“So what?”

“So what should I care?” Kalzin said with a trail of cool shesha smoke trailing from his nose and mouth into the air of the coffee shop.

The place was nothing more than an outcropping of a small alleyway nestled between two buildings. The colonnade supported a high ceiling with roman arches. Small notches in the centers of the arches lent beams of smokey daylight down to the tables and palm plants which were in the throws of the quiet midday. Light conversations and puffs of smoke were rising up in slow wafting bursts which mingled with the smell of chocolate mocha and coffee.

Kalzin brought his coffee cup up and pressed it to his lips below a waxy black mustache with the slightest of tilts. Placing it back down he took another pull from the large hooka on the table. The hooka bubbled. In another wisp of smoke he continued:

“…So the government changes hands and instead of the Ottoman Empire it becomes the Republic of Turks or the Federation of Ottoman states. Calling it The Great Ottoman Pineapple, for that matter, would serve the same purpose. ”

Kalzin took another bubbly pull from the hooka.

“or perhaps the state is split into a thousand new countries with new governments. it does not change that people will still be living here even long after we are dead…And you can expect that we will outlive the last days of the empire now.”

He took another sip of coffee.

“Even if war and turmoil are brought here , it’s nothing that has not been seen before. The government is only made up of people who care enough to participate in it. It is after all only the draw of a card which state we are born under in life. By those same cards are we born in one that has power. It can all change. And I assure you anywhere else, the same people that cling to the illusion that their government is the best for the security it offers exist in other lands.  Just as there are those who rebel against their government’s brand of atrocities, deemed necessary for everyone’s betterment. ”

Kalzin took another puff from the hooka, his eyes scanning the colonnade arches above.

“These pillars have been here since before my grandfather’s grandfather. This place was once the Roman empire yet was hardly made up of Romans. This has always been a diverse city. It is an illusion now that that a government speaks for a people. I wish that they could go about their wars and movements without getting me involved.”

He took a sip of coffee.

“But what if the new government closes down this coffee shop?” I asked.

Kalzin smiled “There are plenty of coffee shops my friend.”

 

 

Cycles

The world has already been explored, our mores have already been shattered. Now we are all languishing.
The wars have been fought. All strength spine and defiance has wormed its way into words of decadence.
The old world is a dying white protestant corpse.

And his word has blanketed the complications of life.

The world that takes his place will not crush his head with a steel boot. It will watch him struggle, brandishing himself on the floor, as the androgynous stormtrooper picks flowers on martian missions.

And that fear of each other will replace with a refreshingly empty experience.

where the universe is bare, and the names are stripped of us.