hagia sophia, trabzon

An unprecedented wave of egalitarian support featuring millions of sad, serene women facing arranged marriages filled with empty hopes and vague promises of love and happiness enlisted to become engaged to strangers across transcendental borders. 

This wave resembled an open hand gesturing in the eternal present of a long now as a mother gifting her daughter a long fare well gesture watched her disappear into life’s teeming stream.

“Be well my love. You are in our hearts.”

Her daughter joined a tribe of singing, sighing women. They were living their dream fate and making sacrifices with clear intention, motivation, determination and focus. The entourage of singing women danced through valleys, climbed jagged Eastern Mountains of Regret and entered a no-name village where males pounded war drums and hammered plowshares into word swords.

Marginalized poor angry males killed each other over pita bread, olives, fresh tomatoes, kebabs and geographical dust while studying imaginary maps.

“The map is not the territory,” said Visualization, a cartographer.

“Where is this place?” said Curious in a strange village in a strange country on a strange planet in a strange solar system in a strange universe.

“It is far away,” said a gravedigger with earth moving experience. “It is a dysfunctional place where bronze statues of fallen soldiers, warriors, corrupt politicians and testosterone fueled fools rust, make millions off the sweat of fools and congratulate each other on their mutual doubts, stupidity and insatiable greed.”

Wind said to women, “Go home. Return to your families and friends. Live in peace.”

Women followed their heart-mind.

“Are you alive?” she said to her cellular daughter.

“I survived,” said a disembodied voice.

“Where are you? When are you coming home?”

“I’m with a tribe of women. We’re breaking down old conservative values. They are so narrow we’ll need a crowbar or acetylene torch or C-4. We’re developing personal empowerment and dignity. I’ll be home soon, dear mother.” Her voice died. Mother swallowing ignorance lapsed into doubt’s quicksand.

At sunset an imam’s recorded voice twittered from a mosque near the private hospital. “Allah is great and merciful. Buy a ticket.”

Push Play.

Hagia Sophia...

trust

Sanitation workers in green

Environmental vests

With broom music swept streets for Lunar New Year.

Make it new. Day by day. Make it new.

We should be so lucky to have crystal clean sheets.

Every day is anew year.

One day is like a minute.

One minute is like a day.

That's relativity. All my relatives are dead.

Never trust an atom. They make up everything.

When you know what you don't know you realize moral character with social intelligence, integrity, and courage.

Courage is an unknown word in our head and heart.

Running away is our way. Survival.

Everyday I have the blues. No one loves me but my mother and she could've been lying too.

name

"What can you do. You get a name, and it stays that way for the rest of your life. And if at some point you go for a walk in the woods, and someone takes a photo of you, then for the next eighty years you're always walking in the woods. There's nothing you can do about it."

 - Thomas Bernhard  Read more…

i'm working on the world

I'm working on the world,
revised, improved edition,
featuring fun for fools,
blues for brooders,
combs for bald pates,
tricks for old dogs.

Here's one chapter: The Speech
of Animals and Plants.
Each species comes, of course,
with its own dictionary.
Even a simple "Hi there,"
when traded with a fish,
make both the fish and you
feel quite extraordinary.

The long-suspected meanings
of rustlings, chirps, and growls!
Soliloquies of forests!
The epic hoot of owls!
Those crafty hedgehogs drafting
aphorisms after dark,
while we blindly believe
they are sleeping in the park!

Time (Chapter Two) retains
its sacred right to meddle
in each earthly affair.
Still, time's unbounded power
that makes a mountain crumble,
moves seas, rotates a star,
won't be enough to tear
lovers apart: they are
too naked, too embraced,
too much like timid sparrows.

Old age is, in my book,
the price that felons pay,
so don't whine that it's steep:
you'll stay young if you're good.

Suffering (Chapter Three)
doesn't insult the body.
Death? It comes in your sleep,
exactly as it should.

When it comes, you'll be dreaming
that you don't need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it's part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark.
Only a death like that. A rose
could prick you harder, I suppose;
you'd feel more terror at the sound
of petals falling to the ground.

Only a world like that. To die
just that much. And to live just so.
And all the rest is Bach's fugue, played
for the time being
on a saw.
 - Wislawa Szymborska  Read more…

in transit forever

They gave him a green plastic transit card. He asked about seeing the world through new eyes.

A kind woman showed him how to slip past metal detectors and immigration.

It is a somnambulistic place. People sit whispering. Ten Europeans, couple of Brazilians, a few Lao. 

Outside the terminal are mountains, gray skies, white clouds.

Pakse is a small southern Lao town known for Khmer artifacts and access to dolphins avoiding dam projects. 

Just go. Go as in walk away. Be in transit forever.

It's simple. Just go. Stand up, start walking.

That's how adventures begin.

The only challenge is never leaving Laos. Never going to a border or exit/entry point. Ever never again.

Stay here forever and a day.

The great man belongs to history.

The great artist belongs to eternity.