Awareness

As Hunter S. Thompson said, “When the going gets weird the weird turn pro.” 

Strange days are upon us.

Governments have long mastered stifling any internal seismic news which could upset their domestic control over the sheep. 

W.H.O. failed to recognize the severity and lack of information from Human Land when the initial virus case was identified. The lack of transparency taught the world a sad long term lesson. 

S. Korea took prompt efficient action. The U.S. didn't.

So it goes. Perfect gardening weather with social distance. 

People wear masks. Masks eat their face.

A Japanese friend says their TV shouts, “The Martians are Coming.”

Someone wrote to say - “The money is gone. The plague is here. Time to write poetry."

This minuscule part of Earth has been spared the contagious onslaught. So far.

This is the new Brave New World and a huge wake-up call for humans. 

I limit my virus propaganda consumption to 10 minutes a day.

Live Forever.

Life gives us the test first and lessons later.

It gave everyone a big test and heavy deep real lessons. HDR. It was only a matter of time coming and will be a long time gone.

Everything is under control.

A virus has no social affiliation, race, religion, gender, nationality, bias, prejudice, expectations, politics, economy or wishful thinking.

I’ve written about this disaster potential in my books so I’m not surprised, knowing how Big Brother and media influences sheep. Bah.

I walk through world dust playing my blues harp & singing about loss and reality.

The Plague by Camus

Author Page

Riding Rails

The trapped mother realized her ice reality. Concise crying crystals reflected clarity. Suffering from fate and free will she danced in flames seeking her SAVE key.

Hearing a child say, “I need help,” she received a blessing.

A child whispered, “The ending is the middle.”

“The middle is the beginning,” said a child. “You can start the story anywhere.”

“We are all orphans sooner or later,” said Rose. “We bury our successes and failures in the same grave.”

Death and the gravedigger agreed. “Everyone comes to us.”

Rail music sang click, clack, click and clack.

In a dome liner, children ate watermelon and spit seeds into sky. A red haired female magician made poverty disappear. Passengers formed quick intense transient relationships between whistle stops before, during and after industrial wastelands.

We zoomed past small town wrecking yards with cars and trucks collecting rust, abandoned swings, toys, dishwashers, gardens, guillotines, baskets of severed heads, shredded tires and water soaked concave fences collapsing into community soil.

I hammered word spikes while waving to strangers stranded in their present perfect tense seeing trains carry perfect continuous tense strangers into new futures.

Down the line riding the rails. Further along the road of iron deficiencies.

At a remote train station, a furious man with his shopping cart home and a whiskey bottle in a bag sagged against a brick wall yelling at his slumped wife.

Her old sad eyes stared far away wondering how she managed to get herself in this fucking mess away from social services, respect, dignity and love. Her heart knew if she had any common sense (not very common) or any strength or power she’d get up and start walking.

Her dilemma was to find a way out of the quicksand swallowing her life. She was conditioned to having someone save her. She loved being a victim and needed a martyr.

Clear cold thin Rocky Mountain air quickened blood streams. We’ve enjoyed rail’s clicking clacking trestle music exchanging laughter and awareness. Visions of starlight sky blends with engine headlights shattering blackness. We arrive at Union Station in Denver.

I know the field behind the station where the headless homeless heartbroken hoboes, drifters and transients exist, hide and run for their lives.

It’s a tricky place at night. It runs north way up to the stockyards 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 frostbitten February, cowboys, cowgirls and plain old city folk put on the Stockman’s 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 to Federal Boulevard on a rise with a church and laundromats and renovated upscale posh neighborhoods overlooking a gleaming screaming downtown Silver City skyline. The killing field is filled with tall weeds in the Platte River flood plain.

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

In the summer, children scream on the roller coaster at Elitch Gardens up on 38th and Tennyson where my aunt and uncle ran a drugstore and pharmacy after WWII. They worked their fingers to the bone, sweated their lives out and never asked for a thing. My aunt was so scared by the Depression she maintained thirty-seven folders budgeting the cash flow by counting every penny every night.

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

The Coast Starlight sliding toward Kansas curves into a space-time bend.

Moon drinks rainwater.

Walking rails I sing with Robert Johnson…“Woke up this morning and looked around for my shoes…I got them walking blues.”

I savor impermanence. Cool blood decorates hot black keys as I bleed words.

