CPR on Martha Ann

A minstrel tuned a lyrical oud singing.

I look up to the tree house balcony and scream to myself to slow down because there is a speed trap up ahead but no one hears me or cares.

Wind - ruh - in Arabic meaning breath and spirit, filters my voice, sounds of oral history away.

My fingers are a sparrow hawk diving on unsuspecting prey.

fredom is knowing how big your cage is

I suspect he’s found a sleeping policeman stretched across the road near the intersection on Hard Drive south of Tacoma where the young girl got blasted by the partially blind old retired man living on a pension going to the drugstore to get his wife’s prescription filled last winter as she walked her dog along Bride Sport Boulevard braving hard slashing winter squalls flying East across Budget Sound full of homeless derelicts and sexual offenders out on parole from Paradise prison where 2,500 convicts incarcerated for drugs, sexual crimes and murder repair bicycles.

They donate them to charity. They make furniture for $.26-36¢ per hour in a Classless IV state owned operated “tax reduction” industry producing chairs and tables doing draftsmanship, sewing, upholstery, laminating, cutting, measuring, finishing, sanding, packing, and shipping maple office materials near state hospitals for the criminally insane and military bases full of calibrated B-52 bombers, with Cobra attack helicopters collecting dust on runways in the city of Lakewood facing financial cutbacks in police states and garbage collection taxes due to voter initiatives, rising interest rates, trillion dollar debt, and a collapsing economy.

It was foggy with crumpled forgotten leaves next to the young girl’s broken life as her dog licked her hand trying to say, “It’s ok now, get up, let’s go home,” as drivers blasted their horns out of callous indifferent anger because they were late for dinner yakking on cell phones negotiating magnificent commercial deals with con people, scam artists, confidence men and sharks swimming below the surface of appearances looking for the key to financial consumer heaven impatiently pulling around innocent bystanders trying to glimpse the disaster inside the labyrinth without a center.

The heat from my last bitter cigarette says it’s too hot for smoking. I know all too well that chemicals in the smoke, such as nicotine, create growth factors causing scar tissue. The beta TGF§ is an autocrine cytosine - meaning once it is elevated due to smoking it creates its own synthesis and eventually forms tumors in a slow deadly process.

I accept my addictive habit as a genetic DNA snub or behavioral choice.

My fingers fly. Bird shadow mirror paper as harsh hot dry winds whip down the Willamette Valley.

Perspiration slides down creased faces as motivated men dig graves and hammer nails with machines in the heat of making it happen, making it perfect and serene in the superficial media controlled culture. They create fantasies of new promises and utopias surrounded by manufactured needs exceeding passionate desired appetites called Desire and Greed.

I sit in my fragile tree house living on the edge of somewhere else keyed into vibrating hammers striking nails home. In my tree house I put it down where it belongs. Chamber a word round, aim and fire. The American way is to fire first and aim later.

Lock and load crashing echoes through space, followed by another crashing bore expending taxpayer’s dollars and foundry worker finances.

I scream hot molten lead words.

My youthful naiveté led me across an ocean of innocent waves to hot humid heaven jungles.

I was born dead in Vietnam and slowly came to life. 1969.

I’ve missed sitting here doing this. Confronting my shadow, my primitive, instinctive nature is scary.

I want to get up stretch my long thin arms go for a run burning calories and fat molecules. I swallow air savoring the world.

I am too full of sorrow to eat anymore.

I need a cold drink, need to paint a watercolor or manipulate a digital image with Dada surrealism placing a dragonfly rippling silence with translucent wings inside a Japanese ZEN meditation garden with carefully raked oceans of sand.

I meditate on my breath and the process of death.

I forget how to type on mirrors received from Mongols along the Silk Road.

I whisper to myself, “I would rather do it well than badly, but I’d rather do it badly than not at all.”

Ten talons tear at twenty-six keys.

I need to stop people from dying.

I need a commitment-free lover to explore the vocabulary of touch.

My mirror is a hard reflection in my pale hands. I digest words, strings of vowels and consonants forming letters held together with cosmic ethereal portable imaginary glue invisible indecipherable delicate foreign symbols.

