Pain's Logic - TLC 33

In Bursa the logic of pain met pain’s tolerance, pain’s loss, pain’s memory, pain’s attachment and pain’s fascination.

Awareness of dancing consciousness morphed a heavy dull throbbing sensation through exposed jaw nerves. Pain danced and sang along invisible blood red threads. Pain visualized minute tentacles of laughter.

Roots of pain bellowed in cold-hearted tissue.

Earlier, Dr. Death massaged tissue preparing it for a heavy-duty stainless steel syringe cast in Turku, Finland with a perfect circle for an index finger.

One by one he inserted three needles filled with anesthetizing solution into soft pink pliable gums. The downward thrust of pressure was constant and bewildering.

Numb the daze. Dumb the naive.

It didn’t take a well trained discerning eye more that a nanosecond after the partial was removed to sense the tooth witnessing interior monologues, dialogues and soliloquies of red stormed flesh pain - a sickness leaving the body - as Winter Hawk winged one true sentence.

The old recalcitrant reclusive tooth was exonerated. It’d served its animalistic purpose with multiple labia and nurturing oral stories. A heartbeat’s death defying rhythm pulsated faster than shadows divorcing themselves in blind love’s labyrinth.

After five days of whiteout blizzards Lucky enjoyed a perfect moment with ice coffee at dusk near a water fountain pen having resolved a molecular reality.

Peace trash in Mandalay

Defrost your imagination - TLC 32

“Today is a good day to be empty. Practice 10,000 breaths until you disappear,” said a Lhasa monk petting a Sumatran tiger facing extinction by Malaysian villagers burning down forests to develop cosmetic palm oil exports.

“Yes, not too detached and not too sentimental,” said Zeynep sitting at a restaurant table creating surrealistic art in her notebook. She drew stick figures with wild forested hair eating purple paper mache houses beneath a startled orange sun as disoriented Bursa talking animals crammed in spinach, green salad, tomatoes, grilled meat, rice and beans.

Across town on the TLC teachers’ apartment balcony sentry ants alerted the tribe to food. They marched from a drainpipe in single file, climbed over the edge of a plastic pot discovering good dirt. Teams fanned out sensing discarded muesli particles.

A mottled wingless insect living in bamboo detected worker ants approaching. Insect couldn’t fly. It scurried up a thin stalk to a green leaf blending in. Its feelers cleaned dirt off head and shoulders sham poop.

A gravedigger eating a hazelnut and strawberry jam sandwich on whole grain bread with grade A black olives harvested from Mudanya orchards nestled tight against Marmara Sea soil spoke to the insect as ants preparing their final assault gathered below the leaf.

“I need to move you.”

“Thanks. If I’m discovered I’ll perish. What do you suggest?”

“We use a leaf. Climb on it. I will let it go, floating over the garden. It will cushion your fall from grace. You will have a soft landing and better than a 51% chance of survival. Ground zero with better cover, food and dew you understand?”

“Ok. Thanks. 51% is better than zero.”

“You sound like an investment banker. Don’t mention it.”

“I need a new adventure.”

“Don’t we all. Here you go.”

Digger did what he had to do. Found a broad brown leaf. The insect climbed on. He released the vein-lined parachute into thin air. It floated. It landed on a huge exploding yellow sunflower.

“Goodbye,” sang the insect, “you extended my little life. I’ve survived to walk another day.”

The gravedigger sang, “Happy trails...to you...until we meet again.”

The Language Company

 

Another day in Mandalay

I lost one day - TLC 31

Crows sang sunrise.

Lucky opened window blinds at the TLC teachers’ apartment. Riding the blinds sang a metaphorical cryptic railroad life. Hop a fright. Get out of town. Hit the highway. Get down the road.

Ain’t nothin’ but da blues, sweet thing.

When you come to a fork in the road take it, said Zeynep.

Sun streamed to pink-red veined orchids in a brushed silver container. Tibetan incense curled into light. Red gladioli, so glad, petaled beginning. Piano Etudes by Glass tinkled. A handful of dust labeled fear celebrated tonal frequencies. Piano fell silent. Violins picked up the slack hemming garments along life’s loom down at the crossroads making a Faustian deal with the d-evil.

In a new world order all the police are children.

They know how the world works.

