Hot Spring

Where in our life do we find magic? I explain this as the act of creation we do each day but there are times that I've come across events that are true representations of a communion with fundamental forces. I recently moved to Denver from Virginia/DC I arrived here greeted by my best friend and new roommate, the first day here went swimmingly and fun, much cavorting was done. My friend Scott presented a great introduction to my new home. A day later I found that my friend Sarah would be arriving into town from DC on a nation wide tour to raise awareness about genetically modified organisms we are eating. Coincidence is one thing but I took her arrival to Denver nearly at the same time as me as a particularly good omen. I see all my friends as being gifted with parts of the universe and among them Sarah is gifted with the power of creation. She builds her world around her seemingly bending it to her will, that is not among my gifts so I am in awe of her power. We got in contact and made plans to meet at a hot spring resort half an hour outside Denver in the town of Idaho Springs. I texted her and she called me, in her tone I could understand that there was only a thin amount of time she could share with me. When I arrived to the small resort I located her and three of her friends in one of the hot spring baths, they were all nude and I became so. We lounged and gabbed, touched base and told stories. It was relaxing and bawdy.

All of us are not hedonistic but often indulgent, I would not be surprised if more than one person present had not at one time participated in an orgy of some kind. What happened at the climax of our time in the hot spring was not an orgy, it was expressly not sexual or even erotic. It begun as back rubs and massages, laughter and conversation. Nude bodies occupying a warm bath of natural hot springs. The amplitude rose as each person took care of another simply applying hands to tired muscles and enjoying the heat. The waves of our experience synchronized at a certain moment and before me there was a scene I accept as magic. Five adults naked, three men and two women. One woman became the center and she rose laying back on the water supported by the others as they massaged her and each other no more talking and no more division. She is beautiful and in another context her wet naked form would elicit base hunger but the moment was beyond sexuality which is often thought to be base and basic, a facet of fecundity and life. The moment went deeper it touched on the infinite joy of being alive, of heat and buoyancy before bodies became objects of desire and they were simply vessels for energy.

The moment ended as naturally as it had come into being and we separated. The conversation became about the upcoming day and the pool that the resort offered, about our trek to the next place. I try to recognize fragments of that type of energy each day but it is entirely fulfilling when such moments crystallize. 

It was the time of nothing, three months of staying in bed not lifting a finger to help myself.
Not many people in my life have told me that I couldn't do things, most have told me that I could that I had it in me to achieve and they expected much from me.This did not help, it did not spur me on to achieve or to meet expectations because people want things from you when you give them things. I realized early on that if I met an expectation or worse yet exceeded it then that would simply inspire people to have more expectations and so on and on. Nothing satisfies them, and I guess the problem is that nothing satisfies me. The absence of things the infinite inertia of standing still, not standing, not floating, not.

What>?

That there is a meteor, a rock that is burning hot. That is why it is producing heat and light.

Nobody knows why this is. It is a mystery that may never be discovered. We can only look up and wonder. Why does energy travel between particles and change the structure changing mass.

At the cliff's Edge

What happened today was that my friend Alex called to ask if I could pick him up from the shop he had taken his car to. The car would not start, it turned out to be an old battery. He told me that he hadn't changed his battery in seven years. So it made sense.

