an old writer and his words

  • CACOPHONY OF SILENCE

    There is one thing a poet hates more than a page that refuses to be filled – it is coming across words that profess or are sworn to silence. I had a pen I truly loved until it announced early one morning it was taking a vow of iambic celibacy. Poems once pregnant with possibility…

    Lou Faber

  • MEDITATION

    Sitting cross-legged on the floor staring into the pristine moon I hear the wailing of the dog next door, his mantra engulfs mine and I slide away braying at the moon.

    Lou Faber

  • WORDS

    “Suppose,” he says “words may be used only once, after that they disappear.” “You mean in a poem” she replies, “or life itself?” Even four stanzas can challenge most except perhaps Basho. Haiku would replace sonnets, villanelles, sestinas suddenly gone, anaphora is self-contradiction. “Imagine,” the young girl mused “sloganless politicians, talking heads struck mute, hushed…

    Lou Faber

  • PLEASE CONTINUE TO HOLD

      The thing I don’t get, he said, is why whenever I put in a call to heaven a male voice answers, and says he will transfer me. Usually the wait time is too long but occasionally a woman will answer and tell me the Queen of Queens, blessed is she, is busy but she…

    Lou Faber

  • I WISH I MAY, I WISH I MIGHT

    Tonight, if the sky remains mostly cloudless I will go out into the yard and select a star. The selection is easy, dragging it into the garage unseen is a far more difficult task. It will have to be a rather small star, a neutron would do but with my bad back the weight might…

    Lou Faber

  • ETA

    I can assure you I will be there one week from the date I was supposed to arrive, not a day sooner and only possibly a day later. If, by any strange chance I am not please feel free to contact me immediately at the number I have not given you and won’t. And if…

    Lou Faber

  • CHECKOUT LINE

    Time seems frozen in the checkout line stuck between the Mars bars and the tabloids, you wonder how Liz could survive a total body liposuction, and further details of how OJ killed in a moment of lust. The old woman in front rummages in her change purse certain she has the eighty-seven cents, the coins…

    Lou Faber

  • DODECAPHOBIA OR NOT

    As the moon begins it’s slow departure we step carefully out into the receiving night. The neighbor’s black cat looks up at the sky warily, steps around the ladder leaning against the house, and sits and contemplates the number thirteen, though it holds no special place in the feline world, it just seems the thing…

    Lou Faber

  • GET IN LINE

    She knew for a certainty that the shortest distance from here to there would be the one route he was incapable of finding. It had always been like this, impatient to get somewhere, he trying to accommodate her, yet still finding the most circuitous route. He was always embarrassed, apologized profusely until the day the…

    Lou Faber

  • S P A C E

    Space is not the final frontier of that I’m certain nor was Debussy right, though some does live between the notes, nor do I want more, what I have will suffice. No space is the damned key on this keyboard that sometimes sticks anddrivesmetodistraction.

    Lou Faber