I Lost One Day

Crows sang sunrise.

Lucky opened window blinds at the TLC teachers’ apartment. Riding the blinds sang a metaphorical cryptic railroad life. Hop a fright. Get out of town. Hit the highway. Get down the road.

Ain’t nothin’ but da blues, sweet thing.

When you come to a fork in the road take it, said Zeynep.

Sun streamed to pink-red veined orchids in a brushed silver container. Tibetan incense curled into light. Red gladioli, so glad, petaled beginning. Piano Etudes by Glass tinkled. A handful of dust labeled fear celebrated tonal frequencies. Piano fell silent. Violins picked up the slack hemming garments along life’s loom down at the crossroads making a Faustian deal with the d-evil.

In a new world order all the police are children.

They know how the world works.

Elegant clouds observed pachyderms and Staunton designed pawns, knights, bishops, rooks and queens fighting to control four center squares.

Look at the board. Absorb all the data. Recognize patterns. Analyze. Develop a strategy. Continually revise and develop that strategy as the game progresses, said Bamboo.

A black knight waving a curving scimitar and a 1* red and yellow hammer sickle flag driving a Turbo-bus filled with Russian baboons passed Hanoi beauty salons and full-body soapy massage parlors.

Girls trimming, buffing and painting cuticles greeted 1.9 million neurotic European tourists and swarming Asian locusts in a fat fucking hurry at Angkor Wats happening?

Bright yellow Turkish taxis idled coughing engines. Arabesque musicians fingered ouds as an operatic Turkish singer in Bursa lamented her melancholic love. Percussionists hammered goatskins.

Singing silver merchants chanted, Mr. Lucky Foot come here. First sale lucky sale make my day.

He joined a Jewish and Turkish man drinking tea at the Bursa silk market in an exquisite stone Caravansary.

I lost today, said the Jewish man.

What do you mean, said his friend. You made 3,000,000 Lira.

Yes, but I lost one day.

Inside a 500-year old hammam, steam rising through rusting metal bars discovered a weak Wi-Fi signal from the Achebadem emergency room staffed by Winter Hawk, Bamboo and heartbroken howling Lone Wolf.

After a sauna Omar and Lucky entered a white marble room with a high vaulted dome. Thirty-two pinpoints of sunlight shafted across blue mosaic tiles. In eight recessed cubicles men soaped, slathered and scrubbed off melting skin in humid heat. A robust masseuse worked sandpaper fibers over a stranger removing dead terrorist cells.

Absorbing musical notes the thermal pool bubbled natural mineral water as the literary outlaws enjoyed a sitting meditation up to their necks. I’ve had it up to here, said Omar clearing his throat.

Renewed, revived and rejuvenated after a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice they stepped into crisp spring air below blue sky.

The Language Company

Tribal Narrator

After they cut out my tongue I started writing script.

I found a compressed black Chinese ink stick with yellow dragons breathing fire. I added a little water to a gray stone surface and placed the ink in the center.

Using my right hand as Master Liu in Chengdu taught me I turned the stick in a clockwise motion. Black ink ebbed into liquid. A drop of water rippled a pond.

I picked up my bamboo brush with pure white wolf hair. After soaking it in water for three minutes to relax it’s inner tension I spread out thin delicate paper.

I placed my right foot at an angle, left foot straight, my left palm flat on the table with fingers spread.

I dipped the brush in the recessed part of the stone to absorb ink then slowly dragged it along an edge removing excess.

I savored the weight and heft. My brush has it own personality character. There are at least 5,000 characters in my written language.

I have much to learn and a long way to travel with this unknowing truth.

I stood up straight, took three deep breaths and exhaled into emptiness.

I centered my unconscious on the paper filled with nothing. My wisdom mind of intent became water. It was quiet, calm and still with concentration and focus.

I listened to brush, ink and paper. I am a conduit.

Be the brush, be the ink, be the water, be the paper.

Each essence is pure, free, clear and luminous.

My useless tongue flapped in the cold December Himalayan wind. Stories and songs were birds. I heard children laughing and singing. Playing with strings of word pearls they greeted each other in the babble of nothing,

They dreamed with eyes open.

When we are asleep we are awake.

I memorize ancient chants with black ink soaking through parchment skin.

I am not of this world.

I sit with a diamond in my mind. It reflects 10,000 things.

It is free of the three dusts: desire, anger and ignorance.

I sing my tongue-less body electric.

Where do I park this empty vehicle?

I have paintings, poems, stories, translations of oral traditions to finish that I haven’t even started yet.

