Ghost in exile

After 364 days an officer pinned red and yellow campaign ribbons on me. I caught a freedom flight from Saigon to Alaska, ran across a frozen tarmac in thin khakis for java and flew to the City by the Bay.

“Anybody want a steak?” said a sergeant processing arrivals.

“Screw the steak. Give me a new dress green uniform. I’m out of here for a flight to Colorado.”

I became a ghost in exile. No one spoke to me. I understood their reticence, fear, guilt and awkwardness seeing me in a military uniform.

Passengers were anesthetized by their life and media propaganda and TV images seeing the dead come home in black body bags. Prime time madness sold soap.

I remembered Samuel at the 265th, “Better than going home to abuse, derision, scorn, apathy and unemployment.”

I’d seen things they would never believe. They averted their eyes with social indifference and I understood. They’d remained static in their work, eat, and sleep routines.

I’d shifted my consciousness with quantum precision. I survived a transforming life experience.

You die twice. Once when you’re born and when you face death.

Surviving a year in a macabre police action zone where an imperialist government tried to impose a Catholic leader on a Buddhist people gave my life new meaning.

It taught me impermanence.

One life - no plan - many adventures sang with clarity and awareness. I create or destroy my freedom.

In my dream I hike past a crude sign hanging from rusty concertina wire at a deserted firebase:

Normal is a cycle on a washing machine.

I locate normal in my portable lexicon.

Normal is someone you don’t know very well. Like yourself.

I used to be somebody else but I traded him in.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation

The narrator, a soldier, talks to a priest while serving in Vietnam.

"The histories speak about humans shedding old habits, attitudes, values, and beliefs and loved ones to go on journeys with new opportunities and compassion.

"How they renewed their spirit with pure gratitude and joy. It’s amazing. I mean here I am sacrificing my youth, desire, ignorance and anger to be cleansed, to be made whole, to integrate my unconscious into oneness with the ALL as an authentic being. We are stardust. We are one third the life of the universe.”

“Yes, my son, using religion I sacrificed bodies and souls. I created sorrows and depravity. I wandered through Sumerian, Greek, Roman, and Spanish villages where I administered suffering, pain and death. I burned 12,000 innocent men, women and children at the stake during the Inquisition. Ah, such a time I had condemning heretics to damnation and life everlasting. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

“Did you record these events?”

“I dictated my myths, legends and story-truth to Omar, a blind Touareg scribe. My amanuensis. You’ll meet him in Morocco on 9/11. You will combine stories and adventures in this tale. Anyway, to continue my little saga, I licked civilization’s fire. As a fire-eater in a traveling carnival I blessed sinners with ashes on Palm Sunday. I drove a tank through Middle Eastern deserts converting the heathen with fire and brimstone. I kneeled and prayed in mosques facing Mecca five times a day.”

“You don’t say.”

“Yes. I survived in Afghan caves near destroyed statues of Buddha hearing Taliban confessions. I tended to suicide cases in GITMO. I meditated in Tibetan caves for three centuries, three decades, three years, three months, three weeks, three days, three minutes and three breaths. Ah, the blessed trinity. At Tibetan sky burial ceremonies north of Lhasa after flaying skin off bodies, I ground human bones to mix with blood for vultures so the departed spirit could, would, should be reborn. Karma and reincarnation.”

“You did all that?”

“Yes. I walked the length of the Silk Road from Venice to Guangzhou bringing comfort to the lame, blind and destitute. I traveled with Italo Calvino from Italy a scribe blessed with magical realism insight when he created Invisible Cities in Kublai Khan’s court. Perhaps you know of it?”

“Yes, he and the great Khan played chess.”

“Ah the great game and a metaphor of life. Castle early. Control the center. Divide and conquer.”

“Checkmate,” whispered Death.

ART

Riding Rails

The trapped mother realized her ice reality. Concise crying crystals reflected clarity. Suffering from fate and free will she danced in flames seeking her SAVE key.

Hearing a child say, “I need help,” she received a blessing.

A child whispered, “The ending is the middle.”

“The middle is the beginning,” said a child. “You can start the story anywhere.”

“We are all orphans sooner or later,” said Rose. “We bury our successes and failures in the same grave.”

