Common

Given sufficient population,
the most unusual becomes common.

A swinging door (Suzuki)

If you think, "I breathe," the "I" is extra. There is no you to say "I." What we call "I" is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale or when we exhale.

Shun Ryu Suzuki

Differentiation

Love is undecorated;
hate, ornate.

What will remain (Darwish)

What will remain of the road of the great journey to the unknown?
— The traveler's song to the horse.

Mahmoud Darwish, from "What Will Remain?"

The lover of strange things

Far better the lover of strange things
than the one who doesn't love.

My scream (Darwish)

I will scream in my solitude
not to wake up the sleeping.
But for my scream to wake me
from my imprisoned imagination!

Mahmoud Darwish, A State of Siege

New poems

+15

Red snapper

Pan-fried red snapper with avocado butter:

More on consciousness

How similar, the dull consciousness in dream and the early mind of man?

On consciousness

Consciousness is, literally, a constantly-fading dream.

Simplicity

Complexity appreciates simplicity
as simplicity can't.

New poems

+15

A hundred love songs (Darwish)

Sing for me, she said, a hundred of your love songs
and you will enter my life! So he sang ninety-
nine songs about love, then killed himself

Mahmoud Darwish, from "Maybe, Because Winter Is Late"

No force

There is no force in the universe strong enough, savvy enough, to save us from ourselves.

Inside his brain (Theroux)

He was almost a tragic figure. He was a kind of Atlas—carrying the world inside his brain instead of on his shoulders—though it was no less a burden to him there. He was paralysed by his knowledge; it oppressed him.

Marcel Theroux, The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes

Inspirations

Our inspirations are small, like breaths,
yet sustaining, like breath.

Synaptic Mechanisms for Plasticity in the Neocortex

Two Thirds North has accepted my poem "Synaptic Mechanisms for Plasticity in the Neocortex" for publication in their next issue!

No nouns

There are no nouns, only schools of adjectives swimming in proximity.

Fracture

Cruelty and love
fracture in infinity.

New poems

+15

Where all is broken (Ludhianvi)

Where all is broken
Where each soul's athirst, each glance
Filled with confusion, each heart
Weighed with sorrow...
Is this a world, or chaos?

Sahir Ludhianvi

It is enough

It is enough to want the sweet because it is sweet without pretending it essential.

Citation

Cite not for authority but for precision.

Door (Seth)

He dreams beyond exhaustion of a door
At which he knocked and entered years before,
But now no street or city comes to mind
Nor why he knocked, nor what he came to find.

Vikram Seth, "Door"

New poems

+15

Wither

The playful, the questing jest,
wither under scrutiny.

On ideology

Hunger is the only ideology.

The world

The world may not be made of poetry
but consciousness is.

Always

Always alliance over allegiance.

A place

Everyone wants to sell you the world
while only renting you a place in it.

The sensible thing

What makes sense is the sensible thing.

On the future

The inevitable future is us (people without tech) vying against gods (people with tech).

On Shakespeare

What we recognize in Shakespeare is that rarest thing, oft-described but seldom-realized: an adult.

New poems

+10

Window

Give me a large enough window and an enticing view, and I shall defenestrate the world.

Iterations

Creating iterations is easy; comparing them, less so.

The only thing

Perhaps the only thing that belongs to you is your belief that things are yours.

Show, don't tell

The problem with "show, don't tell" is all of the assumptions you have to make about what you are showing. You have to hope your reader interprets things as you have done, a quite naive point of view in a world of psychological and other complexities, and will too often find yourself at least tempted to try to coerce the reader into sharing not only the reading you intend but the assumptions that underlie them and upon which they depend. Sometimes a greater (and more honest) verisimilitude can be achieved by more directly orienting the reader to the parameters of your particular story, even if this must involve a greater amount of "telling."

On beauty

Beauty can only make you feel saved.
It takes truth and its techniques to actually do it.

Methods

You must discover methods for weathering the ceaseless onslaught of the surreal or be lost long before being lost.

So many

There are so many pains
we must be taught to notice.

On beauty

Beauty is not a proportion but a relation.

The best fool

The best fool is the sentimental fool.

Real connection

The only real connection
is when another's changes change you.

On hope

Hope exists where error exists.

The random

The random is just meaning waiting to be decoded.

On ignorance

Ignorance is another kind of tolerance.

We fear

We fear kindness being taken for weakness
more than we do caution given as meanness.

Better

Better by far to be unknown than disregarded.

Honestly

Devious is easy;
it takes wit to be honest.

Right past

When we look toward the future
we look right past death.

New poems

+15

At least

If you can't get an answer
you can at least get a clue.

Observation

Those who do it differently are punished,
those who don't do it, despised.

The worst

What is worse than seeing your daydreams outside, owned by others?

Infected

To be sufficiently infected with the past is to be inoculated against the future.

You'll never love

You will never love anything like a leaf loves the light.

The truth of existence

The truth (for it is no secret) of existence is that everything is aggregate.

Quick 2015 Summation

Books Read:  73
Poems Written:  478

Again, fewer books than I would prefer (though I think the overall quality was higher this year), but the number of poems I wrote is crazy, even taking into account how many short one-stanza poems I wrote.