Article 301 in Deep State - TLC 59

“Deep State is a system composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services, military, security, judiciary and organized crime,” said Zeynep.

*

“In summation your honor,” said a defensive attorney from the Land of Smirking Tomatoes, “my client is innocent of personal responsibility and conspiracy charges to overthrow the Deep State. We rest our case.”

 “Your discovery evidence in Article 301 while standing accused of insulting the Deep State is weak and inconclusive,” said a Turkish judge on a political payoff hiding Graft behind his back. “Your motion for acquittal and adjudication is forthwith dead and denied.”

“May I change my plea your honor? May I resume my please bargaining and negotiating hardball tactics on behalf of free speech? May I speak without fear of insulting the schizoid Turkish state, dead hee-haw headless horsemen heroes, nationalism, conservative Fascism and fundamentalism in the form of Islamic religious heroin addiction?”

“That’s a mouthful of here say. File a brief size small with elasticity.”

“Turkey has imprisoned more journalists than Iran and China,” said Zeynep. “Turkey ranks 154th out of 179 countries for Freedom of the Press.”

“Freedom is knowing how big your cage is,” said Lucky.

“Freedom is having no choice,” said Zeynep with an existential twist of sour lemon.

The Guardian

The Language Company

Street talk - TLC 52

Captain Tremendous Tremor here again with an update from the dead zone of grieving Chinese parents and crushed kiddies. One reality shows to go ya where Big Brother wraps barbwire around collapsed schools preventing parents from rescuing 10,000 kids. Educational corruption and fear thrives in a Brave New World.

If you want to play you must pay. We know so much and understand so little.

“I don’t understand a thing. Let’s take the day off and be creative,” sang Zeynep, “grab our cameras and tale a walk.”

Lucky and Zeynep passed through ephemeral effervescent worlds healing strangers. Free non-transferable luck was distributed to the needy.

Air simmered grilled meat aromas in a tomato culture as swirling silver musical spoons tickled tea glasses. Seven tonal notes create cosmic spectrums.

Inside Ulus alleys laughing blacksmiths with calloused hands burnished musical metallic containers. Friends forged balconies, grates, bars and enclosures on anvils with Thor’s hammer. Gateless gates.

A coal man loaded bags of black on his back. A cornered Russian mistress wearing diamonds on the sole of her shoes waited for rich monkeys. A weaver loomed geometric silk ikat threads. A father taught his son the art of carpet repair. Needle led thread. Dusty stories coagulated and copulated on teakettles rusting atop Roman burial slabs covered in binary codes.

Expanding universal maps and NSA spy satellites collected data.

Total information awareness. TIA.

A peasant woman rolled dough to make ravioli-like manta pasta. A brown snail carrying its spiral galaxy home scaled green and white stones as waving antenna received signals from orbiting space-time Dream Sweepers.

Head scarfed women inside stone path shadows near crumbling straw packed homes with broken wooden slat shutters sat in a sacred circle talking and rolling spicy grated seeds into grape leaves. Thick meaty fingers toiled. Heavy 24-caret golden bracelets reflecting scattered light led to undiscovered archaeological sites for sore eyes and a doctoral thesis on amalgamated dust.

“It’s true to report that everyone in Turkey is psychologically well adjusted, employed and content with their free life,” said Zeynep.

“You’re dreaming, delusional or telling real lies,” said Curious.

“Made in the shade, cool baby,” Lucky said. “This is to say with precise specific clarity they have the courage to speak, are never tired or afraid of falling in love and marrying someone outside their rigid social and/or economic class. They take amazing risks and suffer greatly with gratitude. Photographing the universe they rent time-share apartments in black holes sucking matter into a void. Some scribble or doodle unintelligible non-linear calligraphic ideograms. The majority disappears into phosphorescent television monitors where they absorb political blather and fake reality shows. Media buys them. They give up their consciousness and miss the show.”

In Bursa a father + two son trash collection team pushed a rolling cart loaded with discarded plastic computers past crumbling Ottoman buildings secured behind barbwire and rusty locks. Faded orange and blue pigments peeled a long lost hollow bell.

One freezing morning a grandmother staring at Ottoman history lifted her child’s child to an iron-grated window. Zeynep, an invisible street photographer present with empathy squeezed a soft shutter release. A whirling dervish painting with light in continuous mode murdered time.

