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A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
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The Language Company The Language Company
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Subject to Change Subject to Change
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Entries in exile (8)

Saturday
Sep022023

Poem

kick boxers attack mangoes

chop ice while shifting gears in the wind after school

six month infants wail at the hospital for a blue placebo pill

charcoal fires waffles


a boy pedals his bike

seeking recycled trash before wicker baskets say hello

spare change searches for user value collecting cardboard images in a squall

red ink meets onion paper at an intersection

whisper secrets with speaking sparrows

inside thematic variations Echo recalls speaking memory

hastening a chill dance with Cinematic expressionism

write in exile

write naked

write in blood

ink is too expensive

write like you will never see

your friends and family again

gestures of silence washes clothes by hand

family loss

personal joy

simple pleasures

mirrors

weight scale

mad blind whore in love jumps over the abyss

smell rain

hear leaves dance

Sunday
Mar192023

Rolling Thunder

One hot July day my mother rolled her living prose poem of anguish, vision, truth and beauty through Denver and beyond.

“It’s all a myth, a way of remembering the past,” she screamed chasing shadows into blazing sunlight on Broadway Street where immigrant families sat on broken dreams.

She passed devout Tibetan pilgrims walking, singing, praying, and laughing inside the Barkhor circuit in Lhasa. They threw sky crystals at karmic ravens, the symbol of reincarnation.

She rolled past terracotta warriors crashed on bags at Shanghai train stations seeking invisible unknown terminal destinations.

She rolled past Elmore James, Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Sonny Boy, Howling Wolf, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters down at the crossroads sliding their callused fingers on metal frets trading their souls to the devil.

The blues are the roots. Everything else is the fruit.

She flew past Balinese carvers edging faces for shadow puppet plays, jungle painters creating corporate butterfly murals, villagers harvesting rice in layered green pastures and landmine amputees plowing behind oxen.

Hearing Irish tinkers pound pans between villages she rolled past homeless humans dreaming of food as shadows danced on cave walls in the United States of Amnesia.

She rolled past a naked evangelist at his wailing wall forecasting human greed and global economic terrorism.

A phallic snake symbol delighted the envy of quicksilver messengers wheeling past tan cellular idiots waiting for an express bus to financial heaven.

Shifting gears, she burned past her husband’s white-haired aunt in a nursing home painting her final autumn leaf watercolor vision.

She sheared past Ashiakawa weavers threading seasons in Hokkaido, Japan and Sherpa’s brewing tea at 18,000 feet for expeditions collecting Trophy Mountains after paying hard currency to totalitarian emperors for the pleasure of suffering altitude sickness, hypothermia and high blood pressure death.

She rolled past consumers making quick money honey living on plastic debt while driving 4x4s through scarred Rockies as cock-a-roaches devoured natural resources. Land grab development bankers heard mutants scream, “Where is the water for God’s sake? We paid for our thirst.”

She sailed past her eldest son waiting for his NAM dust off chopper from Camp Eagle near Hue toward San Francisco. On the flight to Denver and beyond he became a ghost in exile.

He stayed in Colorado for a month, did eight weeks at the DOD Information School, finished his time in Europe and got out, a free man. He spent six months roaming from Germany to Finland, Portugal, Spain, and Morocco.

In 1973 while attending the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley she knew he’d face abusive rejection from some students. They’d accuse him of being a baby killer and an undesirable outcast.

He became an invisible literary outlaw.

He incorporated passive-aggressive silence. He became anonymous, a figment of their imagination. Staying away from them he practiced covert dark arts on night patrols with stealth, silence and cunning on fully automatic.

Write it down and done, laugh, and move on.

His undeclared major was Survival 101. It wasn’t in the catalog of classes. University admin officials in their cubicles screamed, “You have to declare something!” He selected Cultural Anthropology & Mythology to placate the beast.

She read his final letters home about fire fight survival instincts remembering the horror etched on a black wall in D.C, with 58,000+ names as reverberating chopper blades severed stale humid tropic air and jungle survival removed veils of illusions. He’d surrendered to life and began collecting dust.

