Riding Rails

The trapped mother realized her ice reality. Concise crying crystals reflected clarity. Suffering from fate and free will she danced in flames seeking her SAVE key.

Hearing a child say, “I need help,” she received a blessing.

A child whispered, “The ending is the middle.”

“The middle is the beginning,” said a child. “You can start the story anywhere.”

“We are all orphans sooner or later,” said Rose. “We bury our successes and failures in the same grave.”

Death and the gravedigger agreed. “Everyone comes to us.”

Rail music sang click, clack, click and clack.

In a dome liner, children ate watermelon and spit seeds into sky. A red haired female magician made poverty disappear. Passengers formed quick intense transient relationships between whistle stops before, during and after industrial wastelands.

We zoomed past small town wrecking yards with cars and trucks collecting rust, abandoned swings, toys, dishwashers, gardens, guillotines, baskets of severed heads, shredded tires and water soaked concave fences collapsing into community soil.

I hammered word spikes while waving to strangers stranded in their present perfect tense seeing trains carry perfect continuous tense strangers into new futures.

Down the line riding the rails. Further along the road of iron deficiencies.

At a remote train station, a furious man with his shopping cart home and a whiskey bottle in a bag sagged against a brick wall yelling at his slumped wife.

Her old sad eyes stared far away wondering how she managed to get herself in this fucking mess away from social services, respect, dignity and love. Her heart knew if she had any common sense (not very common) or any strength or power she’d get up and start walking.

Her dilemma was to find a way out of the quicksand swallowing her life. She was conditioned to having someone save her. She loved being a victim and needed a martyr.

Clear cold thin Rocky Mountain air quickened blood streams. We’ve enjoyed rail’s clicking clacking trestle music exchanging laughter and awareness. Visions of starlight sky blends with engine headlights shattering blackness. We arrive at Union Station in Denver.

I know the field behind the station where the headless homeless heartbroken hoboes, drifters and transients exist, hide and run for their lives.

It’s a tricky place at night. It runs north way up to the stockyards near the old Coliseum, not to be confused with the one in Rome where they fed you-know-who to you-know-what. Where every cold frostbitten February, cowboys, cowgirls and plain old city folk put on the Stockman’s extravaganza awarding prizes to animals and the field runs south past the main Post Office Terminal annex and westward toward immigrant hopes and dreams up to Federal Boulevard on a rise with a church and laundromats and renovated upscale posh neighborhoods overlooking a gleaming screaming downtown Silver City skyline. The killing field is filled with tall weeds in the Platte River flood plain.

There’s a fine view of the Rocky Mountains from the field amid random acts of pre-meditated violence around small fires as drifters pray to stay invisible long enough to ride rails out of town away from the mean old street.

In the summer, children scream on the roller coaster at Elitch Gardens up on 38th and Tennyson where my aunt and uncle ran a drugstore and pharmacy after WWII. They worked their fingers to the bone, sweated their lives out and never asked for a thing. My aunt was so scared by the Depression she maintained thirty-seven folders budgeting the cash flow by counting every penny every night.

It ain’t no field of dreams in that big lonely weed choked undeveloped tract of real estate where freights and Amtrak dome liners blow long sad whistles as buttoned waiters serve blood red Colorado tenderloin down wind from the smell of meat grilling at Coors Field where boys of summer play hardball.

The Coast Starlight sliding toward Kansas curves into a space-time bend.

Moon drinks rainwater.

Walking rails I sing with Robert Johnson…“Woke up this morning and looked around for my shoes…I got them walking blues.”

I savor impermanence. Cool blood decorates hot black keys as I bleed words.

ART

Kids Write

“Let’s create a book,” said one, “and we’ll be in it. We can create a quest about love & survival. Like ART, adventure, risk and transformation.”

“Hey it’s a great possibility, with stories or vignettes for word salad dressing.”

“We need stories, water, shelter, food and love.”

“Stories existed before food and shelter. Stories describe hunting for food and social needs. All stories are about forms of hunger.”

“Love is a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor,” said a shadow.

“Will it be a man-u-script or a woman-u-script?”

“Both. If it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage.”

“We are authors looking for characters,” said an Italian kid named Pirandello. “I am a plot looking for a character.”

“When someone dies survivors look for a plot,” said a gravedigger.

“It will have characters facing conflict on their quest,” said a young scriptor. “It will have satire, humor, curiosity and courage.”

“Yes,” said a writer. “It will be a labyrinth of desires and obstacles with rising and falling action and resolution as characters take risks, suffer greatly and overcome adversity to realize their authenticity. You will experience what characters sense and imagine through their actions. Socrates subordinated character to action. Get to the verb.”

