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Entries in guilt (5)

Sunday
Oct062019

Pollatomish, Ireland

The view from the one-story grey stone hostel in County Mayo was exquisite, the Atlantic Ocean all blue-green opening up its long voyage.

A terrible sad beauty recognized the spirit of the young girl who killed herself in a room upstairs years ago.

She visited often, looking for her love, looking for meaning. It took a long time for us to trust each other.

She visited at night, her spirit roaming upstairs.

It took courage for her to trust me.

I practiced silence. Listening.

She told me stories.

She opened her windows to let darkness invade her privacy. She took comfort in the stillness. Her heart was pure but her spirit was restless.

She told me what happened in this dark place when she was a child. She grew up fast and sure of herself before they took the key away. She was a prisoner of memories, dreams, and reflections.

She had few if any friends. Her school was Nature. She was trapped in time, a circle of guilt, punishment, suspicion and neglect. Her mother died of a broken heart.

She was the daughter of a priest. He wouldn’t let her out. He locked her up. He taught her fear. He carried a big black heavy book full of fire and brimstone with him forever and ever and ever.

She died for his sins or so he wanted to believe. He wanted the scared primitive narrow-minded simple village people to believe. He ordered them to believe he sacrificed his love for her out of anger at his wife because she was weak. He taught her to be weak and when she became weak he loved her. She was vulnerable and he worshiped a book of prayer. The Word.

His daughter’s silver eyes were chained to her destiny, her fate. Her heart was stained with blood.

Local people had a real fear about the house. You can feel it when they see you coming up the narrow road. They think they know who you are, who you might be, but they are not sure. They know you are not one of them. This fact ensures they remain suspicious and guarded. You are an outsider. They remain uncertain about you being here in this sad, lonely desperate place.

They are blind in one eye. They want to live in your pocket and know your past, present and future.

Knowing and understanding are two different things.

Suicide was not a viable option in their cloistered world of saints, superstar nova and bursts of gamma rays. They were illuminated manuscripts on vellum.

They congratulated themselves with a real superstition about her death. It carried them through hard times. It gave them the will to live, the will to accept their destiny without questioning autocratic authority. They kneaded, rolled, basted, baked, sliced, and buttered hope.

After the girl vanished they huddled around peat fires wrapped in her death late at night speaking in mute whispers. Her death became their perpetual source of gossip and innuendo. Her iconic free spiirit confused their sanity, sense of purpose and sacrifice.

The house was a heavy stone fortress in the middle of nowhere facing east. No trees, no flowers, shrubs. Living, growing thing were cut down, burned down, and destroyed by hysterical madness.

Estranged distant provincial neighbors still talked about her in hushed quiet scared tones. She was the young vagabond spirit and cheated old age with her eternal restless way. She saw through their hypocrisy, mediocrity, piety and failures.

They never figured her out. Her father was the command and control module in their economically and geographically distant distinct world. They were lost sheep wandering heather ridges and he was given the mandate to drive out imaginary snakes.

The small cemetery off the path of lonely planets was overgrown with wild waving weeds, tall Timothy grass and broken purple heather in harsh winds. Gray stones whispered hand chiseled names, ages, dates. The rusty iron gate hung on a broken hinge at a precarious angle.

400 million year-old orb weaving spiders created their magic. Dew diamonds danced and sang along strong supple silver amino acids mixed with protein in wind rushing from the sea.

Two mute men dug a new grave on the gentle sloping hill surrounded by heather and wild flowers. Their tools bit hard soil. They’d finish their labors and retire to the warmth of a peat fire, cold whiskey and gossip. They’d toast the passing of another soul gone to the greater glory as tongue flames leaped and danced.

Dance and melancholy music, a common ancestor, integrated the community. The keener wailed her banshee oral tradition and they blessed themselves in the silence of accepting what they couldn't see.

“A shudder passing through your body means someone has walked over your grave,” I said.

“Grief for the dead was the origin of poetry,” said the girl's spirit.

