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.

Tomas Transtromer - Noble Prize Literature

The Half-Finished Heaven

Cowardice breaks off on its path.
Anguish breaks off on its path.
The vulture breaks off in its flight.
The eager light runs into the open,
even the ghosts take a drink.

And our paintings see the air,
red beasts of the ice-age studios.
Everything starts to look around.
We go out in the sun by hundreds.
Every person is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.
The endless field under us.
Water glitters between the trees.
The lake is a window into the earth.

The Tree and the Sky

There’s a tree walking around in the rain,
it rushes past us in the pouring grey.
It has an errand. It gathers life
out of the rain like a blackbird in an orchard.

When the rain stops so does the tree.
There it is, quiet on clear nights
waiting as we do for the moment.

The Couple

They turn the light off, and its white globe glows
an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet
in a glass of darkness. Then a rising.
The hotel walls shoot up into heaven’s darkness.

Their movements have grown softer, and they sleep,
but their most secret thoughts begin to meet
like two colors that meet and run together
on the wet paper in a schoolboy’s painting.

It is dark and silent. The city however has come nearer
tonight. With its windows turned off. Houses have come.
They stand packed and waiting very near,
a mob of people with blank faces.

Tomas Transtromer

Shanghai Interrogation

The boy soldier was silent. 

“What’s that for,” the female Public Security Bureau official said pointing to the typewriter on the table.  

“It is for writing letters.” 

They have reservations about letters. Letters, they wonder, looking at each other with jaundiced eyes. Black eyes streaked with exploding blood vessels full of fear and suspicion. 

Letters indicate political insurrection, dissent, forced labor, mandatory abortions, propaganda, civil unrest, turmoil, revolutions, tanks in the street, torture, solitary confinement and executions. 

They see party leaders wringing their pale hands, nervously pacing forbidden cities past stone lions, conducting top-secret meetings trying to figure out what to do, how to put a face on all this. How to manage and manipulate disinformation rivers, how to control floods.

The boy soldier and his comrade save face by maintaining blank, stoic expressions.

They suspect I have connections. Maybe I am a plant, a party member sent to check their unit. Assigned to monitor their methods, their questioning tactics, their subtle use of intimidation, their implications to control and influence peoples' lives for the good of the state.

For all they know I am a subversive. A word terrorist.

“Letters. We will keep an eye on this one,” she said to the soldier.

A writer in Shuangliu, Sichuan, China. 

after my tongue

I sat up straight, inhaled three deep breaths and exhaled far out into emptiness.

I centered my unconscious on the paper filled with nothing.

The entire world has been reduced to a blank sheet of white paper.

My wisdom mind of intent became water. It was quiet, calm and still with concentration and focus.

I listened to brush, ink and paper. I am a conduit. 

Be the brush, be the ink, be the water, be the paper.

Each essence is pure, free, clear and luminous.

My useless tongue flapped in the cold December Himalayan wind.

Stories and songs are birds. I heard children laughing and singing. They greeted each other in the babble of nothing, playing with strings of word pearls. They dreamed with their eyes open. 

When we are asleep we are awake.

Is handwriiting alive?

ecritureinfinie

donate blood

Namaste,

You follow the 39 steps through blood bank doors. You fill out forms answering 20 questions on the donor consent form, such as:

1. Are you in good health today?

2. Do you have an infection now, or are you taking antibiotics now?

3. Since the age of 11, have you had yellow jaundice, liver disease, or hepatitis?

4. Have you ever tested positive for hepatitis?

5. Have you ever used a needle, even once, to take any drugs?

6. In the past three years, have you lived outside of the U.S., except Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan or Western Europe?

7. In the past 12 months have you traveled?

8. In the past 12 months have you received a blood transfusion?

9. In the past 12 months have you had a tattoo, ear or body piercing, acupuncture, accidental needle stick, or come into contact with someone else’s blood, or snorted cocaine or any street drug?

10. In the past 12 months have you ever had sex, even once, with anyone who has ever used a needle for non-prescription drugs?

11. In the past 12 months, have you had sex, even once, with anyone who has taken money or drugs in exchange for sex?

12. In the past 12 months, have you given money or drugs to anyone to have sex with you?

13. In the past 12 months, have you had sex, even once, with anyone who has had AIDS or tested positive for the AIDS virus?

14. Are you a female who, in the past 12 months, has had sex with a male who has had sex, even once, with another male?

15. Were you born in, or have you lived in, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Niger, or Nigeria?

16. Have you had sex with anyone who was born or lived in any of these countries?

17. Have you been injected with bovine beef insulin?

18. Have you ever had a bleeding problem?

19. Are you a female who has had two or more pregnancies? 

20. Have you or any blood relative ever had a dura mater or brain covering transplant during head or brain surgery?

The questions are endless.

Finished circling N answers and doodling in margins, you agree and understand your blood and plasma will be tested for the AIDS virus and other diseases and if there is a risk your blood will not be used and you will be notified and you understand the answers are truthful and to the best of your knowledge and you sign the form and sit in a comfortable deep brown chair watching donors thumb old magazines, devour recipes and eye candy.

Your name is called. Outside plate glass in August haze shadow hills full of dense dark evergreens in hot sunshine beam down white blast furnaces magnifying brilliance.

Nurses pull air conditioned nightmare identity theory cards from files peopled with conversations and delight a slight acquaintance. Take a seat as a smiling nurse pricks your finger with a thorn asking thermometer questions, checking arms for signs of Needles, a California desert town.

You sign more forms you witness you provide credentials you slide into a main room where volunteers direct you to a reclining seat asking which arm left arm you say as she tightens the belt around your arm conditioning blood pressure pump as she swabs down arm holding needle veins out handing you a styrofoam ball telling you to squeeze every three seconds as a machine ticks off down below out of sight out of mind as your blood rocks back and forth inside a new time measurement piece measuring platelets.

You drink lemonade squeeze release squeeze release when machine stops she takes the pressure off takes the ball gone tape off needle out gauze band aid arm up for three minutes drink lemonade make small talk blood in plastic bag dark red liquid sealed documented evidence with bar coded lot number you get off table walk down a hall receiving a key chain after 100 donations.

You sit in shade looking at a universal key chain environment.

This implies you need to find keys, alphabets, script, bones, dust and calibrated songs of ghost dances for the space-time chain.

Two months later you will do it all over again with joy. Your blood goes to any Childlighter child with A negative. One in 16 (6.3%) with statistics, there are lies, damn lies and statistics not knowing who, just knowing  someone out there young and alive lives with your small anonymous gift of red language.

Metta.