an old writer and his words

  • FORMAL PROOF

    First Proposition: You were put upfor adoption because your birthparents couldn’t or didn’t want to raise you. Second Proposition: We or I adopted youbecause I wanted you and not anotherand to give you the good life you deserved. Argument: Given all of the possiblealternatives, you ought to be thankfulthat we saved you from that other…

    Lou Faber

  • TESTAMENT

    Christ and his discipleswalk slowly through the lobbyen route to the bar, discussingthe evil of war and blind obedience.They push three tables togetherand slowly drain the pitchersof Bud draft, laughingover the sound of the Karaoke.As the evening draws itselfinto night, he boastsin Aramaic that hehas translated more than halfof the Bhagavat Gita,although he much prefersthe…

    Lou Faber

  • LATTE

    At the coffee shop they chatter as if in some foreign tongue, conversations overlaid one on another on another, until all I can strain are snippets of words, stray syllables. This is true everywhere I have visited, and it promises good coffee, for I have found that when I can easily eavesdrop on others at…

    Lou Faber

  • PAYING HOMAGE

    No one thinks it all that strangethat novels featuring James Bondappeared well after Ian Flemingagain made acquaintance with the soil. Nor are we shocked that Conan Doylehas seemingly taken up pen againand brought Holmes back to life,although many find those efforts regrettable. And yet when I take pen to paperand cast line upon line of…

    Lou Faber

  • WAITING GAME

    He had been there for days although he’d stopped counting since it didn’t ultimately matter. He would leave when the time was right although he had no idea how he would know when that moment arrived. Some things you do on faith he assumed, and this had to be one of those things. He wasn’t…

    Lou Faber

  • MOBIUS STRIP

    You imagine tomorrow will arrive without warning or notice, and even though you are skeptical, you accept the possibility, and if it doesn’t arrive what are the odds you will miss it? If, as expected, it arrives, what the hell, it was supposed to do that so nothing is odd about it, and if not,…

    Lou Faber

  • NEWS

    The most interesting thing about visiting websites from foreign news services is that so many offer content in English and how deaths that occur locally seem to invoke the same sadness, horror, belated honor, and that local disasters take precedence over our own disasters not merely because it happened there and not here, but because…

    Lou Faber

  • A NIGHT AT THE ROSE

    Three beers over two hours and, giddy, I want to sing along with the Irish house band in my horribly off key voice, just two choruses of Irish Rover or Four Green Fields. It’s beginning to snow outside and it’s a four-block walk to the Government Center station. I suppose it would sober me up…

    Lou Faber

  • BROKEN BOW

    This poem was recently published in the first issue of a new journal, Punt Volat.  You can find it here: https://puntvolatlit.com/issues/winter-2019 Early this afternoon, a Kenworth semi pulling a 53-foot trailer rolled down Nebraska route 92 and entered the limits of Broken Bow. The importance of this event, while not yet obvious, will, I promise,…

    Lou Faber

  • MINNESOTA

    The night fully settles over northern Minnesota in the sky grows dark as the stars make their reluctant appearance. Peering through the tall grasses of the wetlands abutting the road 1000 stars are born and die in an instant only to be reborn again repeatedly, until they are replaced by the beetles that accompany the…

    Lou Faber