Every August

Funny how it comes around just about every time, this time this year, just like last August. Somebody said August is the cruelest month.

Easily the hottest. A local 15 year old girl killed herself yesterday with a single shot to the head. Makes you wonder the who, when, where, how and big WHY.

Last August it was Mary in old Chicago town. The perfusionist. She was the one who called a wrong number out of desperation and, of course, I inherited the inevitable task of talking her through the drama of her life.

Hey, I answered the phone and kept her on the suicide hot line. It eventually produced basic peace of mind for her but nothing but angst, various poems and a well done intense piece entitled THE LAST SEVEN PAGES about a book she was working on.

Walking through fires. It was a tough one. All about listening, a lot of listening, recognizing various faces of fear, seeing truth. Letting go of it. Moving on. Finding balance.

So here it is August again. Out of curiosity I called one of those 900 numbers and left a message. “Independent nomad seeks open minded spirituality adept woman for casual relationship.”

Had three answers and the Relationship Express is humming down the tracks stopping at stations named Loneliness, Emptiness, Friendship, mid-life Crisis, Ticking Time Bombs and Endless Conversations.

Rhapsody of the Disenchanted was playing Still Looking After All These Years, Where’s The One, past scenic views of Depression, Melancholy, Trust, Hope, Anxiety, Doubt, Fear, and I’m transiting through the ‘listening’ role with a couple of new women. Both from Montana through entirely different routes of self discovery, broken relationships and renewal. We're riding the range mending fences, setting up new parameters.

Now I love women, yes sirree, well all right then, but I know better now and it’s just this curious nature of heart and mind to be out there making new connections. I’m not saving anybody.

All the stations have various levels of becoming. Passengers entwined and stuck on levels banging their heads and hearts against transparencies grasping through their Gestalt shattering mirrors and delusions. Working out in their private emotional, physical, spiritual fitness zones. Levels replace levels. Each level has a center. The vortex is the equilibrium, the source.

As one woman, an educator, said to me, “We are works in progress.” She’s divorced, with two kids, a supportive x-factor and looking for a friend.

“I’m just doing my work,” I told her plain and simple.
“That’s a powerful statement,” she said.

Now I wouldn’t be the first person to say it’s healing work but I’ve learned to listen. Not all the clowns are in the circus.

I make it perfectly clear to these kind ladies that I am not in the rescuing business anymore. Nope. No way Jose.

Honesty is the best policy and I’m not in the mood to waste their time, my time and our collective energies establishing a Heavy Deep & Real relationship. The good old HDR.

The emotional bottom line is they are looking for a kind, sensitive man who won’t screw around and screw up their lives. They’ve been cheated on, dumped on and left taking care of the kids. They need someone who will listen and not say, “I can fix it!”
They know what’s what. They know how the world works, how the heart beats. How any system will do whatever is necessary to perpetuate and sustain itself. They have their own toolbox. Some know the map is not the territory.

You don’t need a compass in the land of dreams.

We're all passengers on the train of life riding the rails following our spirit. The simple answer is to listen, stay detached, share, establish levels of responsibility, emotional connections on the heart level, understand healthy limitations and boundaries and remain open to the big picture. Paying attention.

“Not too much wisdom and not too much compassion,” a monk said, blowing the flame out.

The Beginning

Experience Junky

“Thinking neither good nor evil, what was your original nature before your parents were born?” - Zen master

He's broiling on the balcony of his tree house. Getting down and dirty after years away from the word machine. Covered in construction dust and needing oil it’s a small portable piece of heavy dangerous equipment, capable of knocking things down, turning things over, spinning down the days.

He's zooming through life’s magical mystical tour. It’s not the answers you need to know, it’s the questions you need to ask.

Part of him is a peripatetic traveler in the moment, the other part is a journalist with a photographer's eye and the balls of an actor. A mad scribbling poet. He's lucky to get it down and make sense of it later.

He's a mirror rolled into his portable machine sitting in the mandala of his labyrinth. Labrys, from the Greek for a two headed axe. Writing with passion and vision, his mirror reflects everything with confidence and self reliant authenticity.

He's been exploring scattered, fragmentary elements of human diversity reflecting their language, culture, lives and attitudes. He absorbs their being; anger, jealousy, ignorance, desire, fear and suffering. He accepts their illusions, wishes, values, joy, belief systems and dream projected perceptions on his dust free mirror.

He evolved into twilight, past sunsets into new dawns, from old relationships to new friendships. He seeks emotional strength, trust, beauty, wisdom, peace and love.

He experiences forgiveness with emotional honesty. He's tired of beating himself up. He can spell the words limitations, boundaries, vulnerability and creativity in multiple languages.

He's an experience junky.

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