Life is a test. Lessons later.

Discover a pinecone near The Tax Department in Trabzon. It escaped The Department of the Forest.

Make copies of your life. Duplicates accepted. Mirrors reflecting mud and meadows of reality need cleaning.

Visit the Tax office. Get a tax number.

Go to bank. You are #199. Sit on sidewalk. Wait for a teller to tell.

Sullen and impatient she’s late for 12:30 lunch. Sit Down deposits $12,000 for four native barbarians.

Withdraw tomorrow, said Teller’s Overture.

Go to the police residency office across from the cemetery where a wailing mother drumming soil waters roses. Hired guns sing gravestone’s chiseled destiny with a sledgehammer. A gravedigger turns soil in his absolute phenomena of totality.

Grill your usual suspects while eating chicken with shredded lettuce not have this conversation in the abstract.

Giresun loudspeakers imported from Lenin Park in Hanoi engaged, studied and activated speech-enabled synapse software. Attention Comrades.

A woman teacher directed behavior control classes with sparkling syllables. Children memorized grammar rules. Pass the examination. 60 is heaven. 59 is hell. Pass me through.

Life is the test. Lessons later. It is multiple-choice.

Silver man polishes a serving set. Flour hands of a laughing baker removing loaves from ovens whisper secrets near fish hawkers washing ice streams. Bread aromas float past women selling cabbages bigger than lost children.

Walking through sad Giresun rain Lucky remembered his Khmer lover.

The Language Company

Lashio Burma poem

old woman

deep lined face

gray hair pulled back

meditates on emptiness

begging bowl

woman without arms

sits under umbrella

empty begging bowl

loving their phones

market people laugh

selfies - easily amused

wicker basket on her back

silver coins jingle jangle

light passage humor

red thread solid black background

how’s it feel this magic show

meditation, caught in the quiet

absorbing diversity wandering,

sitting in visual symphonies

cement shell zones

steel shutters, mercantile 

set it up…sell…tear it down…go home.

Conversation's Dexterity

Dawn’s orange lightness spread over the Black Sea.

Curious enrolled in a Push Them Through English School. I need vocabulary and the courage to use it with meaning, dexterity and humor. I know my English is not grammatically perfect but I know my English is fluent, said Independence.

Casablanca

I know what I don’t know, said Z. The more I learn the less I know. Real eyes see real lies.

You are the teachers, Lucky said to Turkish beginners brain-washed by parents, media and education system. I am a student.

They expressed fervent Denial, an Egyptian river. No, you are the teacher. We have no free choice or logical imperative to accept responsibility for our learning. If we accept responsibility we have to accept the consequences and do the work BUT we are lazy. We live in a never-ending existential crisis. We are conditioned to sit, listen and memorize. We blend in, like Leo's history teacher warned. We just want to pass the fucking exams. It’s your job to create a facsimile of grammar book learning.

The less I do the fewer mistakes I make, said one smiling with cunning social intelligence. The fewer mistakes I make, said their twin with cunning social intelligence, the less I am criticized.

You got that BS write, said Lucky.

Light my fire, said Jim Morrison trying to impress two girls.

Feed me, said another. I am not a participant. I am a victim.

I know what you mean, said another SAD student. It’s fun being a victim. We can blame everyone else with our projected fears and loss for our failure to be real, human and brave.

See with soft eyes, said Lucky. We see through our eyes, not with our eyes.

Thanks for life lesson #7, said a past tense grammar addict injecting a lethal dose of acquiescence into their heart-mind.

You’re welcome. Next.

I have two scissors and one brother.

How are you? I am 21 and you?

How old are you? I am fine and you?

Speak memory.

Oh yeah? The safest memories are those you never remember.

Memories are all you have.

Are your needs being met?

That’s a fundamental quest-ion. Right there with the What Is Life quest-ion.

You get one chance with dignity and grace. Get is the joker word in English.

I am Curious. It’s a pleasure to see you again. Go with the flow. Flow with your glow. Flow and grow is an honorable quest. I sing and live in a flow state in Giresun, said Lucky. So I heard.

A traveler passing through brought good luck to silversmith, cook, baker, candlestick maker, fish hawker, cheese seller, broom maker men, women sewing cloth, merchants selling knives, banging copper, punching leather, women brewing tea, men cutting roots, laughing children and students saying yeah, yeah we’ve heard all this before, as singing musicians overcoming temporary anxieties with flowing confidence speaking in tongues wandered narrow alleys of becoming.

Poetic inspiration. Short, fast and deadly.

