I am challenging myself to engage in form. To fit in this self-construct -ed mold, the oneI’ve inherited frommy father, and hisfather before him,to swallow, become. And then I break out like I’m on the verge of insanity. And then I break out like I have no family to care about. In an episode of […]
Tag: angst
FREEWRITING EXERCISE #10
There are two ways of looking at every situation. Let’s call them A and B. If they were people, they’d be David and Peter. Or, as I remind myself to degender that ambiguous jellyfish of the mind, let’s call them Valen and Valen. Valen is the type of person who walks down the street every […]
FREEWRITING EXERCISE #9
Writing is a ritual for me nowadays. I don’t do it unless I have to, but I do it every day. I get into something nice, I put on music. I draw the shades. I sit in a comfortable position, and I pull out the blank page. The blank page is a canvas for this […]
FREEWRITING EXERCISE #1
I am writing this poem without having seen the end of it, without thinking of what can emerge from this process or not, much like hatching an egg, a child in the incubator of the womb, because all creation is birth and all death is anti-birth; I am a schemer in a room of humans, […]
Post-Bootcamp: Musings
The last post was about Manuscript Bootcamp, a weekend-long workshop where we got to hunker down and work on our manuscripts with several industry professionals and literary figures. As part of the Bootcamp, we had a “Presentation of Works”, where we got to talk about our work and how it has changed after the bootcamp. […]
Manuscript Bootcamp – Thoughts and Reflections
So, over the last weekend I’ve attended Manuscript Bootcamp (see last post), an intensive 3-day programme where your manuscript gets absolutely slaughtered and picked clean by various people in the industry, from writers to editors and beyond. As mentioned, given that the programme comes only once every two years for poetry, and that only 6 […]
MEDITATION FROM PEOPLE WATCHING IN LONDON
It is a miracle for people to love each other, in spite of the fact that people are people. We are so minute and small in this ocean of want. How we part like clouds nobody watches.Is there beauty in what’s unknown?I’m sitting at a cafe, alone, watching filled-out city buses run to death. Heads […]
SELF PORTRAIT AS OWN BIRTH
If two sameselves make a paradox, then so is my birth;one roll of the die with infinite sides.I oscillate between possibilitieslike a speck of dustcaught in vision. A child of coincidence, one branch of Yggdrasil, born to yearn for fruit. I’d like to reconfirm my own existence, ensure that I was some other unknown in […]
TIME
Time lies, useless as a swordin the lake. For one, there’s time,and then, there is passage, as income, squeeze the cheeks of this little tragedy. Who will offerthe world their breast? I’m sat, couched deep in tomorrow,hands on the pulse. Tomorrow I willflip onto the pavement and pound itInto confession. Tomorrow I will flip on […]
BLUE
The taste of dish soap lingerson the rim of the teacup. You and I sit at crossroads, legsdangling over cliffs. This isan exercise in communicationby proxy, messages hiddenin the fold of an arm. Coltrane murmurs in the background likea roommate, and the televisionis switched off. This is timeless,this is the way we freeze-frame our lives, […]
ugly stage 