Faces blur in the heat of rotating emergency lights reflecting off a magic prism hearing a frantic 911 AMR plead for someone to get the IV going. Administering CPR to the child, I remember my sister, Martha Ann, 13, when she was dying from leukemia and needed life.

I follow procedure. I shake Martha Ann, screaming, “Help!” open the airway, look, listen and feel for a pulse. After two breaths I check the carotid pulse near her Adam’s apple, find the landmark on her chest and do CPR for 1 minute, pressing 1 - 1 1/2 inches deep. I do five compressions and administer a breath every five seconds.

Drenched by tears I look up as traffic swirls past us.

I resume CPR knowing I have, at the most, two minutes to help her. I know two things about this reality:

1) the dead can’t feel any pain and 2) they can’t talk.

Below me oral traditions echo through my heart-mind as nails sing, brushes excavate ancient papyrus. Camel hair caresses rice paper shovels and doors. Silver axes cut the forest down for small caskets.

“Look, it is one of us,” the Turkish tree said when the axe handle came into the forest. Slamming hammers beat nails into coffins.

I hum an old tune. Language is a virus. La-de-da.

Spinning emotional fire visions flow, associate, blend, dive and dance on point performing a plié at the barre.

Steeled letter keys strike hammers, blasting iron nails, merging into Maple, Ash, Cherry and petrified wood.

Iron forged edges bite hard earth releasing soft dust. Brushes reveal artifacts as conspiratorial alarm bells bing bang bong salutations at the end of a line.

A manual typewriter carriage slams home inside the middle way.

Buddhists say you should cultivate the perfect balance of wisdom and compassion.

If you have too much wisdom you are unfeeling, cold, like marble.

If you have too much compassion you become too sentimental.

I resume CPR.

Weaving A Life, V1

Workers' Day

"What I do today is important because I am paying a day of my life for it. What I accomplish must be worthwhile because the price is high."

*

Hello, my name is Nobody. Today is Worker's Day and I am a worker.

I was working the other day in our small sport shoe piece factory like any other day meaning it's all the same day when you work in a small rural village in Utopia and suddenly a strange man came in. Some of the girls hid behind their sewing machines, others ran into the back room but I stayed where I was, just sitting and smiling.

I must be honest and tell you the work is boring, we don't make much money and the male boss is mean to us, but it's a job, the only job I could find after finishing middle school so I took it. My parents are farmers. They are happy because they have a small home, a bike, rice cooker, radio, and TV.

I like the people I work with. The girls and women sew together foam and leather pieces which is the top part of a shoe. I know it's only part because they send them to another factory in another village where they do more pieces.

I guess they eventually become a complete shoe but we all wear plastic sandals anyway so it doesn't matter to me.

The man said some words which I didn't understand and he took pictures. I was a little nervous but he seemed ok so I just sat still, smiling. After he left I went back to my finishing work. It was the most interesting thing that happened in the factory that day.

Happy Worker's Day!

a writer

Cheap Talk

A cheap Mobile Ear Cleaning Phone-y money honey blasted the Asian market today to wild applause from a gallery of fools. The louder addicted talkers yell, the deeper the rich silver spoon edges out unwanted noise, rumor, gossip and useless verbiage in ear channel canals. Rotate clockwise.

People are raving. Raving with delight at high decibels. Ding-dong, ring tone your abs. Tonal quality in high definition wide scream, ear splitting credulousness recovers dusty memory blanks.

Far away in a unique reality sound bite an old woman on a bare bones pension placed a needle on an old revolutionary vinyl recording entitled, "THE LONG TALK."

It blasted down polluted rivers, over lakes, slithering into dorms where frustrated, lonely, bored college students slept, perchance to dream ...

as wealthy rats scoured their totalitarian universe seeking high speed DSL connections, inflated currencies, cheap rice, soggy green veggies, memorized texts, abject indifference and greasy callous attitudes dancing with piles of smelly unemployed laundry.

Beggars disguised as bureau-c-rats enjoy daily competition with packs of wild savage dogs investigating ubiquitous heaps of garbage, trash, raw sewage and restaurant leftovers. One beggar got real lucky.

Look, she yelled, I found a Mobile Phone-y, with unlimited mileage.

Cool, said her independent friend. Let's yell, for help.