Morality exercise

I felt an itch ever since I listened to this program regarding Morality and its origins. Mind you that what I'm am addressing occurs with in the first 5 minutes of the show Radiolab. My discomfort started early with the mental problem of the track workers. In the description of the problem we are told that what we have are two similar situations where the sacrificing of one person will ensure the life of five. The difference is in distance, in the first instace the sacrifice is far away in the next he is next to you. This is not the same situation, that distance changes everything and the question changes so that you are no longer asking if one life is worth multiple lives but if multiple lives are worth YOUR life. In the following "man on the street" interviews people predictably stated that they would kill the long distance sacrifice and were repulsed by the neighbor sacrifice but could not explain the difference or why it made any. The difference is that your neighbor has the same choice as you. Your life is in danger. In the first part of the problem the single trackworker is far away and can't deffend his life or sacrifice yours, in the second part the question of few vs. many is being pondered by two people at the same time. The question has changed to; Why are you not sacrifcing your own life? To save five you need to sacrifice one life but because of the distance there are now two choices as to the instrument. Do you jump and use your own life? or do you use someone elses? Still we forgett that the other person is in the same situation. The only solution is to do nothing. To preserve your life, both of you make that decission because as we saw everyone makes that decission. Two lives vs Five lives, that is the new question. To save the five lives someone has to sacrifice theirs. You will notice that the response is emotional because emotions are thought processes that happen too fast for us to be concious of it. Your brain literaly pulled all the information, debated outcomes, weighed options, and came to a logical (what ever that means) conclusion. Instead of a lengthy monolougue you get a sensation. Or minds are smarter than we give them credit for.

Ubik

The third Philip K. Dick book that I will have read. As with any of his books to describe the plot of this one is futile, things get complicated very fast. It is in this book that I noticed a similarity Dick has with Borges. Both authors include points in their stories where as a reader, definitely as a character, you have to decide when exactly did you go through the looking glass.

satellite

You are the earth
Beautiful complex 75% water
I spin in high orbit
Barely caressing your atmosphere
Barely surviving my transit
Parched lips longing to taste you
Crushed lungs straining for your scent
Frozen skin burning for your touch
Watching all of you pass out of reach

I want to burn
To dive across your dark skies
Silky air turn to fire by friction
Plummet and crash
Explode as I push into soil

I want to be free
To speed and break the attraction
Hurl myself away from your gravity
Into a dark realm of possibilities
Where the stars shine distant and welcoming

Patria

Today there was an article in El Diaro (a Bolivian newspaper from La Paz) about a movement to slow and eventually stop the importation of used clothing into Bolivia in order to support local garment industry. This has been one of the that get under my skin.
As I remember when I lived in Bolivia and when I visit, used foreign clothing is ubiquitous. There are Aymara and Quechua people high in the Altiplano surrounded by the Andes, living in mud houses and scratching a living from the arid earth that sport dusty suit jackets, dirty polo shirts, and other garments that confound me. How did they get a hold of that item, why are they wearing it?! I asked. The answer is simple an enterprising person in the US gathers up the tons of discarded clothing we produce and sends it down to South America for a tidy profit.
The clothes are cheap and carry a little of the city/American mystique with them. So people drape themselves in garbage.

no object

confesions crashing against a cliff
against your inavility to change.
what kind of sea is my love
that after years
so many years of crashing
it can't bear your flesh
worse than stone
no granite like the lack of place
for me in your heart

Ahh but the answer lies in the sky
it is but to move the moon
to change the atraction of this world
moving the planet
tilt away from your continent

