The Bamboo Gallivant

         I fell from where time and space dared to dream of creation and evolution. Landing on the shore of experience I immediately became one with the beach as the wind clung to me like a sheet of spandex cellophane. Memories were knocked from my spirit with confusion only a newborn child with Alzheimer’s could reckon with. Only the morning star reminded me of whence I came in a strange familiar way. I walked proudly to this glorious karmic bamboo stick that floated in from the sea with the grace of a chocolate Labrador. When I grasped the bamboo scepter I knew this is what the god’s meant as fate. I raised the bamboo wand to the moon and only in Valhalla did they admire the way my hair, much obliged to Thor, stayed out of my eyes. I sliced open the earth that lay beneath me like a blind surgeon painting a self-portrait. When I was done carving the sand with my one and only bamboo paintbrush only a couple of skinny-dipping dolphins and a murder of crow got to witness the masterpiece that lay exposed on the world canvas. Without apology the waves of the unforgiving sea reached for my magnum opus and covered it like wax on a telescope.



         I drifted aimlessly along a Styrofoam beach littered with sand until I hitched a ride with a Priest, a Rabbi, and a Polish immigrant on a three-legged donkey named Jack. Jack had lost one of his legs in an elephant stampede when the renowned Cirque du Beach tents collapsed. The whole crash was the result of an elite group of Ringmasters who, instead of maintaining the tent poles, dumped all the Circus’s money into monopolizing on the sunscreen lotion that the tourists all relied on so much; like the yin relies on the yang. They jacked the prices up so high on the lotion that the tourists quit going to the circus. It was tragically depressing, leaving many circus performers out of work, which resulted in circus animals and sun burnt carnies running amuck among the drying kelp. I never went to the circus myself due to the fact that the main attraction was a bee keeper that rode on a unicycle while cloaked in nothing but bees, and I am deathly afraid of bees. In fact, the whole idea of bees let loose on the beach was what convinced us to head down south.



         So the Priest, the Rabbi and the Polish immigrant and I rode Jack the donkey down south of the border. As it turned out they all couldn’t speak, but we had the best of times that mute misfits could have. The four of us made due by taking turns drawing my faithful bamboo bow across the remnants of a morin khuur, made from the bone of the fourth leg of our benevolent ass. The music wasn’t bad but our quartet was a little one sided.

"Oh Lord of this world, if I only had a peso for every righteously-paved road of blasphemy we traveled, I might have been able to buy my way out of that heavenly abyss of chaotic tranquility".

         But we weren’t very prosperous vagabonds, and the Powers-that-be embezzled our loot before our tongues saw anything that resembled porridge. Seven Spanish seals, which were being broken by an insecure lion tamer that lost his job in the circus, named our band Los Cuatro Burro Hombres Del Apocolipsis. Unfortunately I had to leave my comrades when the Grim Reaper himself tapped me on the shoulder and kindly asked if I wouldn’t mind playing a game of death. I’m always up for a challenge so I told the Priest, the Rabbi, and the Polish immigrant that I hoped the joke turned out all right, and they silently galloped away in an offbeat cantor.



         I asked the Angel of Death what he wanted to play and without a word he started swinging his unyielding scythe at me. He knocked me down again and again but I was quick to my feet with my loyal bamboo Shinai, like a samurai making love to the art of Kendo. We fought with the dedication of chickens in Tijuana for ten tiring years working our way back north to my home beach, then I told him the punch line of my voiceless holy gang and he laughed so hard his stomach ached, so I poked him in the eye with my bamboo saber and escaped through the undertow with the grunion.



         I stayed lost at sea for quite some time until I got seasick, or maybe it was homesick, regardless, I caught a ride back to the beach with the high tide where I found the mother of my not yet conceived offspring. Her innocent lips were slurring Kubla Khan until I interrupted her like a man from Porlock, and in return she seduced me like a femme fatale snake charmer until the sun exposed our colorful desires of addiction on that black and white beach. Interestingly, just then, a certain bamboo stick floated to my bare feet and while I was distracted my scarlet-minded girl ran away with my empty sandals. She blew me a kiss as if she was Mata Hari in the firing line, and like broken mirrored dominoes set up to knock over a saltshaker I was then stung by a bee, and I hate bees! I cannot fathom and yet I will always understand why my façade of a concubine chose to fritter away as a midnight cowgirl piggybacking the simian of dipsomania in the violent serenity of a junkyard on the street corner of 65th and Loneliness.



         As the wind carried the ashes of the late sandal-thieving painted woman out to meet the salinity of the air that rose from the sea, I held palaver with a prophetic surfer who rode to shore on a patchouli breeze.

“Don’t worry my brother,” he prophesied. “For when you have lost the time, you will stumble upon a dwarf with a feathery tongue, and out of the sea a nymph as pure as honey will be saved by overcoming your deepest fears. Cries of ecstasy will show validity of her authentic virtues and she will shine her dancing brave fragility upon your gloomy map.”

         His words were as clear to me as Aurora Borealis in the noonday sun. He passed the bamboo peace pipe to me and I smoked him and his patchouli-stained skin up in one gargantuan toke. Then for no reason at all, save for entertainment value, I stabbed my dependable bamboo sword into the sand. I called out far and wide;

“The one who can pull this bamboo sword from the firm grasp of this beach shall be my one and only son.”



         Cart wheeling down the beach like tumbleweed in the night I came upon a small boy browned from the sun. The boy looked at me with a mirrored smile.

“What am I supposed to do with this Dad?”

