blindness

I stepped outside of myself and saw a blind man going down life’s street. Neither of us had seen each other before. 

Dressed in rags, he stooped under the weight of a torn shouldered bag. His right hand stabbed cracked cement with a crooked staff. He had no left hand. In the middle of the sidewalk he stumbled into a parked motorcycle, adjusting his way around it.

Chinese schoolgirls eating sweet junk food on sharp sticks whispering silent secrets about his stupidity passed me with empty black wide open eyes. They were changed to the earth to pay for the freedom of their eyes.

I remembered, If a man wants to be sure of his road he must close his eyes and walk in the dark, or a blind man crossing a bridge is a good example how we should live our lives, the enlightened mind.

I followed him. I sensed a lesson in existence.

He continued scraping his staff against steps leading to shops and worked his way along a long concrete wall. At the far end sat a beggar in rags made from boiled books.

His skeleton supported a battered dirty greasy cap, threadbare jacket, no socks, broken shoes. He struggled to light a fractured cigarette. His cracked begging bowl was empty.

The blind man ran into him.

“Go around” screamed the beggar. “Can’t you see I’m here you idiot!”

“Sorry. I didn’t see you.”

“This is my space! Keep moving you fool. Pay attention.”

Ghost speak

“People are more affected by how they feel than by what they understand,” said a foreign teacher. 

“We know so much and understand so little,” said a bright Chinese girl. One of eighty in a class tomb.

“I want to be a waif when I grow up.” 

During a moment of silence they heard an authoritarian female voice yelling in Mandarin from another room. “The bent nail gets hammered down!”

A ghost passed brown faced women in dirty white aprons chopping vegetables with sharp cleavers on scarred wood. Single girls mopped cement passageways from dawn to dusk. Dutiful daughters swept floors staring at deaf dumb blind televisions stacked on bags of rice, boxes of detergent and hairline fractured straw mattress bedding. 

China is the entertainment capital of the world!

He passed retired pensioners slapping white marble mahjong pieces into tight manicured strategic rows as orange vested street cleaning women whisking ornate hard handled bamboo brushes painted the city’s rising dust. A ghost they never imagined floated past, an apparition they dreamed in their wide eyed wonder.

A peasant woman collected cow manure in broken reed baskets. She carried her load to a road, spreading it out with a hoe to dry in the sun. Instant organic fertilizer.

Ghost speaks the language of silence. This comforts them. His inability to articulate his passion and suffering illusions witnesses a mirror reflecting reality in humanity’s incarnate garden. 

The meaning of meaning was obscured by clouds of anger, fear, desire, jealousy, ignorance, and attachment. They waved him away.

They cast him into deep water. He replenished his spirit. His motivation and intention was clear. 

buzz process

orphan's penned this BUZZ before. about getting your ears cleaned in china.

do you want to hear it? ok. 

so, I’ve heard but you can’t believe everything you hear. easy to say and hard to do as they say in China. 

speaking of hearing china in mandarin, you can get your ears cleaned there. 

what! really? 

yes. now it happened at the empty chinese opera one afternoon in chengdu, you sit down in a wicker chair and give the girl in a blue uniform 10Y or slightly more than a buck.

a group of chinese men in wicker chairs drinking tea stare and laugh at you. everyone stares at you in china because it is a zoo and you are an exotic humanoid species of endless speculation.

look at the funny foreigner! he’s going to get his ears cleaned. boy is he in for a surprise!

you sit back and close your eyes. she has all the tools; long steel wires, cotton swabs, ointment, a microscopic spoon on a post and a pair of stainless steel tongs.

she probes into your right ear with the spoon and digs out hard brown wax. she flicks it on the ground where it becomes part of Ear Wax Mountain, a brave new world order. she swabs and cleans out your ear with a small cotton ball on a thin wire.

while this is buried in your ear she taps the tongs creating a vibrating frequency. she touches the steel rod in your ear and you hear the WHIRLING! BUZZ! BUZZ! as 1,000 bees and cicadas invade your 

consciousness with a deafening crescendo. she has opened your aural chambers big time, taps the tongs again, you receive the echo chamber canyon of sound, the WHIRLING BUZZ like sandpaper being rasped against old fibers of skin or yes, the fast centrifugal centrifuge of heartbeat reactors, roaring rivers inside a galaxy of weightless streams. BUZZ!

she eases it out, massages your temples and your eyes are closed and you are dreaming you are in a Chinese opera playing the role of an old dramatic hero dying at his post after proclaiming his undying love for family and harmonious social order and stability in the country.

she attacks and cleans the other ear and the vibrations take you away. BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZ! far away.

she caresses your ears with something soft, massages your temples, and scalp and when she finishes you no longer have a hearing problem. it’s all in the listening. you’ve been buzzed back to clarity.

everything that goes in the ear comes out as language. it becomes a tool for emotion and expression.

the greatest sorrow is the death of the heart.

one chinese girl

One joy about self publishing was selecting the cover photograph.

Her image spoke emotional honesty. She was trapped behind the steel grate, a hard grey Chinese educational formation of her childhood in the poor village of Maija in a remote area near the university. Her eyes held world secrets and potential.

She stared at the man, a stranger, a diversion in her universe. Her sisters and schoolmates pushed against her. She was trapped against the gate. It was locked. He was on the other side.

 He held a small black machine up to his eye. She heard a click. The shutter opened and closed, trapping time, trapping her image on a memory card. He smiled, thanked her and disappeared on his dirty black mountain bike.

She had no way of knowing. Her image finding a book cover. Her child eyes there for everyone to see. Stories about stories and the girl in some alchemical manifestation lived breathing and aware of her immortality. 

He’d visited her primary school to sing and dance. Speaking strange unintelligible words. His laughter and kindness were a relief after the autocratic, punishing manner of bored illiterate women teachers. They didn't want to be here any more than the kids.

No one had a choice here. You did what you were told to do in a harmonious society filled with social stability ordered from Beijing.

A long distant dream far away from a poor village where people tilled soil following oxen in dirt, mud and rice paddies. 

5000

One day she rode her beautiful dirty black Warrior mountain bike to old student street for dumpling lunch. Delicious.

She prefers old student street to boring new commercial student campus street. She enjoys mature green leafy trees filled with small wild sparrows darting down to feed in garden patches. She savors a wide blue sky and orphaned clouds. She swallows sky removed from blaring omnipresent bland Chinese TV soap operas and cell phone addicted youth.

“Text me baby! Reveal your passion in 5,000 characters. Say things with electronic letters and symbols you’d never find the courage to speak out loud. Your silence is deafening.

"Hold my hand. Better yet, my baby, when we walk covered in our innocent adolescent shyness, slowly rub your elbow against my skin so I know you care, reveal your shy desire with deference and longing. Our skin pours hormonal activity into the possibility we may eventually dance naked. Text me baby!”

A boy approached the table. “May I sit here?” 

“Sure.” 

“May I talk with you?” 

“Sure. You talk I listen.” 

“I don’t know what to say.”