Heart Monitor - TLC 45

On the Metro he sat across from a young boy, his mother and father. Father’s hands were hard calloused.  

The boy smiled, fascinated by whirling flashing light prisms. His father pulled up his son’s shirt. On his chest were two plastic suction cups and a machine the size of a deck of cards. Ace high. The heart monitor measured his beats, his life rhythm regularity. His father checked the display, saw the cups were secure and dropped the shirt.

“It is a machine for my son. It helps him,” he said with tired eyes. “We got it at Hospital A. Doctors said it was essential for his life.”

The boy and Lucky smiled, cupping hands around eyes scanning the universe, explorers with telescopic magnifying lenses.

He’s a happy kid. Not afraid of a thing like Tran my five-year old Vietnamese friend in a Da Nang hospital missing a leg after stepping on a landmine teaching me Courage.

“We should all be so fortunate,” said adults streaming sad life tales, “Oh pity me. I am so, so tired.”

Talk to the kid. He’ll tell you how tired feels.

Echoes of umbrella digger stone music faded near young lovers huddled on benches and a beggar dreaming on tarmac.

Children with sacred eyes on magical adventures balanced on silver tracks escaping dark tunnels. They disappeared into wild winter aspen forests as two black-shawled women negotiated muddy paths through foliage waiting for spring to thaw out relationships with nature.

Rabbits running in ditches sang The Season of the Witch.

Living breathing bipedal accidents with a pulse craved a place to happen with insight, precision and brevity. Pearl letters played out on a fragile necklace of water-beaded molecules inside an instant in eternity.

Time is a strung-out pimp looking for a fix and exit.

The Language Company

Shit Detector - TLC 44

Lucky explored cobbled Turkmen streets alleys and dead ends.

Mothers buried in headscarves observing street etiquette extended manicured necks beyond balconies. They swept, mopped, stirred apartment dust, shaking molecules over blood stained escarpments.

They married consecrated relatives during fifty-minute Encounters designed to use the target language in the context of remembering. The thrill of remembering in Technicolor imprinted new linguistic impressions on synapses watching Pay For View.

Learning is easy. Remembering is difficult. Use it or lose it.

Silent ivory piano keys waited for inspiration’s fingers. Feeling tension, point, counterpoint, hammer strings and resonance, chromatic silence whispered, do not go gentle into the good night. Rage against dying light. Solitary notes of forgotten strumpets wailed across an abyss ignoring civilization’s discontent.

Creased faces ironed red roses petals. Faces eating masks embedded themselves on blank pages in Zeynep’s black notebook. “I don’t know which of us wrote this,” she said.

Two shy Turkish women with beautiful faces and humongous rear end collisions after eating a full course meal of self-pity and loathing buried ancestors in a tomato based culture.

Water exploded off iridescent pools as happy hour birds swimming nowhere in particular heard homo-sapiens shift erotic labia gears while assembling French cars at an eco-friendly green plant in a Bursa industrial zone.

“Were you punished for being a dreamer?” said Zeynep.

“No, I survived the tyranny. My family understood my peripatetic nature. They respected my need for solitude, creativity and independence to a point. I received sadistic whippings with a fishing pole by my polio-diseased mother trapped in her karmic wheelchair and beaten with a leather barber’s strap by father for insolvent insubordination. Welt city. He made me eat dirt when he came home from work if the floor wasn’t clean enough. Now you know why I love linguistic gardening. I shut down my feelings. Mother and father demonstrated hard love in a perverse abusive way.”

“I see,” said a blind beggar.

“Wipe your glasses with what you know,” said Zeynep.

“I was born to be a poet like a bird is born to be a musician,” said Lucky.

“Sing high, sing low, sweet chariot.”

“Brilliant.”

“In finishing school we learned to say fascinating instead of bullshit,” said Zeynep.

“You have a well developed built-in shit detector.”

“That’s the fucking truth. Everyone needs a good shit detector like writers and landmine survivors in Cambodia and Laos. Truth is a value-based meaning factor. Can you create believable documentary fiction-from memory?”

“It appears. So.”

Lucky and Zeynep passed an imaginary double identity theory at Oz-man Homogenized Gazing Metro station. Two gravediggers in long black overcoats carrying umbrella projectiles stepping into unknown futures stabbed cement in cadence.

The Language Company

Public relations - TLC 40

The other TLC cranium belonged to the Director of Natives. From the Big Apple core with a PR background she recruited them, interviewed them, hired them, trained them and centered them. She was off center. She took orders from two daughters managing her, accountants, center service managers, personal tutors and eloquent savages.

