Journeys
Words
Images
Cloud
Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

Amazon Associate
Contact
Monday
Nov172008

The Three Baboons

Greetings,

Speaking of 40,000 year old primates, then, one day he saw three baboons. They were part of a Russian tribe living in his neighborhood. This is how it happened around dawn. 

A blond corn-plaited hairy one stuck her head out of a 5th story window and spit. She watched the spittle fly past trees and SPLAT! on the pavement. 

She looked around and they saw each other. She smiled. Her upper teeth were small and sharp. She started jabbering in her strange language. Her sounds, her words were questions. She wanted to know something.

Here is a rough translation.
“Where do you come from?”
“Are you alone?”

"Do you have money?"
“Do you want sex?”
She made many sounds but that’s the essence. Baboon language is simple and direct.

He just stared at her and smiled. She smiled. They smiled at each other.

She disappeared. A moment later she returned with two friends. One had dark hair, very hard eyes and big floppy breasts. She shook them side to side while speaking to him. 

“Look at these watermelons,” she said.
They were heavy fruit.

Another baboon joined them. She was blond with sapphire eyes and straight hair with short spiked bangs. Her oval face smiled and she stuck out her tongue. A shiny silver post glistened from the middle. Laughing like a child, she rolled her tongue around, up and out like a little snake. Every now and then a snake needs to find a cave.  

She appeared to be the most playful one in the group. 

All three stared at him and jabbered again, making suggestions and questions with their inarticulate yet clearly understood sounds.

“Where are you from?”
Blah, blah, blah.
“How old are you?”
"Do you have money?"
“Do you want sex?”

The plaited hair one got halfway out on the narrow balcony and crouched down, opening her legs. She started riding an imaginary wild mustang. Her eyes and face assumed a state of ecstasy. 

The one with hard eyes started gesturing with her hand, massaging empty space. He stared at this spectacle and smiled.

They laughed. The power of suggestion. 

The silver posted one kept smiling and flicking her tongue in and out, like breathing.

They were full of energy and wanted some action. Such amazing, funny and strange wild baboons!

Metta.

  

Saturday
Nov152008

Looking Back

Greetings,

People here love to look back. It is a passion. It is a genetic molecule of fear, doubt and uncertainty. Perhaps also just a plain childish innocent curiosity of wanting the past, needing.

Yes. Focus on needs, not wants. Needs manifesting their desire. A desire for a ghost. We are all passing through. 

They look back to see if they see, yes, in their vivid reptilian imagination a ghost. Their ghost. A ghost from a family, friend, lost. Looking for clues at their personal ground zero. 

They've arrived from distant galaxies. Java man was discovered here 40,000 years ago.

So it figures, accepting an evolutionary premise, their DNA star chart continues its genetic dance today. 

I live in talking monkey zones. They eat rice. They drink water. They wash one set of clothing and hang it out to dry on poles. They burn down the forest. They harvest brooms. Their shamans bring rain. Tropical downpours allow people the luxury to wash cars. 

They use their faint star energy to look, not really seeing, behind them wondering, all the wondering. 

Food is cheap here. Medicine and education is expensive. This has nothing to do with simians. It has nothing to do with the two women sitting in a dark warung neighborhood food joint. The warung faces a tall cinder block wall. Chickens, goats and cats prowl, peck and forage through garbage and dreams.

One woman sits quietly in a deep meditation. Her friend parts her hair gently, looking for minute insects, cleaning her scalp. They take turns cleaning and inspecting. This genetic behavior is being repeated in zoos, jungles, and rain forests. Chattering oral story tellers play the gamelan, pounding out 40,000 year old tunes.

Healing the people with music.

Males wash their little toy machines. They study the accumulated grime under long yellow curling fingernails. They play chess along the road waiting for passengers. Some visit the warung to chat up the girls or eat spicy rice mixed with tofu, chicken, veggies, green chillies and deep fried snacks.

Here's one man building a brave new world. Forging new futures with a patriotic purpose. An assessment on process in a data based star cluster.

Metta.

Tuesday
Nov112008

Visionary Vet

Greetings,

She was an angel looking down on the human world from a great height. She floated where material concerns and possessions did not matter in the big picture. 