Elegant clouds observed pachyderms and Staunton designed pawns, knights, bishops, rooks and queens fighting to control four center squares.

Look at the board. Absorb all the data. Recognize patterns. Analyze. Develop a strategy. Continually revise and develop that strategy as the game progresses, said Bamboo.

A black knight waving a curving scimitar and a 1* red and yellow hammer sickle flag driving a Turbo-bus filled with Russian baboons passed Hanoi beauty salons and full-body soapy massage parlors.

Girls trimming, buffing and painting cuticles greeted 1.5 million neurotic European tourists and swarming Chinese locusts in a fat fucking hurry at Angkor Wats happening?

Bright yellow Turkish taxis idled coughing engines. Arabesque musicians fingered ouds as an operatic Turkish singer in Bursa lamented her melancholic love. Percussionists hammered goatskins.

Singing silver merchants chanted, “Mr. Lucky Foot come here. First sale lucky sale make my day.”

He joined a Jewish and Turkish man drinking tea at the Bursa silk market in an exquisite stone Caravansary.

“I lost today,” said the Jewish man.

“What do you mean, said his friend. “You made 3,000,000 Lira.”

“Yes, but I lost one day.”

Inside a 500-year old hammam, steam rising through rusting metal bars discovered a weak Wi-Fi signal from the Achebadem emergency room staffed by Winter Hawk, Bamboo and heartbroken howling Lone Wolf.

After a sauna Omar and Lucky entered a white marble room with a high vaulted dome. Thirty-two pinpoints of sunlight shafted across blue mosaic tiles. In eight recessed cubicles men soaped, slathered and scrubbed off melting skin in humid heat. A robust masseuse worked sandpaper fibers over a stranger removing dead terrorist cells.

Absorbing musical notes the thermal pool bubbled natural mineral water as the literary outlaws enjoyed a sitting meditation up to their necks. I’ve had it up to here, said Omar clearing his throat.

Renewed revived and rejuvenated after a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice they stepped into crisp spring air below blue sky.

The Language Company

1st International Children's Conference - TLC 28

“We are not here for a long time. We are here for a good time,” laughed Meaning, a twelve-year old survivor wearing a ragged Beware of Land Mines skull and crossbones t-shirt and prosthesis leg scampering a random life pattern across fields near a stilted bamboo home in Cambodia.

“Are you with us?” pleaded a landmine child survivor removing shrapnel with an old rusty saw after stepping in heavy invisible shit, “or are you against us?”

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper ironing imported Egyptian threaded 400-count linen. No lye.

The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

She’s one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by land mines from forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate 110 million land mines lie buried in 68 countries.

It costs $3.00 to bury a landmine.

It costs $300-$900 to remove a mine. It will cost $33 billion to remove them. It will take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines. Cambodia, Angola, Afghanistan and Laos are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia and 90% in Angola go unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee.

*

Expanding her awareness of mankind’s genetic stupidity, Lucky showed Zeynep a Laos map illustrating Never-Never Land.

Lao Please Don’t Rush is the most heavily bombed country in history.

25% of villages in Laos are contaminated with UXO.

Upwards of 30% of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to detonate.        

80 million unexploded bombs remain in Laos.

More than half of the UXO victims are children.

*

Meaning hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove metal from her skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin. The technical mine that took her right leg away one fateful day as she played near village rice paddies expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second. Ball bearings shredded everything around her heart-mind.

It may have been an American made M16A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range was 328 feet. Or maybe it was a plastic Russian PMN-2 disguised as a toy. She never saw it coming after stepping on the pressure plate. Fortunately or unfortunately she didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding, checked her pulse and injected her with 200cc of morphine. Strangers in a strange land carried morphine.

*

Cut the heavy deep and real shit, said a female Banlung shaman.

Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled.

Fear is blissful ignorance.

* 

Meanwhile, the 1st International Beggar Conference convened in Toothpick, a wasteland near Bright Hope - a rusting rustic dream of exploratory ways and means with scientific cause and effect and logical rational certainty.

It was chaired by a distinguished group of Cambodian orphans.

NGO Fascists rented 12,000 orphans out to fake humanitarian organizations. Abandoned youth pleaded with ill-informed rich donors for marketing and branding money to feed international guilt and shame.

