Juke

My Cadiz, Spain experience sang of Juke, an African word meaning wicked or disorderly in one language.

It also meant a building without walls in the Congo. For American Blacks it took on sexual connotations and a type of dance.

It may have also described jute - a rough fiber made from the stems of a tropical Old World plant used for making twine, rope, or woven into matting - fields and jute workers visiting makeshift bars. Juke joints were bars with dance floors and back rooms for gambling and brothels. Shake your moneymaker.

Your Mask Eats Your Face

To juke was to lead a wandering life, have intercourse. To go in, jam and poke. Whorehouses. From the 1930’s on Delta blues players played juke joints, passing the music from generation to generation. Juke boxes were invented in 1927.

Nothin’ but the blues, everybody’s talking ‘cause talk is cheap.

Hard field work prisons, slavery, life, death, love, loss, leaving and living the blues with a feeling.

It was nothing but the blues talking.

While living, singing, and playing harp blues in the key of C, I trimmed long fingernails down to the quick brown fox jumped over the fence. WYSIWYG. Small slivers of enamel snow spiraled into air floating to cobblestones.

It was a clear truth after three days in the Sierras on narrow Roman passages, chopping and climbing in ancient forests removed from civilization’s discontent.

People moved fast and furious in Cadiz. I sensed their malcontent maladjusted wild crazy freedom from being closeted, closed in, no sky, no air, stoned frustrations manipulating mainstream desires down ways and means with cause and effect in the big city.

It was all a relative reality in the absolute reality and most of my relatives were dead.

Their grounded headstones decorated with names, ages, epitaphs collected dust living with memory.

Weaving A Life (V2)

Passing Through

Smiling makes you happy

Diamond mind wisdom

Women lay out golden chains

Men yak in phones

Gleaming significance weighs inlaid rubies, sapphires

Black Nil stones harvested from deep Earth

Glitter like 1000 stars

Path leads past mannequins

Wearing fashionable silent plastic splendor 

Unloading facsimiles of threaded prayers flowing from a woman’s mouth

Answer stirs ice

Question stabs ice

Scientific dissolution in liquid’s formless form

Shy beyond description

-    a girl weighs lettuce hills

-    cucumbers whisper adjustments

-    cell phone eliminates an old man's loneliness

-    a sharp hatchet congratulates bloody meat

-    a woman stabs ice memories

-    dead dog’s head rests on a counter

 Ice coffee is bitter sweet my sweet

Hammock infant swings high/low

Contemplating an old woman

Stepping through puddles carrying a plastic bag with two tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, daily bread

Eye contact dissolves in the wake up

Sing song chopsticks carry an infant

Wide-eyed catastrophic entropy factoid

Coconut, sewing machine, hyena laughter

Small talk, broken light vegetables green life

Where do you stay, asked man.

I stay in blue sky

Is it a hotel? A guesthouse? No it is blue sky.

Pure land poetry

Jazz poem

Visuals

Passing through

Professional stranger

Ghost Other

Eye hand heart – two won’t do

Show up sit awhile smile draw meditate on emptiness

Witness point line shadow less form

Imagination

Observation

Experience

Rhythm of place

Grow Your Soul

Samuel's Truth

"The important and only vital question is, how much greater, finer, am I than I was yesterday? Have I fulfilled my possibilities, made the most of my potentialities? What a marvelous world if all would - could hold this attitude toward life." - Edward Weston, photographer.

*

November 1969.

Leaving 101 into Eagle we passed white memorial shrines to dead Vietnamese. Farmers and boys grazed oxen near gravesites.

50,000 soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division lived at Eagle.

Mick drove along winding dirt roads past the main post office, barracks and a church. Buildings, clothing and landscape were brown. Eagle would be my residence for the next year if I survived.

Mick turned off the road and downhill to a small shipping container marked MAIL. I climbed wooden stairs to the company clerk’s office and commanding officer’s headquarters. The room displayed pictures of a president, defense secretary and hierarchy.

“Welcome,” said the first sergeant of the 265th Radio Research Company.

“Thanks, it feels good to be here.”

“I understand you volunteered for the 265th.”

“Yes. I looked at the 8th RRFS, talked to some guys and decided this would be more interesting duty.”

“It’s definitely more interesting. Not as plush as down south. Our mission is electronic code breaking, linguistics and traffic analysis. We provide critical intelligence to the Screaming Eagles at headquarters and in the field.”

“Fine. I’ll do my best.”

“I’m sure you will. Samuel will show you around, get you settled. Welcome to the 265th.”

“Thanks Tops.”

“That’ll be all.”

Samuel, a small wiry African-American company clerk was a virtual resident of Nam having extended his tour for five years.

