As the Mind Streams

All thoughts spring from one fountainhead,
In brooks of words they flow,
With lingual thrust they gush ahead,
To nurse or curse below.

One plays and says a thousand things,
Like actors do on stage.
Lifetime of roles he or she brings,
Under one title page.

          -- In Weakness  --

A cleft in one's moral muffler,
The mouth cracked out of rust,
Coughs silent things ten times louder,
While lungs gurgle with dust.

     -- But, in Strength  --

When the Word is good that day,
It soars above the mind,
Touching souls a mile away,
Leaving no one behind.

Who's That?

All those people who crossed your path,
Could have chosen a different way.
They stayed the course and pressed ahead,
To meet with you without delay.
Some come on foot, some come by car
To give you a message from afar.

Mind Whispers Louder at Night

Spiderwebbed rusty hinges on a bedroom door shrieked in the dead of night. Disrupting the abstruse arachnoidal telecommunication hotlines, and disentangling the gossamery figment of the bewitching hour.

A pair of unwelcomed hands in black gloves nudged the door just a crack from behind. Suddenly, a dream-like profile of a man appeared. For a fleeting moment, in spectral silence, he stood as still as a cold stone. Like an unknown soldier seeking his tomb in the catacombs of his own mind; the one bearing the scar of an epitaphic misnomer of a real man cut in boldface lie on a tightlipped marble slab. Even so, he stood at attention in his fuliginous funerary shrouds of mourning-black that night.

What he did next was eye-popping and unreal. You can say that again -- unreal: He expelled all the necromantic air he could spare out of his lungs to reduce his rotund waistline. And now, with deflated girth, he slanted his body askew and sidestepped fittingly right through the opening that he'd just cracked ajar.

Soon thereafter, others with penguoid footsteps followed. Some entered sideways, while others straight up, in accordance with their sizes, measured in breadths -- not lengths. In their wake, the alary shadows flung high and low on ceilings and walls and began to fitfully flap and flutter in corvine clapperclawing avigation. Just like ominous black ravens -- false phoenixes of hope -- from under each shuffling shoe they birthed and flew. Only to bounce off the sleeper's walls and fall.

Everyone's head hurt a little. Everyone's!

Somnus, our sleeper, with his head buried deep in a feather pillow, felt a sudden unease in the noosphere of his woolgathering bed. His orthodoxy challenged and sangfroid in self-doubt, he raised his groggy head off the pillow a whisper to survey the subjective surroundings through the sticky eyelashes of his mind. Soon enough, he directed his gaze towards the uninvited whisperers -- it's no longer a dream -- and what he saw were nine, repeat, nine, eyeballs staring at him all at once in full force.

The one-eyed fellow raised his two eyebrows and didn't even blink once. He was visually impaired all right, but efficient enough with what God had given him -- one of, or taken.

The other four intruders were less dumbfound, understandably, for each had twice as many optical orbs as the other fellow before, but not for long. Until that is, all six -- dreamers, susurrous sleepers, and somnambulant seekers -- all jumped as one.

A~H~A! What a moment!

Just then, out of nowhere, a single eye with pineal glare, not belonging to any one single person per se -- saw it in toto! as it flashed and dazzled them all. Whilst streaking down like a shooting star, and with one epiphanic bang, it awakened all but ONE.

Which? ... Which one "is" the lone dreamer now?

This was as true as a dream could get, yet not unreal -- this was not Somnus' dream, nor the dreamer was he or she. It was not the writer's dream dreamt up in a syllabary bed in deep sleep. Neither were those the other five wanderers' imaginings ... Who's left?

Let's leave things at sixes and sevens, shall we?

It seemed like this selfsame six,VI, 6, were once again hexed as one; as though nary a sleeper was left.

As further, and farther wander I, I wonder! too who the real whisperers of the mind are ... is?

The Wayfarer

It might not have been summer just yet, but it felt like one and it was hot. A lonesome narrow path meandered slowly upon a hill in perfect lockstep with the walker's feet -- as path moved, so did two shoes and a walking stick, or so it seemed.

Destiny, the wayfarer lady, was too tired, fragile, and old. Beside, it was too hazy and quite hot to figure out this mental blur at this noontide. Perhaps a mirage was causing a stir -- is it the person on the path, or the path in the person that carries this mustard seed, which moves mountains under one's feet?  as any advanced soul would care to know, while most would let the question linger and grow.

This old lady, burdened with age of fourscore and three, through aches and pains trekked up some more, with eyes focused on the summit of the first hill all along with two more to scale in coming days. At last, Destiny made it to the top of the first hill and then she stopped! She lifted up her head and eyes in silence to reflect.

As she stood there on a slanted ledge of a new perspective, she took in the whispers of  the wind and smiled. In her mind, she straddled a chasm in time out of the fabrics of today to clothe a new pair of yesterday and tomorrow. Suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, the earth she stood upon shook the foundation of her earthly senses asunder placing her in a kind of fugue state. Thereupon, the path before her eyes rearranged itself like magic and stretched deep into two distinct vanishing points of what's gone and what's yet to come.

