Martha’s Zen Card

I am a short story.

You are a novel.

It never occurred to Matt to buy indigenous cultural music while traveling.

Martha his girlfriend considered it essential.

Music made her edgy and alive.

When she heard music she danced.

She returned to her primitive self.

She danced naked.

Ballet. Flamingo. Tango. Cha-cha. Lambada. Waltz.

He wrote naked verbs. They loved naked. Naked cherished syllable skin music.

They wrote danced and lived like they were dead.

One day they will be. It's now or never.

They were free. It's the way to be.

Culture is what you are. Culture means you can forget.

Nature is what you can be.

People are nature's tools.

Passing through Body Sat Quiet in Asia on a three week, “Look, don’t think” holiday from frozen Europe they happened into an 8th century tourist town music repository.

They smelled music before they saw it. Seeing music is an art form. Synesthesia.

In music like life the end of the composition is not the point.

A music boy handed Matt an orange book. Write your melodic request here. Matt opened the book. A vignette floated free.

An orphan girl popped out of blank pages: I am sorry. Goodbye and good luck to you and your family. These are our famous last words. Big vocabulary. Tongues speak. Small life. Big chance. Yeah. Yeah.

The Hunger Angel watched 24/7 in the big leagues.

Sanitation workers in green environmental vests with broom music swept streets for the New Year. Make it new. Make it new.

We should be so lucky to have crystal clean sheets.

Every day is a new year.

One day is like a minute.

One minute is like a day.

That's relativity. All my relatives are dead.

Never trust an atom. They make up everything.

When you know what you don't know you realize character with social intelligence, integrity, humor and courage.

Courage is an unknown word in our head and heart. Running away is our way. Every day I have the blues. No one loves me but my mother and she could've been lying too.

You absolve in the rhythm when you have adequate life experience.

Silence and hunger are identical naked twins.

Fear and Ignorance produce Expectation & Greed.

I am good at two things:

Eating and sleeping.

Fighting and fucking.

Laughing and crying.

Reading and writing? That's for idiots.

The less I do the fewer mistakes I make, said Insecurity.

The fewer mistakes I make the less I am criticized, said Fear.

It's easier to do nothing, said Doubt.

We know the essence of survival. Keep your fucking mouth shut.

One day, Bliss’s part-time lover said, buy me a TV.

NO.

You have a job, a mother, a 12-year old daughter, two brothers, no father and no husband. I gave you money to buy a bike for your daughter and she lost it, money for clothes, money for medicine, money for food, money for temporary naked lust and currency sobriety. You play me for a fool. You’re fucking crazy.

Her arrival was sporadic at best. She visited randomly at 8:37 for a shower, fucking and another shower.

He explored her lips, thin neck, small ears, crest of skin throat, narrow brown shoulders, pinpoint breasts with tongue talk, flat belles letters, long legs and played his way into her valley of potential.

He loved giving her oral pleasure.

Edging rose lips long and deep.

Slow sweet.

Little man in a boat sang, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

She reciprocated playing his bone flute.

Riding the pony, priming her G spot grinding hard and fast she exploded with precision and extra ambition whispering, Give me a baby. Give me a baby.

He deferred chromosomes. Fat fucking chance, there's no way under the tropical son I'll give you anything but short time, money, temporary love and the high hard one in your strike zone with runners in scoring position.

Here’s the pitch.

She stayed until 9:45 and left for work at an upscale spa wearing aromatic Grecian urns. He gave her 20 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 Lao dams to provide electricity to Thailand fed 60 million Asians downstream in deltas.

His NO created black-eyed daggers. They stabbed him with hatred, loss, self-pity, violence and starvation. Revenge is best served cold with DNA.

They put on death masks.

Your mask eats your face.

They walked out into tropical heat. Separate directions.

Waves of loneliness shuffled down a broken street. Children dying of malnutrition at a health clinic on the coroner of Hope cried as desperate mothers received free blue placebos.

The day after tomorrow belongs to orphans and lucky losers with Wabi-Sabi.

Wabi - the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects.

Sabi - feel one's own sharp existence.

Martha and Tolerance danced through life.

Dead Dog

Hope is the last thing that dies, yells Dave’s wife. Take out the garbage fat man, lose face idiot, hide your shame, raise your voice like a torn flag of authority, signaling your displeasure with infants, get them in line, shape them up because you can’t ship them out.

You will raise them to yell with the best of them. They will yell and bellow like stuck pigs bleating sheep and cackling crows sending shivers down your spineless pitiful form filled with regret, anger and fear manifesting your tight choking life under long cold florescent lights in a shattering glare.

