a shift

Elf asked Orphan. Can you tell me in 25 words or less about your brief time in eastern Anatollia?

I can try. I open my head, heart and mouth. Do they count in the 25?

It's ok. 

Their hospitality is sublime.

Below the surface they love guns and passive-aggressive attitudes. Adolescent macho males in black cradle submachine guns. 

You see worried sullen faces. Depression is served cold with anxiety.

We are worried about money, said one citizen. We have BIG shiny watches, fancy clothes, meat and no sex. We live in fear and ignorance. 

Cultures in which food is scarce, people have more open sex, but dream of food. Whereas cultures in which food is abundant, sex is more taboo, and people yet dream of sex.

You exceeded your word limit, said Elf. Cut the shit. Start walking.

face it

i love everything that flows.

humor and curiosity are the two most important components of intelligence.

create and live w/o fear, shame or humiliation.

thread follows needle.

i am an iceberg. what you don't see is fascinating.

memory is desire satisfied.

social intelligence

yes, social intelligece said to confidence

we learn and love. we leave, leaves fall, seasons adjust.

we know what we don't know. this is wisdom.

look, don't think, said a girl smelling leaves

in the department of the forest.

orchids blossomed fragrant melodies of lost time

where women gathered their solace

between here and now.

if your legs get heavy

walk with your heart.

one day

one morning i assembled my tools.

scrubbing and scouring my day away. see my hand.

two men talked in the market.

one said, i lost today.

what do you mean? you made 3,000,000 lira today.

yes but i lost one day.

ice Girl, 6

Living in China, Leo carried buckets of night soil or shit. It was the price he paid for questioning Authority.

-why, do we have to read Mao’s little red book, it’s mush for pigs, he asked Authority.

-because you are a tool of the state, said Authority.

-this shit stinks.

-here, said Authority. Carry some more.

After that melancholy loss Leo didn’t take shit from anybody. He burned through levels of existence as an exiled ghost. He slept with shamans in cemeteries.

He didn’t suffer from PTSD. He didn’t prowl life’s perimeter at midnight with bandoliers of munitions and Howling Wolf, his M-16 on full automatic. He wasn’t a suicide bomber hijacking ambulances in Gaza or Baghdad or Karachi or Damascus. He wasn’t blowing up cafes in Haifa or Spanish trains of thought watching children and adults fly through the air with the greatest of ease in the Greatest Show on Earth. He did not attend flight training school in Florida on a secret mission of revenge and miraculous destiny.

Being a worthy asset with nonofficial cover he was quieter than a mouse. The second mouse gets the cheese. He disembarked, disabled, distributed, declassified, delineated, discussed, and detonated unconscious trip wires. He was a silent night hymn, a predator practicing silence and cunning with his tantric eye wide open.

I am a camera, he told ice girl. Like you I see the big picture. We are ahead of the future. Wandering storytellers accepted my willingness to walk point. It was the Tao of insight, intuitive friendship and leadership. I don’t sweat the small stuff.

It’s all small stuff, she said. God, the Devil and Allah are in the details. Checkmate, said Death.

In Cadiz a well-dressed bald man with Gypsy blood wearing polished black wing tipped shoes used the financial section of a daily rag proclaiming a 33% unemployed human statistic to collect his dog’s shit off a Roman cobblestone chessboard. He dumped it into a metal trash basket nailed to a postmodern yellow splattered wall.

Five minutes later an obsessive-compulsive cleaning woman in her ground floor flat yelled, “What’s that smell?”    

“History.”