To my surprise he had the bamboo stick in his small perfect hands.

“I don’t know Son,” I stammered. “Why don’t you go play fetch with that dog over there.”

         So, with my encouraging words, my pride and joy ran off like a Mormon on a mission. The dog however, was on a mission of his own and he ran away with my son’s inherited bamboo relic. The secretion of clear emotions that flowed from his large selfish eyes was enough to turn a heart of coal into a carbon bomb ripping through the Northern Boreal Forest. So we hunted the dog down and put one of those funny looking cones around his neck, you know the ones they make so the dog can’t lick his balls. Our thundering triumphant laughs were so loud that the big bang ceased expanding for a brief moment to tip his hat to us.



         I taught the motherless boy how to make a fire by rubbing two bamboos sticks together and we sat in the warmth of our ability to tame the most violent force known to this beach. As we tended the fire with our bamboo pokers, the sparks reflected off of his eyes like an Alchemist in the days of old. I knew that one day my son’s bamboo kaleidoscope would mature into a bamboo telescope and that he would not be able to resist the magic of the horizon it promised him. I taught him all that I knew and when he finally did leave on his own bamboo gallivant I realized that it was he who was the teacher and I the pupil. The lesson was love…and patience, lots and lots of patience. As his shadow grew shorter while he walked toward the rising sun I cheered;

“Godspeed my boy,” even though I didn’t know what that meant, I felt important saying it.



         One evening as I was trolling with my bamboo fishing rod, I tripped over a homeless midget who was dining elegantly on a half cooked pigeon he had roasted with a magnifying glass. Not knowing what to say at such a site I asked him if he knew what time it was. He just shook his head as he plucked a pigeon feather from his tongue and pointed his greasy finger to the purple and orange hue of the setting sun that ravaged the deep blue sea. It was perhaps the greatest sunset ever recorded on that beach, but I wasn’t able to enjoy it because I spotted the most beautiful woman I had ever seen drowning in a tide pool surrounded by bees. I urged the midget to save her but he said he was afraid of bees and then he wondered off. Realizing it was up to me I quickly overcame my fear of bees and dove in to save her. The bees were stinging me all over as I dragged her from the vicious waters. When I had her safe she slapped me in the face and then she made some weird buzzing sound and all the bees covered her naked body like a gown. As it turned out she was the famous beekeeper who used to ride a unicycle in the circus, although someone had stolen her unicycle. Furthermore, she was not drowning but was bathing when I yanked her out of the sea, but she said my gesture was genuine and no one had gotten that close to her before because of the bees.



         I slipped in and out consciousness due to dehydration from the multiple bee stings I suffered, but the Queen of the bees quenched my thirsty libido with her honey-dripping id. Just as the patchouli soothsayer said, her lips tasted of honey and she entwined herself to my long shadow. Or did I bind her to it? Or maybe the fires in the sky welded us to be classically blameless. Either way, her tears shed in rapture when she caressed my bamboo rod with her forgotten hands and dubbed me her knight in shining amour. Songs of warmth tangoed on the cheeks of my perfectly faulty mask and somewhere the universe gave approval by being unexplainable. Intoxicating laughter far outweighed the stars in the heavens, if memory serves my premonitions well. She didn’t question why I had no shoes and I didn’t question why she had no unicycle, but we seemed to find comfort in the obscurity of our mysterious pasts and all the suns and all the moons, try if they so desire, could not part our perpetually deteriorating souls.



         I strolled through a castle made of sand as the sky had a touch of gray. The men bowed and the women curtsied as I waltzed past the gallows. I was greeted by three long lost friends that informed me that Jack, the three legged donkey, was doing quite well down in Mexico entertaining tourists. My honey-nymph handed me my bamboo scepter as we climbed into a papyrus throne. Lyrics poured from the kisser of my queen as she crowned me with a sombrero fit for a gangster of limerick. She then said to me;

“You are cooler than the coolest of cool things, Milord!”

And I echoed in return, “You are finer than the finest of fine things, Milady!”

Nobody listened as I made a poetic toast of enlightenment, “My wonderful people” I said, "be kind to your neighbors, so you can ask them for favors!”

The minstrels cheered and the poets questioned their very own existence. As I stared out into the masses of obliterate memories, I thought of what I had done on this psychosomatic beach; I was an anonymous artist, I had good times with great friends, even if they were a joke, aren’t we all? I was a death-defying warrior armed with nothing more than a bamboo punch line. I was a barefooted broken-hearted fool left alone on liquefied stepping-stones and later a chivalrous knight to a famous beekeeper with lips of honey. Most importantly I was a father, and finally I was now a cool poetic king of nothingness!



         Using my bamboo cane, I now come to the end of this vital beach of counterfeit delusion. A tear of the knowledge of experience rolls down my weathered cheek. I know I will miss this beach. I can only hope that another beach somewhere out across the infinite abyss awaits my deepest thoughts and emotions. I have hope that all our paths will somehow meet again, but now I must go. I write in the sand one last time with my beloved bamboo pen of imaginary creative certainty. My brittle hand is shaky. The gold and rose sunset reflects off of my ancient eyes as I write two words in the sand. I think of my cremation to come, nothing too epic please, a simple bamboo torch to light these bones of mine will do just fine, or bury me here under these two unwanted, yet respected words I am scratching into the sand. Respected, because if there is to be a new beginning, another dawning, then these two words are as explicit as a bugler playing taps. These two words that my hands stall to write as if they were in a Mexican stand off with a black rose. These two words…THE END.