Before Indonesia - TLC 75

Behind reinforced plate glass Istanbul airport windows near conveyor belts and x-ray security machines was everyone who stayed behind - guards, cleaners and Konya dervish dancers.

An attractive thin-legged blond duty free clerk finished her day shift and stripped down for her baboon floorshow at Kitty Cat Night Club. Get down sweet thing, said a Turkish Deep State operative. Shake your moneymaker, said his bodyguard.

She drifted through life with clowns, misfits, literary outlaws, gravediggers, social deviants and manic depressed tourists waiting for airline workers to clean toilets, load beverages and MSG processed food onto Luftwaffe flight 3343 destined for Bang Cock as late afternoon light slashed through terminal dungeon zones of serenity.

“Travel isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s an adventure,” an American father said to his whining son on a rooftop cafe overlooking the Phosphorous. Staring at golden needle mosques, blue waves and catamarans sailing the seven seas they slathered red jam on toast.

After a year soaking in a wet misty Turkish hammam, this abject polite and emotionally distracted future tense void-like dream sequence passed through frequencies where idle people sat around showing no incentive and no desire to be creative or think for themselves as if their loss, their fate was always a long now.

They’d failed to take control of their lives as willing victims in life’s short sad joke.

One was the sullen masked security woman in her 20’s, forced by economics to meet and greet departing strangers. Lucky put his Eagle pack on the conveyor.

A laptop, 120-year old Monte pocket watch out, Leica rangefinder and cell phone went in a plastic tray. Stuff rolled away. She approached. “Do you have any knives in your luggage?”

“Yes,” he said to her death mask, “in the checked bag. They are from Tibet. They are silver with turquoise and coral stones. The handles are yak bone streaked with brown earth colors.”

Insecure security personnel wore death masks to confuse angry spirits eating incense minus verifiable identification. 

Her mask said, I could care less, I'm so tired, so anxious, so bored about everything in general and nothing in particular I could shit a kebab sausage shaped like a small powerful package of torpedo feces grilled to perfection in a tomato based food culture served with onions and wedges of lemon garnished with sour reality. 

“Open your bags,” said her edgy mouth behind cotton fibers.

“Which bag would you like me to open, big or small?”

“The small one and where’s your passport?”

She’d never have one. He handed it to her and she really wanted to be important, self-sufficient, self-reliant, strong, courageous, adventurous, and other impossible to imagine allegorical brave daring metaphorical nightmares in her short sweet life controlling the situation with this Bardo traveler free on parole from a dusty Byzantium archeological dig caressing pottery shards, glazed Ottoman tiles, castles and mosques while stirring musical sugar cubes in brown tea and weaving magic carpets in Kurdish villages under perpetual attack by Predator drones released by aggressive profit motivated war mongers to keep the anxious populace guessing and manipulated 24/7 by terrorist media FEAR propaganda machines controlled by moronic corrupt inefficient political idiots serving as an excuse to waste money on expensive military toys as global environmental, educational and health care systems collapsed under the weight of corruption, greed and eight billion starving mouths. 

After dusting off Patriot mussels and fixed-wing Turkish military aircraft for Syrian no-fly zones, hand carved Meerschaum pipes, glazed ceramics and Roman ruins he unzipped the small Eagle bag.

Winter Hawk flew free.

Lone Wolf ran free.

Shocked back to a fake reality she rummaged. She found music. She couldn’t hear beatific notes blooming along broken-hearted trails of Turkish and Kurdish women fleeing from arranged marriages.

She didn’t hear singing, keening women drumming soil above a wooden Ankara casket six feet down or melodies composed at transcendental borders coalescing with feminine songs birthing, cultivating children like seeds after a quick rain. 

She went through the motions.

“You can go,” she ordered in a short, fast deadly sentence.

Go was music to his ears.

The Language Company

 

Ambivalent - TLC 48

Bursa residents heard, “Woo, woo,” and clip-clop hooves grooving asphalt. A thin Turkish man who’d escaped the Armenian genocide in 1914 by hiding in a mountain cave with Plato’s shadow of illusions hovering over his form commanded a rolling wagon filled with shredded silver wire. A black trash bag on the rear contained cardboard and a draft of The Language Company.

He snapped a long whip at a white horse wearing brown blinders. Red, green, yellow and blue wool tassel tufts waved from its sweat beaded neck. Small copper bells tinkled.

His wife’s hungry face was a skeleton of bones. Her senses were accustomed to roots, soil, inhaling damp earth smells and back breaking labor in spring rain, summer heat, cool autumn winds and frozen earth.

Riding next to her husband hearing leather lash skin felt good. A reassuring signal snapped air. The horse pranced along cool be-bop jazz cobblestones in time with Monk on piano, Pastorius on bass, Rollins blowing his horn, Hart pounding percussion and Zeynep's cello complementing the steady clip-clop rhythm.

They were richer than a poor parent’s skin. They owned their stomach’s hunger.

“Here we go,” they sang in Kurdish.

A cafe below the TLC teachers’ apartment went broke. A wild garden blossomed. One May day an old man arrived with his scythe. His well-adjusted eyes surveyed nature's vociferous beauty. He unwrapped a golden yellow scarf from the curving blade of his hand-me-down tool.

The scythe was eight feet long tapering to a sharp point. Sitting on a wooden stool he refined an edge with wet-stone strokes.

Waving, he cut a waving garden.

Death watched. Ambivalent.

