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

The Gift Keeps Moving

In 1969 he volunteered for the Army, left the world and flew over the pond to Nam.

He walked out 364 days later with his shadow - a bag of bones.

He is a ghost driving a meat-covered skeleton made of stardust riding a rock floating through space.

Fear Nothing.

Transformed, he experienced free time in the long now.

This is what happened, more or less.

One of his names is Lucky Foot. What does that mean?

He elucidates in simple, clear, precise, concise English the language of savage barbarians.

It means, as an experience junky possessing genetic variant DRD4-R7 addicted to new adventures, he brings prosperity to merchants, rest-a-rant owners and nondescript sad, neglected, abandoned and emotionally well adjusted hot to trot red sheen women among humans struggling to survive life’s labyrinth without a center.

He gifts luck to money changers, manicure girls, beggars, banana women -

Landmine amputee survivors, ice and rice sellers, student-teachers, tinkers, tailors, soldiers, spies, textile merchants, weavers, artistic genius children -

Orphans, noodle mama, tea and java purveyors, gardeners, gravediggers, literary outlaws and craggy faced Dan, a boat captain in Hoi An who worked as an interpreter at MAC V during the Vietnam War.

Fate and destiny is the same thing.

If he grows up he dies.

Security is an illusion.

He presents good fortune to Rita, author of Ice Girl in Banlung, barbers cleaning his ears, high-heeled sandal ladies, love sock purveyors and rent-a-life companies.

HCE. Here comes everybody.

90% of life is showing up. When he shows up their day, life, fate and glittering fortunes improve. Karmic destiny.

Fate laughed with him in Morocco on 9/11. He was in the Sahara. He did not take possession of that event and perpetual aftermath. Fear sells.

Destiny danced with him on the is-land of Amnesia in Southeast Asia and exploring Turkey, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

Before returning to Nam in 2009 he lived on a string of 15,000 archipelago islands between Malaysia and Papa New Genie gathering evidence about the human condition.

Each island is a letter. If you string letters together you create a word. This word depending on your imaginary perception of truth-value may or may not have meaning for you like Beauty - your true reflection in still water.

Beauty needs no tongue.

A small journey expands life’s tapestry. He’s a needle without a compass. His needle leads a thread. Threads weave a conversation.

Move like a river, rest like a mirror, respond like an echo.

The Language Company

The Girl on the Train

The Moroccan girl with wild brown hair tied back is not on the train leaving a white station.

Her bare feet grip small pebbles as root structures dance with her toes.

Her grounded shadow prowls toward late winter light.

She is not on the red and brown train zooming past green fields as her sheep in long woolen coats eat their way through pastures after a two-year drought.

She is not on the train hearing music, eating dates, reading a book, talking with friends or strangers, sleeping along her passage, or dreaming of a lover. She does not scan faces of tired, trapped people in orange seats waiting for restless time to deliver them to the Red City.

Her history remembers potentates inventing icon free art, alphabets, practicing equality, creating five pillars of Islam, navigation star map tools, breaking wild stallions, building adobe fortresses and writing language.

She is not on the train drinking fresh mint tea or consulting a pocket-sized edition of the Qur’an. She does not kneel on her Berber carpet five times a day facing Mecca.

She does not wear earphones listening to music imported from another world, a world where people treasure their watches. Where illusions of controlling time is their passion to be prompt and responsible citizens.

She is not on the train and not in this language the girl with wild brown hair tied back with straw or flower stems surrounding her with fragrances.

Inside rolling hills cut by wet canyons she is surrounded by orange blossom aroma in yellow and green fields. Her black eyes absorb ephemeral cloud thoughts in sky mind. Her open heart feels her breath ripple her long shadow.

Her toes caress soil. She is lighter than air, lighter than an eagle soaring above the Atlas Mountains.

She smells the Berber fire heating tea for a festival. A shaman dances in a goatskin cape and skull below stars.

It is cold. Flaming shooting stars leap into her eyes. Her nomadic clan plays flutes and drums. She sways with the hypnotic rhythm of her ancestral memory.

She is not on the train.

She is inside a goat skull moving through soil, dancing through fields.

Red and yellow fire invites stars to her dance.

ART

Morocco

Denver International Airport

mid-day is the least busy time 
frisked down by guys at security -  they may have been from Ghana or Somalia or Ethiopia

but I suspect Congo or Zaire as their dialect was distinct
they are young and laughing at the never ending task 
waving detector wands over people

and the one waving me is young & angry & exasperated

at having to do anything so far removed from his

land, culture, family, his brothers and sisters carrying water

on their heads in cracked plastic pails from deep distant wells 
drying in the heat of perpetual summer’s drought

his tie is askew and his white shirt 
against his thin black neck 
is frayed and his blue blazer looks severely uncomfortable on his frame

and the Asian security woman

says the woman screening bags

doesn’t know 
what a harmonica is so I pull it out in the key of D

ask if she would like me to play her something 
she says yes so I play a few blues riffs on automatic pilot

she laughs as passengers flow around 
mothers manage baby carriages - three tired tiered birthday cakes with burning candles 
their long lonely joyful responsibilities

the music stops 
I bag the harmonica and take the escalator down

to the train watching Hispanic woman mop the floor as 
women in furs and designer jewelry wait impatiently 
for the train to Concourse ABC...

the train zooms through tunnels like amusement park rides

with silver spinning windmills in cement walls

whirling wind tunnels

people get off and on 
a White woman with her Black husband holds her child 
his black curly hair all ringed around small ears

husband looks bored and she is not sure

in her heart
if she made the right decision 
they are flying east to see her folks
he never smiles and they share no words

The Garden #7

Ah, how sweet it is to explore, laugh, share and love.

Chapter 1 in "The Language Company" is longer than a river.

Here is part of a part of the amazing tale.

Listening for thanks.

The Garden #7

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The Language Company