I am empty

Tell me about her.
Don't repress a thing.

Humid air hung like a white shirt.
She went to the market.

He observed cloud animals flying in a blue sky.
Sweat rained his face.

Her return was elegant.
She parked her motorbike.

Angelic face, tight black pants, grey top, high heels.
Dressed to kill.
Gold bracelets, diamond rings reflected sun.
A smile creased her perfect skin.

Gesturing sign language manifestations,
She locked the door, turned on the fan, peeled cloth.
Purple orbs glistened.

Protected by orange umbrella
Two silent monks whispered a blessing
After a boy dropped monetary paper
Into empty containers.

I am an empty container she signed.

Fill me up.

Invent a God

Broken glittering glass edges reflecting an elegant universe magnified the tears of an Iraqi girl burying her parents in a white shroud of cloth, an old flag of final surrender.

Tree leaves blasted green to deep yellow and brown. They flew into a river. They gathered on boulders clogging the Rio Guadalete and dolomite waterfalls. One leaf did a lot of damage. The river needed cleaning.

"See," said the Grand Inquisitor ringing his broken Spanish bell, "it’s all possible. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted if there is no God."

Everything you know is a lie.

"Let’s invent a God," said a pregnant nun supporting her nose habit. "We need reason and faith to believe in a higher power."

"Reason and faith are incompatible," said a logic board filled with circular flux reactors.

"Look," said Little Nino, "I found a compass and it works. The needle is pointing to magnetic north. This may help us. I am a compass without a needle.”

Ahmed read the instructions. "Great Scott! It says one sharp line of description is better than any number of mundane observations."

"You don’t need a compass in the land of dreams," said a mother. "We need all the direction we can handle."

"Maybe one direction is enough," said a cartographer.

"If you need a helping hand," said another, "look at the end of your wrist."

"O wise one, tell us another," cried a disembodied voice.

"Ok, how about this," someone said. "Our days of instant gratification are a thing of the past."

"Looks like everything is a thing of the past," observed a child sifting dust particles at Ground Zero on 9/11.

"You’re wiser than your years."

"That’s an old saw with a rusty blade cutting through desire, anger, greed, ignorance and suffering."

"Yes," said a child, "there are two kinds of suffering."

"What are they?" asked another orphan.

"There’s suffering you run away from and suffering you face,” said a child arranging leaves on blank pages inside her black book.

A Century is Nothing

Finch's Cage, Sapa, Vietnam

In Sapa, Vietnam I discovered a side street and thick cold java at a run-down Internet cafe. I sat outside.

Finch had a yellow chest, red beak and brown feathers. It was outside a plate glass door. It’d escaped from its small yet safe bamboo cage in the main room. Someone, perhaps the young mother worried about her wailing infant or her brother worried about dying of boredom or her old mother worried about dying alone had left the cage open.

Finch sang, “Where’s my home? What is this beautiful world?”

Finch hugged the ground. It looked at green trees waving across the street. It saw a deep blue sky. It inhaled clear, clean mountain air. It heard birds singing in trees but didn’t understand them.

They sang about nesting, exploring, flying, clouds, trees, sky, rain, warm sun, rivers, bark, worms, snails, and melodies of freedom.

I wondered if Finch would fly away. I hoped so however I knew it was afraid to go. Perhaps it lacked real flying experience, the kind where you lift off fast beating your wings to get up and get going to escape the weight of gravity or memories filled with attitudes, beliefs, values and fear pulling you down.

Free, you turn and glide, relax and soar.

Finc, being conditioned to the caged world of bamboo with a perch, food and water looked and listened to the world.

Finch retreated from the possibility of free flight and pecked at loose seeds in a narrow crevice below the door. It smelled the dark stale room where the cage hung on a wire. It pecked under the frame. It wanted someone to rescue it.

It sang, “Help! Let me in. I want to come home. I’ve been outside and I’ve seen enough. It’s a big scary place. I promise I’ll never try to escape again. I was curious, that’s all. I’ve seen enough. Let me in.” 

Finch was amazing in it’s beauty. Yellow, red, brown and bright eyed in its aloneness. 

An old woman opened the door. She trapped Finch in a purple cloth and returned Finch to its cage. She closed the bamboo door and snapped the latch shut.

“Did you learn your lesson little bird?” she said.

Finch sat on its perch, enjoyed a long cool drink of water and sang, “Thank you. Now I am truly happy.” 

The old woman didn’t understand this language.

Muttering under her breath about inconvenience she shuffled down a long dark hallway to a kitchen where she killed a chicken for lunch.

 

Five Chinese Aliens, Bhaktapur, Nepal

Spring roll 2011. It’s dinnertime. Five Chinese aliens appear in a Bhaktapur guesthouse restaurant.

Two males and three females around 20.

They are armed with laptops, cell phones, and loud discursive language. This is their normal. Noise and confusion and interruptions and arrogant attitudes fit their life style.

One girl is dressed like a flapper from the 20’s. Daisy talks with her mouth full of rice as her red diamond tiara squeezes her frontal lobe into a shucked pea.

They are lucky to have a passport. Their parents are important Red Party Officials.

