"Jazz is not a what, it is a how. If it were a what, it would be static, never growing. The how is that the music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists in the time it is created. And anyone who makes music according to this method conveys to me an element that makes his music jazz."
- Bill Evans
Gold draped Cadiz women.
Inanimate visual remnants of Reason, Enlightenment, Illumination and Prosperity revealed gifts from the Magus.
Alchemists transformed base metals into heavy symbolic chains weighing wrists and necks of Spanish matrons and patrons.
The Fleischer - a butcher - wore no gold.
Paring fat his sharpened edge severed layers of gristle. A steel mesh glove protected his left hand. He slammed a sharp hatchet blade through tendons, muscles, bone and meat. Blood littered his table.
Customers gathered to buy their favorite cut. Slabs of acorn fed pigs dangled in windows with funnel tags attached to cloven hoofs collecting fat. Wild boar and stag heads rested above color photos of famous Ronda bullfighters partying with Orson Wells and Ernest Hemingway. Red was the cape’s color. Bull’s blood rivers flowed down muscular necks.
Mandalay, Burma
People in deep state covert operations discussed ambiguities in conspiratorial coded languages.
Airliners slammed into towers of Babel on televised reruns between detergent, automobile and sherry commercials.
I murdered words in their sleep after they had their say.
Word garbage was hauled down to green plastic curbside trash containers. Midnight men in blue garbage uniforms with yellow safety stripes rolled through Cadiz. Teams of men hosing down narrow cobblestone streets sang, “Don’t be fooled by cheap imitations. Everything must go. Going out of business sale.”
Water flooded grateful city grates. Spanish civilization collapsed without street cleaners and women with mops.
Humanity’s narrative explored adventures, quests, dreams, relationships, and historical facts mixed with courage, curiosity, joy and serenity.
Yellow streetlights illuminated a man walking his arthritic Labrador. The well-dressed bald gentleman with Romani DNA wearing polished black wing-tip shoes carried a newspaper and paperback entitled, A Century is Nothing by Omar.
He collected his dog’s shit from cobblestone using the financial section. He downloaded it into a metal trash basket nailed to a wall. Five minutes later a neurotic woman cleaning everything after midnight because she hated chaos and disordered dust in her ground floor flat wailed, “What in the hell is that smell?”
“History baby, history,” he said, walking toward the sea. “The more I see the less I know.”
One if by land, and two if by sea…
Easy Rider.
Oh say can you see? Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may I wish I might dream the impossible dream and throw the first pitch for a called strike on the inside corner.
“We’re headed to extra innings and the bullpens are empty,” cautioned a radio announcer on armed forces shortwave, “and now this,” cutting to a commercial from a mechanic offering an interest free no down payment deal on the finest internal combustion machine money could buy.
“Drive it away today.”
Every vehicle on the road is used.
This was followed by an ad for cheap fuel and a political proposal to open Alaskan wilderness for drilling. Unemployed dentists signed up. Their mantra was, “The more you drill the more you bill.”
Two unemployed poets holding hands walked down a cobblestone street discussing Spanish deficit economics, European financial bailouts, 40% unemployment numbers and financial insolvency. Andalucía was the poorest province in Spain.
Sexually repressed women pacing poverty’s alienation prowled streets seeking future lovers, husbands and fathers for contraceptive children. Lonely-heart club ads assaulted missing persons with conjecture, possibilities and probabilities. Hope floated in a breeze.
Cadiz scooter boys felt genital heat as their girlfriend’s arms held them tighter than tomorrow. After escaping narrow traditional parental attitudes they zoomed past pedestrians.
An old couple supporting their fragile bipedal existence took immediate steps into a long now. Small significant gestures of love and affection rained flowers.
I wrote under a desk lamp with jazz music providing rhythm, harmony and improvisation.
Dreaming of a new environment I studied a provincial map tacked on the wall.
Spanish church bells buried in the Plaza de Dreams, a fictitious conglomeration of unpleasant historical true facts in this tale tolled as mystics hearing hollow Zen bells toiled.
Mary sells seashells by the seashore before crossing to the other side of paradise after paying the troll a toll.
Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir
Mandalay, Burma
Smiling makes you happy
Diamond mind wisdom
Women lay out golden chains
Men yak in phones
Gleaming significance weighs inlaid rubies, sapphires
Black Nil stones harvested from deep Earth
Glitter like 1000 stars
Path leads past mannequins
Wearing fashionable silent plastic splendor
Unloading facsimiles of threaded prayers flowing from a woman’s mouth
Answer stirs ice
Question stabs ice
Scientific dissolution in liquid’s formless form
Shy beyond description
- a girl weighs lettuce hills
- cucumbers whisper adjustments
- cell phone eliminates an old man's loneliness
- a sharp hatchet congratulates bloody meat
- a woman stabs ice memories
- dead dog’s head rests on a counter
Ice coffee is bitter sweet my sweet
Hammock infant swings high/low
Contemplating an old woman
Stepping through puddles carrying a plastic bag with two tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, daily bread
Eye contact dissolves in the wake up
Sing song chopsticks carry an infant
Wide-eyed catastrophic entropy factoid
Coconut, sewing machine, hyena laughter
Small talk, broken light vegetables green life
Where do you stay, asked man.
I stay in blue sky
Is it a hotel? A guesthouse? No it is blue sky.
Pure land poetry
Jazz poem
Visuals
Passing through
Professional stranger
Ghost Other
Eye hand heart – two won’t do
Show up sit awhile smile draw meditate on emptiness
Witness point line shadow less form
Imagination
Observation
Experience
Rhythm of place
Bursa, Turkey residents heard, “Woo, woo,” and clip-clop hooves grooving asphalt.
A thin man who’d escaped the Armenian genocide in 1914 by hiding in a mountain cave with Plato’s shadow of illusions hovering over his formless form commanded a rolling wagon filled with shredded silver wire.
A black trash bag on the rear contained cardboard and a draft of The Language Company.
He snapped a long whip at a white horse wearing brown blinders. Red, green, yellow and blue wool tassel tufts waved from its sweat beaded neck. Small copper bells tinkled.
His wife’s thin, happy hungry face was a skeleton of bones. Her senses were accustomed to roots, soil, inhaling damp earth smells and back breaking labor in spring rain, summer heat, cool autumn winds and frozen earth.
Riding next to her husband hearing leather lash skin felt good. A reassuring stimulus snapped air. The horse pranced along cool be-bop jazz cobblestones in time with Monk on piano, Pastorius on bass, Rollins blowing his horn, Blakey pounding percussion and Zeynep's cello complementing the steady clip-clop rhythm.
They were richer than a poor parent’s skin. They owned their stomach’s hunger.
“Here we go,” they sang in Kurdish.
Nearby, a cafe below the TLC teachers’ apartment went broke. A wild garden blossomed.
An old man arrived with his scythe. His well-adjusted eyes surveyed nature's vociferous beauty. He unwrapped a golden yellow scarf from the curving blade of his hand-me-down tool.
The scythe was eight feet long tapering to a sharp point. Sitting on a wooden stool he refined an edge with wet-stone strokes.
Waving, he cut a waving garden.
Death watched. Ambivalent.
At that precise moment a blue monarch butterfly probing nectar of the gods whispered turquoise wing secrets to a red hibiscus in Laos.
Laos
Many adults in the tribe, being programmed cynical skeptics living in fear, didn’t get it. Indigo kids trusted Omar's natural wild mind. Implicitly. Their collective language transcended words. There were 6,912 known living languages on Earth and he spoke every one, including silence.
He was cognizant a spoken language on the planet perished every two weeks.
We have a huge responsibility here. No language no culture, whispered Omar.
Culture is what you are and nature is what you can be.
Singing oral traditions they experienced seasons, celebrations, rites, magic and ceremonies. They created and exchanged clan and tribal myths. Children moving through history heard, memorized, chanted and recited ancestor songs.
He was a forcestero, a person from outside the pueblo. A blind writer in exile, he loved birds and freedom.
Grind up the sausage, inner gears grind out a hollow form. Form whom the school bell tolls.
"Jazz is not a what, it is a how. If it were a what, it would be static, never growing. The how is that the music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists in the time it is created. And anyone who makes music according to this method conveys to me an element that makes his music jazz."
- Bill Evans
Naive native girls are overdressed jazz and undersexed blues. Their Confucian grounded modesty is outnumbered by males 16-1. Terrible short and long odds speaking of strange cosmic relationships.
"Text me baby and I will reveal deep secrets of lust and desire," she keyed while masking her public face.
As a Socialist sociologist in a Shanghai university in a perverse universe remarked in an education publication, "In Chinese schools the conventional wisdom is that people shouldn't ask questions, they should simply take. Many, many students can't think for themselves. That's a huge problem."
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