Now that I am lowered into my trench language I become an invocation. I am muscles and tendons, a pressurized blood machine, slowly releasing what was stored between the apostrophes, like a captured animal. I am a cormorant of the apocalypse, a confessing nihilist. Opinions grow on me like frozen waterfalls. My rage is inculcated, …
Today, I received a strange visitor called nihilism. His bleak appearance and slow, decisive gait exerted a strange fascination on me, so I decided to follow him on the street after he left. I followed nihilism into an alleyway, where a beautiful woman’s face smiled at me with the promise of a thousand futures, but …
Breathe in. Think of the ridiculousness of life, the absurdity of existence, mortal or otherwise, the laughable preoccupations of breathing animals, the inane schemes devised by homo sapiens to cope with all that, and finally the splendid endeavour to derive from it the source of mere funnyness. We are asking if humor is our best …
We sit still with our eyes closed. In the distance, across the fields, are green hills. Alright, this is my concrete situation perhaps not yours. Never mind. The why-question or more precisely the what are we here for question is personally daunting. So much so, that we assume we can hardly help each other finding …
It has been said – I heard the physicist Freeman Dyson relating it – that the human urge to converse is akin to the termite’s instinct to build castles. Perhaps the truth of this becomes most clear in the edge case of the hermit who converses or corresponds with an imaginary interlocutor. Henry David Thoreau …
Lorca (1898-1936) was one of the greatest Spanish poets of the twentieth century. I have read another of his poems here before. Today I read some morbid text I stumbled upon on the Internet. This is a 1973 translation by Robert Bly: Gacela of the Dark Death I want to sleep the sleep of the apples, …
Recently, I fell for the hype and listened to some interviews with the Canadian professor of psychology Jordan Peterson. I don’t find him controversial and his appeal to a healthy debate bypassing the left-right dichotomy sounds healthy. In the videos I watched, he often stressed scientific and statistical rigor, and I like that. Jordan likes …
Convenient Store This one here is a microwave world, we are sheltering our love from love. I sit down in a convenient store. I drink a cup of coffee. I look at the plastic bottles with pink lids standing on the shelves like proud flamingos. They are indestructible promises of freedom, their feet ringed with …
Phillip B. Williams (b. 1986) is the youngest poet I have read here so far, seven years younger than myself. He is from Chicago and is currently teaching at Bennington college. I read something I found that was inspired by hip hop: After “E. 1999 Eternal” by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony Dear god of armed robberies and …
Begin with breathing, as usual. Today we think about beauty. Let us be aware of all the preconceptions and just look at them in our mind. Symmetrical patterns. Some sort of similarity with things we expect to give us pleasure. An evolutionary side effect like a peacock feathers that for the female peacock are not …
Yi Yuksa (1904-1944) was a well-known Korean poet and independence activist. As one of Korea’s most famous poets, he and his works symbolize the spirit of the Korean anti-Japanese resistance of the 1930s and 1940s. The pseudonym he used, (이육사) also means 264, the prisoner number assigned to him. His real name was 이원록, Lee …