They will grow up to be passive-aggressive yellers. They will burn you and carry your photo to the village artist who will memorize your face in black and white tones. On the family altar we will look at your frozen 8x10 face forever and give you fruit and water offerings.

We  burn incense so your spirit can eat, so it will not be angry and return as a yelling, demanding, hungry ghost or an invisible reliable scripter. You will perform your filial duty

One day in the near future of now, your dead ancestors will remember sounds, words, phrases and life sentences called talk-speak until they achieve the decibel level required to rejoin the family’s formless form. They will compete in yelling contests with speaking monkeys.

Someone - a parent, spouse, child, boss, lover, or stranger yells. I ignore old yeller. Doesn’t matter who it is, family or friend. Ignore the humans, beasts and gods. Old yeller yells again a little louder. No answer. I wait for them to yell louder, said a ghost hiding in Silence.

Silence is Form, Style, Sensation, Nothing and the Reality of Death.

After I’ve made them yell three times I answer with a whisper. They can barely hear me so they yell again and again. I have conditioned them to my living nightmare. To teach them a lesson I answer with a Whisper. They can’t hear me. They have to raise their voice to compete with other yellers around them.

They are distracted by sensory stimuli overload.

I embrace chaos in the glare of ancestor memories. My sweet revenge.

I reject them with silence, a deadly comprehensive weapon.

Two ghosts whisper - give them 1,000 lashes with your tongue.

I have 1,000 arms and 1,000 eyes.

My name is Avalokiteshvara.

I am a Bodhisattva of compassion for all beings.

I churn the Ocean Of Milk at Angkor Wat.

I am infinite wisdom in the ocean of wisdom.

*

Ha Noise people evolve in small tight spaces where voice people practice perpetual eternal racket over each other and don’t listen and yell louder while others ignore them and the yelling gets vicious like the starving dog downstairs, howling, Feed Me!

Angry Dave pisses in his underwear and his wife lives in her pajamas, the Vietnamese national costume  ... They are a cheap red pastel cotton decorated with brown pandas. He yells at her and the kid because he had no choice in the matter when his father and mother told him he was going to pay big money and marry the slob who learned to yell and ignore her parents while growing up which is how they grew into this higher intelligent life form  ... to reproduce.

Their destiny is to breed, work and get slaughtered down on the killing floor.

I pass narrow minded little hovels guarded by locks, doors and rusting metal curtains. Alleys are crammed with sardine dwellings. Discarded sofas, people cooking in alleys using round perforated compressed coal, workers haul cement, bricks, wire, and stones creating glorious Marxist production methods using a knife, hoe, scythe, axe, hammer, and control stick elephant. All fine well and good being a means to an end everything.

An end to a means the end, the means steams beans, streams data.

Lying in a neighborhood street packed with screaming, beeping careening manic cycles, garbage carts, kids playing fast and loose and women selling wilting produce from broken bamboo baskets was a dead dog. A chilled out sausage dog with splayed legs, glassy brown eyes. Inert. This spectacular spectacle attracted everyone. They escaped homes/shops holding something valuable and precious.

CUT! yelled the Director

Characters froze in place.

Sewing ladies held a thread in air, a woman chopping greens a leaf, a man oiling a bike a can, a woman working meat caressed a knife dripping blood  ...  

a girl held her red balloon, a retired man his glass of urine beer  ...  

a grandmother gripped her grandkid everyone staring at the dead dog as twilight rush hour motorcycles beeped impatient musical cacophonies negotiating through the blind crowd to get home to families, sex, food, television and safety before dark.

ACTION!

A thin old man emerged from his small dark space, perfect for hiding from strangers, invaders and dust. He grabbed the dog’s two rear legs lifting it in the air, dripping blood. He was a hunter holding a wild hare following a successful adventure on the moors. Wild hounds flushed it running wild, filled with fear and free. They treed it, trapped it and killed it.

His inscrutable face showed no emotion. He held the dripping dead dog.

Blood formed a small pool on pavement surrounded by angry confused voices of friends, neighbors, and strangers pealing like bells in his cerebral cortex offering suggestions, advice, warnings, predictions, songs, rituals, chants, musical operas and significant silences minus appropriate words inside or outside the mystery and quality of death personified so he stood there holding the legs until he laid the dog in the gutter and the dog’s body relaxed itself into itself.

