Butterfly Nose

Stone path
White yellow butterfly
Hello
Flutter wings
Dancing air
Touches nose
Ah ha

Language river
Brown life highway
Mountain silent
Clouds fly around
Here we go

Brown orange
Butterfly
Escapes rain
Resting
On Kroma rainbow
Cloth

Orange brown
Butterfly lands on forehead
Feelers probe eyebrow, scalp, ear
Skin
Massage
Sit still as a mountain

Still mountain
Flowing river
Sky dancer
Sitting still
Breath rain

She sent a bamboo forest
Poem heart
From Australia (summer)
To Laos (rainy season)

 Clouds dance mountainsButterfly rainbows
Avoid spider webs
 
Under rafters
Parents teach spinning art
Wait until you feel the vibration
Rush down
Grab your struggling meal
Haul it into darkness
 
Upstream brown
Nam Ou sings
Row row row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a
Dream 

A French tourist takes a GPS
Reading
We are lost he tells his wife
Crying in the rain
You will never see
Your precious cat
Again
 
Butterfly swoops
Eardrum brush
Sky mind nature
Original
 
It's not a gamble
It's an investment
Upriver
Weaving village Supjam
Cotton, silk

Dressed in cloud
Mountain celebrates
Luminous forests
Blossoming

The Temple of the Divine Madman

Bhutan
Druk Yul - Land of the Thunder Dragon
Keep it raw
Human flourishing
Eudaimonia

Under this mask, another mask.
I will never be finished removing all these faces.

Wandering river mystic wind
Rhythm of world
Dances
No fear
Expanding joy
Contentment
Laughter therapy

Jump out of your skin
Backwards
Dream

Mind-stream transmission
Form is emptiness
Emptiness is form
 
Cloud carries
East weight
Wind
Around green granite
Mountains
Singing
Here we come

 Brown Nam Ou river

Developing strength

Flowing south from China

Phongsali, Muang Kieu
Karst
Sang
Bring it on
I am thirsty
 
Cloud
Dumped wet cold slashing
H2O
Wait
Stay longer said Nam Ou
I need you
Yes said Cloud
I pass through
Dressing mountains
I dance with Wind-spirits
 
Tiger butterfly
Guards stone entrance
Kisses wing sky
 
The map is not the
Territory
Linguistic syntax interpretation
Cloud dresses mountain

past nine mountains
river brown paints
 
Yellow butterfly waves
hello farewell
Return soon breath wing
Blues harp C key
Luminous magic

Long mud road south
River, villages, mountains
Green all green
Rice paddies luminous

A farmer walks
through strong luminous
green
rice paddies
his life
 
See with soft eyes
Five weeks on river
Ling's passion
Caress reunion
Ease down slow
 
Sweet smiling sorrow
Laughter's delight
Gentle calm way

 
Mountains clouds river
Butterflies
Wave farewell
Thank you for visiting
Good luck to you and your family
Passing through

Moon Ghosts

The Andalusia moon would be full tomorrow.

Mad as hell caged hunting dogs howled high anxiety on western Sierra mountains with an excellent view of a white bone marble spinning through sky inside clouds of pleasure and pain as rolling valleys dreamed of planting and harvest.

Spanish men in sturdy boots carried tools of time’s labor through fields below the rising moon. When full they would not go to the fields, the river, the forests or the mountains after dusk. They owned the day and spirits controlled night. They respected magic.

Dogs bayed and howled through sunset into dusk of rising orange clouds as the moon rose through the either.

The men passed the cemetario on their way to the harvest. It was quiet there. The small church door was open, it’s scared thick and heavily bolted brown wood a thick piece of old resistance. The alter decoration was a simple Virgin Mary crying blood. The altar cloth was changed daily by a woman in black doing her duty saying her life’s penance through intention and devotion.

A forcestero, a person from outside the pueblo, a stranger with a camera passed her and she thought she recognized his shadow.

”A ghost. Yes, that’s all it was, a figment of a soul visiting friends.”                                 

She blessed herself twice with bird-winged fingers watching men walk to their land. It was the end of a warm winter day and the sun had disappeared with Egyptian vultures in heaven. She locked the black gate leading to a series of crypts.

The stranger was here yesterday doing his reconnaissance. Today he worked inside the second metal gate, inside the sanctuary, inside the crypt area. Four walls held the departed. Engraved stones revealed names, dates, places, memories, children, and adults back to 1896. He made images under the green smoky eyes of a Siamese cat on a red tiled roof.

Workers had left their crypt construction bricks, cleaning solution, black buckets and rags in empty crevices. Rectangles waited for ornate boxes. Boxes made in a casket factory miles and lives away. Caskets with handles for hands. Brown and black religiously lined caskets with satin pillows. Pillows softer than language mumbled through tears of the living seeing everything before trembling eyes with hearts beating like drums.

After church services in the village of 2,300 caskets were dispatched in long black cars with wreaths of infinite sweet smelling floral varieties to the black gate and carried on shoulders of strong men past the open church door, a palm tree and through a black gate on rusty hinges and slid into an empty domain.              

The cold gray cement cavities had brick ceilings. The forcestero stared inside an empty space. It was long. It was empty and it was cold. It stretched to eternity.

He stepped out of death's shadow. He heard men in fields using their tools on hard winter ground. They were above the ground. “Any day above ground is a good day,” a ghost whispered.

He listened and went to work.

In fast fading light he imaged interments with names and flowers, passages of memory in love and sadness, chiseled history and their connection to pueblo life. He focused down cavities and shells of rectangular rows of empty passages. They were invisible stories waiting to be told. Waiting for air to carry them to listening faithful. They were silent stories, silent night of the pious silent with collective breathing. 

“The rest is silence,” said Shakespeare.

The woman turned away from men and their shadows bent over fields moving rocks toward dreams and fence plans, pruning dead growth from olive trees along a river and saw the ghost working among shadows of the dead.

Her husband was there. She held his final whisper in her silent heart. “I almost wish it were true.”

She was the silent moon above her bone white memory, a spirit guide serving spirits. She joined the moon.

When he finished his work the forcestero flew away from the cemetario, river stones and fields where men worked their trust, his vapor rising to the moon.            

Their spirit energies manifested their destiny with the moon as dogs howled below them.

 A Century is Nothing

Live the dream

"We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe."

- Upanishad

 

Weaving A Life (Volume 2)

The second volume of his collected works, Weaving A Life (Volume 2) is alive and dancing on Amazon.

Here.

Creative nonfiction blends memoir, travel, journalism, anthropology, history and diverse cultures.

Existential experimental ephemeral experiences.

He is a compass without a needle. We are here to go.

Weaving A Life (Volume 2)

Sewing in Mandalay, Burma.

Weaving A Life (Volume 1)

He has published Weaving A Life (Volume 1) on Amazon. 

It is a collection of his writing blending memoir, creative nonfiction, journalism, history, culture and stories.

It is free on Kindle and e-readers until 29 March.

You can find it here.

Enjoy the ride. You're on it once upon a time.