Like an old river she careened past Arabic nomads exchanging goats and camels for pearls as oil deserted sand enveloped silk encrusted carpets. Refugees on sinking lifeboats discovered geological family strata amid Chinese shipwrecks shifting divorce paradigms.

Independent shamans played with awareness using active imagination’s free potential - exhaling a mind’s eye making B&W street photography in exile.

Women wearing exploitation’s cloth wrapped in solitude braved whirling third-world poverty as their economic fate shattered malnourished rocks along Bhutanese mountain roads creating capitalistic nirvana. Imported from India and desperate for food they lived in river reed habitats with Gross National Happiness.

Gathering speed now.

Rolling her Wheel of Life, she evaporated six degrees of separation near the Tropic of Cancer in fast rivers celebrating animist tribal dialogues hearing tongues sing air earth water fire languages by crow, eagle, raven, coyote and wolf.

She received the mark of the king tattoo from a Tahiti artist in Saipan.

Indigenous natives were surrounded and confounded by blue-eyed European’s commercial greed and cultural annihilation while calculating slavery’s cost for competition’s profit.

In silence she rolled with patience, solitude, and nature just being her doing nothing poem.

Her life created a ruptured aorta in earth, fire, water, and air with pulse platelets as red lava flowing past Himalayan monasteries heard monks chant prayers in assembly halls at dawn.

Green, blue, white, yellow and red Lung-Tao prayer flags singing wind songs welcomed her sacrifice, liberation and freedom with perfection celebrating Maya illusion wisdom free from Bardo.

ART

 

Thursday
Apr292021

Write

“Write naked. That means to write what you would never say.

“Write in blood. As if ink is so precious you can't waste it.

“Write in exile, as if you are never going to get home again and you have to call back every detail.”

-    Denis Johnson

22

Out past massage girls waiting with white sheets on brown tables under red umbrellas resting on golden sand as floppy hatted cuticle management women walking sand looking for needy nails,

lost fat White Russians slathered on UV 30+ staring inland at young backpackers their eyes down on phones fingers flying TEXT ME lonely baby of my heart soul mind rapture

one lone swimmer back strokes in calm blue green water as a small boat engine hums toward a green forested is-land floating away on the surface of reality inside a dream bubble laughing in the divine mystery

Imagination

Observation

Experience

Present moment

Ink me laughter

Waves light nature's song

Riding a beam of light through space

Tribal energies

1 M

Magic wave light

Wushu movement

Yangon Burma brass bell

Signifies

Present Moment

7

Otres to Kampot adventure

Memory of old yellow hospital

Slow easy corroding iron bridge connects land

Between an object and a concept

Between knowledge and wisdom

French architecture remembers history, families, whispers eyes

Stories inside stories

Where I polished The Language Company at Epic Arts (9-12 a.m.)

& Bliss guesthouse (3-6 p.m.) daily for five months once upon a time

The Language Company by [Timothy Leonard]

Zen butterfly in slow river town

How's it feel this gentle Tao?

Karen’s touch with conversation’s widow

Splits profits with mama san running the game near old market

Fancy pants decor, tourist souvenirs

Abandoned Art Deco movie theatre

Ha

Feels good exploring Kampot dust

Sensing the transitory beauty

Peace

Secret

Strength

Life

Love

Sorrow

Multiple Selves - We

Keep your own counsel

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can

It’s what you find in the corner

Circus people live on the edge

Sunset swift lets fill orange sky with magic

Mental hypothalamus

Unconscious

Grow Your Soul - Poems from Laos & Cambodia

 

How many more full moons will you see?

Monday
Apr062020

Ghost in exile

After 364 days an officer pinned red and yellow campaign ribbons on me. I caught a freedom flight from Saigon to Alaska, ran across a frozen tarmac in thin khakis for java and flew to the City by the Bay.

“Anybody want a steak?” said a sergeant processing arrivals.

“Screw the steak. Give me a new dress green uniform. I’m out of here for a flight to Colorado.”

I became a ghost in exile. No one spoke to me. I understood their reticence, fear, guilt and awkwardness seeing me in a military uniform.

Passengers were anesthetized by their life and media propaganda and TV images seeing the dead come home in black body bags. Prime time madness sold soap.

I remembered Samuel at the 265th, “Better than going home to abuse, derision, scorn, apathy and unemployment.”