“Freedom is essential in my life. I control the result with spontaneity. I develop real relationships and embrace extreme situations. I’m a photographer who needs to travel. If I stay in one place I go blind.”

“Our images communicate light, story, form, emotion, information and raw aesthetics,” said L.

“Emotional impact. Photography is more art and intuition than process and procedure,” said Z.

In a warm art studio overlooking a fast icy river flowing from Uludag a female flute player fingering emptiness explained melancholic notes. Her chattering laughing friend created marbled flower art using pinpoint dabs of color in a tray filled with hot wax.

A white seagull’s calibrated internal navigation system negotiated air currents with Winter Hawk, Lone Wolf, 101 Screaming Eagles and Labrys of raging violin string theories. Piano melodies and hard bop jazz improvisation reinforced Bamboo resilience.

A 19% waxing crescent moon danced with clouds. Moon remembered moons in Augustine Fujian. Eat moon cakes, said Curious. Feed dead ancestors with filial duty. A cruel heartless forgotten forgiving month heard sky welcome moon. Clouds explored atmospheric conditions.

HELP screamed in a literary agent’s slush pile. Help was a bulldozer leveling forests to harvest trees outside Phonsavan, Laos. Vietnam bought them all. One tree = $10,000.

Chopsticks chairs tables toothpicks. Wood you believe it?

Lighter than Winter Hawk’s feathers, HELP made fun of people. Invisible howling soft wing energy manifested Beauty. Letters. Signs. Symbols. Metaphors. Observations. Unpleasant facts.

Help expressed brevity. How are you? I'm short, said Brevity.

Help played with variable truth-value meaning.

Help, a landmine in Cambodia below the surface of appearances in a luminous landscape reaching infinity weighted for sensation.

Babble Fish - TLC 51

A Bursa schoolgirl waiting to be grilled maternal fish bait stood at a bus stop with a cell phone implanted in her cerebral cortex. Her mom connected, “Are you alive?”

“I dream I am a free person in a free country. I've escaped the tyranny of what if’s and maybes. I have grit.”

“Enough babble fish jack-o-lama-trauma,” said Zeynep. “Cut to the chase singing songs with abundance, wonder and gratitude."

Ms. Linguist picked Mr. I Love History up. They screwed. She dropped him off. He never paid now. He always paid later.

“Life gives you test first and the lessons later,” said Zeynep. “Blind love with a little luck is a never ending adventure.”

Stressed out over-medicated Turkish kids carried bags of fresh brown bread, black olives and poisoned red apples home to mommy dearest here’s something from my secret garden.

Ambivalent - TLC 48

Bursa residents heard, “Woo, woo,” and clip-clop hooves grooving asphalt. A thin Turkish man who’d escaped the Armenian genocide in 1914 by hiding in a mountain cave with Plato’s shadow of illusions hovering over his form commanded a rolling wagon filled with shredded silver wire. A black trash bag on the rear contained cardboard and a draft of The Language Company.

He snapped a long whip at a white horse wearing brown blinders. Red, green, yellow and blue wool tassel tufts waved from its sweat beaded neck. Small copper bells tinkled.

His wife’s hungry face was a skeleton of bones. Her senses were accustomed to roots, soil, inhaling damp earth smells and back breaking labor in spring rain, summer heat, cool autumn winds and frozen earth.

Riding next to her husband hearing leather lash skin felt good. A reassuring signal snapped air. The horse pranced along cool be-bop jazz cobblestones in time with Monk on piano, Pastorius on bass, Rollins blowing his horn, Hart pounding percussion and Zeynep's cello complementing the steady clip-clop rhythm.

They were richer than a poor parent’s skin. They owned their stomach’s hunger.

“Here we go,” they sang in Kurdish.

A cafe below the TLC teachers’ apartment went broke. A wild garden blossomed. One May day an old man arrived with his scythe. His well-adjusted eyes surveyed nature's vociferous beauty. He unwrapped a golden yellow scarf from the curving blade of his hand-me-down tool.

The scythe was eight feet long tapering to a sharp point. Sitting on a wooden stool he refined an edge with wet-stone strokes.

Waving, he cut a waving garden.

Death watched. Ambivalent.

