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.

Heart Monitor - TLC 45

On the Metro he sat across from a young boy, his mother and father. Father’s hands were hard calloused.  

The boy smiled, fascinated by whirling flashing light prisms. His father pulled up his son’s shirt. On his chest were two plastic suction cups and a machine the size of a deck of cards. Ace high. The heart monitor measured his beats, his life rhythm regularity. His father checked the display, saw the cups were secure and dropped the shirt.

“It is a machine for my son. It helps him,” he said with tired eyes. “We got it at Hospital A. Doctors said it was essential for his life.”

The boy and Lucky smiled, cupping hands around eyes scanning the universe, explorers with telescopic magnifying lenses.

He’s a happy kid. Not afraid of a thing like Tran my five-year old Vietnamese friend in a Da Nang hospital missing a leg after stepping on a landmine teaching me Courage.

“We should all be so fortunate,” said adults streaming sad life tales, “Oh pity me. I am so, so tired.”

Talk to the kid. He’ll tell you how tired feels.

Echoes of umbrella digger stone music faded near young lovers huddled on benches and a beggar dreaming on tarmac.

Children with sacred eyes on magical adventures balanced on silver tracks escaping dark tunnels. They disappeared into wild winter aspen forests as two black-shawled women negotiated muddy paths through foliage waiting for spring to thaw out relationships with nature.

Rabbits running in ditches sang The Season of the Witch.

Living breathing bipedal accidents with a pulse craved a place to happen with insight, precision and brevity. Pearl letters played out on a fragile necklace of water-beaded molecules inside an instant in eternity.

Time is a strung-out pimp looking for a fix and exit.

The Language Company

Shit Detector - TLC 44

Lucky explored cobbled Turkmen streets alleys and dead ends.

Mothers buried in headscarves observing street etiquette extended manicured necks beyond balconies. They swept, mopped, stirred apartment dust, shaking molecules over blood stained escarpments.

They married consecrated relatives during fifty-minute Encounters designed to use the target language in the context of remembering. The thrill of remembering in Technicolor imprinted new linguistic impressions on synapses watching Pay For View.

Learning is easy. Remembering is difficult. Use it or lose it.

Silent ivory piano keys waited for inspiration’s fingers. Feeling tension, point, counterpoint, hammer strings and resonance, chromatic silence whispered, do not go gentle into the good night. Rage against dying light. Solitary notes of forgotten strumpets wailed across an abyss ignoring civilization’s discontent.

Creased faces ironed red roses petals. Faces eating masks embedded themselves on blank pages in Zeynep’s black notebook. “I don’t know which of us wrote this,” she said.

Two shy Turkish women with beautiful faces and humongous rear end collisions after eating a full course meal of self-pity and loathing buried ancestors in a tomato based culture.

Water exploded off iridescent pools as happy hour birds swimming nowhere in particular heard homo-sapiens shift erotic labia gears while assembling French cars at an eco-friendly green plant in a Bursa industrial zone.

“Were you punished for being a dreamer?” said Zeynep.

“No, I survived the tyranny. My family understood my peripatetic nature. They respected my need for solitude, creativity and independence to a point. I received sadistic whippings with a fishing pole by my polio-diseased mother trapped in her karmic wheelchair and beaten with a leather barber’s strap by father for insolvent insubordination. Welt city. He made me eat dirt when he came home from work if the floor wasn’t clean enough. Now you know why I love linguistic gardening. I shut down my feelings. Mother and father demonstrated hard love in a perverse abusive way.”

“I see,” said a blind beggar.

“Wipe your glasses with what you know,” said Zeynep.

“I was born to be a poet like a bird is born to be a musician,” said Lucky.

“Sing high, sing low, sweet chariot.”

“Brilliant.”

“In finishing school we learned to say fascinating instead of bullshit,” said Zeynep.

“You have a well developed built-in shit detector.”

“That’s the fucking truth. Everyone needs a good shit detector like writers and landmine survivors in Cambodia and Laos. Truth is a value-based meaning factor. Can you create believable documentary fiction-from memory?”

“It appears. So.”

Lucky and Zeynep passed an imaginary double identity theory at Oz-man Homogenized Gazing Metro station. Two gravediggers in long black overcoats carrying umbrella projectiles stepping into unknown futures stabbed cement in cadence.

The Language Company

Public relations - TLC 40

The other TLC cranium belonged to the Director of Natives. From the Big Apple core with a PR background she recruited them, interviewed them, hired them, trained them and centered them. She was off center. She took orders from two daughters managing her, accountants, center service managers, personal tutors and eloquent savages.

At a teacher training class in Constantinople chaired by a Spanish princess burning witches at an Inquisition running behind schedule because nobody knew what the fuck was going on the Director kept asking Lucky, “Where’s your watch? Where’s your watch?”

He put an hourglass on the table. He turned it over addressing the gravity of the situation. Sand dancing through time sang, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.”

Everyone creates his/her sandcastle.

The Director achieved her position because the owners knew she’d cause no turbulence during their ambitious tricycle. Training wheels had rusty mudguards and broken spokes.

“We have time,” said a native to foreign explorers in rain forests, “but you have the machines to controls time. Time is free.”

Leo, the Chief of Unemployed Cannibals showed white invaders the alarm clock strangling him, “Time is an abstract infinite concept. What’s strange is what’s going on inside time. In your world when you retire they give you a gold watch and not enough time to wind it. Life’s little joke. Here we have all the time in the world.”

The Language Company