 

Hunters

He rode his beautiful dirty black mountain bike over to "old" student street in Utopia for a 60 cent dumpling lunch. Delicious.

He prefers the "old" to the boring "new" commercial student campus street. He enjoys mature green leafy trees filled with small wild sparrows darting down to feed in garden patches. He savors a wide blue sky and orphaned clouds.

He always sits outside swallowing sky, well removed from blaring omnipresent bland TV soap operas and cell phone addicted youth.

"Text me baby! Reveal your passion in 5,000 characters. Say things with electronic letters and symbols you'd never find the courage to speak out loud. Your silence is deafening! Hold my hand.

"Better yet, when we walk covered in our innocent adolescent shyness, slowly rub your elbow against my skin so I know you care, reveal your shy desire with deference and longing. Our skin pours hormonal activity into the possibility we may eventually dance. Text me baby!"

A boy approached the table.

"May I sit here?"
"Sure."
"May I talk with you?"
"Sure. You talk and I listen."
"I don't know what to say."
"You will think of something. You are developing an English mind."
"Yes, maybe."

"What's your name?"
"Francis."
"That's a great name."
"All the good English names were taken by my classmates. I found it in the dictionary."
"I see. It's a fine and strong name. My name is Nature."

"Oh. What's that for?" he said, gesturing at my worn Moleskine notebook.
"I am a writer. I make notes when I travel."
"Where are you going?"
"Here."
"I like to travel," he said. "I am a hunter of foreign teachers."

I smelled raw instinct. "Interesting. How do you hunt?" 
"Do you know the gate near the teachers' apartments?"

This place was surrounded by walls, sleeping guards and gates.

"Yes."
"Well, I go there and wait. When a teacher comes out I talk to them while we walk. Then, when they say good-bye I return to the gate and wait for another teacher."
"You are a clever hunter."
"Maybe. But I don't know what to say."

"Talk about the weather."
"We don't talk about the weather here. We ask people if they have eaten."
"I know," I said, pointing at his noodles and sliced vegetables. "Your delicious food is getting cold."

Silence welcomed two hunters.

A Little Zen Tale

Only the dead know the end of war. - Plato

*

“We storytellers, enchanters and teachers,” said Omar, “know the world is made of stories and not atoms. Here’s one for your history. Or is that hiss-tree said the snake?”

Somebody told a story about somebody telling a story in a story.

“It came to pass an old woman seer who shared the beauty, magic and mystery of life with friends and strangers took a pencil in her bone white hand on a cold, snowy evening and looked into flames of creation. Embers smoldered in front of her crystal glass. She dreamed she loved a blind stranger. Her friend and lover were spirit guides, blind shooting stars. They flew away from their village with a tribe of survivors.

“They left behind skeptics, cynics, frauds, charlatans, liars, cheats, fools, scoundrels, knaves, demons, and ghost shadows. They dissolved taxicab drivers, beauticians, janitors, doctors, and lawyers, Indian chiefs, cooks, nurses, busboys, lackeys of every sort of makeup and verifiable description including animal trainers and circus performers.

“They moved through the wilderness of their youth, following Raven, their spirit guardian. They carried provisions to satisfy hunger, thirst and desire. They never knew, appreciated or realized desire until they were tricked into eating a piece of fruit. They scattered seeds at an oasis in the desert.”

“What happens next Omar?” said a kid.

“It was raining in the desert before Christmas as Gulf Air Flight 212 departed Kuwait. We encountered gray turbulence in neutral airspace where Islamic law against the consumption of alcoholic beverages had no influence. I savored a cold Carlsberg. By Carlsberg numero dos we were at 25,000 feet in blue sky and white thunderheads. Airmobile again.

"In Bahrain I collected a visa stamp, took a cab to the Diplomat Hotel and room 621 with an excellent view of the aquamarine Gulf and new civic center construction project. I opened windows, an ice cold beer, calibrated rock and roll music on the radio and ordered a three-egg omelet with hash browns, whole-wheat toast complimented by thick Turkish coffee. A Filipino waitress in pink room service motif brought it up.

"The next afternoon I took Taxi #1 into Bubba Bahrain, a maze of haphazard streets. I bought vitamins at a pharmacy and escaped expensive shopping zones entering the old suq lined with herbs, spices, textiles, fruits, vegetables, secondhand watches, goats, sheep, brooms, tea and ancient emulations.