Patria

Yesterday as I listened to the radio my eyes tiered up as I was filled with a great sadness and anger. I was sitting in Rt. 123 traffic on my way to my part time job, listening to Market Place on npr; they were doing segment on immigration and how the current system came about and the consequences for US demographics and the rest of the world. I sat and listened, smoked a cigarette, watched the moving walls of SUVs around me, tried to absorb the statistics and anecdotes coming from my speaker. Every one wants to come to the US for a better life... and I'm here waiting in traffic so I can work 5 more hours on top of the time I already spent in the cubicle, contemplating the cell phone calls i'm expecting for the weekend bar scene.
As my car idles and fumes I think of the black oil and Africans trying to get into the United states. I take another drag of my cigarette breathing in the sweat of migrant workers cultivating the crop. I reach for my phone to touch the same plastic a Chinese factory worker placed in a box as he contemplated how lucky the phone was and how much he wanted to follow it on it's transpacific voyage. I hear the crunch of their houses and standards of living underneath my ass when I stop at a drive through and order in Spanish. Tomorrow I will go by Starbucks and perpetuate a Dutch English tradition of subjugation and exploitation now half a millennia in practice.
I could have been one of the people they interviewed, my parents escape Bolivia's hardships and in the middle of becoming a US citizen: College educated, paying taxes, transracially dating. We all left behind our homes, my parents and coworkers pine for that land. Having grown up mostly here I am somewhat removed from that pain but for me the news and history of all these people escaping homelands to join the rape is infuriating. How can we blame ourselves though? We all saw the lifeblood sucked straight from the ground, straight from the brow of the campesino and sent up a slick feeding tube directly North. So we followed our own blood and sweat so we could stop being victims and start being victimizers. It all seems so innocuous, so simple to live inside this country with playstations, vending machines, central air, MRIs, ICBMs, cars, planes, cheap thrills, and easy addictions.
No matter how "fair trade" "living wage" "ecologically friendly" we are each time we buy a cup of coffee, not just starbucks any coffee, or fill up a gas tank to go to a rally, hell ride the fucking metro and tell me the difference, it is another crack of the whip to our homelands. As long as any one of us lives here and partakes of this lifestyle we are killing and raping and murdering.
But it really isn't all that bleak. There is hope. There is the rising awareness in Latin America and East and Central Africa, some parts of Asia. Strength is building, ideas are coming together, action is planned and in a generation or two all that we covet and all our sins of betrayal will be cleansed by fire. The North American continent will tear itself apart and in its death throws it will slash and claw, scheme and lie to keep istself alive but it will be too late. The US and Europe, and even China will starve.

Sunday

I went to Kings Dominion today and rode the rides. my favorite is the volcano, it dispenses with the clank clank of the nerve wretching assent of most rollercoasters. Instead only moments after securing your seat and a short distance later woooshhh. the first time I saw it the image of the flycycles of Return of the Jedi was immidiate. how freaking cool is that? straight into the first turn you don't go down you don't go right or left you are hurled straight up into a sweet dogfight manouver. and then out comes the banana with corckscrew after corckscrew screaming upside down. and then dive into a stop that forces Gs through your body slaming the chest into the hard harness.
rode that like four times.

The Table

always diving out of the sun
into the moon and into the night
that is where we have our fun

where is the monkey
where is the sprite
where is the jiggle that makes my night

every 3000 miles

jeans
no belt
bronze belly skin
loose cotton shirt
clinging
straining
underneath the car
unscrewing
twisting out the bolt
writhing aside
as the oil
dark and sinous
pours out
filling the pan
dirty hands
greasy streaks
sweaty lips
underneath the car

use to be

why is it that I stand
when you call and demand
for my ear or my hand

at least it used to be

but there is no need for me
your wounds are fast in healing
and your self is fast approaching
becoming whole and free

what use is there for crutches
for beards and mustaches
when kisses
and touches
are simple to obtain

the stares and sidelong glances
start to impair
the sense that all is fair

the poems
undo the illusion
that no one gets hurt

and when nothing can be salvaged
from an accounting of what is healthy
and what is not
what questions does one wonder
in the heavy night

the only answer I know
is to let absence and silence
do their soft eroding
on a love neglected and scorned

wind

the wonderful part
the difficult part
is riding the seasonal winds

summer with gales of laughter and vice
feeding and pealing forgetting the price

autumn's gusts simply chill
each step seems up a hill

spring breezes saunter back
days are simple and slack

winter blows cruel storms
frozen wasted on all fronts

in each season I find a home
flying my kite
holding you tight

sound

where is that sound
the one that makes me smile
the one that drives me wild
a chant a rant a ratatatat of grins and giggles
to my ear your voice is candy sprinkles

I try to contain it
but it ends up spilled

I have to demand
for my cup to be filled

with musings and news
of dead things in this world
with jokes and snorts
of critters and dorks

no squeak is too high
no shout too loud
they all make me sigh
where is that sound