echo

New music echoed. Everyone ran to a window. 

Across the street an Indonesian boy sat on a piece of plywood in the shadow of a long tall Sally art deco three story building. It towered above a gated Jakarta community filled with designer homes, wild tropical blossoming fruit trees, displaced dysfunctional spoiled offspring spinning yo-yo’s and orphans sleeping on broken bamboo bed springs or swimming to Cambodia through flooded dreams. 

In his left hand he held a shining silver chisel. In his right, a flat edged hammer. He slammed metal against metal on a bronze bridge between the Stone Algae and the Iron Algae.

Between knowledge and wisdom.

Between an object and a concept.

Tap-tap-tap. Music flaked dust. His chorale was a tribal creation song remembering family and soft rice paddies feeling wind carry his song.

A Cambodian slave girl in the background using a brothel broom of thinned tree branches whisked a gentle rhythm. She created her symphony of sadness and neglect waiting to be abandoned like a manuscript.

elemental

Curious beginnings determine her artistic sense of form, coloring stories of her village. Cutting, planting, harvesting, complete slow rhythm of life. Her skill shines with every new expression, her heart sings.

Her simple direct feeling is all sensation.

Art enables her this beauty. She describes what she draws. Her words fly through forests, colorful birds resplendent peacocks birds of paradise.

A blind conversation developed a through line. Turn a blind eye.

Blindness listened. Blindness heard muted laughter before intuition gestured pink floating word worlds.

Laughter danced with exhaled attachment.

Blindness danced on through late yellow faltering light penetrating bamboo leaves spreading themselves over banana baskets impaled on swinging posts. Literally.

A bike bell. A young girl sat quiet watching the V girl do her toenails. Cutting, trimming, lemon/lime soak, cuticles, clear before applying a silver hued glossy glean. Nail by nail.

Blindness solved the mystery of sight crying tears of silence. A van of blank faced white Europeans trapped behind glass held rampant desires and expectations on laps. Fidgeting with uncomfortable languages floating into inner ears. Assaulting their long painful strides navigating tomorrow’s promises.

Blindness resolved to practice the subtle art of Tai-chi with precision.

Blindness exchanged blue ink for a dark shade of green. A handheld hair dryer waved hot air over a shampooed head. Mirrors whispered secrets.

Elements of silence said farewell. A series of eyes investigated decompression while swallowing fresh yogurt with peach slices near afternoon’s languishing empty promises intent on discovering new, make it new day by day. Explanations have to end somewhere.

In her village, the other world, Blindness threaded new beginnings as her loom waited for pressure and tightness between notes feeling sunlight dress saliva beads blending a weave, texture, design, saying hello Beauty.

downstream

Here's the pitch.

She stayed until 9:45 and left for work at an upscale spa wearing aromatic Grecian urns. He gave her 10 bones. Feed me.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Get out of my life, said Telepathy. You are subservient and I am stupid to put up with this shit. He creased her indifference into a cumulus cloud. It rained goodbye and good luck.

She sat on the bed with her back to him. Sniffle sniffle.

Her fake tears formed rivers named Regret and Hopelessness and Indifference.

Fish behind twelve Laotian dams financed with Chinese capital to provide electricity to Thailand fed 60 million Asians downstream in deltas.

Practice

My body.

My breath.

My practice.

stateside fear

“I’m afraid you will have take your boots off,” said a soldier wearing a 45-caliber sidearm with an M-16 slung over his shoulder when he saw Point’s scarred Swiss climbing boots at SeaTac airport in March 2002. They had steel rivets.

“Anything interesting happen while I was away?” said Point.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“Do you mean the half before the shift or the half after the shift ?”

The G.I. answered with a dull blank stare.

A retired homeless bag lady approached security. “It’s good to know that 450 airports in early 2002 hired more than 45,000 workers. Maybe I can get a screener job here.”

“Why not?” said a T.S.A. official standing near an X-ray machine. “Each month, screeners take from passengers about a half-million things, including 160,000 knives, 2,000 box cutters, and seventy guns.”

“Look like things have really improved since I’ve been gone,” she said, pushing her grocery cart down the discount aisle. “Now I feel really safe.”

Point removed his boots and passed through detectors. Along the concourse he studied glossy high definition pixel posters of airplanes slamming into towers with the admonition:

Beware! This could happen to you.

Live in fear.

Report any and all suspicious activity.

Do not trust anyone.

Spy on your neighbors.

Report them to the Secret Police.

Do your civic duty.

Big Brother is watching.

He knew it’d come to this. He’d been far away, in Morocco and Spain imagining this Brave New World with precise clarity.

Returning to the United States of Advertising after centuries on the ground he sat down in a cabin on 8,000 year old Kalapuya Indian ceremonial soil. He had a maul, a hatchet, and a double bladed axe named Laughter. 

A Century is Nothing