"From an inside secret pocket of a worn olive drab photographer’s vest, I pulled out a very small, simple and technically precise European designed 35mm rangefinder camera loaded with 125 ASA black and white film. A gift from gods of optical ingenuity. A well-designed tool. A work of art.

"I started with an image of a donkey’s head covered by a burlap feed bag to prevent attacks on unsuspecting humans. Down twisted alleys I wandered, shooting old men and women, trapping their spirits on negatives. Children’s faces wearing cartoon character masks with innocence preserved behind wide glowing eyes were captured forever. Delicate eroding architecture, thatched reeds on woven bamboo poles embedded in mud, iron grated windows and intricately carved balconies made of blue and white mosaics were threaded into a black canister.

"In early evening out of curiosity I stopped at a Persian carpet retailer to learn about his business. Over endless cups of tea he shared these facts.”

1. There is a difference between “expert” and “well knowledged (sic).”

2. Carpet making is based on tradition, history, quality and time. Takes 14 months for some carpets.

3. Design and a particular technique is required to produce a good quality carpet.

4. His carpets were woven and stored in a warehouse in Iran before being smuggled by dhow to a Dubai wholesaler. A buyer in Bahrain purchases them by the bundle paying a single price for the lot before shipping them to the shop.

5. Cotton costs BD (Bahraini dinar) 2/lb.

   Neck wool BD 7/lb.

   Silk BD 9/lb.

6. Good prices were available now with the recent devaluation of the Iranian Real.

7. One needs to be aware of specifics. Is it pure silk or combed wool? What is the precise number of knots per square inch?

“I thanked him and walked to the Dolmen Hotel, an old foreign oasis constructed for air crews. Interior pseudo classic Arabic architecture featured vaulted windows, wattle thatch and poles on low ceilings. Dave, from the Twin Cities, sat at the bar complaining about needing a third operation to correct poor metatarsal bones in his left foot. He said Saudi doctors messed him up twice so he came to Bahrain for, hopefully, a final operation.

“I saw three Filipino males have their right hands cut off in Riyadh for stealing,” he said, meaning Sharia law. “Justice is served every Friday at high noon in the town square. Authorities tied their arms down on boards to support the wrists.”

 “Amazing,” I said.

“Yes,” Dave said. “The multawa, an official, approached one man, flashed his sword into the air and severed his right hand off. He screamed. The multawa moved down the line doing his job. Another man carrying a blazing torch applied fire to the stump to cauterize the wound.”

“Lynnette, a 31-year old Filipino waitress at the Dolmen was pleasant, lonely and bored. After five years doing cashier work in Manila she found a job in Bahrain.

“My dream is to save money and buy a house back home.”

“Do you like it here?”

“Not really. The wages are poor, they give us lousy Indian food and there’s no social life.”

“Why’s that?”

“Hotel management locks us in at 7 p.m.”

“Sounds like slave labor. Been going on in the Gulf for a long time.”

“Well," she sighed, “it’s just a job. It's not forever.”

I wandered away.

“At happy hour, the Intercontinental Hotel was jammed with Arabs, English investment suits and punkers. I ordered a beer at the bar. A small Bahraini man crowded next to me started asking questions.

“Where are you from?”

“Everywhere. I am the mother of all grasshoppers.”

“What do you do?”

“I kill people. I'm a mercenary.”

“I don't believe you,” said his eyes. 

“Yes. I kill people with kindness. It’s a living. I am busy 24/7. It’s a job. It passes time. People pay good money for me to take care of their problem. I’m paid to clean up other people’s messes. No women or children.”

He wanted to know something about his life. I predicted his age, family history, occupation and future. He left me alone.

“Outside the Kuwait suq battered red and white rusting water trucks with chipped paint stood idle inside a wire compound leaking their loads into dust. Two solitary Bedouins sat on metal folding chairs with crushed plastic buckets and sacrosanct rags collecting dust near the Fifth Ring Road waiting for drivers needing a car wash. Waiting was their patient life in the desert, waiting for dusty cars, waiting for oil to be discovered below sand, waiting inside an omnipresent yellow haze swallowing everything.”

Weaving A Life, V1