“Let’s make it dramatic by focusing our spotlight on specifics and floodlight on the general to establish a P.O.V. I’ll play director. Places everyone. Lights. Camera. Action!”

“Our stories contain conscious and unconscious awareness like a maze or a puzzle palace. I need your help with dialogue and action as characters reveal their fears by living forty questions in the dark night of their soul. They trade their soul to the devil down at the crossroads at midnight so they can play the blues, create art and dance. Free from masks they are breathing, laughing and living healers.”

“Let’s act out their fears, dreams and joy.”

“Do your characters discuss moral ambiguities?”

“Yes. They speak with nouns and verbs with choices, actions and consequences. They slay adverbial dragons with an ultra fine red pen.”

“Is a place like this hospital a character?”

“Sure, a place has character? Writers explore environments like Tacoma, Vietnam, Morocco, Spain, caves…”

“It sounds like nature vs human or human vs human or human vs themself. You become the thing you fight the most.”

“Do they playfully deconstruct the human condition with story-truth moving the narrative forward to get to the root of their experience?”

“The roots are below the surface,” said a young nun washing teacups on a Taoist mountain in Sichuan, China. “I mediate on the roots below the surface of appearances.”

“Get is the joker word in English. A lit agent at the Willamette Writer’s Conference said this work is a word farrago photograph, a jazz beat stylistic epic in process. She suggested throwing the narrative out and focus on one geography or one specific time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Rita, 14, an ice seller and independent author of Ice Girl in Banlung in Ratanakiri, Cambodia.

It was a wild-west town of 25,000 with dusty red roads near the River of Darkness and animist cemeteries. “It’s fucking hysterical.”

ART

Sunny Side Blood Donation

Pure red life floats to the surface. A drop of blood splatters. A finger smears one drop on skin. Small swift red rivers trickle. Veins release blood volcanoes. Red-hot meteors explode on epidermis.

After Nam I became a regular blood donor every two months. Someone needs it more than I.

“Are you allergic to pain?” said a nurse in a mobile blood unit parked at Sunny Side Beach, south of Tacoma.

“Only to pleasure.”

A needle penetrated a vein drawing A-.

“Writing is easy,” said Hemingway, “just open a vein.” The earnest man wrote clear precise words.

“I wrote seven words today,” James Joyce said to a friend one day in a Paris cafe. “I wish I knew what order they go in.”

Squeezing a rubber ball I bantered with a mother of five. Blood flowed through plastic tubes out of sight out of mind into clear liter bags with an identification number. Sugar cookies and OJ. Hugs from a thank you clown provided emotional wellbeing.

I donated blood into sky.

On the shore four men and a woman stood silent on wet rocks. One man held an urn. He handed it to the woman. It was large and awkward. Death dust is awkward. Cradling it she tipped it toward water.

A river of brown ash flowed over the edge. A fine mist dressed liquid. Her dancing arms scattered a trail of someone’s life. She handed the urn to a companion. He poured ash into miniature tides.

A bouquet of red, yellow and white roses with long green stems flew from the woman’s hand into Puget Sound. The urn was offered to another man. No thanks, shaking his head.

A Vietnam veteran in shadows wearing a faded Boonie hat played a weeping guitar. Seven faltering notes ran through sand past an old couple staring at oceans beyond life’s horizon. A laughing father and son threw seaweed at each other. A crow’s black shadow landed on a dead tree branch.

My blood flow created a cataclysmic flood. Cold mountain poems melting snow fed forest trails and seeped to sleeping roots below the surface of appearances. Lotus petals opened. Earth lava blood carved canyons. Tributaries branched from the Tree of Life.

Blood gouged out rock, cleaning earth, transforming stone to sand, to dust, erasing river bottoms, collapsing banks, overpowering everything in its path, forming new microscopic celestial arrangements.

Finger paints blood on my lips and loom threads.

Luminous light illuminated weavers, gravediggers and writers. Shuttles click clack. Blood dyed threads loomed stories. Diggers cherished cemetery solitude and silence.

Soft brushes exploded seeds into rain. Laughing bones excavated stories. A double-bladed axe split clouds into Alpha, Beta, & Omega.

A thorn embedded in my skin allows a ghost in exile to realize a life principle.

Eudaemonia - human flourishing from the Greek – meaning a love of travel and a love of life.

ART

Kids Talk

“Are you a ticket taker or a risk taker?”

“If you want to do amazing things you need to take amazing risks and suffer greatly.”

“Anybody have any spare change?” asked a panhandling waif on an aspirator with wealthy aspirations.

