Ghost speak

“People are more affected by how they feel than by what they understand,” said a foreign teacher. 

“We know so much and understand so little,” said a bright Chinese girl. One of eighty in a class tomb.

“I want to be a waif when I grow up.” 

During a moment of silence they heard an authoritarian female voice yelling in Mandarin from another room. “The bent nail gets hammered down!”

A ghost passed brown faced women in dirty white aprons chopping vegetables with sharp cleavers on scarred wood. Single girls mopped cement passageways from dawn to dusk. Dutiful daughters swept floors staring at deaf dumb blind televisions stacked on bags of rice, boxes of detergent and hairline fractured straw mattress bedding. 

China is the entertainment capital of the world!

He passed retired pensioners slapping white marble mahjong pieces into tight manicured strategic rows as orange vested street cleaning women whisking ornate hard handled bamboo brushes painted the city’s rising dust. A ghost they never imagined floated past, an apparition they dreamed in their wide eyed wonder.

A peasant woman collected cow manure in broken reed baskets. She carried her load to a road, spreading it out with a hoe to dry in the sun. Instant organic fertilizer.

Ghost speaks the language of silence. This comforts them. His inability to articulate his passion and suffering illusions witnesses a mirror reflecting reality in humanity’s incarnate garden. 

The meaning of meaning was obscured by clouds of anger, fear, desire, jealousy, ignorance, and attachment. They waved him away.

They cast him into deep water. He replenished his spirit. His motivation and intention was clear. 

molecules

Readers may find your work interesting, especially the part about Americans being transparent.

I used to work where there was a nuclear reactor and knew a lot of physicists there. They were trying to reduce fifty-five million tons of leftover radioactive material like Technetium-99 from seeping through the water table into the Columbia river.

Others developed hydrogen fuel cells for alternative energy sources. I’ve never met a physicist working with detergent.

Wow, I know TC-99 and it’s deadly stuff. They’ll never get rid of it. They’ve created a hell of a problem for future generations. Anyway, yeah it’s pretty cool working with these detergent molecules. And now we’re here.

He took a breath.

Did you know that the world is made up of 98% helium and hydrogen? Well, the remaining particles of atoms, a very small part, is life and inside these atoms a very small part of that is intelligence. The rest of the pyramid is garbage. Tell your editor to take that out! He laughed long and loud.

The amazing thing is how many people don’t know it or get it. The natural law is for things to get messy. That’s why people clean, to rearrange the molecules in some form of order.

They think they are in control of it. They are afraid of change. Things happen which are outside their control or plans of the creator. It expands the evolutionary process.

dead sunday

I learned from Ankara students how they were tired.

They loved being addicted to their phenobarbital phenomenon reality altering life, taking anti-depressants by mouth. I processed their fear and anxiety. 

A national Turkish problem according to a psychiatrist I met one day by chance on purpose my second week is anxiety.

It was a dead Sunday.

Clinking a small musically inclined silver spoon dissolved square sugar cubes made in a factory where the hygiene conditions were abysmal.

I sat in a tea house filled with artifacts. Iranian carpets, blue amber oil paintings and thick deeply embroidered cushions near a well thumbed Tarot deck. Fortune telling is an art and science depending on the suspicious, auspicious way. I gifted them the State of Relaxation. The Zen Tarot. Reading, feeling, absorbing the future.

We are all extras in someone's film, said Sappho.

hello december

tomorrow is national day here in laos, said orphan.

big deal, said a little red rooster. cock-a-doodle-do.

ain't nothing but the blues, said a sallow shallow faced female teacher. a skin teacher.

i dance. i drink beer. i hunt foreigners. it's a job. 

rooster crowed. cock-a-doodle-do.

orphan said, it was blatant child abuse and he was one pissed off kid. i tried to murder his attitude, his free spirit. 

i was trapped in my chair. he was trapped in the relationship. he learned how to be a pain giver, an efficient manipulator. he carried his heavy bag of neglect, emotional pain, shadows and independence into through and out of relationships. he distributed gifts of emotional suspicion. 

he practiced the ancient art of abandonment. loving and leaving. 

i finished doing my wheelchair time. i posted bail. i was released on my own recognizance. i stumbled, adjusted, and found my balance. i renewed my sense of self determination and self reliance.

i walked on the curvature of the earth. a simple walking meditation. a kinhin.

my kensho was a liberation and a loneliness.

OR-7 wolf

A female from Montana headed south through Wyoming, crossed southeastern Idaho, dropped down to Utah, crossed northern Colorado, and headed back up to Wyoming, where she ate poison and died.

"If you connect all the dots, she walked something like 3,000 miles," said Bangs.

"Wolves are amazing travelers."

And patient. One male hung out four years in Idaho, howling and leaving scent markers, before a female found him, Bangs said. They established a pack, and the male lived to the near-record age of 13 before lying down and dying next to a dead elk.

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