A blue monarch butterfly probing nectar of the gods whispered turquoise wing secrets to a red hibiscus in Laos.

 

Remember ABC - TLC 37

Said the Director of Sales at TLC.

“What’s that mean?” said a Kurdish beggar girl in Bursa one freezing night. To pay a Mafioso extortion bill her family threw her to the wolves. She hawked blue tissue packages to a sad man playing a flute sitting near a broken escalator above a homeless woman in rags setting fire to a pile of manuscripts trying to stay warm. Have mercy.

“Always be closing.”

Lucky sat in a blue plastic Metro chair zooming through a rainy morning. Mountain peaks meditated in white clouds above rocky-forested slopes and golden mosque spires. Other than two cheerful speech-enabled women, passengers were cold, distant, lost, bored and going somewhere intangible or else they’d be homeWaiting For Godot.

Tracks sloped down concrete edges. Blurring trees disappeared. Cars slid into darkness as florescent beams glided lighting bolts on steel tracks. Black click clack music reached an underground station with immaculate white tiles, benches and a large steel box holding bagged sweets. Comatose women in floral scarves grasping plastic bags studied heavy territorial shoes built for comfort. Station man in a green and yellow uniform manipulating a broom pushed history.

An automated Metro voice announced a stop. Doors opened. People departed. People boarded. Doors closed. Metro rolled on.

Communist party loudspeakers lashed to trees boomed across Lenin Park Lake in Hanoi:

Enjoy the ride. You’re only on it once.

The Dream Sweeper Machine collected everything.

The Bursa Sales Director resigned the next day. He had a falling out with management. It was always about numbers. Sell. Sell. Sell. He said he had 210 for February. They said 175.

That ominous day the TLC owner arrived from Constantinople, parked his Benz and entered the center of the universe where everything happened similtanesilly.

The receptionist freaked out and called the Sales Director.

Marketing man #2 escorted Boss through the center of Earth. He looked around. Purchased from Leaf Branch Growth in Dublin for $700,000 the three-month old franchise didn’t meet his standards. He had a corporate mentality and wasn’t a happy little camper. No clocks, broken glass doors, no wall art, out-of-order computers, badly peeling lamination work on desks and so on. “Shoddy half-finished work, even if I do say so.”

Lucky and the soon to be extinct director were enjoying a munch lunch with sheesh-kabobs. The director’s cell sang.

“He’s here,” said the receptionist.

“Who?”

“Sand Dune. He just blew in.”

“Oh no. I’m not dressed for work.”

Buy low sell high.

Revealing his true character he ran away. After a final e-mail to headquarters about numbers he trashed his office, yelled adios to the staff and disappeared into a subterranean cavern catching a Metro home sweet home.

Women staff cried on the sidewalk facing the center. A girl dragging a metal cart filled with cardboard and broken computers needing an OS surmised someone died. Serious departed tears. Tearful women smoked in sunlight. One tear reflected 360 degree blue sky. Melting mountain snow returned to work murmuring gossip and fear.

“Who’s next?”

The center’s magic numbers were now two sales, two receptionists, two native personal tutors (one from Trabzon - see footnotes) and two imported barbarians.

“We are understaffed, overworked and underpaid,” lamented a joyful personal tutor. Her name was Zeynep, the older, from Kurdistan. She spoke English, Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, French, Esperanto and Cello. She cherished seven magic stones from Mudanya on the Marmara Sea where she lived.

Her grandmother told her Kurdish creation stories. Her language was out loud and outlawed by scared totalitarian Ankara politicians. Kurdish speakers were decapitated in public with a jeweled word sword every Friday at high noon.

“Bend over,” said Teflon Ergonomics, the Prime Minister and de facto dictator. Playing economic prosperity songs to poor uneducated Soma coal mineworkers, illiterate villagers and wealthy middle class voters he bought the presidency in late 2014. It’s never too late to be president, he said. Manipulation and I can really run the Deep State now.

 TLC had Janus heads. One head was the owner.

“Hey,” he said, “it’s a business this language and money acquisition cycle.”

He called Hire-n-Fire, the maintenance manhole cover job in Instant Bull and ordered him to fix every little thing. He returned and did a partial job. It gave him an excuse to come again in a juicy sandwich with Russian dressing.

“Someone’s chasing their tale here,” said Omar, a vinaigrette vignette guide. “I love fragments of true authenticity. It’s all I trust.”

 *

L said to Z: There’s an old fable about a bird and an ogre telling his daughter where his soul lived. “Sixteen miles from here is a old gigantic tree. Around the tree are tigers, bears and scorpions. On top of the tree is a huge snake. On top of the snake’s head is a small cage and inside the cage is a bird. Inside the bird is my soul.”

Kurdish whispers

“We are understaffed and overworked,” lamented a brilliant happy personal tutor. Her name was Zeynep and she came from Kurdistan. She spoke English, Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, French and Esperanto. She collected magic stones from the Black Sea where she lived.

Her grandmother told her stories in Kurdish. Her language was out loud. It was outlawed by the scared politicians in Ankara. Kurdish people whispered.

In an unprecedented wave of support, millions of sad, yet strangely serene women facing callously arranged marriages filled with empty hopes and vague promises of love and happiness enlisted to engage strangers on distant borders.

This wave of support resembled the open handed movement in the moment, the long fare well gesture a mother reluctantly gifted her daughter recently before watching her disappear into the teeming stream.

"Be well my love," sang the mother. Her daughter joined a band of women, singing and sighing.