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

Courage

I am fearless and fortunate. Courage.

There are not many things you need to remember about your visit to Earth.

Compared to death all life is short.

Remote viewing. Practice upstairs telephone. Remote intervention.

Ter- hidden. Ton- treasure. Terton (Sanskrit)

It was a Halloween day at the small private school in Vientiane. He wore a sign around his neck. "I am a deaf mute. No speak. No hear. If you want to talk to me please write. Thank you." He carried a pencil and paper.

What was the response?

It varied from ignorance to laughter.

Were there any interesting comments?

One boy wrote, you talked yesterday.

Yes, I wrote, today is a new day.

Another?

How can you be a teacher if you don't talk?

I use pictures. I read lips.

Tell us about your sensations.

Many visuals - kids in costumes, playing games, having fun. The adults thought I was crazy. They didn't write anything.

Not curious?

No, lost, as in absent. Not present. They were mute manifestations of the silent inexpressible FEAR. I was deep in my own world of silence. I appreciate that. Yes. It was subtle, clear and immediate. I learned many valuable lessons. Visual sounds.

Slowing down, meditation, awareness, solitude.

Yes, most ignored me. I imagine either they were too shy, shocked or mute. Too lazy to take the pencil and scribble. Scribble their frustration or FEAR.

I appreciate the value of silence now. More so than when I was afflicted. Being pure and radiant. It is a blessing with gratitude and forgiveness.

A combination of no voice, no hearing is perfect in myriad ways. 

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

Metro Casket Express - TLC 43

The five-car Express pulled into the central underground Ankara station every midnight.

On the Departures platform were 1,001 soldier boys in pitted iron helmets carrying black gas masks, silver water canteens, golden rucksacks and rusty rifles.

David carried a slingshot.

A sergeant-at-arms played a bagpipe dirge.

The Arrivals platform fronted 1,001 weeping women.

The women, informed by a faceless totalitarian desk jockey handed the inevitable task of notifying next-to-skin, came to claim. Wives, mothers, daughters and sisters wept for death.

Orange and black doors opened on both sides. Soldiers rammed spines to attention eyes straight ahead. Scottish notes reverberated off tiled walls.

Each car held 1,001 wooden caskets. Boy-men spit on hands hauled them out and stacked them below Big Brother Is Watching You eye-spy cameras.

Weeping mothers, daughters and sisters surged forward fighting and grasping. Women rummaged in caskets seeking clarification: an I.D., a photo, a necklace, a ring, a shred of admissible evidence, a glass eye, a visual epiphany. A memory.

A woman keened, “Where are you now my blue-eyed son...my darling young one...”

This captivated an audience of transparent inoculated passive ambivalent idle Turkish bureaucrats hiding behind piles of shredded fake treaties with ISIS, Greece, Armenia, Israel, Iraq, Syria and 49.5% of the Turkish population among falsified bills of lading for African ivory, Burmese jade, Iranian oil, Central Asian natural gas and sleeping tigers.

Men finished unloading caskets. Women scavenged.

Boy soldiers sang, “We’re off to the Kurdish/Syrian twilight zone to meet our destiny. Front and center, Sir.”

They marched into cars. Doors closed. It departed.

Despondent wives, mothers, sisters, grandmothers, daughters and strangers waved goodbye. Women dragged caskets home for a broken hearted family farewell before carrying them to a cemetery to join a woman drumming soil and watering roses with her tears.

A gravedigger spit on his hands. My job is never finished.

The Language Company

King Louis - TLC 42

In Bursa the wireless signal from the Achebadem hospital emergency room was weaker than a heart monitor in Room 101 where you confront your deepest fear.

It’s the last room you want to enter next to the Genocide Museum in Nom de’ plume, Cambodia filled with 2,000,000 skulls. Ghosts inhabit The Killing Fields.

In the 1527 hammam near Culture Park hairy muscular men using eucalyptus tree bark scrubbed soapy clients and pummeled epidermis into oblivion. Pinpoint light filtered through stain glass. Illuminated businessmen relaxed in arched cubicles. An octagon hot pool rippled reflections of mosaic light.

Across town King Louis, a native barbarian, moved into the teachers’ apartment in a 10,000 year-old neighborhood. He was green, neurotic and angry. A tall invincible insatiable invisibility corrected his mean variation.

He’d escaped to Turkey after selling Chinese appliances and silicone breast of chicken implants in Berkeley-by-the-sea. He hated women. He loved Roman history. His perpetual fantasy was to be a Roman general leading warriors from Troy to Crete to Bursa.

“Take care of my horse,” he ordered the male TLC receptionist.

“Serve my food,” he commanded the female receptionist after a day expanding his imaginary empire.

They despised his attitude and character.

He sat around the apartment watching The History Channel. He loved German U-boats, planes, bombs, destruction, concentration camps, gas chambers, the Holocaust and death. He kept the volume LOUD while eating dill pickles from a jar. He was a big, loud, sad, passive-aggressive lonely jarhead. 

He’d last a month. He made everyone’s life miserable. He expended zero effort to understand the culture because he felt like he was entitled to be stupid and paranoid.

“I’m afraid they put something in my food,” he said one day referring to a restaurant below walls covered with graffiti screaming, “Romans OUT!”

“They’d have a good reason,” said a receptionist.

He washed his plastic clothes every day. He wasted hours, days and his pitiful life in the bathroom coloring his hair, trimming nose debris and afraid of germs, washing his hands until they disappeared.