invisible bird lament

He decided to end it. Ling was too expensive. Her heart was good yet money/greed was her basic underlying motivation. He'd been contributing to her welfare for five weeks.

"Money for mama and papa. Money for my friends. Money for the festival. Money for my motorcycle. Money for my son. Milk money."

He’s a soft touch.

They shared their desires, lust, loneliness, curled up together in the dark night of the soul as wild cats howled before a invisible tropical bird sang its long lament at dawn.

Yes, he'd had enough playing this rescuing role.

If you pay you owe.

He ended it on Valentines Day. Break my heart.

There was no emotional attachment to the sight.

It was an unpleasant fact.

Moleskine sketch #1

Not True

interrupted Omar’s suicidal literary agent speaking through voice snail. It’s impossibly probable.

You make your own truth from embroidered lies.

I know everything and can say nothing about beginnings, arc, tension or sustaining a plot. Something has to happen to move it along with narrative flow, character development and action. Make me cry. Give me emotional honesty so I feel for the protagonist.

Grab me by the throat in the first clear short sentence. Make me pay attention. Give me a sharp emotional marketing hook hanging above a mainstream marketing platform in cheap plywood Asian brothels where evil greedy men with POWER threaten and violently abuse orphaned sex slave girls. Where they buy them or steal them from poor families in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, season them for five years in rooms, use them, abuse them and discard them on the mean old street.

They are commodities like rice. Rich men buy virgins for $5,000 a pop. Open my legs. Plow the fertile soil between my legs. Open my feeble, nonchalant and passive innocent broken heart-mind. Throw in some Asian culture like Chinese opera, gamelan music, 3-act dramas, ballet, The Art of the Fugue by Bach and dancing Apsara dancers on 8th century laterite Angkor Wat ruins being strangled by cotton wood roots.

Show me how superstitious evil men believe fucking a virgin gives them super strength enabling them to leap over tall virgins with a single organismic shudder. Give me a small organic boom-boom death in eight seconds. Just get to the verb.

“Ok, said Rita, an orphan in Cambodia and independent writer/publisher of Ice Girl in Banlung. “Unpleasant facts are littered through this work like lovers, countries, butterflies, natural phenomena, rice and hot sex.

“Cambodians have been screwed by history, war, violence and predatory politicians. Let’s Make A Deal. Do the numbers. 15% (and rising) of Cambodia has been sold to China. They’ve invested $16.9 billion. They bought the government.

“1,7,000,000 million out of 11m were massacred by human genocide animals. 40% of our land is filled with unexploded ordinance. Millions are illiterate. Millions are subsistence farmers. It is a rural agrarian society. They produce only what they need to survive. They eat, sleep, fuck and sit around. Milling around is an art form. Khmer are soft and kind. They have a good heart. They are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. They drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera. The trick is to tolerate bland empty eyed star gazing starrers and hustlers with Patience, your great teacher.

“Bored after five minutes they lose interest. Bye-bye butterfly. Let’s pretend to be exactly who we are. The Great Pretenders. Be careful who you pretend to be.”

“Thank you Rita. Whew, what a mouthful,” said the blind literary agent.

“Yeah,” said Rita. I spill sounds and smell metaphors. The human condition reads history and weeps. Create memory, a form of history, re-write history.          

“Your memory is the world, and the world is a village,” said the nerve agent. “Cry me a river. Build me a bridge. Get over it.”

“I will, will you?” said Rita.

“I have a question for Lucky.”

“He’s here.”

“What do you recall during the one-hour full body massage with blind Flower at Seeming Hands?”

”Her hands were all,” I said. “Her hands were water, air, earth and fire. Soft gentle sensations. Sensing, feeling her physical sense. Engaging all her senses. Touch is her essence. She knew my body, all the pressure points.”

“Soft, medium or hard?” Flower asked.

“During her therapeutic touch and go I considered this vignette. How I was looking for ideas and structure and formless form and literary vulgarity. I slowed down inside the labyrinth. A writer is a dwarf, invisible and must survive.”

Flower whispered, “I don’t like sleeping alone. It’s fucking boring.”

It’s easy to remember loving Flower’s soft, deep real tactile sensations. She knew how to please a stranger’s skin. She lived in the middle way. Her middle way is breathing, and awareness. Her middle way is acceptance and loving kindness. It is wisdom, patience and gratitude. Non-attachment. Flower is the essence between detachment and sentimentality.

“Eat the world with your blind eyes,” she whispered.         

“Yes my Flower, yes.”

“Dead or blind, there’s no difference,” Flower said.

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

the blind man and his daughter

He wore a felt hat. He gripped a wooden staff. His face was long and sallow.
The girl was 11. Wearing cotton, her face was solemn, shocked.
Both wore plastic flip-flops.
She held his hand.

They came to an intersection. Small buses, bikes, lost fat Europeans, orange robed wandering monks, silver vans. Women carrying bamboo baskets spilling oranges negotiated pavement.

The girl led the man across the street.
Their pace steady, yet hesitant.

She was his eyes. He trusted her implicitly.
A stranger drawing in his notebook watched them.
He pulled a 20 Kip note from his pocket.
He gestured to the girl, Take it.
She froze.

She spoke quick Lao words to her father.
Questioning, doubt, healthy uncertainty in her eyes.
The stranger gestured the 20.
She remained still.

