letter

this life seems a numbing dream I try to sustain, inevitably i see through the planks of this makeshift bridge glimpsing the infite chasm beneath me. Abysses open up under my feet at the slightest provocation. I am like the candle- panicked by the smallest breath. My eyes are prisons, my tears inmates of indifference. My words bleed where i cannot. They carry the feint odour of a despair that is locked inside a labyrinth of roomless doors. I take refuge in my words, the words my pen weeps. As long as I am speaking, as long as I am writing, my pain is less keen. There are those whose pain leaves them abandoned in the frozen landscapes of the desert. How can we care for the world (that abominable abstraction) or for others when we are hounded by our own existence? Insomnia, someone once wrote, stems from a lack of faith. To sleep requires one to trust the night. Those who see the world with eyes that have plunged into hell cannot close them to the night. We know the dark too intimately to turn our backs to it.

celan

Instrange yourself / deeper


Trust the tearstain

thinking about those who have walled themselves up in apathy in order to simulate the illusion of invulnerability. These people treat others like islands, weigh stations, temporary sites of rest or exoticism, stopovers between the solipsism of the high seas. They may even visit an island several times, but when the winds change their course, they move on to other waters...

“prayer-sharp knives”

To puncture the omnipotent silence
To wound the divine indifference
To make God bleed
So that something
Any thing
Will ooze into this void
And violate the emptiness

sickness

Sick of profundity
Sick of ecstasy
Sick of poets in-
dulging in fantasy

Sick of confession
Sick of song
Sick of writers ad-
mitting they’re wrong

Sick of transparency
And dissemblance too
Sick of pronouns
Of ‘I’ and ‘you’

Sick of words
Silence is no better
Sick of their hold on
existence enfettered

Sick of insanity
And the myth of health
Of having to live
By means of stealth

Sick of all who rhyme
As if words could help
Sick of nausea
Of sickness itself