an old writer and his words

  • A SCREAM

    Then there are the days when extracting words feels like extracting teeth, and there is no Novocaine for either my pen or me. If you hear a scream, just ignore it please, it is only the agony of a poem’s death throes.

    Lou Faber

  • INSTRUCTIONS TO THE NOVICE HAIKUIST (AND AN EXAMPLE)

    INSTRUCTIONS: Make certain that you carefully count syllables and mention summer   EXAMPLE perhaps not a bang certainly not a whimper– summer’s arrival.

    Lou Faber

  • TIME OUT

    She is fond of saying that time is on our side although we both know that time does not take sides, is incapable of action, is passive in passage. It is something of which we may never have enough but we are certain no one has more than we in this moment. She cannot imagine…

    Lou Faber

  • IF

    It is never if – we have no control over that, and if we did, we wouldn’t be able to control the when and the how. And if that weren’t enough, if we need if so badly, why are we so often completely uncertain what would happen if not.

    Lou Faber

  • LOST, AGAIN

    It would help, she said, if you would stop thinking of yourself as Sisyphus and all of life as the rock, you might actually, one day, begin to enjoy what you do. It would help, he said, if I could be like a great blue heron, grow wings and take to a summer sky leaving…

    Lou Faber

  • SLIPPING AWAY

    Each day I am certain something more slips away, forgotten, no longer able to be recalled, lost in the vast abyss of yesterdays. I would like to think this happens because something new, something better has taken its place, and I had no choice but to displace it. That is the convenient story I tell…

    Lou Faber

  • BUDDHIST RELATIVITY

    Now then, he says, and at once he is again victim of the confusion that he spreads in his wake. She takes him to task again, but he protests that what was now is clearly then, now, and this now, too, is now then, for each now is gone in the time it takes to…

    Lou Faber

  • ABSURD, YOU SAY?

    Here in Haikutown verisimilitude can be found in line two.   But over in Tankaville it can have three addresses.

    Lou Faber

  • YANGSHAN’S “DHARMA POSITIONS”

    This word no longer exists. This moment is now history. Dead stars shine brightly in a midnight sky. The Buddha has a thousand names and will answer to none of them. Why do you keep calling him? A reflection on Case 14 of the Shobogenzo (Dogen’s True Dharma Eye)

    Lou Faber

  • COGITO

    The hardest thing to remember is to remember is to program terminated after infinite loop. Forgetting is often easier, or perhaps we only think that is so for once we have forgotten something we may recall the act of forgetting but never the thing just forgotten. The key is to be selective in forgetting for…

    Lou Faber