Gratitude

In late 2011 in Vientiane, Laos he finished another revision of A Century is Nothing.

He let it rest. He's tired of it. He's been consistent with it every morning and afternoon.

Doing the work. Polishing is the party.

He feels good about the process.

Stories inside stories.

A work of art is never finished. It is abandoned.

The 2nd edition was published December 2012.

After spraying oil on sprocket and chain he rode Mystery the mountain bike.

Slow.

He discovered a woman with her plastic box sitting in the shade doing nails on a quiet side street.

He gestured scraping callused souls. She smiled and finished another woman.

He soaked feet and hands in water. She scrubbed off dead skin.

It reminded him of murdering his manuscript darlings. She trimmed cuticles and skin with a small silver tool. She wrote him into her story and he wrote her into his. They're are mutually inconclusive.

Love is unconditional.

He is open minded, patient, positive, flexible, and friendly.

She is intuitive and creative with empathy, trust, respect and gratitude.

He paid. They smiled.

He rode away protected by a white butterfly ringing a bell.

Present and empty.

Short Fast & Deadly

How slow can you go?

Walk at the speed of a camel.

Design charcoal elements of crisp fire

infants scream at talking head women

driving young ones crazy

in out in out

their tongues bang like pistons

on a desultory 125cc engine propelled by virgins

returning home with their unblemished shy dignity intact.

One woman fans skewered buffalo meat to a crisp.

A Lao grandmother cradles an infant. She has diabetes Type II.

Shuddering wedding photos are frozen on a wall. It never turns out like people imagine.

They breed work and get slaughtered.

They trade hands and hearts.

She skewers another hypnotic form of laughter to preserve her ugh ugh conversation.

Fat lost European tourists waddle past.

With an accusatory tone men get smashed on weak beer.

A mechanic hammers one sharp line of description vs mundane observation.

Exile spills midnight blue Mont Blanc ink next to attention deficit disordered humans dancing 10 seconds down dirty.

Write short, fast, deadly.

Ikat silk designs drape well.

Non-listeners living abject cause and effect seek meaning with suffering and loss, accepting no responsibility.

Someone else controls their existence.

Milling Around, a fine art, embraces kindness and compassion. 

Mandalay, Burma

Memory Fragments

Live in the present, in the eternity of the instant.

On the 27th he absorbed reflections in a small village. Attracted by no tourists partly cloudy skies.

She undressed. In her silent beating heart she knew the man couldn't, wouldn't save her. She was happy with him for his playful kindness.

She signed. He tried to understand her willingness to share their intimacy. He was a slow patient lover. She trusted her instincts. After knowing him for nine months she accepted soft passions with conditions of intimacy. No kissing. No cunning linguists.

One-eyed blind.

On the 28th he said, I prefer doubt to certainty. I am more interested in the traces than the object. I love the fragments.

On the 29th he asked her, Where do I place this fragment? What country what continent what city village or heartbeat? Every heartbeat contains worlds of possibilities and probabilities.

Keep it simple like a breath, she said.

On June's final day she asked him, Do you like small? Skin on skin? Yes kneading her shoulder muscles, easing out tissue from her supine sublime spinal chord erasing tension. Her smile said, Yes. Her relaxation exhaled.

On 1 July she spoke with hand wings. Short, fast and deadly.

She dreamed of writing a short story, perhaps flash fiction. She made a pot of green tea.

Nervous, she selected a pen. She unscrewed the black ebony Mont Blanc summit. She opened a black notebook. She started with flowing calligraphy letters.

My life began in a village. I don't need to leave my village. My village is the world.

She drew a picture. It looked like this.

3 July said, tourists find and travelers discover.

A dreamer with controlled imagination passed a broken traffic sign near a golden pagoda...

SLOW CHILDREN...word lightning bolts - blue butterfly, white sky, green flowers, red leaves, songs of invisibility, piano shadow.

How do you spell loss? Accept loss forever.

Memory contains an entire world.

A blind painter paints from memory. A laughing blind poet scribbles symbols. 

"A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom," - Robert Frost

 

Phonsavan, Laos

El Carnicero

Big black hungry Spanish flies buzzed and fought around fresh red meat dripping warm blood into dust dancing along the devil’s whiplash.

