fingers of forest interspersed with fingers of pasture -- the hidden & the exposed -- two kinds of danger: being seeable & being unable to see. is the mind fearful of being exposed the same as the mind fearful of being confined?
Dusty trails & caravans.
Traders & spice
slow walking
toward coin.
A thousand merchants,
a thousand tongues,
& lingua franca confusion.
Dazed & dreary
every eve.
Wired each morn.
Sleeping under starry skies
with long silences between
bleating goats or screeching hawks.
Dog, companion & security guard,
barks only when someone approaches,
and there is so much space
to lend wide berth.
Silk Road vagabonds
walk the path alone:
exploiting and dropping
opportunities at will.
The sweep of trees
forms a mandala.
The eye roams over it,
looking for a center
that doesn't exist.
Those roving eyes
rove & repeat:
caught in an
infinite loop.
And I wonder what hides
in the arc of trees?
What monsters mimic
the sinuous spine
of those pointy trees?
Whose eyes catch
the fine light,
reflecting back a
burning bright-yellow?
What lives unseen?
What flows unbidden?
What empties out,
but returns?
and returns?
and returns...
driving due west
at day's end,
the sun too low for visors,
an angry sun,
flaring in one's sunglasses.
the interminable tick-tocks
it takes for the sun to drop
down behind the mountains.
oh, how one wishes
the sun would disappear,
even though, having driven all day,
there's something demoralizing
about knowing you require a couple
more hours of dark drive time
before pulling into a motel.
such a big country,
so much West remains.
A long time ago,
I listened to the audiobook of
Kerouac's "On the Road."
In that format,
I became aware of how often
Kerouac used the word
"rickety."
Almost as aware as I became
of how often Twain uses
the N-word in Huck Finn
when I unwisely listened to
that audiobook while driving
through downtown Atlanta
with my windows rolled down.
I'm now reading Hunter Thompson's
"Kingdom of Fear," and I've become
aware that Thompson had a love
of the word "gibberish" almost on par
with Kerouac's love of "rickety."
And I think about how much beautiful
rickety gibberish I've read from those
authors, and what a fine
thing it is if one can write
rickety gibberish that stands up
under its own weight.
Stationed in East Anglia,
I remember layered fog,
fog so thick one couldn't
see past the hood's end,
but, given a slight rise,
one could see all the way
down the runway -- as if
it was a cloudless full moon eve.
As one might expect of an airbase,
(having been built around a flat runway)
there wasn't much topography.
But sometimes life is like that:
a tiny rise in perspective
allows one to see the world clearly,
but a minor dip puts one in a
soup of unfathomability.
Walking the ruins
of some old Buddhist
university,
I entered a chamber,
and found myself
confronting a Buddha,
its head obscured by
a bolt of sunlight.
I thought it might be like
one of those Angkor Wat
crop tops from when Pol Pot
had the heads chopped off
all the Buddhas to make
some quick cash.
But the head was intact,
just blotted out by blinding light,
and I blinked my way into sight
of that serene face.
Sun, Rain, Wind,
& other agents of wear
that tear down ancient stones
one grain at a time,
eroding symbolic rocks
carved with symbols
that meant something
to people in days of yore.
And they mean something
to people today,
but whether those meanings
match is another question...
Because our understanding
of past perspectives
is ever eroding:
just like those rocks,
but - unlike rock -
thoughts and beliefs
were wisps writ in a
malleable art: language.
We cling to traditions & lineages,
but everything is erased.
The forest is parted by a line of asphalt. Speeding cars send leaves fluttering. Everything that crosses that road is imperiled by someone's need to get nowhere quickly.
brain numb. voice dumb. a wicked harmonic builds in the core - tuned to volcanically vibrant skies. flash fires of feeling riffle through the body. the tone dials into a whine that bursts into a scream.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 