“Let’s eat,” said a fat banker moments before his yacht hit an iceberg in 2008.

“What you don’t see is fascinating,” said Zeynep, “like roots below the surface of appearances.”

“We have so much ice and they have so little,” said an Icelandic chess player attacking Death.

“Everyone comes to me. My patience is infinite,” said Death. “I make only one move and it’s always the correct one.”

Beggars, landmine victims, genocide survivors and sick and tired dehydrated dying starving neglected humans from 195 countries convened in sequestered committee rooms filled with suits, scholars, academics, UN personnel, CIA analysts, NGO profit motivated scam reps, IMF bankers and plastic ornamental steering mechanisms.

“We agree to disagree,” said Rich Suit.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” said Wage Slave.

Orphans, beggars and children spoke about slave labor, hunger, exploitation, corruption, human trafficking, corrupt police states and the terrorism of economic poverty.

“Bad luck,” said a rich slave. “That’s a you problem, not a my problem.”

Children addressing global media held press conferences focusing jaundiced eyes on lenses, recorders and bleeding pens. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Sound bites sang starvation’s misery.

If it bleeds it leads.

Incoming! Bleeding hearts ran for cover.

Orphan motions for adjudication, arbitration, fairness, equality and equity were tabled for further deliberation and discussion nowadays.

The average monthly wage was $37 in a Bangladesh clothing factory. 350,000 Cambodian women making $61/month stitched garments for Korean export companies.

Give someone a sewing machine and with a little luck they’ll feed their family. Let’s Eat.

Bamboo - TLC 27

Reflects vigor, life, energy, zeal, endurance, integrity, patience and resilience.

Lucky carried small strong Bamboo to Bursa.

Freezing January snowflake feathers fell. Adults in the Ankara bus terminal stared at thin green life floating through their transition zone.

Luminous leaves remembered spring, soil, light and resilience. Smiling children understood Bamboo’s natural motivation, intention and freedom.

He propped Bamboo into a meshed container, fronting seat sixteen. They travelled west for six hours.

They passed glittering snowfields. Solitary brown-feathered Winter Hawk rested on ice-crested branches above frozen animal tracks. Silver-white trees sparkled crystal diamonds under a blue sky. 

After winter they scaled steep mountains into autumn. Bamboo witnessed silent snow peaks. Late afternoon light played in red wispy clouds.

Descending they departed seasons. Winter became fall in reverse, green moss, summer fruit trees. A farmer on a tractor plowed spring soil. “Ah,” whispered Silent Spring, “I am ready for my turning. I feel blades in my furrows dancing with roots...”

Bamboo pressed green leaves against a window.

“Where am I going?”

“Yes,” said a leaf, “it’s an amazing Zen meditation in a long now.”

“Am I this or am I dreaming?” said a leaf turning a page.

They reached Bursa on the western edge of The Silk Road. Bursa began in 200 A.D. below Uludag (Mountain of Monks) 2,543 meters high, edging snow stone above forests toward Roman thermal baths and mineral rich waters.

They found a temporary room at Achebadem, a private suburban hospital. Clean sheets, a cot and three daily hots. It was an intensive care visual spectrum color theory filled with young lovers living emotional zombie lies of healthy doubt and uncertainty.

Downhill from the hospital a crying middle-aged man holding an orange hospital folder waited above groundat a Metro subway station. Folder contained papers from a doctor, a lab, a prognosis and a definitive medical history. It revealed a story about someone dying - a wife, child, uncle, someone he loved.

He waited in heavy unconditional silence for a green Metro to transport him down the line to his 700-year old Ottoman mountain village of Cumalikizik.

Sharing his tale he’d spill the unabridged package of loss and memory on a hand-hewn oak table surrounded by friends and relatives. Say it’s not true, said a grieving ancestor thumbing medical leaves. It’s a true fact, he said, they left us, alone, we are grateful for their love and our memory. We cry for the living, not the dead.

Hypodermic needles named Pain and Pleasure sharing fabulous silent conversations laughed on life support.

Walking past the hospital Lucky smelled red, white and yellow roses. A bird pressed itself against a rose thorn to make her self sing. He whistled hello. Bird’s refrain was a short sharp interlude trilling a deep symphonic vibration-throated free mystery with harmonic warbling scales.