The Girl on the Train

The Moroccan girl with wild brown hair tied back is not on the train leaving a white station.

Her bare feet grip small pebbles as root structures dance with her toes.

Her grounded shadow prowls toward late winter light.

She is not on the red and brown train zooming past green fields as her sheep in long woolen coats eat their way through pastures after a two-year drought.

She is not on the train hearing music, eating dates, reading a book, talking with friends or strangers, sleeping along her passage, or dreaming of a lover. She does not scan faces of tired, trapped people in orange seats waiting for restless time to deliver them to the Red City.

Her history remembers potentates inventing icon free art, alphabets, practicing equality, creating five pillars of Islam, navigation star map tools, breaking wild stallions, building adobe fortresses and writing language.

She is not on the train drinking fresh mint tea or consulting a pocket sized edition of the Qur’an. She does not kneel on her Berber carpet five times a day facing Mecca.

She does not wear earphones listening to music imported from another world, a world where people treasure their watches. Where illusions of controlling time is their passion to be prompt and responsible citizens.

She is not on the train and not in this language the girl with wild brown hair tied back with straw or flower stems surrounding her with fragrances.

Inside rolling hills cut by wet canyons she is surrounded by orange blossom aroma in yellow and green fields. Her black eyes absorb ephemeral cloud thoughts in sky mind. Her open heart feels her breath ripple her long shadow.

Her toes caress soil. She is lighter than air, lighter than an eagle soaring above the Atlas Mountains.

She smells the Berber fire heating tea for a festival. A shaman dances in a goatskin cape and skull below stars.

It is cold. Flaming shooting stars leap into her eyes. Her nomadic clan plays flutes and drums. She sways with the hypnotic rhythm of her ancestral memory.

She is not on the train. She is inside a goat skull moving through soil, dancing through fields.

Red and yellow fire invites stars to her dance.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Turkish coffee - hotter than hell, black as death, sweeter than love

“Where are you? I needed the documents on Saturday, you promised.”

“Yes. I wasn’t here. I was leaving.”

“Leaving?”

“Yes, leaving.”

 “Leaving what?”

“Leaving a comedy of errors.”

Lucky was a now. He delayed Sit Down. He learned to say maybe later in Turkey. It was lingua franca in inefficient micromanaged bureaucratic countries. Yeah, yeah.

Layers and years of later. He invented a tale. “I'll get them to you by Monday.” Ha, ha, ha. Monday turned into Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday. Lucky was a moss free rolling stone.

Please return to your seats. Fasten your seatbelt. Put your tray in an upright position and open your window blinds. Only the blind can see, said Omar adjusting his acuity.

Tuesday, October 30. Smell the scent and scene the screensaver scream team. His disappearance was discovered if you can discover a disappearance in a 4,000-year old historical zone.

Someone tried his line. A cold metallic message sang, “The number is no longer in service.”

It's a numbers game, said Profit Before People. They tried again. Ha, ha. No luck.

On the 30th, after the holiday, when Lucky was late for class, Ebru, the TEOL secretary in Giresun overlooking a Black Sea low cost coast harbor and Roman candle candy castles called him. No answer.

The previous week on the 23rd, she’d screamed in his cellular ear, “Where are you? You have a speaking class now.”

“I’ll be there in no time.”

At that decisive moment he was retuning his traveling shoes and salivating grilled meat. Coffee grounds coated his throat.

Turkish coffee should be hotter than hell, black as death and sweeter than love.

He showed up that afternoon and pushed TEOL students through a magic lantern language acquisition mirror.

A week later he was history.

Kill SIM

A German woman coughing on Flight 007 between Istanbul and Bratwurst via Bang Cock showed a refugee from Kiev how to fill out an arrival card for immigration.

A nervous confused Crimean woman wearing large silver hoop earrings fiddled with her passport and immigration documents misunderstanding quality of life values en route to sweet and sour Southeast Asian menu escapades with two daughters.

Ebru couldn’t find Lucky. His phone was dead. He’d turned it off and discarded the red Vodaphone SIM card into a green Re-cycle Through Re-Education Reform Labor Camp container at Gate 214 in the Istanbul pre-boarding zone while meditating on his death.

Passing through with élan.

He relaxed in 39B on an Airbus 330 with Winter Hawk gaining altitude.

Free to fly.

Bamboo exhaled.

The Language Company

no metaphors

I'm one of those people who’s learned through living that there is nothing and nobody in this life to cling to.

I am a metaphor looking for a meaning. There are no metaphors, only observations.

I feel free to move away from safe familiar places and keep moving forward to new unexplored areas of life. Drifting some would say.

If I had one red cent for every time someone asked me when I’d settle down I could afford a world hypothesis! Settling down was never an option.

Yes. I could bid on blessings. I’d sacrifice pre-linguistic symbols and create silent metaphorical abstractions. My linguistic skills would evolve into love into discursive logic.

26,000 year-old Paleolithic iron and copper paintings create a secret symphony of ancient stories in a Spanish cave.

No lengthy drawn out off-the-wall abstract explains my small empty self to anybody by virtue of who I was, am and will be.

Life is a palimpsest.

“There are only two stories in the world,” I said to the Moroccan. We carried boarding cards through the Casablanca terminal. 

“A stranger arrives in town or a person goes on a journey.”

“Yes,” said Omar, a blind writer overhearing our conversation, “we might add there are also stories about love between two people, stories about love between three people and stories about the struggle for power. Stories are about characters revealing emotion through dialogue and action.”

The world is made of stories, not atoms.

He handed me a pile of yellow papers wrapped in rushes.

“A gift for you. A Century is Nothing. It contains a farrago of evidence. Keep it simple.”

“Thank you. Where do I find you?”

“In the caves south of Ronda. It’s a long walk.”

He disappeared into Baraka.