A mangy cur dog rolled over in shade, ribs scraping grounded dust, begging for water.

A drop in the ocean, where it’s all H2O no matter how deep you dive. Waves washed shores singing stones.

Sausages retained a sharpness inextricably swaying like dancers in choreography. Tired, frayed strings bent under dead meat weight mass, substance, context.

Remembering the Spanish Civil War, Manuel the butcher stared through a jagged broken glass window. His facemask spoke a weary solemn stillness quiet lying fury.

His silent words were exaltations, evaluations, a surcharge, a value added tax in an empty stomach for services rendered by reinforcements riding hard through Basque valleys listening for waves of German bombers over Guernica 1936.

Beleaguered men inside stone shepherd huts trapped in desolate Pyrenees mountains stood spinning, surrounded by empty canteens, bread crusts, discarded family heirlooms, spent shell casings, and decomposing bodies relishing solitude.

He’s required to remember old Fascist propaganda spreading information.

He is El Carnicero, one who slaughters.

In order to put food on the table and provide for his family after peace was declared with celebrations of music, church services, baptisms, wine, street dancing and tear streaked burials, economics forced him to slaughter his remaining beast of burden.

His bull was his calling card, vision, hope, dream and village identity. Dictators, thieves and Fascists had stolen everything else. Dignity, integrity and self-respect survived.

Destiny arrived minus sympathy, sentiment or condolences. Shaded from a brutal sun he sharpened his axe, honing steel across a grindstone. New edges were sharpened with passionate ambivalence.

Laughter’s axe was ready.

He walked into a red clay ring surrounded by a white clapboard fence. The bull stood in the far corner.

He held out his hands lined with pulse-rivers. The bull emerged from shade. Manuel collected reins. In the animal’s eyes he saw memory reflected in his soul. Sighing, he clapped his hands twice, bowing to the bull as a Shinto priest pays his respects to Bishamonten, the Kami god of benevolent authority.

He asked for forgiveness, this act of fate, raised his laughing axe and brought it down hard and fast on the bull’s neck. The bull froze, slumping, straining to escape steel carving tough weathered skin, muscles, tendons, sinew, arteries, veins, snapping final bones.

Front legs folded, rear legs buckled. The carcass shuddered. A final breath exploded red dust.

He clapped his hands, severed the head and dragged everything through dust to his shop. He hung the severed head in his broken window.

“For Sale.”

His wife served portions to family and neighbors. They consumed his life’s work, toasting his wise sacrifice for the greater good. Sharing is caring.

I am an accomplice to death. I could have stopped it. No. This is a lie. Truth lies. Truth hides in the mystery of interpretation. I couldn’t prevent death. I tried to speak and save the bull. Words. I was afraid. Language strangled me. My voice was dust. I was five.

He was my father.

Which is greater, real pain or pain’s premonition I wondered as Manuel’s silver blade melted reflections into diamonds of glittering light. The quick and dead burned. Manual and death danced inside my childhood, inside time’s compressed memory where rivers of stained glass mosaic memory melted. I took ownership of laughter’s axe.

Mirror reflections retained red river blood and sweat dancing on Manuel’s temple. Blood and sweat congealed in red dust creating tributaries and oceans in Spanish heat one swift irrevocable summer.

The world is a strong sense of Guerencia, a Spanish term for homeland, “a place, like a bull facing death in the ring, where you feel comfortable dying.”

Surviving along the Mediterranean meant controlling trade routes in slaves, salt, textiles, gold, silver, copper, limestone, turquoise, red granite, alabaster, bananas, sugar cane, cotton, sorghum, ivory, timber and purple dye.

Land and sea trade routes flowed with cuneiform, hieroglyphics, Phoenician alphabets, Mandarin, Meso-American, Runic and Indus script, coins, wooden tally sticks recording the number of animals killed, religions, amber, animals, royal purple clothing, grains, horses, incense, olive oil, silk, spices, tin, wine, tortoise shells and slaves.

Commodities.

Witnessing everything from a small Spanish village at the edge of the sea I seized cold-blooded mercenary opportunities. I evolved through determination, persistence and perseverance. Trial and error danced with cause and effect hearing The Art Of The Fugue by Bach.

