vision. Short fast and deadly.

My mirror reflects everything. It absorbs desire, anger, ignorance, passion and suffering.

Beauty has no tongue.

I’m confident and self-reliant exploring the human condition. Human energies, frequencies and vibrations reflect languages, lives and attitudes. Dreams dance reflections.

Mirror reveals emotional trust, wisdom, peace and love with truth and compassion.

Meditate on the process of your death.

Suffering is an illusion.

Your mask eats your face.

My mirror is dust free.

Creativity dances in language.

Language is oral, gestures and graphic.

Oral and gestures dissipate.

Symbolic graphic is constant.

This awareness enlightens you after years of wandering. I have been here for 1,000 years so I can only imagine what they are going through.

Everything you know is a lie.

Keep a diamond in your mind.

To feel better, clean my heart, purge old fears and improve the quality of life I climbed down to donate a pint at The Blood Bank. Good old hemoglobin.

Suffering from cancer, a hospitalized child I will never meet, know, or love needs platelets more than I do. It’s been sixty-four clicks of Earth’s rotation between donations. It’s the best re-cycling program on the planet.

Give the gift of life that keeps on giving.

My calmness meets a scared mother pacing sterile emergency rooms at Sacred Heart Hospital wondering if her daughter will receive essential ingredients in time. 

A solemn-faced, stressed out cardiovascular lab tech with his personal set of challenges and opportunities, said to her, “At this moment we have no matching donors. We’ve released a global search engine to see what’s available on the market. People are selling short to cut their losses. It’s all about supply, demand and the fear of poverty. Scarcity. There are indications of further interest rate cuts to stimulate consumer confidence. We have no immediate indication of a stimulus. We will keep you informed.”

The mother doesn’t need to hear this prattle from a white lab coat.

Fingering her bone prayer beads, skeleton heads shake, rattle and roll. Fingers caress thorns. Everything happens by accident on purpose in her life, speaking of destiny, fate and chance. Life for her and millions in the land of the free, home of the brave and broke is free will versus random chance.

Everything’s already happened. People need to experience it while confronting their shadow and alienation, loneliness and loving community in a corrupt, cynical, hysterical greed-based world where people try to Control their fear.

Write FEAR & ANGER on a paper napkin.

Burn it.

Let go.

Citizen sheep believed in fear and unsustainable consumption because they were afraid of being lonely and poor.

Happiness is a myth. The wish of desire said so.

Humans were willing victims of their fear, healthy uncertainty, and doubt. Their amygdala, a small almond shaped brain structure creating fear and emotional response fired up. Fight or flight?

Are you the hunter or the prey?

ART

Give Blood

Experience, a wonderful little teacher nowadays said, giving blood helps someone who needs it more than you. Survival luck. Giving blood gifts life.

Living safely is dangerous.

Lucky had rare A-. He donated after receiving permission from Ankara medical authorities. Yes you may, blood is no argument.

The blood bus sat near a busy downtown intersection. He walked past pretzel sellers, cascading water fountains and shit covered statues of hero soldiers firing rusty guns into cobalt skies.

Paying attention he heard imprisoned Turkish journalists crying, begging, and pleading for free speech in a totalitarian Deep State of Fear.

A voice in the wilderness cried out, “The application of Articles 6 and 7 of the Anti-Terror Law in combination with Articles 220 and 314 of the Turkish Criminal Code leads to abuses. In short, writing an article or making a speech can lead to a court case and a long prison sentence for membership or leadership in a terrorist organization. Together with possible pressure on the press by state officials and possible firing of critical journalists, this situation can lead to a widespread self-censorship.”

Dissent is terrorism, said the angry frightened Prime Minister, slapping a Soma miner for booing him in public. Oh the shame.

Lucky climbed on the bloodmobile express.

A smiling Bulgarian nurse asked health questions in broken English. Another nurse took blood pressure. She attached a tourniquet to his left arm. “You have excellent veins.”

She swabbed one and slid a needle in. “Open and close your left hand.” Blood river flowed.

Outside tinted windows in blinding sun Turkish, Armenian, Kurdish and Syrian parents gripped children’s wrists. Fingers never touched. Scraggly half-starved men unloaded boxes of tomatoes from a truck. Light reflected off cheerless sunglasses. Savage salivating salvage teams folded and loaded crushed cardboard boxes into metal carts.

Sad affective-disordered businessmen spilled black market Iranian nuclear fission material and Syrian VX chemical liquids into Ankara’s water supply. Sharing is caring.

Suchness, a heavy responsibility weighted lives.

Nurses waved goodbye, “You brought someone luck by donating life.”

“It’s a small powerful gift. One stranger helps another stranger.”

101 people lined up to donate platelets. “This should be fun,” said a girl to her mother, “I love needles.”

Tears flowed into The Dream Sweeper.

The Language Company

Eudaimonia

Dream Sacrifice

Humans dreamed their language acquisition cycle. They desire clarity and kindness with meaning.

Ironic beauty shared languages.

