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A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
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Subject to Change Subject to Change
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Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
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Entries in poetry (33)

Monday
Dec192022

Talk Story

  1. Where does the story want to go?
  2. Embrace ambiguity
  3. Stay confused

Be a work of art or wear a work of art

Talk Story

Discuss common sense

Not very common

The world of forms/ideas

Form is emptiness

Emptiness is form

Forms in natural world

Basho said, if you want to know a tree go to a tree


World of ideas

Imagination

Observation

Experience

Present moment

Ink me laughter

Waves light nature's song

Riding a beam of light through space

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

 Inhale here

Exhale now

Mental hypothalamus

Unconscious

Grow Your Soul

Grow Your Soul: Poems by [Timothy Leonard]

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?

Tuesday
Apr132021

Hope Marries Exile

Hope had free choice. She married Exile at the Cathedral of Dreams. They ran through meadows, olive orchards and summited Spanish mountains above the Mediterranean.

“There’s a big world out there,” she said to Exile.

“Yes and that’s only the top of it,” he said. “Shall we share an orange?”

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

Hope birthed a girl named Patience. Raising Patience was life’s little test for Hope and Exile. Patience gave them the test first and lessons later.

Exile was a lone wolf and Patience tested his love. She tested his stability, honesty, trust and way of creating worlds inside worlds melding swirling atoms of experience. He was a risk taker not a ticket taker. Patience admired this.

Personality tests revealed their character traits and imperfections. With empathy and gratitude Patience tested Exile’s ability to act and let go. She gave him desire, anger, and ignorance and he created a diamond reflecting 10,000 things. Patience cherished this jewel in the lotus.

Hope was relieved seeing Exile content in this context.

“No one dies. Their spirit evolves,“ said Exile as they chopped and carried wood.

“True,” said Hope. “Patience lives forever. Magic protects her. I felt it before she was born. She was a stream of light floating inside me.”

“She is radiant,” said Exile. “She is beauty, truth and wisdom incarnate. She will master her Jinn spirit energies becoming a fine healer.”

Exile raised Labrys, his double bladed laughing axe. Stream splinters sang twilight. Exile chopped. Hope carried. A yellow moon rose through orange-blue streaks above the Sierras.

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

“Who?”

“The forcestero, the outsider. Visiting spirit sources.”

“Indeed,” said Exile, “they fly with the full moon.”

Hope and Exile danced in their nets of light. Their floating spirits were free of substance. Free spirits in a free world left temporal bodies floating down to the Rio Guadalete River.

 

 

River said, “I wake you up. You follow me and reach pools. Pools are your quiet mind in deep meditation. Deep pools reflect absolute emptiness. No people. Nada. Zip. Zero. You: nature, water, stones, vegetation, trees, animal skulls, blue sky, and sound ...

My music is water. It is soft. It is all you know. You are centered pure and simple. It is all you need. Water is the first thing an infant needs and the last thing an adult requests. To satisfy thirst for your dying father you will smash ice. He was appointed to have you. You selected him to accept responsibility for his life and death ...

You memorize my silent sound and carry it in you. It is light and portable. It multiplies its flowing vibration by streaming. Stones sing with water. They sing their softness, wildness, purity unimpeded. Amplification of clear water is short immediate direct and with you forever. It is heavy deep and real. HDR baby ...

I wake you up. You pay attention. Your spirit flies away and I know you are safe, blessed by my pulse and flow becoming river. Feel the energies. My magic spirit is strong. It flows through your life adventure. I sustain you. My stream is never ending, never beginning. It is the stream of life. Absorbed into the flow you are still. As above, so below.”

Exile and Hope combined their blood with water. The water rushing from dark gray Sierra Mountains through dolomite paths was clear, cold and delicious.

Gathering flowers they savored fresh turned soil, olive and cork trees, pine, evergreen, Pinsapar Fir and trees without a name.

Trees pointed at stars. “Look there,” they said, gesturing thin branches toward sky diamonds, “there, there we are.” Trees identified pulsating white stars.

“Yes,” they sang, “there we are.”

“Look,” sang another, “there we are.”

“And there, and there, everywhere.”

Moonbeam winds heard stars whisper magic star tale secrets of star trails dancing in a vast silent vacuum. Hope and Exile manifested light.

ART - A Memoir

Author Page

 

Lao kids carry worlds on their back.

Tuesday
Mar162021

Sophia from Panama

The Iberian drama evolved with whiners on one side and complainers on the other. They blamed the weather. Weather laughed at the idiots. Pedestrians on the shady side of the street complained about the cold instead of walking across the street into the sun.

You have to cross the street to learn something, said Education.

A tossed coin landed on its edge. Fate and destiny are two sides of the same coin.

A woman said to her friend, “I think God and Death are two sides of the same coin.”

“I thought it was fate and chance, or tragedy and comedy,” replied her friend. “Life is something to be lived, not talked about. Let’s go shopping.”

