Wild Horses

“Look hard. What do you see. What do you want to see?”

“Can you feel your eyeballs exploding from the heat?”

“I am afraid to tell you what you are afraid to hear.”

Always in a programmed circle, merry go round horses always in a fashion bobbing up and down on shining steel shafts, oiled and greased and well lubricated by sexual assault in wide country where there are no boundaries, no fences, gates, impediments or ticket takers. Risk takers survived.

Wild mind horses in rhythm as the electric current flows and follows rainbows across the sky. Their desert world is blood red, mottled browns littered with sage, dry washes, discarded skins. Some horses need another coat of paint, some have worn down ball bearings and cry out for forgiveness through their pain and torture.

As if on cue they break free of coated molds rear and gallop away through the park to the amusement and horror of patrons relaxing on a day when everything is quiet and taken with a grain of salt. Salt is traded for gold. Commodities. To market we go.

They stampeded their thunder warnings to the shadows as hoofs flashed lightning bolts sending people cowering into corners. Humans were frozen mesmerized in one motion. All is still as stallions with silk coats glistened and paraded past fearful human eyeballs.

Horses remained free and find their way out of the enclosure. They take no hostages, make no unreasonable demands and are allowed to remain free on their own recognizance.

The merry-go-round operator scratches his head in wonder and surveys empty poles. His eyes follow tracks left in damp soil and he knows they are gone forever. They are shadows. He is chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of his eyes.

Ubrique

Greetings,

it was good to be on the street again. he got off the bus in ubrique just after 2. the ride down from Graz was through a long glacier valley flanked by sharp dolomite gray mountains. these stones were endemic in the area.

where the romans marched. where they set up small encampments between U and G. their road was a pale shade as moss and grass gradually took back the land but the road was clear enough in places. looking close enough you could see the footprints of old sandals, feel tired legs, aching muscles, hear screams of the wounded, the cries of thirst. it was a desperate time and they were in a desperate place. they marched on and on and on. they were miles from rome.

they imported everything. they carried their lives with them on the endless twisting stone road.

everything was closing down in U and people on bikes and taking bus #11 were heading home. school was out and mothers escorted thier kids across bridges and through their young life. the old people on their crutches, their beady eyes piercing the stranger; the man with a white beard, strange clothing, black pack, the movement. he was an outsider and passing through.

it was excellent to be anonymous. to be feeling broken erratic pavement under erractic steps. no hesitation in finding the up direction on the internal compass.

it was a small spanish city with tight apartments, flowers, laundry and residents. yellow cranes constructed new worlds.

his images took over. the narrow old part of the town was up the hill. romans came here, lived here and it was easy enough to see their settlements, the remnants of their civilization. near water they built their baths, their public washing areas.

he moved along the highest area below the mountains which faced west. the settlement had been tucked into the end of the valley. smart.

at the base of the mountains the homes and roads were narrow and old. whitewashed as always, they reflected the heat. every home he passed featured a cracked kitchen window and the sound of clattering utensils and eating.

he passed old women hunched over their bowls of soup in the small dark interiors. the doors were open. small black dogs barked. people stared. he found a fine discarded piece of bamboo and used it for a walking stick, pounding on walls, stone streets, trash cans, fences, tapping the ground.

he wandered to the top of it all and down. he'd arrive at a fork in the narrow way and point his magic bamboo stick first one way and then the other asking, “Which way?" and the stick danced in the direction he could take so he did. he wandered for hours. delightful.

Peace.

The Blue Eyed Ghost of Shuangliu, China

Yes my dear friend it is true, or at least as true as can possibly be for he has returned to the beginning - and this is where his small tale begins.

Rickshaw bells and heavy groaning green and purple pedicabs propelled by thick legged men prowl through humid traffic air. No one sees him but everyone stares at the ghost. The majority are oblivious to his existence.

He walks along a broken cracked sidewalk past men hammering their work. They are building an 6-story high extension at the high school. Cement mixers, scaffolding made of bamboo, emaciated men haul crumbling red bricks, immigrants sing in the rain. Dancing along their future. The developer drives a shiny black Benz.

Streets are congested with yellow bulldozers, lorries loaded with dirt and salvaged steel pig iron, ‘City Boat’ blaring bus horns, small red cabs, - tired students trudging to lessons inside cold cramped cement caverns where teachers arrive late, leave early, smashing wooden sticks on desks to get their attention - men pedal carts of large blue plastic barrels full of leftover restaurant slop for village pigs and emotionally abused children splash water on their dreams.

He passes brown faced women in dirty white aprons chopping vegetables with sharp cleavers on scarred wood. Single girls mop cement passageways from dawn to dusk.

Dutiful daughters sweep floors or laconically stare at deaf dumb blind televisions stacked on bags of rice, boxes of detergent, hairline fractured straw mattress bedding.

This is the entertainment capital of the world !

He passes tables of retired pensioners slapping white marble mahjong pieces into tight manicured rows of strategies as orange vested street cleaning women whisking ornate hard handled bamboo brushes paint the city’s rising dust in their wide eyed wonder.

He speaks the language of silence and this comforts them. His inability to articulate his passion and suffering is only because, like you, he is a witness to this absurd reality in humanity’s garden.