A wandering minstrel in Trabzon played his Kemil with love inside shadows of tolerance and charity. His broken orange shoebox collected currency from enamored strangers. A young girl turned to her mother, you know the words mama and I know the music - he plays loss, hope and memory. It’s our cultural history sweetie.

Crystals reflected an island where Amazon women warriors took no prisoners. They had sex once a year and abandoned males in pine forests.

A busy busboy checked his obsessive watch. Out. Pulsating tick-tock. Big time waits for no one.

Office hysterics. A young English teacher from Plymouth expressed his quest. I need empathic accuracy. Look it up, said Lexicon opening his heart.

The Language Company

Deep State

Before Lucky moved downstairs writing in cold empty rooms waiting to be abandoned, SOL let him crash for seven days in his family (mommy & daddy were pensioners living in instant bull) owned 80,000TL all white Swedish-styled six-room apartment filled with glass tables, appliances, chairs, sofas, wardrobes, plasma screen savers and high tech cleaning tools like rags, brooms and mops with a partial view of the deep blue BS.

SOL (shit out of luck) was kind and lonely - feeling heavy deep real repressed bitterness like millions of others intelligent enough to see know and understand how the Turkish authoritarian micromanaged Deep State system had screwed citizens with grandiose educational employment lies and empty promises pacifying 300,000 unemployed teachers living at home on welfare handouts while exerting Power & Control programs through never ending academic tests, endless exams - play it again Sam - prolonging the inevitable death of individual spirit and curiosity and humor with enough monumental paper pushing to grind humans down, kill hearts and dull minds causing emotional earthquakes on cultural fault lines while stifling dreams and desires of paranoid students to achieve future social and economic dreams.

Fat chance said zero luck.

The future is now, said Lucky and it’s a beautiful mystery. My generation is fucked, said SOL strumming his Spanish guitar with sad eyed seriousness on his balcony near The Department of the Forest.

Before going to Giresun Lucky helped twenty Trabzon university students practice for oral exams. They needed more vocabulary and courage. They studied forty topics to prepare for extreme extra temptations like sex-ting and extemporaneous vocal chords.

Topics were about society, politics, history, current events, moral choices and obscure rigid authoritarian cross-cultural scientific and mathematical legacies focusing on developing and fostering insecurity, memorization and command and control illusionary procedures employing Deep State propaganda to coerce eighty million bleating sheep into medicated anxiety.

Let’s eat more XANAX, said student victims swallowing fear, healthy doubt and mysterious uncertainty.

We cannot change our major, said female university students. Ever. We live and breathe and die in our systemic major whether we like it or not. My dreams to be a boat captain disappeared like the Titanic, said one girl. Poof.

Suck it up, said Deep State.

We need more Engineers said Deep State in 2008. Design and conquer.

We need more Teachers said Deep State in 2012. Buy the book.

We need more prolonged adolescents over thirty living at home, said parents. Females crying silent tears waited for pre-arranged marriages to perfect strangers.

We need more idle backgammon players drinking brown tea and stirring processed carcinogenic sugar molecules said Deep State.

We need more big time watches, expensive cell phones, patent leather shoes, guns, water cannons, tear gas canisters and corrupt profit motivated private mine inspectors in Soma, said Deep State police.

We need more Xanax, said the dumbed down population. Increase the dosage, said a shirking shrieking shrink in Ankara.

WE, Deep State disguised as surrogate parents, will whine you and dine you. Do what we say or we will starve you to death by consensus.

Being curious is not in our vocabulary, said female university students. Personal freedom and independence is not in our lexicon, having been outlawed by Article 301. 

Dissent is terrorism, said Deep State.

Outlandish.

Outsourced to ideological appliance factories and Re-form Through Re-education Gulags in China.

Bend over said Deep State raising a sword. Take it like a man.

The Language Company

Gratitude

A forest outside my new room.

Evergreens towering into sky. Crow calls at 6. Wake up! Wake up!

Sunburst over the Black Sea.

The flat is high in hills.

Fresh sea air.

Trabzon lies near the sea. On the sea. Greek, Roma life, ancient fort, walls, steps.

People share curious greetings, ah, so you know Turkey from 2007?

Dancing spoon glass

Wandering old roman stone streets early light,

Fruits, veggies, 28 olive varieties, raisins, tomatoes, cheeses, fish in food heaven.

Feels great being anonymous, ghost, blessed to be here now

Hospitality is slow.

Imagine the day.

Gestures.

Time machine.

See through eyes, not with eyes.

Zen way Tao.

Acceptance and gratitude.