Hot and cold tongues rolled, spitting, parsing, and ejecting sounds from vocal chords forming English.

My 5,000-year-old Mandarin language of emperors and dynasties was filled with peacock thrones, concubines, courtiers, Forbidden City intrigue, conquest and opium warlords’ gesturing life or death with fingered deftness.

Gestures use us.

Mercenary survival skills allowed me to breath, absorbing death free from fear. Free from the small fear.

I am one with the sky.

I trimmed my claws, flaying skin from bones, grinding bones for a potion. I drank from deep unconscious wells. Hearing Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons my animistic archeologist recovered fossils with a brush.

I dreamed the Sun Dance of the Plains people. Nations gathered in late spring celebrating a four-day cycle of rituals and creation dances. Dancers choosing self-torture have their chests pierced by skewers. They hang under the weight of buffalo skulls for twenty-four dances.

Their sacrifice is successful if they have a vision during their trial.

The sun went home to earth.

One vision is all you need.

I spin, dive and dance through inner and outer landscapes. My transparency is automatic. A rock n’ roll manifesto shuttles my kairos through bark, indigo, camphor, jasmine and juniper fire inside nebulous gases of dancing electron particles and energy waves.

Meditating, my head is held by a string. I transfer delicate weight from cloud to cloud, disengaging from the stimulus. Incense rises from flames.

My muse spirit guide joined The Department of Wandering Ghosts. We design mysterious projects. We sharpen rose thorns. I felt sorrow and joy seeing two drops of blood on a finger after brushing a rose thorn. A thorn embedded in my finger flesh dissolved at dawn.

A bird pressed her breast to a thorn to sing.

A beautiful rose creates a sharp thorn.

My thorn is a claw, a sharp definitive talon for tearing meat from white bones. Satisfying my hunger.

I track rabbit’s form blending into underbrush. Floating on evergreen peak winds, I wheel. My eyes see a path you are destined to follow across helter-skelter earth. In, out, in, out, breath flashes fur. I circle above your feeling fleeting form. One eye sees where you’ve been the other knows where you are going past volcanic boulders, through valleys and dry riverbeds where you never sleep. Latent fears harbor your grieving desire. Your shelter search takes on immediacy as your energy adrenaline wanes. Wings fold with forgiveness. I dive. You take evasive action among wild berries. Their sweetness is a faint taste. My sharpness tears you from soil into air.

I rest with death. Claw thorns at your throat.

A drop of blood splatters. Pure red life floats to the surface. A finger smears one drop from skin. Small swift red rivers trickle. Veins release blood volcanoes. Red-hot meteors explode through space.

After Nam I became a regular blood donor.

“Are you allergic to pain?” asked a nurse in a mobile blood unit parked at Sunnyside Beach south of Tacoma.

“Only to pleasure.” A needle slid into a vein drawing A-.

“Writing is easy,” said Hemingway, “just open a vein. The secret is that it is poetry written into prose and it is the hardest thing to do.”

An earnest man discovered right words. Put them in the right order.

Squeezing the plastic handgrip pressure pump at the blood bank I bantered with a mother of five. Blood escaped arms down into plastic tubes out of sight out of mind into clear plastic liter bags with an identification number. Hugs from thank you clown.

I donated blood into sky.

On the shore four young men and a woman stood silent on wet rocks. One man held an earthen urn vase. He handed it to the woman. It was large and awkward. Dust and death are awkward.

Cradling it, she tipped toward water. A river of brown ash flowed over the edge. A fine dust mist dressed liquid. Her dancing arms scattered a dust trail of someone’s life. She handed the urn to a companion. He poured ash into miniature tides.

A bouquet of red, yellow and white roses with freshly cut long green stems flew from the woman’s hand into Puget Sound. The urn was offered to another man. No thanks, shaking his head.

A Vietnam veteran in shadows wearing a faded boonie hat played his weeping guitar. Seven lingering faltering notes ran through sand past an elderly couple staring at seas beyond life’s horizon. A playful father and son threw seaweed at each other. A crow’s shadow landed on a dead tree branch.

My blood flow created a cataclysmic flood. Cold mountain poems melted snow, painted forest trails, seeping to sleeping roots. Meadow petals opened to moisture. Earth lava blood carved canyons. Tributaries branched out from the Tree of Knowledge and Tree of Life.

Blood gouged out rock, cleaning earth, transforming stone to sand, to dust, erasing river bottoms, collapsing banks, overpowering everything in its path, forming new microscopic celestial arrangements.

Fingers painted blood on lips and threads. Luminous light illuminated weavers, diggers and fleischers. Shuttles click clack.

Blood dyed threads loomed stories.

Diggers rattled their blood. Brushes exploded seeds into rain. Laughing bones excavated histories.

A laughing axe split clouds into letters.

Alpha, Beta, Omega.

A thorn allows a ghost to realize a life principle.

Eudaimonia ‘human flourishing’ from the Greek means a good life.

A Century is Nothing