“Hmm, I see a faint star at the conjunction of the head and heart life lines. Does that mean anything?” said a kid fingering green palms approaching Easter Is-land on a bamboo raft.

“Depends,” ranted a child orator standing on a soapbox. “Do you mean faint as in non-distinguishable or feint meaning to throw one off a socially agreed upon tacit path implied by pretending to understand anything while processing information with a deft movement?”

“Yes,” philosophized a child with the wit of Camus, “it’s a sublime paradox, this absurd metaphorical life theater. We have aspects of knowing. We know so much and understand nothing. We are affected, infected, rejected or injected by how we feel not what we think we understand. Life is short and sweet. Art is long. Our lives are works of art. It’s not so much that there is something strange about time. What’s strange is what’s going on inside time. We will understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.”

“You’re just saying that,” said a voice.

“Sounds like a description of the food they serve here, speaking of strange,” one resident commented to no one in particular.

“No lie flutter by,” sighed a Monarch’s wings in Greek.

“What’s that have to do with the conservation of angular momentum and a parabola?” queried a child spinning wheelchair tires on a tennis court and making a racket while performing real alignments for friends.

“Do I love you because you are beautiful,” said Rose, “or are you beautiful because I love you?”

“Both,” sang the Greek chorus.

“You get what you pay for,” said a kid ironing words with grit, perseverance and discipline.

ART

Every kid needs a bike.

Magic Story

The tribe dreamed. Wood became ash. Their fire dream consumed itself. Sighing sensations tingled through Raven’s body. Night winds played around her heart. She danced with stars. Diamond crystal swallowtails flew from her hands into silent endless space. Her breath released peace.

She fell awake.

Sunlight streamed through ferns, plants, and roses. A morning breeze delivered rose petals at her feet. She stretched like a solitary snow leopard at 16,000 feet feeling freedom’s wildness. She glanced at the fireplace. Her shattered glass lay on the brick floor near a charred pencil and scraps of paper. She gathered word edges, lines, drawings and blurred prisms of light.

She felt a searing pain in her heart, released the papers and touched her third eye. She went deep inside. A calm feeling blessed her. A warm breeze carried her into the center of a sacred wisdom circle.

Her essence was joy, gratitude, truth and compassion. Pure being.

The world of appearances was heavy, grasping, suffering, desire and illusion.

Discovering her essence her spirit energy breath renewed her heart, her passion and vision with pure luminous light.

People seeking to know their future with wisdom sought her out for guidance. She opened her heart finding solace, peace, strength, and dignity in the sacred flames of regeneration through quiet simplicity.

She kept her own counsel. Others would discover their own way through their personal labyrinth.

Gathering flames she lit a piece of bark in a Paleolithic cave. She lived in 26,000 year-old paintings.

She mixed volcanic ash with water, creating a thick paste of red ocher, a cosmetic balm to gain entry and passage into the spirit world of ancestors.

She walked through fire, dancing in her inner light of pure intention in a magical world realizing childhood’s innocence.

She became an angel of light.

Her Jinn emanated fire, life and consciousness. This fire consumed ignorance, and my memory of her became a meditation on the physical process of identifying with higher energies through form, sensation, perception, sense impressions and consciousness. Her meditation inside the cosmic dance dissolved the self.

Fire became her driver. Sexual kundalini yoga burned soft and hard wood together. The sleeping serpent coiled at the base of her spine ate energetic fires. The Jinn manifested by the fire of the telling.

“Yes," said Omar, “Jinn are summoned through spirit ceremonies. People communicate with music and dance.

“I am a character in my own story,” said Omar, “a hakaawati, a professional Persian storyteller inside the shadow of my imagination. I manifest an oral way of transmitting khurata, fanciful stories, inside the ocean of stories.”

“Wonderful," said Jamie. “I like the part about the sacred wisdom circle. It’s a magic story. Reminds me of a woman talking about her Ghost Dance. In her wishes, lies, dreams, memories and reflections she is a Wovoka, a Paiute weather doctor with power over rain and earthquakes. Her Ghost Dance magic is destined to return souls of those who have died. Is it my turn?”

“Sure Jamie, just keep it shorter than life because a reader doesn’t want to struggle if the narration is hard to follow.”

“Yeah," said a kid. “This Zen tale may be too much for some readers to wrap their head around. You become the thing you fight the most. Let’s see all the beauty and ugliness without hope or fear.”

“Ain’t that truth? What is the sound of one hand laughing?”

Someone in the tribe asked Other to tell them about the beginning of his wandering ways.

Omar wrote it down and translated it into unspoken languages.

Weaving A Life (V1)