Thin calm detached hungry dancing spirit fingers hummed down a necklace of threaded skeleton bone beads of catastrophic karmic actions near contemplative Gomchen mystic Tantric hermits north of Sera monastery in Tibet. Monks sat chanting and praying in sight of Chomolungma, the Mother Goddess.

Butchers, the untouchables, flayed corpses before smashing bones for vultures to reincarnate a spirit in a sky burial.

Frozen earth informed archeologists there would be no work here with their soft brushes.

I absorbed Tibetan dialects by swallowing bone dust. Transmissions of spirit energies, renewal and transformation evolved with joy, beauty and gratitude.

I sat meditating, breathing, digging, absorbing creation stories, illusions between what was and what is.

Realizing amazing journeys I discovered childlike laughter, curiosity and joy.

You are either innocent or mad.

Flip a coin. Magic nature opened my third eye to see what will be. Mirrors are free of dust and illusions. I dissolved.

The day after tomorrow belongs to me.

The Gomchen taught me how to meditate on the process of death. It centers a person fast. First thing in the morning, shapes my motivation with clarity.

“What is the motivation behind my desire to acquire _______ and the things that come with it?”

Motivation and its effects were determined by reading The Roots of Wisdom by Ming.

Mountains and rivers and earth are already nothing but dust.

Man, of course, is but dust within dust.

Bodies made of blood and muscle will surely return to bubble and shadows.

If the highest wisdom is not obtained, there will be no heart of understanding.

All is vanity.

One ought to live a life of peace and quietude.

What’s the point of unrelenting pursuit of external things?

El Carnicero, archeologists and I cherish our illuminated rolling stoned spirit energies.

Our choice is simple.

Sit or move. 

Weaving A Life (V1)

Cadiz, Spain

“Once upon a time,” said Nino one bright future day as the tribe rolled along, “and such a strange time it was, the gravity of thinking played music in a new century. There was a Spanish man with a hammer. At 9 a.m. on an overcast Cadiz morning he began chipping away at unexplored caverns. The Alio modo Fugue a 2 Clavier by Bach drifted in the background.

“He was building an extension on a roof where housing was scarce and straight up. The only split-level ranch duplexes with multiple garages in sight were American reruns on old battered televisions. He hammered stone below The Sheltering Sky.

"It was over 100 degrees. His hands bled. Blood seeped through an old Moorish roof splattering into a room where a writer lived in exile with a blind prophet. Hemoglobin landed on a keyboard. On the B. He let it dry. He treasured sudden rare immediate insights. Drops fell and congealed.”

“Fascinating,” said Omar turning a page. “And then?”

“Down below in deep morning shadows Rosario swept her front stoop on Benito Perez Galdos. Her white apron was clean and starched. She swept away yesterday’s accumulated debris and the mist of pedestrians coming and going. Old shit, dog urine and dust received her mop’s holy water. Their accumulated real and imaginary sins littered Galdos, heading for the gutter.”

“Let me guess,” said Omar picking up the thread, “church bells pealed eternal melancholy songs of hope and redemption across from the Castelilo de Santa Catalina, the main citadel of Cadiz built in 1598.”

“Exactly,” Nino said. “Inside tight white oval corridors, an exhibition of black and white photographs depicted Nicaraguan people fishing, polling canoes through jungles, chopping down forests, sitting for the camera, living and laughing.

"One room held beautiful black handmade fans in tribute to Federico Garcia Lorca. Considered the greatest poet and playwright of 20th century Spain, he was assassinated by members of the Escuadra Negra (Black Squadron) a Franco death squad in August 1936 for his left-wing sympathies and homosexuality. He belonged to the Generation of 1927 with Dali and Bunuel identifying with the marginalized Gitanos and woman chained to conventional social expectations in Andalucía.

"He wrote about entrapment, liberation, passion and repression. A long red scarf lay draped over a single rattan chair. Invisible wires held black fans decorated with peacock feathers and rainbow colors suspended in silence. Outside a dark window Atlantic waves smashed ramparts.”

Nino inhaled. Omar sacrificed an orange skin to enjoy the fruit.

Weaving A Life, Volume 1