A blue monarch butterfly probing nectar of the gods whispered turquoise wing secrets to a red hibiscus in Laos.

 

one black night - TLC 46

King Louis’s paramour dialed his cell. He answered her call of the wild and turned off The History Channel. He slammed the laundry door causing a massive 7.9 earthquake in remote Sichuan killing 10,000+ children in the rubble.

He got into her Tudor fuel-efficient machine. Slamming her erotic door created aftershocks in Tectonic plates below Java forming tsunamis erasing 200,000 village people at Ground Zero.

He kissed her hard love.

“Wow,” she said, “that was delicious. Say more. I feel insecure and despise my shameful intentions using treachery and guile.”

“Your vocabulary’s improving with guilt. I am too sad to speak. My verbal actions revealing internal repressed anger will illustrate my morose story. I whine about America and how I lost my chance to be rich and famous. I played college baseball and the coach never let me hit. I sat on the bench getting splinters in my ass. I was always treated with disrespect. I will reap what I sow. People cheat you. You can only trust 10%. They disarm you with sweet nothings. Man needs language to woo women. Never trust a woman who wears her dress too tight. Treat them like dirt and you won’t get hurt.”

“What kind of story?”

“Drive around. I will concoct a mysterious magical truthful tale of self-pity, fear and alienation. I will reveal the meaningless of my puny little existence.”

“I need six inches of your hard meaning.”

She shifted out of park. Thin hands gripped life’s wheel. She remembered wild sex with the angry muscular teacher speaking of death, Indian food, foreign language lips, smells, taste tests, groping, racing hearts, a throbbing purple snake, love juice. She couldn’t eat, sleep, dream or focus, savoring unconscious fragments.

“I am a man eater. You are a real man. I will eat your heart. This is our custom. Our lover’s heart gives us strength, vitality and power. In exchange I will give you something to remember me by and by.”

“What happens after you eat my heart?”

“You’ll see. I’ll grow up to be big and strong with courage.”

“See? See what, how, when, where, who, why?”

“Ah, the quest-ion words. You’ll see. Trust me. Release your insecurities and fears. Celebrate joy and life with gratitude. You started well because you compromised your ethics. After we met I remember how you came home and told Lucky how you only wanted to be friends with me, how you didn’t date women who smoked and then after I gave you my hot smoking sex you changed your tune. You started singing a variation of your former thematic ideology. Your loud boisterous voice mellowed from the concerto to the sublime. You ran out of meaningful words to say about life in the states of consumption living with fear, ignorance and....you compromised your morals and principals and values based on primal lust. My illuminated illustrated body gave you more than you figured you needed. Or needed to figure speaking of my skin glowing in the dark, my swollen labial lips gorged with blood as I panted harder, harder yes yes yes tracing memories down my spine walking through a Marrakesh souk hearing plaintive sellers shout ‘Hout, Hout,’ meaning dead fish as Omar’s son, playing Pan’s magical flute enticed a black cobra in a timeless trance dance.”

“Yes,” Louis whispered to her shadow free existence exploring her labia major. A hard rain beat roof rhythms. “I didn’t know how shallow I was when I came here.”

“The more you learn the less you know.”

Winter Hawk’s aerial perspective sang bye-bye to a red rose blooming near Bamboo. Light escaped thin gray clouds above Marmara Sea more know less.

“You were and still are large and loud,” she said, swallowing his alchemical semantic fluids in her crucible. “Such a fine little life stew we brew with pleasure and pain my sweet warrior.”

“Honey pie you are driving me crazy.”

“Leave the driving to me.”

They shifted positions for better GPS triangulation on her refugee relocation assistance program. Achieving orgasm she sang, “Keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel.”

“Drive papa home baby,” said Louis approaching rapture.

“I don’t know how well you handle jealousy,” she said. “It’s a factor in relationships here.”

“Say more about trust.”

“Jealousy is a well used behavior modification strategy here. Feminine manipulation controls weak males. Mama boys. Guilt trips. I play the victim and you play the rescuer. Do you get it? My love is like a faucet. I turn it off, turn it on.”

“The word get is the joker word in English.”

“Get on, get in, get by, get over, get through, get going, get set from the get go,” sang Ms. Linguist.

Exploring his hand-held device improved her reception.