Certain

What is certain is uncertainty.

The silence (Kalfař)

Now the silence was another unwelcome noise.

Jaroslav Kalfař, Spaceman of Bohemia

Everything

Given composition and organization
we see everything but origin.

Aren't we all

I’m too old to be governed by fear of dumb people.

The Newsroom

New poems

+15

Everything

Everything we know comments on the past.

Civilization's choice

Civilization chooses participation over mastery.

singing like (cummings)

along the brittle treacherous bright streets
of memory comes my heart,singing like
an idiot,whispering like a drunken man

who(at a certain corner,suddenly)meets
the tall policeman of my mind.

e. e. cummings, from "Five"

New poems

+14

Dangerous

It's dangerous to challenge someone's worldview, deadly to question their self-image.

Whatever we carry

Whatever we carry unbroken through the disaster of our lives is just what we can never transfer to another.

Cannot (Kasparov)

You cannot overreact against fascism.

Garry Kasparov

The intention

The intention is an act,
but it is not the act intended.

An end to change (Shafak)

Undergoing undesired changes that bring an end to the past can prompt a desire to bring an end to change per se in the future. Those with less to conserve end up all the more conservative.

Elif Shafak, The Saint of Incipient Insanities

On privilege

All privilege is relative.

Is it free will

Is it free will that projects, detects, or protects the illusion of free will?

New poems

+15

Virtue (The Doctor)

Without hope, without witness, without reward.

The Doctor

On tolerating intolerance (Popper)

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

Karl Popper

The impulse

The impulse toward analysis is a desire to delay acceptance.

To judge someone

The only way to judge someone is to reduce them to what one can recognize, what seems familiar.

Just how (James)

Fifty years later I'm still trying to figure out just how the propulsive energy that drives a line of poetry joins up with the binding energy that holds a poem together.

Clive James, Poetry Notebook

Poets

Poets are alchemists of metaphor.

No character (Heller)

It was miraculous.  It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice.  Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all.  It merely required no character.

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Enthusiastically

The best thing an enthusiast teaches about their favorite subject is enthusiasm.

New poems

+14

O miserable minds (Lucretius)

O miserable minds of men! O hearts that cannot see!
Beset by such great dangers and in such obscurity
You spend your little lot of life! Don't you know it's plain
That all your nature yelps for is a body free from pain,
And, to enjoy pleasure, a mind removed from fear and care?
And so we see the body's needs are altogether spare—
Only the bare minimum to keep suffering at bay,
Yet which can furnish pleasures for us in a wide array.

Lucretius (A. E. Stallings, trans.),
The Nature of Things

Shakespeare?

It's not that Shakespeare did so much, it's that we do so little.

Cognition

Cognition tilts between attention and invention.

Life

Life struggles to teach us
to renounce.

The do

The do not
contains the do.

Extrapolation

The extrapolated future is a nightmare.

Open Letters Monthly

Open Letters Monthly has now published/posted my poem "Enough" on their site. The caliber of work on their site is high, and I recommend checking it out!

New poems

+16