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Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

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Sunday
Oct182015

warrior attitude

He is open minded, patient, positive, flexible, and friendly.

She is intuitive and creative with empathy, trust and respect. Money.

He paid.

They smiled.

He left protected by a white butterfly ringing a bell.

Music is the fuel.

Welcome to Planet Insane Asylum.

You are released on your own recognizance.

Create a new world. Ride a bike. Explore.

Life is the destination.

Warrior attitude.

Understanding by design.

Your story emerges from nothing. Discover a point of departure, a direction.

Mad ones sing with fools.

Saturday
Oct172015

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.

 

Thursday
Oct152015

Burned woman - TLC 47

Well removed from erotic games of loneliness, regret, alienation and impending loss Metro doors opened at 9:23 p.m.

She limped in dragging her right foot. Scared. Excruciating pain. Alone and cold in a thin black sweater and long gray skirt. 45, slight of sight, olive pale skin, black hair pulled back. Her left foot was normal. Her right foot resembled elephantiasis.

Bending down she raised her skirt from around her ankles. Burned and bloody skin ran three inches across and ten inches high. First or second-degree burns exposed a layer of red lined white skin. She touched an edge of fried skin with a white tissue. Clear cold air sent shivers through her central nervous system shutting down pain receptors.

She needed medical attention. Two embarrassed men diverted their eyes.

Grimacing she fingered a phone. No tears.

Metro rolled through darkness, over a river, past an Everest furniture store flashing red neon and shuttered Doner diners.

Why was she alone on a freezing late night in a flimsy sweater her skin below the knee running to her ankle burned away exposing blood red lines wearing an abstract expression on her sacred scared distracted face watching night fly past windows where blue flickering TV images and children eye spied on each other as she kept going

past the expensive private hospital on a hill gleaming its extensive intensive care wards filled with antiseptics, bandages, lotions, potions and patients with money as her treatment was delayed, forgotten, useless now

because she was poor and silent in her seat, anxious, feeling pain wondering where she’d go, where she would end up on this cold dark night of her soul

as a stranger

lacking the ability to heal her studied her anxious passive expression feeling her violent burning sensations as fire and heat nerve impulses penetrated synapse sensory channels where signals blocked by neurotransmitters shut down her final inconvenient chance.

The Language Company

Wednesday
Oct142015

scrub dead skin in laos

On a Sunday in Vientiane he finished another revision of A Century is Nothing.

He thought to retitle it Omar the Blind. It will see another edit. Another polishing.

A 2nd edition was published in the fall 2012.

Now he will let it sit still. He's tired of it. He's been consistent with it every morning, afternoons. Ding the work. Polishing is the party.

He feels good about the process.

He rode his mountain bike after spraying oil on sprocket and chain.

He rode slow. He discovered a woman with her plastic box sitting in the shade doing nails on a quiet side street.

He gestured scraping souls. She smiled and finished another woman. He soaked feet and hands in water. She scrubbed off dead skin.

It reminded him of murdering his manuscript darlings. She trimmed cuticles and skin with a small silver tool. She showed him Timothy Michael Leonard.

She wrote him into her story and he wrote her into his.

They're are mutually inconclusive.

Love is unconditional.

A Century is Nothing

Monday
Oct122015

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.