ART

new world life

Keep your own counsel
Poetry is what happens when nothing else can
It’s what you find in the corner

Circus people live on the edge
Sunset swift lets fill orange sky with magic

Breathe in nose
Mental hypothalamus
Unconscious

70,000 years of pointillism
Walking makes the road
Khmer wedding music clanging symbols
Yellow silk accompanies jackhammers

In a brave new world

Pure mind Buddhism - world as illusion
Clowns decorate random acts of kindness
With the gravity of tenderness

Look and leave people dance
As death
Chases them through life
Go go go

Smiling makes you happy
Be happy for no reason
Your compassion is greater than your fear

 

Rain glorious soft smooth clear rain
Cloud tears echo silence

Calm way
Spring speaks laughter
Cool sky jazz

Water imagination seeds with bliss & gratitude
Diamonds reflect a universe on bamboo leaf

In a Brave New World you shift from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness.
I ate civilization.

Grow Your Soul

Kids Write

“Let’s create a book,” said one, “and we’ll be in it. We can create a quest about love & survival. Like ART, adventure, risk and transformation.”

“Hey it’s a great possibility, with stories or vignettes for word salad dressing.”

“We need stories, water, shelter, food and love.”

“Stories existed before food and shelter. Stories describe hunting for food and social needs. All stories are about forms of hunger.”

“Love is a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor,” said a shadow.

“Will it be a man-u-script or a woman-u-script?”

“Both. If it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage.”

“We are authors looking for characters,” said an Italian kid named Pirandello. “I am a plot looking for a character.”

“When someone dies survivors look for a plot,” said a gravedigger.

“It will have characters facing conflict on their quest,” said a young scriptor. “It will have satire, humor, curiosity and courage.”

“Yes,” said a writer. “It will be a labyrinth of desires and obstacles with rising and falling action and resolution as characters take risks, suffer greatly and overcome adversity to realize their authenticity. You will experience what characters sense and imagine through their actions. Socrates subordinated character to action. Get to the verb.”

“Let’s make it dramatic by focusing our spotlight on specifics and floodlight on the general to establish a P.O.V. I’ll play director. Places everyone. Lights. Camera. Action!”

“Our stories contain conscious and unconscious awareness like a maze or a puzzle palace. I need your help with dialogue and action as characters reveal their fears by living forty questions in the dark night of their soul. They trade their soul to the devil down at the crossroads at midnight so they can play the blues, create art and dance. Free from masks they are breathing, laughing and living healers.”

“Let’s act out their fears, dreams and joy.”

“Do your characters discuss moral ambiguities?”

“Yes. They speak with nouns and verbs with choices, actions and consequences. They slay adverbial dragons with an ultra fine red pen.”

“Is a place like this hospital a character?”

“Sure, a place has character? Writers explore environments like Tacoma, Vietnam, Morocco, Spain, caves…”

“It sounds like nature vs human or human vs human or human vs themself. You become the thing you fight the most.”

“Do they playfully deconstruct the human condition with story-truth moving the narrative forward to get to the root of their experience?”

“The roots are below the surface,” said a young nun washing teacups on a Taoist mountain in Sichuan, China. “I mediate on the roots below the surface of appearances.”

“Get is the joker word in English. A lit agent at the Willamette Writer’s Conference said this work is a word farrago photograph, a jazz beat stylistic epic in process. She suggested throwing the narrative out and focus on one geography or one specific time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Rita, 14, an ice seller and independent author of Ice Girl in Banlung in Ratanakiri, Cambodia.

It was a wild-west town of 25,000 with dusty red roads near the River of Darkness and animist cemeteries. “It’s fucking hysterical.”

ART

Virus Life

A short story with universal repercussions.

Once upon a time (for 10,000 years) a Bat lived in Human Province. 

It carried a disease in its small black body. 

Bat shit landed on the ground. 

Another animal named Pangolin ate the shit.

A starving hunter trapped Pangolin. 

He sold it to a woman working in the Human Wet Market.

She killed it. She cut it up to sell.

Hungry customers bought Pangolin parts. 

They took it home, cooked it and served it at parties.

Everyone who touched and ate the Pangolin became sick. 

Their sickness infected their communities.

A doctor at a Human Hospital diagnosed a patient with a strange disease.

He notified other health care workers about his discovery.

Police came to the doctor’s house. They said, “You are spreading rumors. This is not allowed. It is harmful to the people. Sign this paper saying you were wrong and repent your actions.”

The doctor signed.

He became sick. He went to the hospital. He died from a virus called Corona. 

Some citizens said he was a HERO. Big Brother said, he was not important.

Big Brother made 11 million Human people stay indoors until the end of time.

More died. 

The virus escaped and infected many humans on Earth. Some lived, some died.

Big Brother said, “We are victorious. We have eliminated the virus.”

"Holy Bat Shit!" said Robin.