an old writer and his words

  • FUNYO PUNISHES THE SKY 鐵笛倒吹 三十二

    If there are no clouds, punish the sky with your stick. If there is no sun punish the clouds with your stick. As you walk the Way both road and sky know your stick with each step. If you doze will you strike yourself with your stick or grab it away? A reflection on Case…

    Lou Faber

  • HELL’S PRISONER

    I am pressed into a seat that would conform only to the body of some alien creature, or so it seems, for hours into a flight that increasingly seems eternal, particularly for the baby two rows back, who, like me would much rather be anywhere else. The crew dims the cabin lights the universal indicator…

    Lou Faber

  • DO NOT FORWARD

    I thought about sending you a postcard, one with the Riviera in the background or from Vieux Nice, with its teeming life, after all, we did have 30 years together. We never came here, I haven’t been back to the places we went together since they, like so much of what we shared, I left…

    Lou Faber

  • STEPPING IN IT

    Over the next few weeks I shall step into more churches than is safe for a formerly Jewish Buddhist, but in Europe it seems no tour is complete without one or more churches, at least one of which will be the most beautiful cathedral in all of [choose any country you wish and inserted here.]…

    Lou Faber

  • ALTERNATIVES

    I would much rather be home, listening to Joan Osborne on the CD player, lying on the couch with you sleeping across the sofa curled under the cotton throw coiled against the winter battering the windows ca tucked into your knees. Instead, I sit on the bed CNN droning in the background and stare out…

    Lou Faber

  • ENFOLDING

    As a child I was quite adept folding sheets of newspaper into paper hats and paper boats. The boats immediately took on water, and sank like the sodden masses I made them to be, but I could wear the hats for hours, until my mother had to scrub my forehead to get off the printer’s…

    Lou Faber

  • REASON

    I write poems about Wisconsin because I love the sound of the word cheese.

    Lou Faber

  • MAN OF GREAT STRENGTH 無門關 二十

    From this place traverse a thousand paths visit the ten directions with unmoving feet and recount your tale with frozen tongue to we deaf quadriplegics. A reflection on case 20 of the Mumonkan (The Gateless Gate)

    Lou Faber

  • THE ONE-EYED MAN

    He’s heard the expression “the silence is deafening” and he could never understand it. Today they studied his eyes, he staring into the the equipment, lights changing and flashing, they sitting, repeating “Blink.”  Soon he understood what it was. to be “blinded by the light”, and while he waited for his eyes to undilate, he…

    Lou Faber

  • ENVELOPING

    The night wraps us in the faint light of the glowing moon. The snow falls, reflected in the street light’s glow, and settles on the snow fields of recent days that obscure the earth that suffers beneath. We will flee tomorrow and leave the snow in our wake, hoping that on our return a week…

    Lou Faber