Death and the gravedigger agreed. “Everyone comes to us.”

Rail music sang click, clack, click and clack.

In a dome liner, children ate watermelon and spit seeds into sky. A red haired female magician made poverty disappear. Passengers formed quick intense transient relationships between whistle stops before, during and after industrial wastelands.

We zoomed past small town wrecking yards with cars and trucks collecting rust, abandoned swings, toys, dishwashers, gardens, guillotines, baskets of severed heads, shredded tires and water soaked concave fences collapsing into community soil.

I hammered word spikes while waving to strangers stranded in their present perfect tense seeing trains carry perfect continuous tense strangers into new futures.

Down the line riding the rails. Further along the road of iron deficiencies.

At a remote train station, a furious man with his shopping cart home and a whiskey bottle in a bag sagged against a brick wall yelling at his slumped wife.

Her old sad eyes stared far away wondering how she managed to get herself in this fucking mess away from social services, respect, dignity and love. Her heart knew if she had any common sense (not very common) or any strength or power she’d get up and start walking.

Her dilemma was to find a way out of the quicksand swallowing her life. She was conditioned to having someone save her. She loved being a victim and needed a martyr.

Clear cold thin Rocky Mountain air quickened blood streams. We’ve enjoyed rail’s clicking clacking trestle music exchanging laughter and awareness. Visions of starlight sky blends with engine headlights shattering blackness. We arrive at Union Station in Denver.

I know the field behind the station where the headless homeless heartbroken hoboes, drifters and transients exist, hide and run for their lives.

It’s a tricky place at night. It runs north way up to the stockyards near the old Coliseum, not to be confused with the one in Rome where they fed you-know-who to you-know-what. Where every cold frostbitten February, cowboys, cowgirls and plain old city folk put on the Stockman’s extravaganza awarding prizes to animals and the field runs south past the main Post Office Terminal annex and westward toward immigrant hopes and dreams up to Federal Boulevard on a rise with a church and laundromats and renovated upscale posh neighborhoods overlooking a gleaming screaming downtown Silver City skyline. The killing field is filled with tall weeds in the Platte River flood plain.

There’s a fine view of the Rocky Mountains from the field amid random acts of pre-meditated violence around small fires as drifters pray to stay invisible long enough to ride rails out of town away from the mean old street.

In the summer, children scream on the roller coaster at Elitch Gardens up on 38th and Tennyson where my aunt and uncle ran a drugstore and pharmacy after WWII. They worked their fingers to the bone, sweated their lives out and never asked for a thing. My aunt was so scared by the Depression she maintained thirty-seven folders budgeting the cash flow by counting every penny every night.

It ain’t no field of dreams in that big lonely weed choked undeveloped tract of real estate where freights and Amtrak dome liners blow long sad whistles as buttoned waiters serve blood red Colorado tenderloin down wind from the smell of meat grilling at Coors Field where boys of summer play hardball.

The Coast Starlight sliding toward Kansas curves into a space-time bend.

Moon drinks rainwater.

Walking rails I sing with Robert Johnson…“Woke up this morning and looked around for my shoes…I got them walking blues.”

I savor impermanence. Cool blood decorates hot black keys as I bleed words.

ART

Kids Write

“Let’s create a book,” said one, “and we’ll be in it. We can create a quest about love & survival. Like ART, adventure, risk and transformation.”

“Hey it’s a great possibility, with stories or vignettes for word salad dressing.”

“We need stories, water, shelter, food and love.”

“Stories existed before food and shelter. Stories describe hunting for food and social needs. All stories are about forms of hunger.”

“Love is a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor,” said a shadow.

“Will it be a man-u-script or a woman-u-script?”

“Both. If it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage.”

“We are authors looking for characters,” said an Italian kid named Pirandello. “I am a plot looking for a character.”

“When someone dies survivors look for a plot,” said a gravedigger.

“It will have characters facing conflict on their quest,” said a young scriptor. “It will have satire, humor, curiosity and courage.”

“Yes,” said a writer. “It will be a labyrinth of desires and obstacles with rising and falling action and resolution as characters take risks, suffer greatly and overcome adversity to realize their authenticity. You will experience what characters sense and imagine through their actions. Socrates subordinated character to action. Get to the verb.”