I’d seen things they would never believe. They averted their eyes with social indifference and I understood. They’d remained static in their work, eat, and sleep routines.

I’d shifted my consciousness with quantum precision. I survived a transforming life experience.

You die twice. Once when you’re born and when you face death.

Surviving a year in a macabre police action zone where an imperialist government tried to impose a Catholic leader on a Buddhist people gave my life new meaning.

It taught me impermanence.

One life - no plan - many adventures sang with clarity and awareness. I create or destroy my freedom.

In my dream I hike past a crude sign hanging from rusty concertina wire at a deserted firebase:

Normal is a cycle on a washing machine.

I locate normal in my portable lexicon.

Normal is someone you don’t know very well. Like yourself.

I used to be somebody else but I traded him in.

ART

Sunday
Feb132011

Hope & Exile

Hope had many choices and she chose Exile. They married at the Cathedral of Dreams and ran through fields over Spanish mountains to the edge of the Mediterranean. 

 “There’s a big world out there,” Hope said to Exile pointing over the sea. 

“Yes and that’s only the top of it. Let’s share an orange,” Exile said to Hope. 

“Yes,” said Hope, smiling at real and imaginary worlds over the horizon, “we will sacrifice the peel to enjoy the fruit. Delicious.”

Hope birthed Patience. Raising Patience was a test for Hope and Exile because she gave them the test first and the lessons later.

Exile was a strange wild bird and while he loved Patience she challenged it, his love. She tested his stability, honesty, devotion and his way of constructing a world inside a world, a universe inside the swirling molecules of their experience. He was a risk taker not a ticket taker and Patience admired this reality. 

They studied and evaluated their character traits and imperfections. They took personality tests. Patience tested his trust, his ability to forgive and forget with gratitude and love. Patience handed him small portions of fear, anger, jealousy, ignorance, and desire. He created a diamond reflecting 10,000 things. These were the things Patience cherished.

Hope was relieved when she saw Exile was content. She didn’t know how long it would last. He always enjoyed living on the edge of somewhere else.

The old forest when they saw the axe handle entering, said, “Look it is one of us.”

“No one dies,“ Exile said one evening as they chopped and carried wood on the edge of a rain forest.

“No, I suppose not,” said Hope. “Patience will never die. She will live forever because she has a magic about her. I felt it before she was born. It was like a stream of light was floating inside me.”

“She is radiant,” Exile said. “She is beauty, truth and wisdom incarnate. She will learn how to float, how to project her spirit energies. She will be a fine healer.”

Exile raised Labrys, his double bladed laughing axe above wood. Streams of splinters blasted into twilight. Exile chopped and Hope carried. These were the choices they made as the moon rose through orange and blue streaks of light.

“He went to the cemetario today,” Hope said. 

“Who?”

“The forcestero, the outsider.”

“He was there yesterday as well, why?”

“Visiting the spirit sources.” 

“Indeed,” said Exile, “they will be out tomorrow with the full moon. Clearly.”

Hope and Exile danced in the meadow under the moon.

Light pierced their being and they floated. Nobody else saw them floating. They were protected by a veil of light dancing behind a curtain of surrender. Their spirits were free of their physical being. They were free spirits in a free world blessed by their imaginary limitations. 

They left their temporal bodies and floated down to the Rio Guadalete to combine their energies with water. The water was clear, cold and delicious. It flowed from dark gray Sierra mountains in a rush of sound through a rocky path. It flowed flowers absorbing their scent inside water. 

As petals danced in air Exile and Hope gathered warm flowers around them below the moon. They ran along the valley through fresh turned soil, past olive and cork trees, inside forests of pine, fir, evergreen, pinsapar, maple and trees without a name. 

Bare trees pointed at the moon.

“Look there,” trees said, pointing thin branches toward the sky, “there, there we are.”

Trees pointed to pulsating white stars. “Yes,” they sang, “there we are.”

“Look,” said one, pointing far away, “there we are.”

“And there and there,” they sang reaching every direction. The wind listened to the stars whisper secrets telling star tales seeing star trails across the emptiness of sky inside the vast vacuum of silence. 

Hope and Exile were light.