It's not a problem. It's a surprise.

Between wild bonsai and Bamboo he regained consciousness at 5:18 a.m. outside Jakarta.

“Twilight in reverse,” sang a full-throated songbird in a Banyan tree stretching gnarled roots, “be diverse and grateful.”

It warbled a short trill, trilled a long solitary note, trilled short and silenced.

Bye-bye blackbird.

He lit Tibetan incense and unlocked the front door. Hearing bolts slide the bird sang. He stepped out. He whistled in return, establishing a connection. Mimicry. White and purple orchids shared aromas. Inhaling petals and bird melodies he scattered breadcrumbs on a path. Black snails snaked through roses leaving slime trails. He watered apple trees, flora and fauna.

His mind reflected a diamond.

Dew on a spider’s web glistened silver pearls.

Villagers awoke before dawn. Girls swept leaves from stones. After wringing flesh fibers dark eyed laconic women wrapped raw silk around female skeletons before hanging laundry on portable stainless steel structures to dry inside gray billowing fumes from fired garbage dancing over a sky high chipped wall decorated with green glass shards and oxidized barb wire.

Plastic bags, banana and coconut leaves, discarded clothing, feathers, Styrofoam happy meal containers, cardboard, chopsticks, plywood, grammar textbooks, comprehension checks and balances and IMF social network addictions LIKE ME burned with ferocious addictive intensity.

Phobia sang a rising middle class song accompanied by an Indonesian servant spoon-feeding Chinese infants before boys were stolen by coastal trafficking mafia retailing for $3,500 - $5,000. Negotiate. Keep talking about price. Always Be Closing.

The one-child family planning genocide policy created a desperate daily search for heirs. Losing face with facile piety meant public humiliation. Shame.

“There are 119 males for 100 females,” said Chinese Statistics at The Office of Mandatory Abortion and Population Control next door to The Morals and Re-Education Office down the street from The Ministry of Truth Myth & The Dark Arts.

“All the A men with a career, condo, cash, credit card and car are taken. Single women will have to settle for a B or C man.”

Millions of women facing single status shame committed suicide to preserve filial family honor. Goodbye cruel world. Good luck to you and your non-family.

Before an Indonesian girl swept she wept. Birds whistled. Humans yapped emotional SOS distress signals as leaves veined. Rats, geckos and butterflies laughed. A faint step slapped gravel. A piano note reverberated. Broom music whisked stone. A crescent moon sex slave on her back massaged ink in sky islands floating on blue water. Awake for the living.

Be a work of art or wear a work of art.

Art is what everything else isn’t.

Lucky survivors composed tongue bone oracles inside Tibetan meditation thangkas creating a Kalachakra ceremony with rainbow sand particles.

Mandala. Center. Release.

Silk weavers fingered golden threads. Miners harvested Blue Zircon near Ice Girl in Banlung. Read everything backwards. Backwards everything read. Write right left to the imagination sitting on a Metro subway sandwich as sensations explored labyrinths without a center. Mystic Arabic dervish dancers spinning on the Wheel of Life rejoiced in ecstasy. Angels danced on a pinhead.

Give female orphans sewing machines training and they’ll change the world with endless job opportunities, low population growth, free medicine, clean water and free education, said The Dream Sweeper.

Your needle leads thread, said Kairos. I am a compass without a needle, said Lucky.

The heart-mind gift of writing allowed Zeynep to meditate in the present as a stranger to herself: Mindfulness gives me time and time gives me choices. Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom. I’m not swept away by my feelings. I can respond with wisdom and kindness rather than habit and reactivity.

I love the crazies, it’s the fools I can’t tolerate.

A Zen writer is an artist, said Zeynep the younger, heroine of The Language Company.

They love making a big bright, beautiful mess, cleaning it up and making another mess. You are a Lone Wolf blessed with R/7. Free is your quality of life.

The world is a stage and we are but the players. The play’s the thing. A risk taking adventure using asemic language sensing joy and mystery winds down. A poem begins in wisdom and ends in delight. Visionary mystics blossom radiant beauty.

Water-stone. Yin-Yang.

Wear a star on your forehead. 

Small powerful stars sing with their light.

Zeynep, a curious star visited a blue marble hurtling through space. What is Earth like? Are inhabitants gentle and compassionate? Do they share calm heart-minds? Do they create archetype wisdom art using multi-colored pigments on cream-colored paper dreaming with their eyes open spilling rainbows in meditative blissful silence? 

What is life? Autonomy. Personal growth. Self-acceptance. Purpose. Environmental mastery. Positive relationships. Eudemonia.

good at two things

“Mind yourself,” Z said in cursive Latin as she and Lucky exploring diverse civilizations cradled a bamboo candle on their quest for an illuminated translation.

One morning while walking to the Bursa Metro he received a rose from a kind Kurdish woman who tended a small grocery below a quadrant of grey cookie-cutter Soviet apartment blocks filled with crying children and sad adults devoured emotional immaturity content in a guilt-based context between a physical object and a precise concept.

“We are good at doing two things,” sang a Turkish man swirling a silver spoon in his tea...'around and around we go and where we stop nobody knows, tinkle, tinkle little star how I wonder where you are, way down in the glass so low with processed sugar’...sitting and singing, here we go.”

“I thought you said reading and writing,” said Rita, the anarchist writer of Ice Girl in Banlung and H20 seller in Ratanakiri. To make ends meet on weekends her family of eleven rented her out to a NGO scam at an artificial orphanage.

Buy her beware.

Rita knew what was what.

“According to UNICEF, there has been a 65% rise in the number of orphanages since 2005. There are more than 300 and yet, only 21 of those are run by the state.”

“Say more,” said Lucky.

“UNICEF estimates that 72% of the 12,000 children in Cambodian orphanages have at least one living parent or close relative. Desperate poverty makes it easy to persuade uneducated families that their kids will be better off in an orphanage.”

Her Banlung machine world roared, reversed, revered and resounded with operatic overtones. Chugging down the street, antiquated ¼ ton trucks recycled from catastrophic invasions, wars, death, suffering, bombings, and genocide carried 1.7 million people dying from forced labor, starvation and execution illuminated by historical footnotes.

Ghosts said we are nothing but historical history. Memory agreed. Voices blended with billowing black diesel exhaust and forgotten cultural memory in swirling red dust.

Two barefoot mendicants walked past Rita. One content in a simple white cotton cloth shirt and pants. A red and white-checkered kroma scarf knotted his head. He carried their possessions in three white rice bags suspended on a bamboo pole balanced on a bony shoulder. A tall gaunt man followed his trail of tears.

Man #1. These bags are heavy. I am tired of carrying them. You carry them. Bags and pole crashed on red dirt.

Startled birds flew. A brown river changed course. A woman stopped sweeping dust.

A rich man getting out of a black SUV smiled at prosperity.

A young boy fondling his fantasy without objection paused.

A prone passive girl suffering from eternal hunger in a plywood room waiting for fake love and an easy ten bucks blinked.

An infant dying of malnutrition cried in its sleep.

A mother begging for fake medicine at a health clinic holding her child shifted hip weight.

A monk in a pagoda turned a page of Sanskrit.

An ice girl massaged cold reality with her sharp edge of truth.

The man walked over to a large water cistern. He splashed his weathered face. He drank deep. His friend stooped over, adjusted bamboo through twine, hoisting bamboo and bags onto his bony shoulder. Where are we going? Muttering to his feet wearing red dust, one said down this endless road.

The Wild West town bigger than a village welcomed smaller. The dexterity and fortitude of millions shuffled along in a flip-flop sandal world filled with joy, opportunity, risk, chance, fate, and destiny.

They devoured French pastries and flavored yoghurt.

Ambiguity, contradictions and paradoxes assumed the inevitable. Assumptions and expectations wearing Blue Zircon saw harlequins.

A boy downstream near Angkor Wat sawed crystals of clarity in his tropical kingdom. He saw but didn’t see standing tall in a blue hyperventilated dump truck holding a rusty trusty bladed saw. Blocks of ice disguised as solidified water were longer than the Mekong feeding Son Le Tap Lake.

He unwrapped blocks. He sawed. He tapped a musical hammer at precise points defining worlds of experience into melting scientific sections. His co-worker loaded condensation on thin shoulders carrying melting weight to a bamboo shack. He dumped ice into an orange plastic box. A smiling woman frying bananas over kindling gave him monetary notes, Thank you for the cold.

Carver carved. Tap-tap-tap.

Rita opened a big orange plastic box. She picked up a chunk of ice in her left hand, cradling it in a blue cloth slamming a hammer on ice. It cracked. Fissures of released refracted pressure, jagged lines and imperfect beautiful white lightning spread deep inside ice. Holding global warming in her left hand she smashed it with all her power and strength fragmenting ice, floe chips and elemental particles.

A sharp piece of frozen ice pierced Lucky’s left eye. The sensation of pain was minimal, immediate and directly cushioned by the delicious cold feeling of ice melting through a retina, cones, rods, a pupil, nerve endings, frontal lobe, cerebral tissue, and layers of perception altering his visual organic sensation as ice light transmitted new electric signals from rerouted optic nerves to the cerebral cortex following a path of synapses. 

Enhanced visual acuity reflected everything. The stimulant was all. The world is made of water seeing crystals shimmering in ice mirror kaleidoscopes. Illusions of truth, pleasure, pain and drama danced. Long jagged beautiful sparkling universes emitted glowing crystal rivers. Everything he saw, heard, touched, tasted and felt was ice.

Sibylline language.

She dropped the block of ice into the box. Collecting chips in a glass, she added fresh thick brown coffee, sweet condensed milk extract, a straw and a spoon. She handed it to him. Here, you look tired and thirsty, I am, thanks, I’ve been walking all day. It’s delicious. You’re welcome.

She assaulted ice with a hammer shattering fragments to refresh java, coconut and sugar cane juice. Ice blocks melted latent potential. She bagged a block of ice and handed it to a cycle man. He gave her crumbled Real notes.

An old woman in pajamas sweeping dust heard ice weep, “Hope is the greatest evil. Her daughter whispered, “Evil doesn’t exist. It’s a myth.”

History, war, violence and predatory politicians screwed Cambodians, said Rita handing Zeynep, Leo, Lucky cold impermanence.

“Reading and writing is for idiots,” a Turkish man said to his attachment’s delight. “I am proficient at eating and fighting. I’ve been killing people for 4,000 years little thing. Nobody knows who the king is.”

Z said: I am a camera. Close my aperture to f/8 or f/11 for depth of field. I am a snow leopard in hot sun on Himalayan ice. I am a human mirror reflecting mud and meadows of reality. I am Winter Hawk winging free. I am resilient Bamboo.

I am love - a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor. Love is in the air. Run for cover. I am Patience, your great teacher.

I am mindfulness.

I am breath.

I inhale life and exhale death in a random universe.

I am blood red ink drawing in dust and unloading words for a book called TLC to be explored, experimented and abandoned.

Wearing a burgundy pashmina shawl from Lhasa before the Chinese invaded in 1959 with Re-Education propaganda/publicity machines of terror, fear, suffering and death I smell like fresh Anatolian laundry in a gentle spring breeze.

Ice Girl in Banlung

The Language Company

one door opens - TLC (end/beginning)

He escaped Turkey after fifty-one days of learning and enlightenment. He’d returned because he was curious about Trabzon. He appreciated the hospitality and kindness of strangers at ground zero.

He discovered he was too sensitive to Turkish suffering and repressed aggression.

A little luck goes a long way.

One door closes one door opens.

He felt tranquil seeing red and green-checkered diamond and rectangular Cambodian earth patterns. Small human habitats with flickering candles in windows illuminated manuscripts.

Let's go home, said a grateful cloud passing by. We know you by now.

Decompress language and your quality of life with slow steps and smiles.

Laughter and curiosity joined simplicity sanctuary and serenity.

Veni. Vidi, Vinci.

He came, he saw, he lived.

Good-bye and good luck to you and your family.

The Language Company

Zeynep the heroine of The Language Company

Diamond in your mind - TLC

Secret literary agent accepted a covert mission. 51 days led here.

He knew in mid-September, after being in Trabzon, Turkey for two weeks doing street photography at dawn, writing field notes, helping students develop speaking courage and bringing prosperity to everyone along a wandering path, his essential choice for freedom brought him to today October 25^th.

Savoring thick java and sweet flaky pastry in a Trabzon establishment he observed people on Sacrifice.

Every day is a celebration when you practice the art of letting go.

You either let go or get dragged along.

Miniature buses disgorged humans: head scarfed heavy-set women clutching canes, swaggering males, well dressed couples, a sleek woman twirling a red rose, old men trailing texting generations and desperate parents gripping children’s hands.

A tan joyful man released from his daily grave digging soil toil danced away from angry confused faceless ones anticipating a long uphill walk past shop windows where they’d purchase flaneur reflections.

Shoppers entered to buy pastries, cakes and cookies. We have to show up with something a wide wife said to her mousy husband. Children begged for sugar, Feed me.

Three obese Saudi males bought bags of hand wrapped candies. Our caloric families will love this stuff said one from the house of Saud cramming it into his designer bag on plastic wheels of fortune.

You brought us good luck today, said the smiling woman behind the counter when Lucky prepared to walk on. You’re welcome. It’s a never-ending adventure.

A Trabzon taxi driver taking him to the airport said, “Today is like Christmas in Turkey.”

Deck the halls with boughs of folly tra-la-la-la.

Near the check-in zone a girl of four didn’t see her mother’s knife-like eyes inside the chador. A black veil masked her face. Closed for respectful preservations.

Everyone stared in amazement as a literary outlaw enjoying random encounters with evanescent beings sang your life is a work of art. We are stardust riding a blue marble through space.

The flight from Instant Bull to Backpack took eight hours.

In a transit zone he discovered Mont Blanc Fine and Medium Rollerball refills and a large bottle of dark blue fountain pen ink for Omar. He bought a 12-pack of multicolored pens for Zeynep.

Do you travel the world, asked the clerk as look n’ leave passengers examined the art of writing instruments. It is my destiny, You brought me good luck today, I am a calm lunatic assassin, I am not saving anyone.

The plane to Seems Ripe banked left to the imagination before climbing to 33,000 feet in an invisible night as he journeyed to the center of the Earth.

The Language Company

Ride like the wind.

A gravedigger is never out of work.

Ukiyo-e. Floating world.

Have luck will travel. A Giresun songbird gave Lucky the all-clear signal. Go.

At 0609 pulling a wheeled bag down 65degrees of click clack Roman stones he met a healthy golden brown dog. They walked to the ULUSOY bus station. The dog picked up a new scent, wagged his tail thanks for the company good luck and wandered away.

Down in the cold BAY piss chamber Lucky played his C harp singing an old blues song, “All my Love’s in Vain...”

Echo passed through: “When the train/bus/plane left the station there were two lights on behind...one light was my baby and the other was my mind...all my love’s in vain.”

Today - Bayram is Sacrifice, a national holiday. Make a sacrifice. Write hello my little fear and hello my littleanger on pieces of paper. Burn them.

Red, yellow, golden autumn leaves littered ground with sound. O sweet season. Mountains conversed inside foggy forests as curling chimney smoke swirled through bone cold villages.

Ukiyo-e. Floating world.

Sacrifice watched people watching people going to visit families. Someone somewhere waited for relatives to arrive with money and stories. Stories were cheap. Money was expensive. Layered characters using verbs wore leather shoes, new designer rags and carried big time.

Lucky remembered a story about a dignified man in Guatemala who walked barefoot from his village to town carrying his best shoes in a bag. On the edge of prosperity he put them on. Envious eyes followed his every step until he walked out of town. He carried them home. That’ll show them.

In Turkish villages after a breakfast of tea, tomatoes, black olives, yellow cheese, brown bread and thin sliced salami men wandered down trails to join friends at a cafe for tea and talk. Some read newspapers. Others fingered anxious worry beads. Passive men focusing on the idiot box watched a Teflon PM slap a grieving Soma coalminer in the face, No one boos me. Take that, idiot.

One man looked for his name in the obituaries. The grim reaper hasn’t found me yet. My luck is holding. I am that I am.

Men cleaned dirt from nails. They brushed lint or a meandering story thread from suit jackets. A gravedigger washed his hands. Someone evaluated the volume of black ink in a fountain pen before spilling words on paper.

The Black Sea was flat blue. A ¾ moon hearing cellos sang shit puke thunder and lightning.

Turkish citizens texted survivors, looked at big time or yakked their hearts out on cells with anxious intention celebrating Sacrifice.

The Language Company