No epiphany is worse than realising that you do not matter in the grand scheme of things. Like dust on a window pane—something to be wiped off without second thoughts, something forcibly left to brood in an untamed emptiness. Your first and only mistake was believing you mattered

To watch an Iranian movie is to become a tissue wrapped inside a wet cloth. Oh Children of Heaven, pity me, I am still a hard man, so you have no right to make me weep.

Guillaume Apollinaire’s Zone is a complete masterpiece. You appreciate its brilliance more when the reading is done on transit. A whole new planet of linguistic/imagistic possibilities captured in 4k by a wandering French maddie.

"Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider."—bacon

Cupid laughed in my face and told me that I should buck up and be a man. Freaking Ovidian gusto.

Sometimes you take a picture of a house down the street and spend the rest of the day wondering what the owner was doing at the exact second the camera light shined on the house. Here, a house is a memento. A secret verb. Something so ordinary yet full of extraordinary questions.

And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass -Ezra Pound

On nights like this I crave aloneness with a demystifying touch of belonging.

If you are awake reading Deleuze on a creaky bed while the world goes to bunkers, I want to say “congratulations, my friend, you just discovered the secret recipe for ruin.

Beautiful, rainy morning swaddled by a nostalgic husk. Got remembered of one of my earliest poems published in 2019 via Praxis Magazine.

Brian Gyamfi

We never truly realize we are living in a sort of historical bubble until it becomes history. Time is whatever we say it is. The man existing outside time’s kinetic space lives more freely, more beautifully, more rebelliously against the immortally dark-hearted purveyors of nature.

I have a yearly ritual of sharing this Keith Leonard’s poem, almost like a personal tradition. Some poems are perfect, beatific things you want to wear for the rest of your life. If you have ever wondered about the navel at which philosophy joins with poetry, here’s your answer.

The wound was eternal, but the mind was God.

Stay alive, learn, study, think, read, build, invent, create, speak, write, dream, design. Stay alive, stay alive inside you, stay alive also outside, fill yourself with colors of the world, fill yourself with peace, fill yourself with hope. Stay alive with joy.

Joan Didion

Dreams are as much relevant as your nightmares. Trust whatever it is you have been shown, told, and dealt. Your God doesn’t need a shuteye as well as the devil you so much despise, and their knowledge is eternal. They may not have equal power, but what power have you on earth?

My love story resides between constant awe and arrant nudity.

“My doubts stand in a circle around every word. I see them before I see the word.”—Kafka

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As a young writer, you want your writing to change the world, or someone, or something other than yourself. But then you hit a certain age of sustained experience, and you realize that the person you ought to change is you. That somehow the world will always reflect the trueness of our spirit.

You must wash your bedsheets while they are still clean. If you wait till they’re glaringly dirty, it might be too late. You might never be able to get them clean.

Writing a profile of a dead author under the sweltering sun and pretending to know what I am doing with my life seems fine my favorite hobby. Now I think, like Kafka said of Joyce, I am washed by divine fire.

I have a theory that poetry died the moment political poetry became a genre of poetry.

Not every suffering is made of blood. Some are a handful of roses you keep in your pocket, then watch them die.

One day I woke up and found myself in a strange place, but I didn’t take a leap or beg to be saved from the approaching enemy. I think I was quite comfortable in my undefined love for self-condemnation than in the quest to be alive and free.

Please repost.

All fictions are ordinary inventions of our private truths, bending inward, branching out into multiple streams of consciousness. There are no absolute truths: Even what’s remembered can be a myth lodged between a dreamer’s song and a realist imagination.

Hello Booksky, I seriously need writing/editing/teaching gigs. I’m short on funds right now, and with bills mounting like bulls on heat, the pressure is somewhat inundating. Please if you have any job for me, or know anyone who does, or come across any job opportunity, please share with me. Thanks.

There is language, and there’s the theory of language. What borders both is attention.

Bark all you want in a poem, but if it doesn’t bite off my head with the delight and sensuality of its language or leave teethmarks on the soles of my feet and walls of my heart with awe or land me in a hospice for the inundation of hard thoughts, you are a walking contradiction.

Whenever the god of capitalism answers the call of death, I’ll surely be there to pour the first shovel of sand.

Bark all you want in a poem, but if it doesn’t bite off my head with the delight and sensuality of its language or leave teethmarks on the soles of my feet and walls of my heart with awe or land me in a hospice for the inundation of hard thoughts, you are a walking contradiction.

Birds at the window every morning don’t know how to knit a Mozart, they scream—chaos: noisy wingflaps, beaks violently pecking my glass window. Before you begin your vanity talk, there’s nothing poetic about the ordeal. Sometimes a poem can be a metaphorical attempt at escaping.

Affordance versus relevance. The risk of seeking relevance is that there’s always a tendency for self-abandonment. When you lose selfhood, which I have always believed is where the true image of God dwells, you are whatever the world deems you to be. I choose affordance, always.

I had to become aware that I had lost my soul. — Carl Jung

Hey baby, love me in this minute of silence, so you can love me in the storm.

Back to writing poems after months of digging through slices of life with a toothless fork. Although right now my lines seem a little jagged, a little pretentious, I am delighted to make something out of the void. Oh god, maybe language doesn’t heal, but I can bet on my life it absolutely redeems.

Personally reading has become a chore. Lack of concentration is the ultimate propeller. But I do not blame myself. You don’t tell someone running away from rabid sharp-teethed dogs to sit down and perhaps ponder the metaphysical consequences of reading nineteenth-century Norwegian authors.

Don’t visit the library alone in the dark. Those books lined up on the old rickety wooden shelves see and hear you, and they know who you actually pressed the blue ink for during the last election, and they are coming for you.

If you haven’t noticed, people are utterly tired. Less posting, less drama on the timeline—just plain old inertia thrown in by the radical moment we live in. It looks like the teeth-baring wolves has finally won. But don’t be deceived: we are here, we are the other, and we shall prevail somehow.

The word is in the craft. The word lives in the craft. The word is God. Nothing else makes sense in life than the mastery of one’s god-given craft. The end isn’t always a circumference of perfection. Let the first walk wobble. Your job is to learn tricks to keep your feet firmly on the floorboard.

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Endless January just added an extra queue.

“My roommate raises a question, "Who do you think you are when there's no one watching?" I say nothing because I'm suddenly thinking about what the news headlines would look like if I go on and annihilate myself tonight, on my birthday.” A lil revamp. Subscribe. open.substack.com/pub/sparetim...

I dare you to read a little Dante or Milton at a mental facility in Suho where every patient is being held against their will and therefore walks around looking for someone to kill.