He turned away from neighbors and beep-beep fascination. He entered his dark interior space with shadows and ghosts.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Mrs. Pho

A female garbage collector rings a bell daily at 16:55 alerting residents in Dave’s neighborhood it is time for them to bring out their waste. Remove the evidence. Bag it and tag autopsy material.

Mrs. Pho hears the bell. She’s ready, willing and able. She’s arranged her family’s consumption debris in two plastic bags. One pink. One white. Orange and yellow fruit rinds went white, everything else pink fat shreds. She didn’t waste a thing. No one does.

Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle she reflected, bowing in front of her parent’s images, dead and long gone to be remembered infinitely with their stoic black and white ghost face images resting above glowing electric Buddha bulbs pulsating red, green, blue and white lights on her family altar. It’s decorated with plastic flowers, fruit offerings and spirit food incense.

She hears her father whisper in her burning ear as he carried her away from their napalmed village during a war. She doesn’t remember which war. They were endless. Remember where you came from, he said. She never physically returned.

It didn’t matter which garbage bag went where because after she’d taken it down the high walled schizoid alley blocking sincere fading light, she tossed the bags into a rusty gray rolling cart with plywood boards reinforcing height pushed by a masked woman in a green city garbage vest.

The accumulation of garbage was tremendous. Growing exponentially it became part of the collective mess, their collective consciousness. Garbage in-garbage out was everyone’s civic mantra.

She was content knowing her contribution was not elaborate. Just enough to get her away from cold walls and plasma idiots to gossip with neighbors as cracks of white twilight filtered past musical hammers  ... creaking wheelbarrows pulled by skinny boys, incessant motorcycle horns echoing through tight chambers with floating dust particles breaking light into a magical sense of mystery for her tired eyes

... marveling at this visual epiphany as 21 shovels of Earth were moved and manipulated this and that way by young desperate hungry boys and girls from poor villages with zero educational opportunities or laboring wheelbarrows filled with sand, gravel, bricks, mud, sludge, wood, dreams, their bodies caving in from AIDS, exhaustion, heat, H1N1 virus, mortar attacks, suicide dreamers

... while hearing young Sapa Hmong children speaking excellent English with no further hope of an education after grade eight reduced to selling handicrafts to tourists, their bright beaded bags, embroidery stitches, indigo blue staining their hands through long dark cold winters as storms howled, Have mercy, Have mercy on the war weary inoculated objectivists savoring an inferno of their eternal nightmare now reduced to survival and No Exit save fate, death and dust inside a universal spiral.

A shattered mirror reflected her dignified stoic face.

To survive, a young migrant prostitute finished fucking a young migrant boy behind a corrugated curtain at a construction site. Plow my field buddy. She moved down a crooked alley to another construction site singing, nobody loves me but my mother and she could have been lying too. When she wasn’t screwing the quick and the dead she cooked food for laborers. This gave them the strength to handle her wildcat ways. She never slept alone being destiny’s child.

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with rusty brown barbwire encircling his URL domain name and social media sites before easing past shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

One Room

I found a private room in a densely packed Hanoi neighborhood near Lenin Park.

It was filled with narrow twisted alleys, dead ends, byways, rusty gates, spilling bougainvillea foliage, curious kids, workers pulling wheeled carts filled with discarded bricks and mud and tube homes on narrow land for tax reasons. 4-5 floors is the max.

I had two roommates. A mellow Frenchman working for a private agricultural farm three hours north who returned to Hanoi on weekends.

The other guy was Mr. Condescending, a young frantic Vietnamese speaking neurotic smart ass Canadian teaching English and playing weekend jazz music with his band of wandering minstrels. He was a native head case.

He’d been in-country four years, was a slob and greedy for money like the locals. He’d drifted from a language factory job to a university language factoid situation. His favorite phrase was in theory.

Give him the hook, said a Khmer playwright.

Sequestered with palm trees and small ponds, my room was a respite from streets and noise with gentle wind. A balcony vision offered red tiled or PSP roofs, jumbled homes, distant flashing light communication towers, clouds and sky.

Narrow alleys were packed with residents on sidewalks eating white noodles, spring rolls, fresh greens, drinking green tea.

Just like crowded Utopia cities, said Leo. Old dusty pagodas wafted incense offerings.

Life on Hanoi streets means 5,000,000 zooming motorcycles, hawkers of red star hats, t-shirts, bags, reproductions of famous oil paintings, silk, traditional medicines, shoes, bamboo baskets and labyrinthian lanes of aroma and mystery. Designs of family life and eternal relationships lived the blues.

Wear and tear shed a heart travel tear with shimmering noodle passion, a broth of conversation’s hunger, said Tran.