At a teacher training class in Constantinople chaired by a Spanish princess burning witches at an Inquisition running behind schedule because nobody knew what the fuck was going on the Director kept asking Lucky, “Where’s your watch? Where’s your watch?”

He put an hourglass on the table. He turned it over addressing the gravity of the situation. Sand dancing through time sang, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.”

Everyone creates his/her sandcastle.

The Director achieved her position because the owners knew she’d cause no turbulence during their ambitious tricycle. Training wheels had rusty mudguards and broken spokes.

“We have time,” said a native to foreign explorers in rain forests, “but you have the machines to controls time. Time is free.”

Leo, the Chief of Unemployed Cannibals showed white invaders the alarm clock strangling him, “Time is an abstract infinite concept. What’s strange is what’s going on inside time. In your world when you retire they give you a gold watch and not enough time to wind it. Life’s little joke. Here we have all the time in the world.”

The Language Company

Invent a God

Broken glittering glass edges reflecting an elegant universe magnified the tears of an Iraqi girl burying her parents in a white shroud of cloth, an old flag of final surrender.

Tree leaves blasted green to deep yellow and brown. They flew into a river. They gathered on boulders clogging the Rio Guadalete and dolomite waterfalls. One leaf did a lot of damage. The river needed cleaning.

"See," said the Grand Inquisitor ringing his broken Spanish bell, "it’s all possible. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted if there is no God."

"Let’s invent a God," said a pregnant nun supporting her nose habit. "We need reason and faith to believe in a higher power."

"Reason and faith are incompatible," said a logic board filled with circular flux reactors.

"Look," said Little Nino, "I found a compass and it works. The needle is pointing to magnetic north. This may help us. I am a compass without a needle.”

 Ahmed read the instructions. "Great Scott! It says one sharp line of description is better than any number of mundane observations."

"You don’t need a compass in the land of dreams," said a mother. "We need all the direction we can handle."

"Maybe one direction is enough," said a cartographer.

"If you need a helping hand," said another, "look at the end of your wrist."

"O wise one, tell us another," cried a disembodied voice.

"Ok, how about this," someone said. "Our days of instant gratification are a thing of the past."

"Looks like everything is a thing of the past," observed a child sifting dust particles at Ground Earth.

"You’re wiser than your years."

"That’s an old saw with a rusty blade cutting through desire, anger, greed, ignorance and suffering."

"Yes," said a child, "there are two kinds of suffering."

"What are they?" asked another orphan.

"There’s suffering you run away from and suffering you face,” said a child arranging leaves on blank pages inside her black book.

A Century is Nothing

Defrost your imagination - TLC 32

“Today is a good day to be empty. Practice 10,000 breaths until you disappear,” said a Lhasa monk petting a Sumatran tiger facing extinction by Malaysian villagers burning down forests to develop cosmetic palm oil exports.

“Yes, not too detached and not too sentimental,” said Zeynep sitting at a restaurant table creating surrealistic art in her notebook. She drew stick figures with wild forested hair eating purple paper mache houses beneath a startled orange sun as disoriented Bursa talking animals crammed in spinach, green salad, tomatoes, grilled meat, rice and beans.

Across town on the TLC teachers’ apartment balcony sentry ants alerted the tribe to food. They marched from a drainpipe in single file, climbed over the edge of a plastic pot discovering good dirt. Teams fanned out sensing discarded muesli particles.

A mottled wingless insect living in bamboo detected worker ants approaching. Insect couldn’t fly. It scurried up a thin stalk to a green leaf blending in. Its feelers cleaned dirt off head and shoulders sham poop.

A gravedigger eating a hazelnut and strawberry jam sandwich on whole grain bread with grade A black olives harvested from Mudanya orchards nestled tight against Marmara Sea soil spoke to the insect as ants preparing their final assault gathered below the leaf.

“I need to move you.”

“Thanks. If I’m discovered I’ll perish. What do you suggest?”

“We use a leaf. Climb on it. I will let it go, floating over the garden. It will cushion your fall from grace. You will have a soft landing and better than a 51% chance of survival. Ground zero with better cover, food and dew you understand?”

“Ok. Thanks. 51% is better than zero.”

“You sound like an investment banker. Don’t mention it.”

“I need a new adventure.”

“Don’t we all. Here you go.”

Digger did what he had to do. Found a broad brown leaf. The insect climbed on. He released the vein-lined parachute into thin air. It floated. It landed on a huge exploding yellow sunflower.

“Goodbye,” sang the insect, “you extended my little life. I’ve survived to walk another day.”

The gravedigger sang, “Happy trails...to you...until we meet again.”

The Language Company

 

Another day in Mandalay