She remembered standing at attention at basic training in another century with Senior Drill Sergeant Roger That screaming in her face, “You’d better keep the big picture in mind you bunch of dumb shits. What I’m telling you may save your sweet ass.” They practiced eating dust, killing ghosts and lethal hand-to-hand combat. The quick and the dead.

It was one of those crucial survival messages she was blessed to receive in her short sweet life. Before they packed her off to a hot humid Asian jungle where she gobbled rice with her hands, moved with the speed of a reptile, swam with leeches sucking her blood, connected all her senses into a single bright sharp clarity, maintained her ironic detached sense of humor and kept her mean machine clean. 

She’d rotated out of the jungle and just kept on going. 

They pinned medals on her in sweltering Saigon, she caught a freedom flight, confronted bitter cold in thin tropical khakis dashing across an Alaskan tarmac, then flew to the City by the Bay. A sergeant offered her a steak dinner. 

She muttered, “Screw the steak, give me a fresh dress green uniform and I’m back to Colorado.”

Airborne, airmobile to Denver she became an exile with a degree in Silence and Cunning. Surrounded by the living dead. Wandering Ghost material.  She’d evolved through the first of many metaphysical windows. It was impermanence; one life, no plan and many adventures. Restless was her masterful mistress. Movement and silence. 

She eased out at the Spanish summit to breath deep - receiving freezing cold gray and black clouds. They gave her the threads she needed then and there in the wilderness. They were a security blanket around her shoulders and she weaved them into a fine piece of work. 

She started descending toward the Penon Grande mountains above Lacilbula where she’d sit down doing her winter weaving travail. 

Immediately after arriving at her small space it started pouring. Coming down. Reminded her of Nam monsoons. Nature’s rain turned to violent hail, welcoming her to a new sanctuary in the old Roman pueblo. She welcomed the transition.

Inch deep hail accumulated on patio plants. She’d been warned it had the highest rainfall in Andalucia. The weather turned bitter cold for a week. 

“Unseasonable,” said a woman neighbor near a rose bush outside her cobalt blue Moorish door. 

She settled into an intimate furnished two room space with plastered stone walls, no central heating, a patio with 20 plants and delicious orange and lemon trees. Simplicity, serenity and sanctuary.

Metta.

 

Sunday
Nov092008

Baka Beyond

Greetings,

Drum. Dance inside the forest. Baka Beyond. Senses engaged. 

You have a responsibility to your imagination.

"There are two kinds of people in the world," said a child playing near a construction site on Java.

"What?"

"There are people who want to blame you and people who want to distract you."

"Heavy."

"Yes, this life construction project is a heavy duty process. Pick it up, carry it around. Put it down."

"Sounds like a bag of bones, if you ask me," said a tribal musician playing a skin.

"You are a rainbow of light."

"Yes, we cut through desire, habit and fear."

"This is the beauty and clarity of music and dance. Welcome to the forest."

Metta.

 

Saturday
Nov082008

Arcos Angel

 

english Arcos angel divorced her quiet half

after seven years of butterflies

in Africa

when he was renovating a home 

in a tight white myopic minded pueblo

full of poor greedy peasants

counting their pesetas

under low ceilings, behind Moorish doors with small openings for sabers stabbing 

opposing onslaught weak weakened warriors forces

unrolling their bankrolled visions on interior geometrically perfect tiled walls

white crochet nimble fingers

lentils, brown bread, yellow cheese

old black and white portraits 

of grandfathers from 1936 civil war years 

feasts 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 straits remembering how it was running the bull

beneath gladiolas spilling their blood

for tourist images

framed children kicking 

a ball off spic n’ span white 

walled fortifications of Christian church bells, 

round crypts, plastic bleeding flowers blooming 

rocky Roman roads, small tilled inhospitable fields, 

wild lemons, oranges, expatriates looking for a deal

stealing

narrow corridors

lost in Andalusian Sierra wilderness

angel flew away to regain herself

at new homeopathic remedy elevations

along with vultures, griffins

catching free thermals 

from dreary english weather patterns

in flip flops halter top leathered skin

manicured nails

necessities become luxuries