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Entries in Prose Poemes (130)

Thursday
Sep052019

Denver International Airport

mid-day is the least busy time 
frisked down by guys at security - 
they may have been from Ghana or Somalia or Ethiopia

but I suspect Congo or Zaire as their dialect was distinct
they are young and laughing at the never ending task 
waving detector wands over people

and the one waving me is young & angry & exasperated

at having to do anything so far removed from his

land, culture, family, his brothers and sisters carrying water

on their heads in cracked plastic pails from deep distant wells 
drying in the heat of perpetual summer’s drought

his tie is askew and his white shirt 
against his thin black neck 
is frayed and his blue blazer looks severely uncomfortable on his frame

and the Asian security woman

says the woman screening bags

doesn’t know 
what a harmonica is so I pull it out in the key of D

ask if she would like me to play her something 
she says yes so I play a few blues riffs on automatic pilot

she laughs as passengers flow around 
mothers manage baby carriages - three tired tiered birthday cakes with burning candles 
their long lonely joyful responsibilities

the music stops 
I bag the harmonica and take the escalator down

to the train watching Hispanic woman mop the floor as 
women in furs and designer jewelry wait impatiently 
for the train to Concourse ABC...

the train zooms through tunnels like amusement park rides

with silver spinning windmills in cement walls

whirling wind tunnels

people get off and on 
a White woman with her Black husband holds her child 
his black curly hair all ringed around small ears

husband looks bored and she is not sure

in her heart
if she made the right decision 
they are flying east to see her folks
he never smiles and they share no words

Saturday
Aug312019

Spin Your Wheels

I have a spaceship here in SR.

It’s disguised as an old reliable small black Japanese made folding bike with 20” wheels and five gears.

It cost 50 bones a year ago at the used bike market across town or, if space travel is your lingo, across the universe. It’s fun to spin the wheels.

 

Considering many Khmer vehicle operators have a death wish, riding the bike is more akin to playing Russian roulette in traffic. Slow is the mantra.

While walking is the preferred way to travel especially for street photography the bike is fun.

Every kid needs a bike.

Like Laos, it’s a motorcycle culture here with many young immature zombies talking on phones while driving at high speeds.

Caution is advised. Traffic laws are nonexistent.

You do see the occasional partial roadblock by police when they stop drivers w/o helmets.

The tender gravity of kindness says howdy hi howdy ho.

Buddhist Khmer are soft and gentle. They live in the now. The advantage is being present.

The challenge for them is to focus on more than one thing at a time. This unpleasant fact is illuminated by their dopamine addiction to phones + everyone talking at once w/o comprehension. Embrace chaos.

Gadgets make great babysitters.

For the majority it’s about entertainment distractions not information.

Relationships here are like adopting a child.

All the adults need childlike supervision.

Sunday
Aug042019

Cadiz Construction

Satisfying a sublime unexplainable scientific artistic impulse, a curious human exploring Earth loved existing in a perpetual twilight zone of repairs, renovations, chisels, hammers, stone facades and dire classical solemn faced people stirring languages into new creations. 

“It has something to do with his dream,” said Omar. “Process now, product later. Hunting and gathering instincts.”

Cadiz hammer music and gypsy serenades welcomed dawn. One-eyed men roared around industrial revolutionary spirals without a building permit.

“Sound check!” yelled a construction worker waving his tools staring at stoned glazed edges. His partner hammered down morning light easier than breathing. Young boys started 50cc engines. Echoing through cold canyons machines sang like obnoxious chain saws in a forest of buildings.

A sad blond Spanish woman off to make a living juggled guilt, purple books, black purse and a white cigarette. She looked down at her stoned path, a reminder of Roman civilization.

After tearing it up to implant pipes in front of the Cathedral San Francisco, men used a thin string plumb line tied to granite stones to create an intricate stone design. One man dug dirt, another ran a portable cement mixer and another hammered stone edges to achieve the perfect geometric floral pattern.

People at a nearby cafe sat surrounded by fragmented noise. Pigeons filled the air. Pedestrians negotiated rubble. A beggar rested on church steps waiting for charitable parishioners. He had just enough energy left in his thin frame to hold out his hand. The only thing he owned was an empty stomach.

