Position

Position is poison.

For granted

What we take for granted is taking things for granted.

Our daily bread

Respect is the appetizer; fear, the meal;
disdain is dessert.

Escaping the tyranny (Harkaway)

At the same time, an increasingly ontological science tells us that the world we see is no more real than the ones we imagine: the universe is not what it appears to be at our clumsy macro-Newtonian level. Are we simulations? What does that question even mean? How is an informational model of a quantum world different from a quantum world made of information? As government takes steps to control the inside of our heads, freedom reaches to a future where even physical reality is not legislated; where what is written in stone is no more fixed than dreams or water. To escape a fascism that has become internal, we embrace an external world that is ultimately fluid and where the tyranny of the real itself is moot.

Nick Harkaway, Gnomon

Cherry rhubarb crepes

A poem

A poem doesn't have to tell a narrative to be a story.

Closer and closer (Knausgaard)

All of this still existed. The smooth, flat rocks were exactly the same, the sea pounded down on them in the same way, and also the landscape under the water, with its small valleys and bays and steep chasms and slopes, strewn with starfish and sea urchins, crabs and fish, was the same.... The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child's reality and an adult's, was that they were no longer laden with meaning. A pair of Le Coq soccer boots was just a pair of soccer boots. If I felt anything when I held a pair in my hands now it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else, nothing in itself. The same with the sea, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation, now it was just salt, end of story. The world was the same, yet it wasn't, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book One

The Animal Commitments

My poetry chapbook, The Animal Commitments, is now available for pre-order! If you are interested in buying a copy, please place an order during this pre-order period, as the number of pre-orders I get will determine my initial press run and the number of author copies I receive from the publisher.

New poems

+15

Thai curry tilapia

On grief

Grief is a systemic rejection of the intolerable.

On influence

Influence is an infection, which provokes a creative reaction by the immune system.

Unredressed

An unredressed injustice never dies.

New poems

+15

Easier

It is easier to love the tree than to love every leaf on it.

Unlawful (Harkaway)

Just because something is done according to the law does not mean that it is lawful. Law is made in the image of an ideal. One can make a law that does not reflect that image, and that law may be a law without being lawful.

Nick Harkaway, Gnomon

Forgotten (Orlean)

I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten but that we are all doomed to being forgotten; that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts nothing matters. Everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody.

Susan Orlean

By definition

I reject any paradigm that defines people by their institutional role.

Convince me (Porchia)

Convince me, but without convictions.  Convictions no longer convince me.

Antonio Porchia

Memory

Words are made of memory.  Even the shortest word—even "I"—is inconceivable without memory.