It’s all about connections.

They’ve whined their way out of manners and intelligence in public places. The new breed of The Ugly Chinese - lost, terribly frustrated never satisfied in a big fucking hurry coddled spoiled youth.

They are the new emperors and empresses in a rising dynasty. They act like they own the restaurant. They complain about the price of a meal. One girl said in a shrill voice, “Oh, it’s too expensive. I am a poor student.”

She majors in Stupidity and Callousness at Beijing Ab-Normal University. She failed Basic Courtesy 101.

Gated primary Chinese student in Maja village Fujian, China.

A brat boy chastises the Nepalese waiter about his pronunciation of “Menu.” The crew cut Mandarin idiot commands the boy to say it again. Menu. Menu. Menu.

They are living breathing examples of the spoiled one-child political and cultural genocide legacy.

It will come back to haunt China. They have the emotional maturity of a 10-year old. They are so busy stuffing their faces and talking over each other all the European guests stare at them. They don’t care. They act and talk like this at home.

A vociferous Chinese virus has been unleashed on Earth.

Flapper Dolly jumped up on the table yelling, “Kill the Running Capitalist Dogs! Making Money in China is Glorious!”

Everyone threw steel-toed reinforced hiking boots at her. She died of Shame. Such indignity.

Her friends dragged her body out. They sold the boots to pay for her cremation at a Hindu temple.

Bhaktapur, Nepal

Life Essentials Post 9/11

Tribal adults and children survivors of 9/11 sifted through leftovers searching for sustainable resources. They needed essentials: food, shelter, water, air, sex and stories.

"This is the day of my dreams," said a girl with a diamond in her mind watching fireworks explode over the Willamette Valley in Eugene on the fourth of July. Her wisdom mind reflected 10,000 things.

Yangon, Burma

Omar opened his book, traced braille and read.

“The honorable monkey mind trickster wandered through her expansive museum sensing pure intention, motivation and reflections. If she is not careful and paying complete attention the monkey mind will run wild splashing green jealous slashes, red anger strokes, and blue attachment colors on her beautiful canvases. While some ignored it at their peril others respected monkey mind and kept an eye on it with respect and dignity.”

“It was a mindfulness,” said a woman sketching shadows.

"Now I see why Picasso painted Guernica in 1937," said a blond kid kicking stones, raising dust.

"Everything we love is going to die."

"Yes, we accept loss forever."

She cleaned her canvas with a camelhair brush while leaning against a wall of sound. The echo was deafening. Silence is the loudest noise in the world.

"Picasso was a great thief," said a museum curator. "When you see his work you see the influence of all great artists."

"The ancient texts predicted this," said Other, a seer.

He sat in a pile of splintered wood sharpening the edge of his knife on a small piece of flint taken from his old sweater pocket. Sunlight glistened off his finely honed Spanish blade as he worked it under the skin of a pear. 

"They talked about choices and unintended consequences," said a woman digging for water.

"I’m thirsty," said Little Nino.

"Be patient my child."

"Yes, said Jamie. "It takes faith."

"You can’t take faith to the bank," replied a girl.

"True," said Other, "faith doesn’t know where the bank is."

"A bank is what holds the river together," said a child.

"Faith is a woman in this tribal tale."

"It will take more than Faith," someone said stumbling over piles of discarded twisted logic.

"Speaking of falling faulty twin towers, it will require firm resolve, an unyielding capacity for vengeance, retaliation, and retribution in this living memory," said Lloyd, an unemployed insurance underwear writer from classless London. His three-piece Brooks Brothers suit was in shreds.

"It’s because of the amygdala," counseled a doctor.

"What’s that?" said Little Nino.

"It’s a location of the brain where fear lives. It’s a knot of nerve cells and tissues. We think anger lives there as well but we don’t know for sure."

“Yes," said Alfredo Jari, “memory is the duration of the transformation of a succession into a reversion. In other words, any internal obstruction of the flow of the mobile molecules of the liquid, any increase in viscosity is nothing other than consciousness.”

“Can you put that in plain English?" pleaded a lit major.

“Yes I can but I won’t.”

“Their collective archetypical memory was heavier than collective unconscious and lighter than consciousness,” said an analyst named Jung.

Lighter than wind.

Fat democratic spectators cheered from sidelines. Consumers swallowed bitter tears of greed and desire.

Let’s go shopping to reduce our fear of poverty, said nations of sheep.

“The archetype can't be whole or complete if it doesn’t allow for the expression of both good and evil in the conscious or unconscious,” drooled a sedated American soldier in a VA hospital wheelchair. He needed an exit strategy.

“More drugs, nurse!” he screamed. “I coulda’ been somebody. I could'a been contender!”

All he received was his pitiful wailing voice echoing in empty chambers.

On a movie set medicated military reservist wives dressed as cheerleaders jumped up and down in wild mind agitated states of abandon. They filed for divorce after taking lovers while their husbands looked for improved body armor in oppressive Middle East desert heat.

They were the undereducated doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful.

Other visualized their death while poverty’s heirs prayed that instant replay would change reality. 

A Century is Nothing