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

Basho Haiku

That soon they will die

Is unknown

To the chirping cicadas.

Basho

 

Literary Outlaws

Music is the fuel.

Welcome to Planet Insane Asylum. You are released on your own recognizance.

Create a new world. Ride a bike. Explore. Life is the destination. Warrior attitude.

Understanding by design. UBD.

Your story emerges from nothing. Discover a point of departure a direction.

Only the mad ones sing with the fools.

Events, characters, setting, impressions. Energies and frequencies.

Remember Coco speaking in Fujian, China watching 15,000 university students walk past old village people. "They are all peasants."

Years later the rich Chinese man in Laos served you fresh green Fujian tea at the Luang Prabang guesthouse. "Children are tools," he said. He had two. They arrived in a Raging Rover using GPS.

Discernment with sensitivity.

Engaged by a stimulus. Disengaged from a stimulus.

Truth-Force.

Signal-Noise

High season in Vientiane. Perfect for drawing twilight as scooters mumble putt putt exhausted fear based laughter succumbing to circumstance.

Yoke said a verb is a condition.

Her insight was victorious. Word got back that all but three 8th grade students were caught cheating on their Lao exams. No surprise there. Delight in their sly cunning attitude. Oh, to be human.

Determination chopped ice, shifting passive years, gears and fears into a zonal transparency of blank eyes. Is-land tourists became localized stimuli wandering blank.

It's a meaningful coincidence.

We are literary outlaws.

Explanation is a well dressed mistake.

We connect the dots forward. Play an infinite game of chess.

Checkmate, said Death. I always make the correct move.

Existence precedes essence. Flame your life.

my cremation

Sekala, what is seen. Nisekala, what is unseen.

After chopping wood and carrying water I returned to Monkey Forest in Ubud, Bali for my cremation ceremony.

It was the best decision I ever made.

Everyday is a celebration.

The family tended my corpse for seven days, washing it with holy water, rubbing it down with rice flour, turmeric, salt, vinegar, and sandalwood powder. Shreds of mirrored glass - banten sutji - were placed on my eyes, pieces of steel on my teeth, a gold ring with a ruby on my mouth, and jasmine flowers on my nostrils. My four limbs received iron nails symbolizing perfect senses allowing rebirth as a stronger and more beautiful human being.

Since the 13th century every Balinese liberated their soul through cremation to heaven for judgment and rebirth in their grandchildren. Failure to liberate the soul haunted descendants as a ghost.

My corpse was wrapped in a white cloth, a straw mat and tightly bound with more white cloth on a rante of split bamboo. On cremation day it was placed in a tower constructed of wood and bamboo covered in rattan, decorated with colored paper, ornaments, glittering tinsel, and small mirrors. The tower represented the Balinese conception of the cosmos.

In a series of layers were bamboo platforms. The base signified the underworld with three ascending platforms representing the visible world, a pavilion for the body, and the tumpang or heavens.

French, German, American, British, and Japanese tourists wearing ceremonial sarongs holding camcorders and 35mm cameras mingled with local food and drink sellers. A Balinese man sold film from a suitcase. Women hustled soft drinks, water, and carved ebony statues. Local children trailed an ice cream man.

Festive crowds climbed crumbling moss covered earthen walls in Pedang Tagal anticipating my body exiting the family home. A towering ceremonial black bull waited as people gathered at the junction of two narrow dusty roads in sweltering heat.

My body was carried out and placed on the golden pavilion behind the 15’x15’ bull.

Women in ceremonial dress led a procession balancing effigies and offerings of fruits, rice and vegetables.

Forty yelling, screaming men in black and white checkered sarongs lifted the bamboo platform onto their shoulders. Laughing, they ran down the road jostling the bull back and forth in erratic semicircles to confuse angry spirits. Jubilant villagers doused the carriers and bull with streams of water. People stopped cooking, resting, working, and painting. They emerged from walled compounds to witness the ceremony.

My widow and children waited with 100 people in Monkey Forest. Noise and confusion mixed with laughter as the black bull and golden tower entered a clearing. The men struggled up a steep dirt hill under the weight.

The bull was placed under a cremation platform - bale pabasmian - constructed of bamboo with a white sky cloth and gold tinsel roof. Reeds secured the bull on four corner poles. The music stopped.

Women worked the crowd selling water and soft drinks in searing heat. Tourists replaced film.

Men cut the bull’s back open with a large knife under the sky pavilion and removed a section. I was lowered from the tower accompanied by cymbals, drums and clanging instruments. Women circled three times around the bull with offerings.

Hot, tired, sweaty, laughing men lifted me up and passed it to a group near the bull. They lowered it inside. My widow placed family heirlooms on my corpse. Forest monkeys chattered overhead. A black and white butterfly danced in fractured light.

A Brahmin priest in black stood on scaffolding singing and chanting prayers with my family. They cut a string binding white cloth, poured holy water from clay pots over me, passing them to a family member who smashed them on the ground.

The priest accepted a flowering plant and sprinkled soil on me. Another man added yellow silk. People handed them family items wrapped in white cloth to be placed inside. More clay pots were emptied on my form and destroyed on earth.

A tourist in the shade wrote a postcard.

A family member took a final photograph of me. An effigy of reeds and tinsel was dismantled and placed on me. The lid was replaced on the bull and secured with bamboo lashed diagonally across the corners.

Someone lit my fire.

The bull and flowers burned quickly as wood, bamboo and rattan sent smoke and ash circling into sky. Cloth shells flamed away as heat jumped to the tinseled golden roof.

Italian and French film crews worked close to the fire.

The crowd evaporated. The ground was littered with plastic water bottles and ashes.

My widow sat in the shade eating, drinking, and talking with our children and friends about sekala, what is seen, and nisekala, what is unseen. 

 

Becoming

Begin this day at dawn.

Pashupatinath Hindu cremation ceremony along Bagmati River.

Shiva is the destroyer and creator.

Wood pyres. A woman kisses her shrouded husband goodbye.

Light his fire.

Fire is the beginning and end.

Fire is your rosé flame.

Stir his bones.

His ashes flutter with death and mortality.

Silence. Solemnity. Serenity. Grounded and transient. Flowers. Offerings.

Glorious color dancing fire.

Return to Source.