He got up and slowly approached her. His hand extended the money.
His hand said, take it.
Her small hand emerged with caution. Her small fingers accepted the gift.
She smiled placing her hands together.
Her fingertips touched her chin meaning, Thank you.

She whispered to her father, it's 20.
His blind eyes darted back and forth.
He mumbled, Thank you, joining his hands.

His wooden staff hung in the air like a pendulum.
She led him away.

They disappeared. 

  

The Transmitter

I am the Naggal, ‘The Transmitter’ in Persian history.

I am the hakaawati, the professional storyteller from historical times when stories were told after harvests, during night when stories were cherished, reserved for darkness - the idle time between planting and harvesting - during long lonely winters.         

“Their stories maintained, developed, protected, transferred to children and women. This is the way the ones who feared the power of the story told us.”

“Why?”

“They abandoned us to the exile, islands, remote meditation caves, vision quests, temples of stone singing word-strings toward Arabic, Persian, Indian, Mongolian, Tibetan and European oral mystics. It was all a play, a la’ab inside the shadow of their imagination.”

“What did you learn from them?”

“There were seven layers, seven levels deep in their unconscious. Seven is the number you must remember, for it symbolizes perfect order and a complete cycle. It leads to the seven directions of space, forms the series of musical notes, colors, planets and spheres. Seven is the symbol of pain, a sickness leaving the body.”

They moved through the wild wilderness of their youth after seeing and hearing their spirit guardian, a solitary black raven, a Tibetan Golak. 

The oracle went into a trance to deliver the transmission.

The transmission was Baraka, investing them with a supernatural power of prosperity and blessings. The Baraka allowed them to conserve and control power.

Baraka was transmitted in the solitary deepness of the Sahara between Berber tribes. The more you see the less you know. The less said the better.

Mindfulness - TLC 67

They met on the Metro. Lucky carried an aromatic red rose through green sliding doors. Z sat in a permanent change of scene.

He inhaled fragrance. He handed her the rose. “Here, for you. Everything we love dies.”

“Infinity is behind us, eternity is in front of us.”

“Nothing behind. Everything ahead.”

The National Director of Barbarian Natives at TLC resigned after pressure from Sister #1. Her father Sir Franchise was King of The Money Tribe.

The National Die Rector was wishy-washy. Making personnel decisions was a stressful heartless job. Native barbarians were transferred to Siberia with Tundra Dragon and his consort Phoenix rising from ashes of self-pity, loathing, shame, guilt and fear to regenerate, reinvent and reincarnate themselves with critical thinking skills, social intelligence, mindfulness, courage, humor, gratitude, curiosity, fairness, integrity, diligence, perseverance and discipline wearing liberal amounts of delicate compassion.

Players wrote themselves into the story. They invented plots. Plots invented players with assignations, fake artifices, palace intrigue and three-act Greek plays featuring desperate insecure and courageous thematic holistic variables.

Greed and betrayal discussed intention and motivation.

A, an, the - old article men in teahouses reading newsprint verbs whispered syllables out loud memorizing lies, myths, Soma mine disasters, political denial, unaccountability, football results and obituaries. One reader said, “Thank God. Death hasn’t found me yet.”

“Don’t worry,” said Death, “I’m busy with others. Patience. I’ll get back to you. You can begin living the rest of your rare days meditating on the process of your death. Impermanence and non-existence.”

“Tell that to the guy selling fire and knives in Ankara.”

“I will,” said Death, “when his time is up and only then.”

Bursa mountain winds seeking plains became strong, sudden and slashing. They flew across thermal bath waters after plumping mist into rain’s arranged marriage. Spirit-winds reached back circling prey without saying anything of value or meaning joining relatives and strangers floating inside fog moisture captured from distant seas like dancing children, circling, spinning out from nothing, evolving from the center of their stillness, caressing flayed onion skinned fragments inside Zeynep’s black book where people didn’t reallylisten know or care in Comabodia  - an imaginary country trapped between Nam, Siam, and Laos  - swimming with 2,000,000 genocide ghosts spreading superstition and repressed violent DNA psychosis while sleeping with wide open eyes struggling with regret, low grade anxiety, big FEAR, swallowing happy Xanax pills, wearing huge magnificent watch this time machine on thin wrists in a witness protection program using a false identity theory.

Hand-me-down my walking stick, said L. Here you are, said Z. Let’s go.

Travelers arrived in a village on the Marmara Sea. Olive orchards dressed hills. A white butterfly skimmed blue sea. It’s wings created a breeze around shadows sitting in shale shade. Feet caressed geology. Waves washing the shore day by day rolled millions of pebbles creating a gentle musical interlude.

Rinse and repeat.

Ocean waves. Earth peoples.

The soft propaganda machine selling media’s tired old lies broke down. Desperate neglected broken-hearted ADD people fingered a remote or mobile.

Tribes in remote jungles created fire with Leo. Spirit-winds sailed smoke signals across oceans, seas, tributaries, rivers, bays, fjords, streams and inlets to Anasazi, Navajo, Apache, Hopi, Tiwa, Cherokee, Ainu and Tibetan ancient ones. Flying clouds acknowledged ethereal messages.

Imaginary fears of poverty and starvation gripped humans.

Beauty dispatched monarch butterflies skimming over a cresting white wave tumbling above blue water lapping land.

The Language Company