A nervous brown robed Franciscan monk in a Moorish doorway fingering his rosary watched the men slave. Sunlight glistened off a balcony along Rue Cepeda.

The streets were named for saints, explorers and shy women in their destitute languishing remedy of hope. Hope died last.

Sunday light blessings reflected off religious icons in Catholic pews. Trinity angels emerged from shadows melting into flower markets where fishmongers mixed langoustine snails, sliced escargot tourism and Super Tour buses dropped utensils on their heads.

Bowing to market forces on Sunday everyone went to church. They fed bread wafers to their immaculately dressed children. They prepared heirs to meet and greet strangers and relatives in narrow cobblestone streets with sweets for my pretty.

Soiled spoiled children escaped small cramped Spanish flats on narrow slick tiled stairs. Descended from Berber bloodlines they groaned out their childbirth, childhood, a-dolt futures where 10-12% would finish higher degrees.

A minimum return on investment (ROI) strategies in Andalucía, the poorest Spanish province raised interest rates. They were targeted for an infusion of future cash from the European Union along with austerity measures and general strikes.

To greet the mean old street citizens passed through patios filled with copious plants and entrances tiled with Moorish quasi-crystalline tiled designs. They came and went with precise regularity, discipline, stability, structure, and unwavering self control.

They escaped microscopic interior spaces strolling on esplanades and through parks lined with statues of heroes on horseback challenging blue skies with glistening sabers, marble busts, effigies and fountains of boys holding iron fish spouting water.

Off shore, oil tanker ships, military destroyers, container ships full of imported and exported goods, small sailboats, and luxury liners with gleaming white lights bow to aft sailing for Lisbon plied waves.

Waves washed the shore every day. Every morning sun-blocked retired well greased women set up camp on the Cadiz beach, playing bingo, knitting red yarn with quick fingers. Their husbands in bathing suits, clasped hands behind backs walked through surf discussing weighty matters of church and state.

A handicapped swimmer left her crutch in the sand and waded into blue water like a crab.

Old fishermen with long poles threaded small shrimp on hooks before casting from high stonewalls. Lovers in shaded bliss played with cell phones while petting each other out of passionate boredom.

In the countryside a laborer earned 5,000 pesetas a day thrashing trees. Olives fell toward mechanized presses. Virgin oil was the best. Spanish courtship took years if you desired the really good stuff, requiring the fine art of romantic seduction.

Citizens finished their tiled stair-master workout and faced the door. It was a heavy dark brown in two sections. The ground floor was originally for storage, an old warehouse. Depending on the century it was easier to throw hot oil down on Arabic or Christian invaders from a balcony.

A woman pulled her weight open and faced the crooked 3,000 year-old street hearing stones sing historical reference.

Little Wing, a word weaver stood in the shade of the Cadiz Conservatory of Music captivated by a violin, a cello, a piano and a young girl’s melancholy voice.

She was surrounded by musical, flying notes inside the roaring silence.

Silence is the loudest noise.

Invisible musicians played keys and strings. A voice punctuating air wrapped itself around solid gray stones edging liquid. It was all tonal vibration frequencies.

Wing was transformed.

Her neighbor mopped small stone paths, raised her red tool and dumped long universal string theories into dirty water as life’s stew simmered on her eternal stove. She squeezed it out.

Her white apron covered a black dress. Her black hair was pulled back in a skintight bun. She was eighty. She mopped the stone path every day of her life.

Omar the blind, watching from his temporary home was in transit, hanging out in space. He paid meticulous attention to people’s values, attitudes, beliefs, faces and intimate behavior.

He studied their honest soled solid souled shoes.

Worn heel edges indicated external and internal posture.

Weaving A Life (V1)

A Century is Nothing

Friday
Jul122019

Understory

“Learning is easy. Remembering is difficult. We have storage ability and retrieval capability. Speak memory,” whispered Zeynep in Bursa doodling with magic pens on transparent paper in her elegant universe.

He'd had heard ALL of this before.

“Ha, ha,” he laughed seeing through their world of transparent stupidity temerity fear and never ending sense of confusion and so forth.