This foot traveler, in shoes of half-torn soles and a shaking stick, lifted one foot first and then summoned her soul, murmured something and walked. She pressed forward with all her might to reach the faraway lands, which only seem far from here, but once reached or approached, most travelers turn around, straggle quickly and disappear on their desultory way -- very few stay a trifle to contemplate -- as to what, why, or who brought them here, on the first place. Nevertheless, it must be done. She knows not why she does these things, only knows that she must.

With ears pricked high to the skies while eyes cast low to her toes, gingerly, she put one foot in front of the other and the earth began to move again as if on cue, each going in opposite way from the other; just as always. She straightened out her time-worn and -fused vertebrae as best she could in deference to gravity's downhill traffic-laws. She then commenced her descent down towards the next valley where she'd been before, but long-forgotten. Feeling lighter, down the rambling path she ambled once more as if for the first time in her life. Alas! there are two more hills ahead to negotiate and their corresponding valleys to boot.

And back.

Only to do it all over again; to rise and fall forever more, till she's no more.

The Pearl

The miracle of You is yours;
The miracle of Me is mine.
You could do anything with yours:
Own it or loan it -- love it or shove it -- keep it or sweep it,
Or cast it before swine.
Just keep your hands off mine.

Murderers on the Turkish DisOrient Express -- Then And Now

One hundred years ago, a man, an accident of birth like Hitler, with spitting inner-images of each other, once said to a bellicose nation with scimitar-rattling hands, "Burn -- Demolish -- Kill all Armenians." His name was Talat Pasha, a young bloodthirsty Grand Vizier; better known as, the principal architect of the first genocide of the twentieth century; chief director of the genocide of the Armenians as described by Henry Morgenthau, United States ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at that time, and the author of The Murder of a Nation.

In 1915, Talat and the other two members of his triumvirate government, Enver and Djemal set in motion a blood-soaked campaign to exterminate all Armenians from their ancestral land.

Thus the first knell of death was tolled for the Armenian people by the advanced demons of the Ottoman Empire; with Jihadist fervor they went to work, and they did Burn -- they did Demolish -- and they did Kill.

AND Rape, Defile, Plunder, Desecrate, Torture, Decapitate, and Crucify, yes, Crucify, let me say that yet again, in staccato tempo, so the reader could comprehend the incomprehensible, C-R-U-C-I-F-Y (quite apropos in the turbid mind's eye of an Ottoman Turk to do so to infidels, for the Armenians were the first nation in the world to officially adopt Christianity in 301 AD).

Countless other heinous acts  were perpetrated with zero compunction and with Mongolian mores to murder and maim, that was their aim and their game. The following, dear reader, will make your cultured flesh creep, I might as well here explain: They nailed horseshoes into the feet of Christian leaders and taunted them to run like cattle towards their Savior Christ. They flayed and torched defenseless people alive. The "butcher battalions" even gambled with lives as yet unborn with twisted brilliance of sadism. They used pregnant women to make wagered-guesses on the gender of their babies whilst still in the safety of their mothers' womb, only to be sliced open with a bayonet tip to reveal the winner of that bet; thus a new Turkish game was invented by killing mother and child, two in one, while they had fun. They perpetrated these heinous acts without the slightest sting of consciousness.

This was the dawning of a new age of evil right at the temporal gates of the twentieth century. Courtesy to the Ottoman Turk, a genocide was being perfected in the killing fields of Anatolia where rivers of blood carried away bodies and souls of a slaughtered nation changing the courses of  Tigris, Euphrates, and destinies. It is a documented fact, that the mighty Euphrates did change its course for a hundred yard from the overload of carnage dumped into it.

100 years ago the Ottoman Turks did this, and this by any other name murders a nation just the same. Raphael Lemkin studied the Armenian plight with untiring assiduousness and called it by what it was -- GENOCIDE. Mr. Lemkin coined the word, only; the Ottoman Turks coined the act, verily; the former came from the latter. That is the direction of the arrow of truth.

Unfortunately, today, on the eve of the centennial, and 1.5 million Armenian victims later, modern-day Turks perpetuate the genocide by vehemently denying their forefathers' crime. Through denial, Turks continue to exacerbate the pain and suffering of Armenian survivors worldwide.

Why is it that when the word "genocide" is uttered anywhere in the world, it is exclusively a Turkish heart that hops, skips a beat, and jumps till it fittingly drops in his sole-less shoe of denial, and much quicker than you could grunt the "G" phoneme? WHY? Is it possible that an Assyrian, a Pontus Greek, a Bulgarian of Batak, or an Alevi of Dersim would know the answer to this conundrum? You bet! for they too were massacred en masse by the same grand masters of genocide.

The greatest danger to Turkey lies not in anyone’s use of the word “genocide,” but in refusing to acknowledge what took place 100 years ago. As recently as April 12, 2015, when Pope Francis uttered the word "genocide" the Turkish authorities ran amuck and went on autopilot attack mode, and began denying the undeniable; defend the undefendable, while parroting ad nauseam, "our-noble-ancestors-did-nothing-wrong” line. In 1915 alone, The New York Times published 145 articles about the Armenian genocide.

Genocide is not the result of denial; denial is the result of genocide. As French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy declared, “Deniers are not merely expressing an opinion; they are perpetrating a crime.” Yes, A CRIME.