Picaros the card tricksters traveled through neighborhoods selling a game of fortune. “Pick a card. Any card. Take a chance.”

Howling Wolf, my word machine, shifted into full automatic sensing a Nothing is true everything is permitted universe.

The Spanish Inquisition lasted from 1478-1831.

In 1492 a bankrupt Isabel and Fernando monarchy expelled 200,0000 Jews from Spain who refused Christian baptism. The church, state and landlords decimated the middle class.

Money & Power & Control

Church bells pealed melancholy songs of salvation and redemption across from the Citadel Castelilo de Santa Catalina built in 1598.

An exhibition from Central America entered a new story-truth.

 

 

Sophia from Panama pointed to an exhibit in a room. Inside a large glass rectangle were glowing yellow candles, religious icons, sandy footprints and a huge black and white sepia image of a jungle warrior. Panamanian women danced rituals in a video. Exotic travel brochures collected table dust.

“Adults are afraid to go in there,” said Sophia, pointing to the exhibit.

Her dark eyes were rich.

The music of men hammering grandiose plans to improve their quality of life faded as crashing Atlantic waves cleaned the world of sensation and perception.

“Maybe they’ve lost their innate curiosity,” I said annunciating each letter. “Adults are afraid of death. They run away carrying memories, guilt and fear. It’s the human condition.”

“It appears so. We have to encourage them to go in.”

“It’s a time warp. In the flower market I saw four smiling faces in an hour. The people wear a sadness.”

“It’s the way they live,” she said. “Their attitude. Their Catholic guilt is all conditioning. It’s a bag of heavy deep and real imaginary bricks. They study the stones at their feet when they walk.”

“Yes. They love the street, the beauty and perpetual sadness of the mean old street. It’s an old love.”

A century is nothing here,” she said.

“That’s a good title for a jazz epic opus by a blind writer named Omar.”

“We are all a work in process. We know so much and understand nothing.”

 

 

She danced with an unlit cigarette in her hand. We stood on white marble steps hearing ocean erode land. She spelled words on her palm. “You need to learn Spanish.”

“Yes. I am lazy. When I was a kid I dreamed I could speak-talk every Earth language. I could live anywhere. Language is the cultural key. English is the language of cultured barbarians.”

I wanted her. I wanted to tell her she was beautiful in her language, her oral tradition spilling memes, nouns, verbs, proposals, phonics, magic, dreams, gardens and pure land poetry.

“Will you be here tomorrow?”

Sophia danced away. “It’s all random when I will be here.”

While we were talking someone blew up a Coca-Cola plant in India. There were some pissed off marginalized humans in a world inundated with too much sugar consumption in caste systems. A low fat diet of fear satisfied their daily requirements.

I walked to an exhibition in the Citadel. Narrow white oval corridors displayed black and white photographs of Nicaraguans fishing, polling canoes through jungles, chopping forests, sitting for the camera, laughing and contemplating their natural world.

One hall was filled with delicate black handmade fans and tributes to Federico Garcia Lorca.

Considered the greatest poet and playwright of 20th century Spain, he was assassinated by members of the Escuadra Negra (Black Squadron) a Franco death squad in August 1936 for his left-wing sympathies and homosexuality.

Lorca belonged to the Generation of 1927 with Dali, Miro, Picasso and Luis Bunuel a filmmaker, identifying with the marginalized Romani and Spanish women chained to conventional social expectations in Andalucía. Their art introduced symbolism, futurism and surrealism into Spanish literature and life.

Lorca wrote about entrapment, liberation, passion and repression.

“Then I realized I had been murdered.

They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries and churches

They opened the wine casks and wardrobes

They ravaged three skeletons to gouge out the gold of their teeth.

But they did not find me.

They never found me?

No. They never found me.”

By Federico Garcia Lorca, 1929

 

A long red scarf lay draped over a single rattan chair. Invisible wires held black fans decorated with peacock feathers and suspended rainbows.

This silent beauty contrasted with stark white walls and a wild blue sea. Relentless waves smashed ramparts.

A passenger ship running lights stem to stern sailed toward Lisbon filled with people afraid to fly and losing their baggage and fears in a pressurized tin can at 30,000 feet.

They carried a life vest with pockets of heavy change that would drown them. Sleep with the fishes.

They waited for the captain to yell, “All hands on deck, everyone into lifeboats,” after reaching Brazilian jungles to evolve new survival strategies among noble native savages.

Natives said, “We have the time but you have watches and machines to measure and control the time.”

A native ran across water to a ship. “We are so glad you are back. We forgot how to preach.”

A fat white priest said, “When you retire they give you a gold watch but not enough time to wind it. Turn back the dial.”

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

 

 

Saturday
Feb162019

Grow Your Soul

Grow Your Soul, a new book of poems and esoteric magic is now on Amazon.

Paperback and Kindle editions. Transcribed from a journal Sept 2016- August 2017.

Live broadly, write boldly.

Enjoy the ride. You're on it once. 

Cambodia