He’s seen it in the land of five red star golden Xiamen dragons

spilling black calligraphy ink on parchment and now witnessed it in Asia Minority

where bored tired people ate grilled meat played backgammon

and twiddled retired thumbs as metro cars

carried morose living dead humans dressed in black

mirroring their soul out to industrial wastelands

on the far edge of Ankara, before returning at night

filled with heavy hand carved simple wooden

caskets spilling wasted youth from the PKK war front near Serious on the Iraq border.

 

Gravediggers and headstone carvers had steady work everyday everywhere.

Emergency crews pried a suicidal man from below Bursa subway engines after being struck by lightning.

He walked through an old expansive cemetery. It was spring. Wild flowers, white headstones, names, dates, and memories rested below tall pines and thick evergreens.

A woman sat on a grave pulling weeds. Tending soil. Nearby, her friend, sister, mother, aunt and grandmother from Asian Steppes speaking Tamashek whispered to a child, "She is cleaning the spirit entry. She is drumming remembering."

The child sang to the woman on the grave, "Auntie! Auntie," but the woman didn't say anything. She played soil like a drum. She was sad remembering her son, father, husband, uncle and grandfather. Their love and kindness.

Her tears watered red, yellow and white roses. A thorn pushed a white haired woman in a wheelchair along a path inside a humid rain forest covering 6% of the planet.

Smoke from burning bamboo and coconut leaves circled it's veins through a heart's four clamoring chambers. Smoke and love echoed from the Forest Floor to the Understory, rose to the Canopy and emerged through the Emergent.

Bird of Paradise, Eagles and Macaws lived here.

He passed chiseled stones wearing Arabic script.

There was a quick explosion of metal on stone. A man with a sledgehammer pounded a collection of memories around a grave. He paused, removed fragments and slammed his sledgehammer again.

The sun went into hiding. It rained. A woman played musical notes on Earth.

Kathmandu, Nepal

Friday
Oct052018

Moroccan Girl Dances

The Moroccan girl with wild brown hair tied back is not on the train leaving a white station. 

She sits on her haunches. Her bare feet dig soil gripping small earth pebbles as exposed root structures dance with toes. 

Her toes are extended connections where her shadow lies forgotten. It spreads upon vegetables. They prowl toward late winter light.


She is not on the red and brown train zooming past green fields where her sheep in long woolen coats eat their way through pastures after a two-year drought. She is inside green with her wild brown hair pulled tight. 

She is not on the train hearing music, eating dates, reading a book, talking with friends or strangers, sleeping along her passage, or dreaming of a lover. She does not scan faces of tired, trapped people in orange seats impatiently waiting for time to deliver them to a desert Red City. 

Her history’s desert reveals potentates sharpening swords, inventing icon free art, alphabets, algebra, practicing equality, creating five pillars of Islam, navigation star map tools, breaking wild stallions, building tiled adobe fortresses, selling spices, writing language.


She is not on the train drinking fresh mint tea or consulting a pocket sized edition of the Qur'an. She does not kneel on her Berber carpet five times a day facing Mecca.

She does not wear stereo earphones listening to music imported from another world, a world where people treasure their watches. Where controlling time is their passion for being prompt and responsible citizens giving their lives meaning.

She is not on the train and not in this language the girl with her wild brown hair tied back with straw or leather or stems of wild flowers surrounding her with fragrances.

She is surrounded by orange blossom perfume beyond rolling hills cut by wet canyons and yellow and green fields where her black eyes penetrate white clouds in blue sky. 

Her open heart hears her breath explore her long shadow, causing it to ripple with her shift. 

Her toes caress soil. She is lighter than air, lighter than eagle feathers in High Atlas Mountains. She smells the Berber tribal fire heating tea for a festival where someone wears a goatskin cape and skull below stars. 

It is cold. Flames leap from branches like shooting stars into her eyes.

Someone plays music. It is the music of her ancestors, her nomadic people. She sways inside the hypnotic rhythm of her ancestral memory. 

She is not on the train. 

She is inside a goat skull moving her hoofs through soil. She dances through fields where she danced as a child seeing red and yellow fire calling all the stars to her dance and she is not on the train.

Weaving A Life (V4)

Burma

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