If I had more time I’d make them shorter.

Wat Bo 22 May 2020

Tribal Narrator

After they cut out my tongue I started writing script.

I found a compressed black Chinese ink stick with yellow dragons breathing fire. I added a little water to a gray stone surface and placed the ink in the center.

Using my right hand as Master Liu in Chengdu taught me I turned the stick in a clockwise motion. Black ink ebbed into liquid. A drop of water rippled a pond.

I picked up my bamboo brush with pure white wolf hair. After soaking it in water for three minutes to relax it’s inner tension I spread out thin delicate paper.

I placed my right foot at an angle, left foot straight, my left palm flat on the table with fingers spread.

I dipped the brush in the recessed part of the stone to absorb ink then slowly dragged it along an edge removing excess.

I savored the weight and heft. My brush has it own personality character. There are at least 5,000 characters in my written language.

I have much to learn and a long way to travel with this unknowing truth.

I stood up straight, took three deep breaths and exhaled into emptiness.

I centered my unconscious on the paper filled with nothing. My wisdom mind of intent became water. It was quiet, calm and still with concentration and focus.

I listened to brush, ink and paper. I am a conduit.

Be the brush, be the ink, be the water, be the paper.

Each essence is pure, free, clear and luminous.

My useless tongue flapped in the cold December Himalayan wind. Stories and songs were birds. I heard children laughing and singing. Playing with strings of word pearls they greeted each other in the babble of nothing,

They dreamed with eyes open.

When we are asleep we are awake.

I memorize ancient chants with black ink soaking through parchment skin.

I am not of this world.

I sit with a diamond in my mind. It reflects 10,000 things.

It is free of the three dusts: desire, anger and ignorance.

I sing my tongue-less body electric.

Where do I park this empty vehicle?

I have paintings, poems, stories, translations of oral traditions to finish that I haven’t even started yet.

If I had more time I’d make them shorter.

Eat Fast or Starve

Leo and Lucky sharpened sticks on stones. They carved paleo-Leo-lithic paintings on soft clay walls. Leo edged circles, rectangles, triangles, curves, lines and dots.

He carved his name inside out for historians and archeologists to get the EOL gist, or, as an unemployed academic financial analyst on Wall Street would, could, should declare, English On Line.

They connected dots forward.

Salvaged garbage mired in mud created a recycled art project on the canyon bottom. They assembled a statue using sticks, soggy faded purple underwear, a filtered worker’s mask with a broken elastic strap, beer bottles, soda cans, green string, cigarette packages, feathers, needled pine cones, coral blue seashells, orange peels, melted candles, used condoms, fractured leaves, bird songs and Lung-Tao prayer flags from Lhasa.

Dirt play was a welcome respite from class tomb drudgery.

They practiced meditative Zen mindfulness.

A voice was missing.

Dozing, it concealed inherent pixel images of sad-eyed curious children trapped behind educational gates near women struggling behind plows and oxen or bent over Butterfly sewing machines threading conversations and manufacturing tongues in village shoe factories years and lives away from wealthy cities and dummies in display windows.

Lucky nurtured an indoor jungle in his university apartment and watered playful artistic English growth with two kids, Bob Dylan Thomas, 10, and Isabella the Queen of Spain, 12, from Human Province.

Interior. Their parents operated a popular student restaurant featuring boiled noodles. Slurping eaters' gazing befuddlement observed the three geniuses speaking and laughing, ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha.

Laughter is perfect survival therapy.

After a dinner of steamed fish, rice and fresh spinach he introduced chess tactics/strategies to freshman every Friday night in a cafe overlooking student street near new campus.

It was a mishmash of seventy-five restaurants, shops, beauty salons, karaoke night clubs and fruit and vegetable stalls amid rancid street garbage filled with malnourished savage scavenging dogs competing with humans foraging for sustenance outside high cement walls, rusty guard gates, cement dormitories, miles of flapping laundry and blue lakes leading to a Buddhist temple on a green mountain reflecting a yellow sunset.

“You've noticed,” said a waif castling early, “how the majority of Asiatic eaters drop their faces into the bowl to eat. Very few raise the food to their mouth. It's not about taste and camaraderie. It's about finishing it.”

“Eat fast or you starve. You’re either fast or last,” said Lucky, developing the Queen’s pawn.

Shit Detector

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.

Ankara

“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 James Joyce, arranging seven words..

“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 Cambodian/Laos landmine survivors. 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.

Weaving A Life, V4