Dream street

Greetings,

I am dancing down the final farewell sing Saigon long gone song. See if you can scribble down 20 words. Write one true sentence. 

Twenty little words. Twenty quick painless mini-stories about the 60-year old man last evening in the BLINKING LIGHT. An American or European, retired, a widower. Smoking, drinking a beer. He wears a drab flower print shirt. Alone. He calls someone.

Ten minutes later a woman arrives on her cycle. Mid 30's, long dark hair, red shirt, attractive. He greets her, grasping both her hands expressing a deep gratitude, welcoming her. Back into his life. She is his lifeline in Saigon, his hope, passion, unrequited love - his salvation from loneliness, sorrow, suffering and the pain of living.

He hands her the wine list.

'Anything you want. It's yours.' He is eternally grateful to know her. Receive her. 

'I want your heart,' she says. She is happy with him. He is her savior. Her love. Her salvation.

After a romantic quiet candlelight dinner they return to his hotel. They will smell and taste and laugh and sing and dance with each other for dessert. She will trace his spine with her fingers. He will rest his head on her breast, listening to her heartbeat. Hearing the thump-thump-thump of the muscle pumping blood through miles of veins and capillaries and arteries. They will hold each other until dawn sweeps dream street.

For one night they know peace inside their healthy loving mutually beneficial addiction.

Metta.

Split the difference

Greetings,

Do you want the short version or the long version? This a perfectly appropriate question in life's chess game of experiences and conversations, especially while traversing the road less traveled on Earth, a spinning rock.

If you flesh out the short version with some immediate specific personal details it becomes longer, growing as threads of character development and destiny as character is destiny inter-twine a kind a rope made of hemp fibers or tightly woven reeds from a river in Mesopotamia which you can employ to hang yourself or pull yourself to safety or easily used by someone in the story before, during or after you finish what erupted as a simple sentence with a line long enough to hang laundry on taking on a life of it's own because you are a conduit, a towering magical volcanic mountain releasing hot molten lava from a highly charged pressurized center. 

A burning ring of fire.

Give someone a match and they'll be warm for a minute. Set them on fire and they'll be warm for the rest of their life.

This molten conglomeration of dust, mud, water, soil, sediment, sandstone, gas, graphite, gypsum, rocks, boulders, pebbles, 24-carat carbon diamonds, fossilized fragments of vegetarian dinosaurs, compressed plankton and every imaginable geological logical particle known to man, woman and child and even others blasts it's way out of the deep red hot core of existence into the atmosphere where it cools, then gravity, the scourge of civilization and it's malcontents, contributes it's force as the dense weight of mass falls, slithers, slides, rumbles, cascades, rolls, strolls, runs, flowing down, down, down engulfing everything in it's path melting the landscape, carving new strata grand canyons gouging out a path for the quickly cooling massive debris reaching it's crescendo before slowing to a mere glowing vein.

Metta.

2-million year old bones in Spain.

Carmen, a famous chef in Eugene, Oregon.

Take bus #11

Greetings,

I'm walking across a screaming motorcycle street in Saigon. Bus #11 is bearing down fast and furious. I escape. Another person in another country in another life along another path said.

'Poor people walk. They take bus #11. It means use your legs.'

The gap between rich and poor - such is the reality in developing countries - is becoming more apparent.

Recent figures speak. Average city wages - $1,054 a year. Rural wages - $540 a year.

The central party hopes their economic stimulus will encourage rural people to buy appliances and cars. I need a 4x wheel drive washing machine so I can I take my family on weekend excursions to the beach, the Himalayas and deep tropical jungles where life is simple. Yeah!

The process evolved like this. I walked. I saved and eventually bought a bike. A Flying Pigeon. Black. One speed. It got me from home to the village rice paddies.  

We had a radio in the work unit. The local propaganda machine blasted revolutionary worker party anthems day and night. We got one for the home. My wife was happy. Then we had the required one child. We wanted another one but the forced abortion committee and local officials said, NO! You do not qualify for two children.

Then my wife wanted a TV. Ok I said, let's get a 24" flat screen with a remote.

What about a new rice cooker? Ok I said.

How about a used refrigerator? What's wrong with the box of ice? You shop for fresh vegetables at the market every morning. Why do we need a refrigerator? Because the neighbors have one.

Oh, I see. I scrounged around and traded rice for some chickens and traded the birds for some used teak wood smuggled in from Burma. I developed some connections. One trade led to another and I eventually found a well used fridge. My wife was happy. Then we filled it up with baby formula.

The formula was tainted with a chemical to increase the protein. We didn't know this small fact.

Our little girl became sick. The Worker's Hospital #8 said I had to pay them a lot of money for medicine or she would die.

I sold my bike to buy medicine. Now I walk to the hospital to see my daughter. It takes forever and a day.

I want to move to a big city filled with neon and food smells and construction projects and appliances hoping against hope to find a job but party leaders say millions of unemployed workers are returning to their villages in the new year.

I have a feeling the new year is going to be a lot like the old year.

The radio and flat screen scream stream tells us to stay home. Be quiet. Don't worry. Practice social stability and harmony. My future opportunities look precarious.

I have to go now because they will cut off the electricity soon and I need to buy some candles.

"Life is found in a desperate situation." - Chinese proverb.

Metta.

 

Mandala

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

I have no reason to despair because I am already there.

old poem

Greetings,

Seeing or watching 
even blind people see
- the tailor on the Saigon sidewalk feeling threads, 
a needle points magnetic north, true north? Such a question.

evolutionary GPS navigational systems inside his fingers

sharp diabolical edges of conversations
laying out splendid contorted plans
program expectancies 
there is so much we do not 
or will not or cannot know

where the inside is hidden
in the outside inside
 

old black and white portraits 
of grandfathers from 1936 Spanish civil war years 
feast or famine centuries

cover walls 
eating grass soup 
grandmothers doing their white 
crochet handicrafts wearing fingernails 
down to the bone into the lentil soup it goes 
under watchful framed wedding dress prop remembering

how it was running with bulls
beneath grateful gladiolus spilling their blood
for tourist images

a day after climbing sharp stones steps
over valleys buried in mountains
to Cueva de la Pileta caves

seeing, feeling, hearing, touching, tasting, absorbing 27,000 year old Paleolithic paintings  
bison, goats, seal, deer, archers, fish, traps, calendars, stalactites, stalagmite organ music

sweeter than dream time ancestor stories
 
dripping water pure pools
hibernating marsupials species specific  
2,300 bats zooming toward night
 
fires for illumination
no cooking
eat it raw
fertility symbols
even the archaeologists 
do not know 
exactly what they mean
calcium carbonate 
copper and iron 
5 cm of animal fat pigment
traces of fingerprints
pure water

releases itself inside mountain

we took tea
near heavy ripe lemons 
spring flowers struggled toward faint sun 
crying words 
sharing silence
pink and white petals dancing in a clear blue sky

Metta.