“Better money to be made than going home to abuse, derision, scorn, apathy and unemployment,” he said issuing me a sleeping bag, M-16, ammo, gas mask, helmet, flak vest, Boonie hat and survival knife with a serrated edge for tearing flesh.

In - out dialogue.

“I know what you mean.”

“No you don’t. None of you white guys have a clue about real life in America. Better drugs in Nam cheap and good quality control. Let me know if you need a little weed.” Access. He pointed to my hooch up a hill.

“Top will meet you there. Take you on the grand tour.”

“Thanks Samuel. Nice to meet you.”

“See ya around.”

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A memoir.

*

Spike Lee co-wrote and directed a film released June 12, 2020. Da 5 Bloods follows a group of aging Vietnam Veterans who return to Nam to find a fallen commander and buried treasure. It received excellent reviews.

Seamstress

Away from ice girl’s eyes wet season life shimmered in green rice paddies. Beauty, creativity, dance, and music described sensations. Sensations rested between an object and a concept. Stimuli engaged disquiet.

How do you manifest this waking dream, asked ice girl.

It’s all process, said Leo. Any explanation is a well dressed mistake.

Across town a seamstress returned to her guesthouse. She splashed water on her face, changed clothes and spit into red roses. She kick started her cycle and went to the market inside a dark labyrinth.

At her corner stall she keyed multiple locks. She stacked numbered wooden shutters. She dragged out her Butterfly sewing machine, ironing board and manikins.

Dummies wore exquisite yellow, purple, blue, white shimmering silks decorated with sparkling faux pas silver stars, moons, and small round reflecting balls.

Her skill designed fabrics for women needing elaborate sartorial refinement for engagements, weddings, and cremations.

She evaluated serious fittings and adjustments. Her sewing universe process was selecting fabric; measurement, ironing backing, a ruler, white chalk to mark pleats, cutting, pushing her machine treadle, pins, threads, trimming edges, hand sewing clasps, shiny connections, and ironing.

Needles inside a slow prism flashed light and shadow as threads danced through cloth in endless conversations. Needles talked about traditional conservative morals and opportunity-value cost.

Thread followed their conversation securing 1,001 small mirrors. Together they measured precise calculations establishing a stop-loss number. All explanations have to end somewhere. Cut.

Ice Girl in Banlung

We Gave Them Everything

Two pale female French tourist conspirators plotted their narrative near the Khmer gardener.

Colonizing this hell hole we gave them baguettes, war, illusions of freedom, top heavy dull administrative procrastination tools, fake NGO bureaucracies, wide boulevards, legal beagle systems, an eye for an eye, corruption potential, designs of egalitarian ideals, morals, ethics, principles, values, faded yellow paint and French architecture.

Yes, said her friend, this IS the old brave new world and I am lazy and passive and my stomach comes first. I am starving. Let’s eat our sorrow and be grateful we don’t live in this depressing country filled with compassionate Buddhist people. I’ll never understand their intention to do nothing with mindfulness.

It’s the hardest thing a person can do.

She was a super thin model of anorexia boned with stellar constellations. Her grim hawk faced rotund lesbian lover had flabby upper arms. She scribbled serious fiction-memory and sense data entitlement in an unlined black notebook with one hand while massaging her forehead to increase creative blood flow.

They examined a microscopic map of Angkor Wat filled with unconscious alliterative jungles, gold lame Apsara dancers, 232 species of black and red butterflies, 1.5 million anxious tourists in a big fat fucking hurry, Chinese, Japanese and Korean robot tour groups, crying elephants, super tour buses, 125cc motorcycles, tuk-tuks, begging children speaking ten European languages hawking gimcracks and whining predatory adults with an 8th grade education accompanied by miles of flaming plastic garbage, narrow boned white oxen pulling carts, 18 million attention deficit disordered citizens addicted to simple minded FACELOST entertainment diversionary cell phone adolescent sex text nonsense and 1,001 laterite cosmic Hindu temples stretching across Burma and Thailand into Laos and Vietnam in a circular boomerang dance evolving from the stillness, letting go of outcomes as the French ladies whispered, Where have we been, Where did we go, What did we see, Where are we, How do we feel, Did we discover the intuitive third eye of enlightenment or any wisdom in this totality of mystery, devotion, and sublime splendor?

They’re trapped in SEA. One described fragments of her short life history with an animist talking stick.

The other cut out brochure glossies, ticket stubs and bleeding hearts to paste in her book. A future visual memory of her ear and snow.

Her attention span was shorter than a tour at the Genocide Museum filled with 2,000,000 smiling skulls.

Here we are.

The Language Company