“Let’s make it dramatic by focusing our spotlight on specifics and floodlight on the general to establish a P.O.V. I’ll play director. Places everyone. Lights. Camera. Action!”

“Our stories contain conscious and unconscious awareness like a maze or a puzzle palace. I need your help with dialogue and action as characters reveal their fears by living forty questions in the dark night of their soul. They trade their soul to the devil down at the crossroads at midnight so they can play the blues, create art and dance. Free from masks they are breathing, laughing and living healers.”

“Let’s act out their fears, dreams and joy.”

“Do your characters discuss moral ambiguities?”

“Yes. They speak with nouns and verbs with choices, actions and consequences. They slay adverbial dragons with an ultra fine red pen.”

“Is a place like this hospital a character?”

“Sure, a place has character? Writers explore environments like Tacoma, Vietnam, Morocco, Spain, caves…”

“It sounds like nature vs human or human vs human or human vs themself. You become the thing you fight the most.”

“Do they playfully deconstruct the human condition with story-truth moving the narrative forward to get to the root of their experience?”

“The roots are below the surface,” said a young nun washing teacups on a Taoist mountain in Sichuan, China. “I mediate on the roots below the surface of appearances.”

“Get is the joker word in English. A lit agent at the Willamette Writer’s Conference said this work is a word farrago photograph, a jazz beat stylistic epic in process. She suggested throwing the narrative out and focus on one geography or one specific time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Rita, 14, an ice seller and independent author of Ice Girl in Banlung in Ratanakiri, Cambodia.

It was a wild-west town of 25,000 with dusty red roads near the River of Darkness and animist cemeteries. “It’s fucking hysterical.”

ART

Burn your fear

Write FEAR & ANGER on a paper napkin.

Burn it.

Let go.

Citizen sheep believed in fear and unsustainable consumption because they were afraid of being lonely and poor.

Happiness is a myth. The wish of desire said so.

Humans were willing victims of their fear, healthy uncertainty, and doubt. Their amygdala, a small almond shaped brain structure creating fear and emotional response fired up. Fight or flight?

Are you the hunter or the prey?

Manipulated by the collective unconscious and a pervasive system of socialization control mechanisms, consumer sheep were happy. The subtle influence of right wing conservatives and media addiction bought idiots. Facing their mind-numbing daily grind with heart breaking choices sheep needed someone/something to Control them.

Accepting responsibility for their freedom was scary.

Intelligent centered ones feeling gratitude and empathy in their heart danced with Death. Everyone lives and dies.

“You work, breed and get slaughtered,” said an Asian child with a junior philosopher badge.

It’s essential to die once while you’re alive. Get it out of the way.

*

I carried a copy of Omar’s book, A Century Is Nothing from Turkey to Indonesia to Nam in 2009.

Together with Omar we used fire, this crucible of alchemical combinations, diversities, sweat, blood and tears to create it so I’d use fire to release it. Save books, build a library.

Books are universes of ideas, experiences, feelings, visions, and paths, destinations obliterated through discovery, reminding memory. They are worlds of dreams, stories, dramas, plays, songs, histories and guides into new visceral experiences.

Pages sing their laughter with wisdom, song, and poetry. Preserve memory. Live forever with paper’s tactile voice. Voices of reason, comedy, and tragedy are skintight drum stories.

They are oral transmissions recorded on parchment, vellum, and illustrated manuscripts in Irish Gaelic talking tongues, Sumerian clay and Asian scrolls.

I didn’t burn it, a way of sacrifice offering and letting go. Down the road I gifted the brick to three Asian women in Saigon. They had Chinese ancestry from Hong Kong and lived in Australia.

I said a friend wrote it so I signed it and laughed letting it travel with them. Thanks for the book. You’re welcome. I hope you enjoy it. It took all three to carry it.

They staggered up guesthouse stairs with the tome. After breaking down a wall they struggled to get it through an opening. People need to break down before they break through.

Maneuvering it into a bag they discarded cheap Vietnamese souvenirs. We’ll have to check this monster all the way to Sydney.

ART