Expatriate Blues

Small satisfaction in a cold quick clear voice of terrible insight that he, like so many others had desperately underestimated the passion, greed, bitterness and explicit angry religious attitudes playing sad songs as teams of boy soldiers leveled marble and glass skyscrapers with rocket launchers, systematically exploded distant oil refineries and detonated poison gas cylinders at major intersections in the city.

A city he helped build.

First light broke over the desert as premediated violence and destruction compressed distance. He turned to his wife and daughter.

"Pack all the food and water you can carry, put together a bag of clothing, get the gas masks and maps. Load everything into the car. It's time to rock and roll."

Every road out of the burning city was blocked. They diverted to the coast where they gave away their car and paid premimum rates to stow away on a dhow taking tea and carpets to a country at the southern end of the Gulf.

The rest is history.

His Last Morning

On his last morning in Morocco before sunrise, before an orange sunburst ball of gas broke sky edges he flew north to Amsterdam and west to Seattle and east over Cascade Mountains.

Before leaving Saad’s home in Casablanca, The Other who’d been up all night anticipating another departure, took a gigantic shit over a hole in the ground and swept sweet smelling kid’s sanitized paper wipe over his ass, stumbled through the dark with Rex the shepherd who lived in the wood pile out in the furniture factory on his heels pouring water from an old green bottle into the holy plumbing system, waking the dead on their highway of life crowded with whiners and complainers.

The toilet paper was crap in Spain. In Morocco it was nonexistent. It felt good to blast yesterday out of his system and he knew all their bilingual time, trouble and effort and cost not measured in material things had been worth it. Because it was a refreshing drink of water, a hard desperate breath during a climb for a clear perspective.

Light severed the sky, illuminating white Andalucian and Arabic villages, stone paths, brown Moorish doors, idle men, shifty eyed one armed merchants, unemployed dissatisfied immigrants.

As an entity from history he traversed light, space, and time near vaulted arches kissing everyone on both sides of extended faces shaking hands with everyone confirming his flight. His exile dream vision.

All the adults were tired, wasted, beat. Moroccans walked, stopped, looked around with hesitancy, this delay, this question on their boarding card faces.

Their visa stamp bled through their indigo robes piercing shirts, blouses, delicate woven craft work designed by millions of minimum wage children in twisted alleys without a visa. Lucky to make a buck a day. They needed a bread visa, a scrap of meat visa, a tea visa, freshly cut sweet smelling green long boiling tea to mix their life’s colors with sweetness.

At the Casablanca airport he waited in line for a military man to stamp his passport. Exit. Two beautiful women received preferential treatment and a Moroccan man behind him remarked, “I love this country but hate the system.”

“I know you what you mean,” he replied knowing countless countries where people felt the same way.

“There are only two stories in the world,” he said to the man as they carried their boarding cards through the terminal. “A stranger arrives in town or a person goes on a journey.”

longest moon night

we dance on the lawn of death
with your canine teeth at my throat

thunder clouds
rise in the west
thunder blows sax
broken streets
old man’s shopping cart
lined with plastic bags full of cans

homeless indigents
beggars – bodhisatvas
hard hatted lunch bucket brigade
watching the girls
‘another mule is kicking in my stall’

look at that will ya’
it’s a classic – pay attention all the time
nomads in the world – a bird call – solitary golak raven

how is this
amazing blaze of fury’s dancing
mixed w/laughter, living and loving
you’re facing it now
people cast into shadows
and only the shadow knows
everyone
hidden behind their shadow
chasing shadows, illusions
feeding imaginary needs

eating mountain fire and wave fire
whales pirouette down their territorial depths

ballet dancers on point
balance a machete
hacking their way through turbulent undergrowth
coming at them in cloud waves
exposing lightning bolts
ghosts smoke
fire in the hole!

above calm surface
lives full of wonderland
delight and never-ending mysterious
unfold precious discoveries

wrapped in smooth emotional fabrics
complete with pulsating heart vibrations
washing sunsets
lips pressed
against diamond dew drops
eternity's smelling
small world’s wind color—
blue, yellow, red, white, green

laughter O joy
traces earth - rocks are her bones
grass and trees her hair
water her blood
drop by drop
gathering light
smelling sea peace

in a window a woman irons dreams
a globe, books, razor penciled paper

inside a paramedic van,
red, orange strobs
is a trapped man
and someone is screaming, “where is his vein?”