Weaving A Life (V3)

 

Writing in Burma

Monday
Oct122015

one black night - TLC 46

King Louis’s paramour dialed his cell. He answered her call of the wild and turned off The History Channel. He slammed the laundry door causing a massive 7.9 earthquake in remote Sichuan killing 10,000+ children in the rubble.

He got into her Tudor fuel-efficient machine. Slamming her erotic door created aftershocks in Tectonic plates below Java forming tsunamis erasing 200,000 village people at Ground Zero.

He kissed her hard love.

“Wow,” she said, “that was delicious. Say more. I feel insecure and despise my shameful intentions using treachery and guile.”

“Your vocabulary’s improving with guilt. I am too sad to speak. My verbal actions revealing internal repressed anger will illustrate my morose story. I whine about America and how I lost my chance to be rich and famous. I played college baseball and the coach never let me hit. I sat on the bench getting splinters in my ass. I was always treated with disrespect. I will reap what I sow. People cheat you. You can only trust 10%. They disarm you with sweet nothings. Man needs language to woo women. Never trust a woman who wears her dress too tight. Treat them like dirt and you won’t get hurt.”

“What kind of story?”

“Drive around. I will concoct a mysterious magical truthful tale of self-pity, fear and alienation. I will reveal the meaningless of my puny little existence.”

“I need six inches of your hard meaning.”

She shifted out of park. Thin hands gripped life’s wheel. She remembered wild sex with the angry muscular teacher speaking of death, Indian food, foreign language lips, smells, taste tests, groping, racing hearts, a throbbing purple snake, love juice. She couldn’t eat, sleep, dream or focus, savoring unconscious fragments.

“I am a man eater. You are a real man. I will eat your heart. This is our custom. Our lover’s heart gives us strength, vitality and power. In exchange I will give you something to remember me by and by.”

“What happens after you eat my heart?”

“You’ll see. I’ll grow up to be big and strong with courage.”

“See? See what, how, when, where, who, why?”

“Ah, the quest-ion words. You’ll see. Trust me. Release your insecurities and fears. Celebrate joy and life with gratitude. You started well because you compromised your ethics. After we met I remember how you came home and told Lucky how you only wanted to be friends with me, how you didn’t date women who smoked and then after I gave you my hot smoking sex you changed your tune. You started singing a variation of your former thematic ideology. Your loud boisterous voice mellowed from the concerto to the sublime. You ran out of meaningful words to say about life in the states of consumption living with fear, ignorance and....you compromised your morals and principals and values based on primal lust. My illuminated illustrated body gave you more than you figured you needed. Or needed to figure speaking of my skin glowing in the dark, my swollen labial lips gorged with blood as I panted harder, harder yes yes yes tracing memories down my spine walking through a Marrakesh souk hearing plaintive sellers shout ‘Hout, Hout,’ meaning dead fish as Omar’s son, playing Pan’s magical flute enticed a black cobra in a timeless trance dance.”

“Yes,” Louis whispered to her shadow free existence exploring her labia major. A hard rain beat roof rhythms. “I didn’t know how shallow I was when I came here.”

“The more you learn the less you know.”

Winter Hawk’s aerial perspective sang bye-bye to a red rose blooming near Bamboo. Light escaped thin gray clouds above Marmara Sea more know less.

“You were and still are large and loud,” she said, swallowing his alchemical semantic fluids in her crucible. “Such a fine little life stew we brew with pleasure and pain my sweet warrior.”

“Honey pie you are driving me crazy.”

“Leave the driving to me.”

They shifted positions for better GPS triangulation on her refugee relocation assistance program. Achieving orgasm she sang, “Keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel.”

“Drive papa home baby,” said Louis approaching rapture.

“I don’t know how well you handle jealousy,” she said. “It’s a factor in relationships here.”

“Say more about trust.”

“Jealousy is a well used behavior modification strategy here. Feminine manipulation controls weak males. Mama boys. Guilt trips. I play the victim and you play the rescuer. Do you get it? My love is like a faucet. I turn it off, turn it on.”