He’s been here before. He trusted you to understand. The meaning of meaning was obscured by clouds of anger, fear, desire, jealousy, ignorance and attachment and you waved him away.

You cast him into deep crystal water where he replenished his spirit reflecting another glorious revolution.

Dialogue with an Irish fly

“Your machine, memory and imagination are your friends. Keep them clean, sleep with them. Remember to take out the garbage. That’s the advice your old buddy Mike, your old fishing buddy, said years back, or was it in the future he told you? I can’t remember exactly, it’s all a blue blur."

"You’re in a place full of archetypes, spirits and dancing death."

“Cast a cold eye on life, on death, horseman pass by” and all that said Mr. W.B. Yeats.

Mike reminded him to take out the garbage. Cut out the the vague shit and remember the reader doesn’t want to work too hard.

Always fondly reminding him of this truth.

The fly goes into cardiac arrest. “My god! A fly fisherman. You gotta be kidding.!”

“Yes speaking of fly speak. He uses you to snare trout skis. No worries, he ties his own flies. He was talking about revision. Yes. Finding the thread in the story as we work through and wander along the labyrinth with the ancient clew of our pilgrimage.

“When he isn’t writing a collection of stories about growing up in orchards full of sweet delicious oranges, working in his garden planting future salads or pounding pavement and isolated paths near Colorado tributaries to prepare for the pleasant torture of Hawaiian iron man events, he defends humans in Cuba.

“He argues for a living. He’s busy filing appeals when illegal Military Tribunals sentence clients to death. Execution. It’s a job.”

“We are all in various stages of appealing sentences,” said the fly recovering from a comma.

“Here. Read my mind.”

He tends thorns in life’s rose garden wondering if people scheduled for execution on death row see the complete impermanence all around them. Maybe they see everything shrinking down to a finite particle of light reflected as rainbow spectrums zoom across the sky. Maybe people on death row just breathe, sit quietly in their cell and experience detachment.

“Maybe they live in the eternal frozen moment of non duality with complete lucid clarity until the executioner wearing a black hood with eyes burning so bright, so close he can see where warp and weave meet, throws a switch.”

“Electricity? Public utilities? Deregulation of energy sources. Prayer wheels turned by water for hydroelectric power fingers sliding to the switch, the button on the console, transportation rooms filled with prisoners sitting on thin mattresses near cold metallic sinks, shoes carefully arranged, eating freeze dried popcorn, staring at calendars with Aztec and Mayan sun gods designating virgins through family genealogy destinies threaded together on looms of acid pellets sliding into a ceramic dish spinning inside a wheel of gas?"

“Injection? Hypo syringes dripping toxins, lethal molecules, subatomic particles of Technicium or TC-99 from Hanford’s Nuclear Reactor seeping a slow death into the Columbia River and passing camels through a needle’s eye into deserts watering solitary confinement.”

The fly had heard enough. “In Texas they call it the barbecue pit where Friday is fry them alive day. The Bush throws the switch.”

Tra-Na Rossen, Donegal

“There it is,” Pat, the area bus driver said, pointing toward the hostel in the distance, a big gray building with two gables and a loggia with natural stone facing and gray slate roofs blending into a rocky hill below Crocknasleigh Mountain standing 544 feet.

Tra-Na-Rossan was the northern most hostel in the Irish Republic, and donated to An Oige in 1936 by Mrs. Phillimore, a respected and well liked lady in the community. She had a Catholic cross constructed on a green sward so villagers wouldn’t have to walk the two miles to church.

It was a large, comfortable, cozy isolated place with miles of beautiful countryside, beaches and mountains for exploring with views east over large grassy fields full of grazing sheep and west to the Atlantic coast.

The lower area below the hostel was all bays, wide green pastures, low rolling hills, inlets, patchwork designs of land leading to distant beaches and beyond to Horn Head, a massive projection of rock miles away and only accessible by leaving the peninsula. A single road past the hostel led toward Melmore Head.

He opened up, moved into the warden’s separate living area, read the previous warden’s notes regarding emergency numbers, checked supplies and rang up Dublin on the hand crank phone verifying old accounting ledgers and filing his report with the home office. They mentioned “the problems” to be sorted out.

Flagstone floors. The spacious common room had a fireplace, couches, chairs, tables, book shelves with games and reading material. A small pantry stocked basic canned goods. There were drying closets, bathrooms, hallways with many small windows, lots of plants, a miniature greenhouse, notice board and dining area. Exterior buildings held turf and coal supplies, a general storage area, a pump house next to a burn trash heap and piles of rusting cans.

The hostel accommodated 36 travelers in a warm, comfortable place along their journey. The warden area contained a bedroom, kitchen and small sitting room. The Smith Corona had a new table and a lamp to illuminate his work.

Sitting in his Donegal kitchen with life’s operating manual on the table he heard wind blowing banshees as a peat fire roared.

One morning his Aussie lover headed south and home where she worked as a nurse in the outback. Their wild intense affair satisfied their primal natures. Helen stopped along her way and they moved through collective consciousness sharing quick painless conversation, laughter, tales and uninhibited passionate animal behavior. Her long red hair was on fire. They expanded and regaled collective energies through lust, attraction and attachment phases with a strong gravitational energy.

The hostel was deserted in the dead of winter.