bones around my neck
carved human skulls
ward off shadows – protection from evil spirits

bones are a heavy weight considering they are dust

bones, bones, caressing the bones

she is a Lung-ta Tibetan wind horse
peace compassion strength wisdom
flying into elders' dreams
manifesting forgiveness
on her path

moving through fire
dancing on death's lawn
with her canine teeth at my throat

The Field

He knows that Denver field, the one where the headless homeless heartbroken hoboes, drifters and transients exist, hide and run for their lives behind Union Station. It’s a tricky place at night.

It runs north way up to the stockyards area near the old Coliseum, not to be confused with the one in Rome where they fed you-know-who to you-know-what; where every cold frostbite February cowboys, cowgirls and plain old city folk put on the Stockmam's day extravaganza awarding prizes to animals and the field runs south past the main Post Office Terminal annex and westward toward immigrant hopes and dreams up off Federal Boulevard on a rise with a church and laundromats and renovated upscale posh neighborhoods overlooking a gleaming screaming downtown Silver City skyline and the killing field is full of tall weeds in the Platte River flood plain.

There’s a fine view of Rocky Mountains from the field amid random acts of premeditated violence around small fires as drifters wait and pray to stay invisible long enough to ride the rails out of town away from the mean old street.

In the summer children scream on the roller coaster at Elitch Gardens down the street. It used to be up on 38th and Tennyson where his aunt and uncle ran a drugstore then a pharmacy after W.W.II. They worked their fingers to the bone, sweated their lives out and never asked for much. My aunt was so conditioned by the depression she maintained 37 different envelopes for budgeting their cash flow and checked every penny every night.

It ain’t no field of dreams in that big lost lonely weed choked undeveloped tract of real estate along tracks where freights and Amtrak scenic vista super dome liners blow long lonely whistles as buttoned downed waiters serve blood red Colorado tenderloin down wind from the smell of meat cooking at Coors Field where the boys of summer play hardball.

One Lhasa Morning

We take a side street to the Barkhor - everything is in cold frozen shade as life stirs. People are bundled against the freezing air, their faces hidden by white medical masks or wool scarves. Only their dark eyes exist. Khampa meat men dump severed glazed eyed yak heads on old stone, long horns; women prepare yellow butter blocks, chunks of glistening fat.

We slow down. Each step is a breath. As before, in other planetary places we savor the beginning of a new day in scenes of becoming - cold, isolated, strange, mysterious reality. The street blends into the circuit. We enter the main square.

Two large chorten furnaces are breathing fire, sending plumes of gray and black smoke into the sky. Figures of all ages and energies, sellers of juniper and cedar. Buyers collect their offerings - throw sweet smelling twigs into the roaring fire, finger prayer beads and resume their pilgrimage. Merit.

We join the flow, shuffling along. We feel the softness being with the ageless way of meditation, a walking meditation.

It is a peaceful manifestation of the eternal now. The vast self vibration of frequencies in the flow. His “restless” wandering ghost spirit feels the peace and serenity inside the flow.

The sky fills with clear light. As above, so below. Prayer flags lining roofs sing in the wind as incense smoke curls away. The shuffling pilgrims create a ceaseless wave - the sound of muted consistent steps, clicking of prayer beads, a gentle hum of turning prayer prayer wheels, murmurs of mantras from lips. Everything is clear and focused on offering, sacrifice, gaining merit in the collective unconscious. Our river flows.

Dawn light blesses western snow capped mountains with a pink glow.

A black-faced half-naked boy throws himself down and out on his hands and knees prostrating the length of his skinny skeleton. He wears slabs of wood on his hands and an old brown apron. He edges forward, pulling himself along, rises, gestures to the sky, hands together, down along his skin out and down to the ground scrapping away flesh edging forward inside shuffling pilgrims.

His eyes are on fire!
We complete one circuit after another, circling the Jokhang. More light, more people ascending into the square - handfuls of juniper feed roaring flames, Crack! Hiss! Burn! Back to Dust!
You will walk through the fire.
We do this practice every day.