“The word get is the joker word in English.”

“Get on, get in, get by, get over, get through, get going, get set from the get go,” sang Ms. Linguist.

Exploring his hand-held device improved her reception.

Saturday
Jul302011

Addictions

I was the only addict in detox taking notes on a yellow legal pad.

I needed raw unfiltered evidence and truth.

I was addicted to writing, photography and traveling. 

Heroin, smack, booze, pills and love addicts were wolves crying and howling in their self imposed vast wilderness of pain, hatred, agony. Looking for self love in detox, trying to get their lives together. 

Some lived as if they were already dead.

“Before I checked when I was growing tired of it all,” I said.

“I lived with a woman in a disastrous, self destructive relationship. I played the rescuer, a father figure. My victim turned on me. They always do. My writing was empty. I drank to avoid the truth facing the real work. Before coming here, I submitted to therapy.

"If I was going to survive and be healthy, I acknowledged the fact, the hard cold realistic truth that I wasn’t responsible for my mother’s death. I needed to confront this guilt at the heart level, not the head level.

“You have to break down before you break through."

“What happened?” said Tom Vodka.

"I broke down, cried, talking out old fears and self destructive behaviors, old angers and resentments. I realized my integrity, my self-reliance. I accepted more responsibility for my life.”

So it goes.

Wednesday
Jul272011

Orphan Tourism

Namaste,

According to an article by Charlotte Turner, there are 269 orphanages and 12,000 orphans in Cambodia.

"Visitors see some poverty and they feel bad about it," said Ashlee Chapman, a project manager with Globalteer, an organisation that matches volunteers with local organisations.

"They want to do something," she adds, saying they might visit a children's project for a few hours, donate money and toys, "take a holiday snap and feel that they've contributed."

"Constant change of caregivers gives emotional loss to children, constant emotional loss to already traumatised children," Jolanda van Westering, a child protection specialist at the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) told AFP.

Read more.

The Cambodian children pictured here are not orphans.

Metta.

Thursday
Oct072010

sorrow

Greetings,

"People who cause you difficulties you should think of them as very, very valuable teachers because they provide us with the opportunity to develop patience."

I'm a mercenary of the false disguise inside poverty's domain.

The land of fairytales inside lost childhood contains historical perspectives. 

Forgiveness and trust dance with passionate ambivalence. 

People here practice saying the I'M SORRY syndrome in the present continuous sentence structure. They say I am sorry from morning to night. When you ask them, "Why are you sorry?" they have absolutely no answer. They stare at you in pure dumb amazement. They know three little words. Their eyes and heart are blinded by fear, doubt and uncertainty. 

They repeat. I'm sorry. Perhaps this sorrow, this feeling of regret and loss and contrition and sadness is history speaking. Does history have a voice? Does history whisper or shout? 

Do genetic structures speak? How do new generations adapt, adjust and evolve with their ingrained, deep rooted genetic and cultural and historical lives of suffering? 1.7 million humans suffered and died between 1975-1979. The older generation teaches, by example and action how to be silent. I am sorry is acceptable.

Nuth is 10. She has parents. The other young people at the NGO supported cafe are orphans. We are all orphans sooner or later. They have a safe place to stay with their friends and learn practical job skills like cooking, customer service and basic cafe operations.

Nuth and I hang out, drawing, practicing English and sharing food. One day, no matter what I said, Nuth said, "I am sorry." I asked her what she was sorry about. She couldn't or wouldn't say. There was no context.

In a sense she was merely miming the older girls. Someone taught her. She heard. She repeated. Everyone here has paid the price of sorrow. It is endemic. They wear their perpetual sadness like a shroud. Their eyes and heart cannot hide their deep fear.

They are easily distracted, unfocused and always looking over their shoulder.

Before someone kills you say I am sorry. I am sorry for everything. I am the cause of all suffering.

Metta.