Ambivalent

Bursa, Turkey residents heard, “Woo, woo,” and clip-clop hooves grooving asphalt.

A thin man who’d escaped the Armenian genocide in 1914 by hiding in a mountain cave with Plato’s shadow of illusions hovering over his formless 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 thin, happy 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 stimulus snapped air. The horse pranced along cool be-bop jazz cobblestones in time with Monk on piano, Pastorius on bass, Rollins blowing his horn, Blakey 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.

Nearby, a cafe below the TLC teachers’ apartment went broke. A wild garden blossomed.

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.

At that precise moment a blue monarch butterfly probing nectar of the gods whispered turquoise wing secrets to a red hibiscus in Laos.

Laos

Many adults in the tribe, being programmed cynical skeptics living in fear, didn’t get it. Indigo kids trusted Omar's natural wild mind. Implicitly. Their collective language transcended words. There were 6,912 known living languages on Earth and he spoke every one, including silence.

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

We have a huge responsibility here. No language no culture, whispered Omar.

Culture is what you are and nature is what you can be.

Singing oral traditions they experienced seasons, celebrations, rites, magic and ceremonies. They created and exchanged clan and tribal myths. Children moving through history heard, memorized, chanted and recited ancestor songs.

He was a forcestero, a person from outside the pueblo. A blind writer in exile, he loved birds and freedom.

The Garden #3

Podcast of poems written in Laos from Grow Your Soul.

In Kindle and paperback.

Thanks for listening.

The Garden #3

Lao fisherman nets life.

Understory

“Learning is easy. Remembering is difficult. We have storage ability and retrieval capability. Speak memory,” whispered Zeynep in Bursa doodling with magic pens on transparent paper in her elegant universe.

He'd had heard ALL of this before.

“Ha, ha,” he laughed seeing through their world of transparent stupidity temerity fear and never ending sense of confusion and so forth.

He’s seen it in the land of five red star golden Xiamen dragons

spilling black calligraphy ink on parchment and now witnessed it in Asia Minority

where bored tired people ate grilled meat played backgammon

and twiddled retired thumbs as metro cars

carried morose living dead humans dressed in black

mirroring their soul out to industrial wastelands

on the far edge of Ankara, before returning at night

filled with heavy hand carved simple wooden

caskets spilling wasted youth from the PKK war front near Serious on the Iraq border.

Gravediggers and headstone carvers had steady work everyday everywhere.

Emergency crews pried a suicidal man from below Bursa subway engines after being struck by lightning.

He walked through an old expansive cemetery. It was spring. Wild flowers, white headstones, names, dates, and memories rested below tall pines and thick evergreens.

A woman sat on a grave pulling weeds. Tending soil. Nearby, her friend, sister, mother, aunt and grandmother from Asian Steppes speaking Tamashek whispered to a child, "She is cleaning the spirit entry. She is drumming remembering."

The child sang to the woman on the grave, "Auntie! Auntie," but the woman didn't say anything. She played soil like a drum. She was sad remembering her son, father, husband, uncle and grandfather. Their love and kindness.

Her tears watered red, yellow and white roses. A thorn pushed a white haired woman in a wheelchair along a path inside a humid rain forest covering 6% of the planet.

Smoke from burning bamboo and coconut leaves circled it's veins through a heart's four clamoring chambers. Smoke and love echoed from the Forest Floor to the Understory, rose to the Canopy and emerged through the Emergent.

Bird of Paradise, Eagles and Macaws lived here.

He passed chiseled stones wearing Arabic script.

There was a quick explosion of metal on stone. A man with a sledgehammer pounded a collection of memories around a grave. He paused, removed fragments and slammed his sledgehammer again.

The sun went into hiding. It rained. A woman played musical notes on Earth.

Kathmandu, Nepal

The Garden #2

The Garden #2

Podcast of poems from a Laos journal.

Published in Grow Your Soul.

Availlable in Kindle and paperback.

Take The Orange Pill

Another brilliant Banlung day bloomed bright. Infinitesimally small intense waves and particles traveled at 186,000 miles per second.

What you don’t see is fascinating, said Ice Girl. She and Leo heard the clatter of tourist utensils singing near dumb thumbed Angkor Wat guidebooks dancing with dusty beggar children hawking vignettes at a medical clinic.

The Angkor Children’s Hospital in Siem Reap has 22 beds in one room. They are filled with infants wearing air hoses in their nose. They suffer from pneumonia, tuberculosis and dengue. This is common. A parent holds a tiny hand.

I.C.U. has five occupied beds.

400 mothers cradling kids wait to see a nurse. She dispenses free orange generic pills.

Life is a killer. Life is a generic placebo.

The mothers are happy to get SOMETHING, anything. They have no knowledge about modern medicine.

One effective blue pill costs $1.00. Parents need to buy 15. 

$15.00 is a fortune. Out of the question. Parents accept free ineffective orange drugs. Parents need a miracle.

How much does a miracle cost?

Mothers are hopeful. They wait. They have ridden on the back of cycles from distant villages. Everyone there had an answer for the child’s sickness. Babble voices of genocide female survivors sang remedies. Men pounded drums. Relatives prayed and burned incense.

A shaman dancing with death smeared chicken blood over a tiny chest. Another healer waved smoking banana leaves over a child running a fever.

400 mothers waited forever to see a nurse and get an orange pill.

Chapter 22 Ice Girl in Banlung

Ling's art in Laos