A male street hawker spoke with flair and conviction, If you don’t buy my cheap cotton hat with a national flag red star, or a cheap wooden bracelet made by an orphan, then the next time I see you while I am walking hot Hanoi streets in the middle of a broiling day with sweat streaming into my eyes trying to make a living, then I won’t know you.

My eyes will be dark and lost in my pitiful future. I won’t remember you. Ever. I will continue to walk all day in heat. No water. No rest. I walk work meet tourists. This is my social and economic reality. I ignore you when I don’t have a sale.

I began a gardening project on the balcony bringing up trees, plants, flowers and dirt. Good dirt. We have lots of dirt in Vietnam, said Fat Chance the landlord’s son. He had big plans for expanding the property after his father died.

Monsoons arrived. My dear friend a Poet knighted by William Butler Yeats in Sligo, living on San Francisco Mountain near the Grand Canyon asked about floods. Am I drowning?

I sang, row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, life is but a dream.

I am floating. Cleans the air. This is the rainy season and you know how the media likes to sell disasters, epic dramas of humans battling nature, conflicting themselves. Gotta keep the viewers amused and distracted. Media marketing never dies.

I floated with a clear awareness, sitting, writing, exploring, aligning stars and exploding galaxies, nebulas and infinite diversity. A respite from civilization’s abyss.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Garbage in garbage out

Rocket Storyteller

Content is the payload. The rocket is the story.

We begin new as I, the Invisible Rocket Storyteller - IRS for short - visit Earth. I am looking for lost poets and visual realists.

One dear friend, a retired defense attorney, lives near Flagstaff, Arizona writing poetry about Mountain Wizards while living, laughing and loving under evergreens and firs with mountains, waterfalls, blue skies, clouds and Eagle wing shadows.

He lost sixteen pounds training for a marathon in Norway. Can you imagine running 26 miles and 365 yards in Norwegian rain, sleet and freezing cold? He did it. He’s a warrior of agony and accomplishment.

Originally from Country Claire, Ireland, he is a world-class marathon runner. He’s run in Oslo, Traumas, Stockholm, Dublin, Paris, Kyoto, Shanghai, Lhasa, Boston, Santiago, Tir An Og, Cadiz, Damascus, Rome, Hanoi, Istanbul and one more. You’re only as good as your last marathon, he says. It ain’t about starting it’s about finishing, like writing.              

He is an expert fly fisherman. He catches and releases.

A vociferous reader and Fluent in Gaelic, his multi-lingual translations of illuminated manuscripts includes:

The Book of Kells

Hells Bells, Personal Demons

The Book of Sand by Borges

The Unbook of Knowing

A 12-Step Clean Personal Perception Program

The Housekeeper of Reality

What Is Meaning?

Rumi Dances In Trances and the infinitely popular

Book of Gnomes, Trolls, Fairies and Fantastic Creatures Disguised as Humans and

Rock The Metaphor are among the finest academic and literary examples dancing through world paper libraries. Now available on Kindling.

They are sources of wisdom because he is a brilliant source of fascination, delight and he-man activities.

Together with his wife, Sunshine, a famous St. Paul graphic artist, photographer and painter, using ancient platinum and silver developing and printing techniques, they created a wonderful series of soft, muted, diaphanous images displayed in SEE, a Phoenix gallery. They travel Earth. They run. They explore. They hold hands while crossing streets.

He speaks fluent French. This allows them to survive in French-speaking African countries while translating texts in Timbuktu libraries, some of the oldest on terra firma.

Mrs. Sunshine has seen and HEARD Museum orchestras playing skin drums with a nomadic group of Tuareg men in the Sahara.

Omar is the Nomadic Laughter Inspector and Scribe Dude. A Griot, he pounds the skins. The skins are used for utilitarian purposes like drums, writing parchment, artistic canvases, shelter, vessels, clothing, blankets, umbrellas, prophylactics, toys, games, trampolines, birth shrouds, burial shrouds, cloud shrouds and surround around sound.

Skins make wonderful writing parchment, said Leo. Difficult to create, easy to use, portable, durable, and recycle while rolling and unrolling your little calligraphic life.

Punctuation is a nail in agreement with a tool, said Tran driving his point home using his plastic leg as a hammer.

A frozen 5,500-year-old well preserved leather shoe was discovered in Armenia. It was stuffed with grass. The workmanship was superb. Footwear experts determined it to be of the finest craftsmanship.

Walking is the way to travel. The soul is pure white light and travels at the speed of a camel, said Leo.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged