Little Voice

Where do I place it, these words?

What country continent city village town or heartbeat?

A heartbeat is a universe of possibilities.

Simple like a breath.

She asked him, Do you like small? Skin on skin?

Yes, kneading her shoulder muscles, easing out tissue from her supine sublime spinal chord erasing tension. Her smile said, Yes. Her relaxation exhaled.

She spoke with hand wings. Short, fast and deadly.

She dreamed writing a short story, a poem, flash fiction.

She selected a pen. She unscrewed the black ebony summit. She opened a black notebook. She made a pot of green tea. She started with flowing calligraphy letters.

My life began in a village. I don't need to leave my village. My village is the world.

She drew a picture. It looked like this.

Tourists find, travelers discover.

Traffic sign - Slow Children...

Lightning bolts - blue butterfly, white sky, green flowers, red leaves, songs of invisibility, piano shadow.

How do you spell loss?

Memory contains an entire world.

A blind painter paints from memory. A blind writer. A blind poet.

She weaved words with yellow laughter.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

A dreamer with active imagination.

Little voice.

Life Stream

Tribal voices spoke.

“Think of it as a small sacrifice, an offering, a form of suffering.”

“The river of life will wake you up,” said an elder. “You go up river and reach pools. They are as quiet as your mind in deep meditation. No people. Nada. Zip. Zero Homo Sapiens. You are water, stones, vegetation, soft green moss, animal skulls, blue sky, nature and sound. The sound is water. It is soft. It is all you know. You sit in the middle of everything pure and simple. It is all you will ever need.

"Water is the first thing an infant needs and the last thing an adult requests. To satisfy thirst for your dying father you will smash ice with tools. You will inhale his death and exhale his life. He was appointed to have you. You selected him to pay for awareness, to accept the responsibility of his life. You will memorize every silent sound and carry it with you. It is light and very portable.

"It will divide and multiply its flowing vibration around rocks in the stream. You are a rock and a stream. Amplification of clear water sound is a single bird throated song. Short immediate. It is heavy deep and real. HDR baby. It will wake you up, as I said. You pay attention.

"You fly away and we will never see you again. We know where you are and see you’re safe, blessed by the sound, pulse and flow being part of the river. Its magic spirit is strong. It’s flowing through civilizations, its adventure down, down, down. It’s distributing itself along the way. The stream is never ending, never beginning. As above so below.

“It is the stream of life.

“Listen to the energies. They will swallow you. You will be absorbed into the flow and you will be still. Stones sing with water. They sing their softness, their wildness, purity unimpeded, reflecting deep pools below open shadows. You are the flow.

“We move forward. Living in the past is time consuming. Nothing behind. Everything ahead. We pay attention. The road gives us our fate. Fire begins with one ember.”

“Funny,” said a child. “Someone along the way said it wasn’t the mountain they thought was difficult but the pebble in their shoe.”

“True. We will meet people and establish a mutual form of simple heart-mind language.”

“Is it paved?” asked one, “this so called road of language?”

“With good intentions, phrasal verbs, grammar, and simple present continuous obscure contextual meaning,” answered one.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” said someone in shadows.

“Is that a detour sign up ahead?” said a forward observer (FO). He was so far forward it scared some of the tribe. He was out there, testing frequency shifts.

They suspected he had a psychic ability to see stuff that hadn’t happened yet and they were at a loss, trying to figure it out. They had to trust him. They released their fear, healthy doubt and uncertainty. It was beyond, well beyond their comprehension. He mumbled things like, “You can’t step in the same river twice,” sharing stories, histories, legends, myths, dreams, and illusions.

Omar, Ahmed, and tribal survivors didn’t know if he just made the stuff up out of sheer boredom or if it was the truth of history. Much to their amazement while others carried a lot of stuff like emotional baggage, fear and generic uncertainty, he kept it simple.

His pen sketched and scribbled notes. Pencils and colors danced across Moleskine pages. They noticed in their simplicity and sympathy he carried a kid’s watercolor set. He used river streams and tributaries to mix paints. He splashed pigments left, right and center.

He loved making Fibonacci spirals. They couldn’t figure him out with their subjective abstract sense data perception tools so they relied on trust, instinct, blind faith and a crazy thing called love. Love, a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor drove bus #11.

Passion creates and destroys.

They were blessed by their imperfections. He used life to create art and used art to celebrate life.

Many adults in the tribe being programmed and conditioned cynical skeptics didn’t get it. Indigo kids were clued in to his natural wild mind and trusted him. Implicitly. Their collective language transcended words. There were 6,912 known living languages on Earth and he spoke every one.

He was cognizant a spoken language on the planet perished every two weeks.

“We have a huge responsibility here. No language no culture,” whispered FO. “Culture is what you are and nature is what you can be.”

They sang oral traditions.

They experienced seasons, celebrations, ceremonies, rites, and magic. They created and exchanged clan and tribal myths. Children heard, memorized, chanted and recited songs of their ancestors.

Weaving A Life (V4)

Hello Chicken Soup

Goes the market women’s mantra song waiting for customers in Sapa, Vietnam.

Basic English is all you need to sell chicken soup. It arrives with long white noodles. Food women work from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week. 

Sellers, shoppers, locals, a few tourists with guides or in pairs feel comfortable with inexpensive market food. What is the profit margin, food cost, labor cost? 

Two foreigners live here. One is a Frenchman mid-20 with a brown ponytail. He speaks fluent H’mong. He stands on the cement staircase between the cloth market and sprawling food tables. He stares at people eating. He doesn’t smile.

He was married to a local H’mong girl, 19. She had a baby. Two years ago he left her. He pays support. Now he is chasing a Red Dzao girl. He works for the International Manipulate Relations Love Company with a Big Orgasm.

A fluent thin foreign man in his 20’s wearing large framed glasses carries a worn knapsack. He walks fast. He buys greens and tofu. He goes into a small shop for cooking oil. He hurries away over broken disjointed concrete blocks covering the central sewage system. He is in exile from far away. 

The Red Dzao women are persistent sellers, Buy from me. Repeat. Repeat. They never give up.

Mo, my 10-year old teacher gave a good lesson in how to handle these sellers. We were hanging out.

She said, When the women ask you to buy something, don’t say maybe, or later, or not now, or tomorrow, they will remember you and now and maybe and later and tomorrow they will tell you, you said tomorrow, later, maybe, now, Thanks for the lesson, Yes, I don’t know but I understand.

My and Mo, Sapa, Vietnam

Red Dzao

Mo

Chekhov & Wolves

Fear sells.

Fear speaks volumes being a universal language. Good idea, said Zeynep, Work fear and sex into this. Readers need to keep turning pages. This work is not linear. It doesn’t flow from A 2 Z. It presents a form with a minimum of punctuation.

Punctuation is a nail.

Is it an error or a mistake (part of a statement that is not correct) that’s a question for a linguist. I love Linguini, said Devina. What else? Split the infinitive hairs. Infinity. Infinite. Finite. Dynamite. Kids know infinity, adults are scared of it, said Death. It’s long, cold and black. Nothing ever happens again. 

Well, it’s ok to be horrible, said Z. Some writers give up because they want it to be perfect. You need to be passionate and persistent about your art without become obsessive-compulsive about it.

A writer has grit and stamina.

Do it because you love it. Make a mess. Clean it up and make another mess. 

A work of art is never finished. It is abandoned, said Duchamp Ulysses Take Nothing For Granted.

Kill your father. Marry your mother. Push a stone up a hill. It rolls down. Push it up again.

We are all orphans sooner or later, said Rita, Speaking from my hard lived experience. Experience is my teacher.

Editing is a form of censorship, said Leo Told Story, waving a pile of rejection letters from lame mainstream upstream.

Anton Chekhov said, “When a human is born they face three paths. If you go to the left the wolves eat you. If you go to the right you eat the wolves. If you go straight you eat yourself.”

Phonsavan, Laos

My Name is Erhan

I am your masseuse.

I’ve lived in this Bursa, Turkey hammam since 1555.

In a large domed room sunrays shafting at precarious precious angles slant along humid walls glancing off mosaic tiles singing blue, green, yellow reflections. The dome has a perfect eight-starred symmetrical hat surrounded by sixteen stars in a geometric pattern. At night stars sing their light. They give me a pleasant headache.

This is where I live and work. I raised my family here. I will die here. This is my fate in a water world where tea and conversations meet in companionship, community and conspiracy.

After the hammam and noon prayers men went to a teahouse. They whispered stories, gossip, myth, legends, fairy tales, innuendo, lies, half-truths and fabulous fictions as small silver spoons danced in glass.

Someone else writes this with a Mont Blanc Meisterstuck 149 fountain pen. He drinks thick black Turkish coffee. A silver embossed glass of water waits for fingers to leave condensation on its surface. He turned to a stranger, “Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death and sweet as love.”

“If you finish the water it means the coffee’s no good,” said a stranger.

Lucky distributed providence to oral storytellers engaging tongues, dialects, foolscap and fading footsteps behind shadows playing cards and slurping tea. Eyelids were heavy deep visual reminders studying down all the daze.

Such a grand and glorious saga, sang Zeynep, a heroine in a vignette.

I am a short story. You are a novel.

By day I am a gravedigger, said Lucky, and a literary prostitute after dark.

We bury our successes and failures in the same grave.

On your grave are two dates separated by a dash. What’s important is what you do during the dash. Is life a dash or marathon?

Go with your flow. Flow your glow.

The Language Company

Turkey