an old writer and his words

  • MONOCHROME

    It is an admittedly odd sign of my age that I recall clearly when bathrooms were tiled mostly in monochrome, black and white, and it was a mark of quality when each tile was hexagonal, a hive of ceramic cells, impenetrable. Now tiles are square or rectangular, come in a rainbow of colors, often intermixed…

    Lou Faber

  • A SMALL PAIL OF TRUTH

    The Good news about rom-coms is that Hollywood (and occasionally Paris, Lisbon and Madrid, but never Berlin) crank them out endlessly, and each contains that grain or two of truth, like salt rubbed in the wound of a failed first marriage, and the balm of the discovery of true and abiding love. The small pail…

    Lou Faber

  • ELEGY FOR A POET

    (for Allen Ginsburg) You died quietly in your bed friends gathered around the cars and buses of the city clattering out a Kaddish to a God you had long ago dismissed as irrelevant. We would have expected your to howl, to decry the unfairness of it all, but you merely said it is time, and…

    Lou Faber

  • IN SEARCH

    He’d been searching for ever, or so often seemed, for no-self, and he couldn’t fathom why it was so difficult to attain simple absence, nothing must be less than something, after all. He knew, like Sisyphus, he would continue to search until he succeeded, the gods of his soul decreed it and you don’t fuck…

    Lou Faber

  • THE GREAT HERE AFTER

    When it’s time, i suppose I’d like to go like my dog and cat, slipping away as they were gently stroked. It could be like that, there’s a chance but I can’t count on it, no one can. I never did try skydiving, too late, now and so a failed or fouled chute won’t be…

    Lou Faber

  • SEPPO’S SANCTITY 鐵笛倒吹 三十七

    You claim to seek sanctity – will you know it if you find it along the way? What if it sneaks up on you when you are lost in reverie, what if it reaches you in a strike of the teacher’s stick, will you jump in fear and frighten it away, or sit with it…

    Lou Faber

  • NUMBER 9?

    The truly sad thing is not that billions were spent on the voyage to our most distant planet only to discover, on arrival it wasn’t a planet at all, merely a dwarf, a near planet and yet there was no rebate for the downgrade. Life is too often like that, you want a mulligan and…

    Lou Faber

  • DYING TO MEET YOU

    The single greatest problem In writing about death Is that everybody does it, dies Sooner or later, so it’s hardly All that special unless, like Twain, it happens more than once. But perhaps multiple deaths are not All that uncommon, for Buddhists, Among whom I count myself It happens all the time, karma demands it.…

    Lou Faber

  • MOVING PICTURE

    Increasingly few can remember the time when making a home movie was an event unto itself, when you didn’t strap the camera to handlebars, helmet, dashboard or body, but you hand-carried the damn thing weighing a pound or two, you stuffed it with film which you sent off to the lab to have developed, hoping…

    Lou Faber

  • PRAYER

    We bow our heads and utter words not to the cicada speaking through a spring night or the beetle crawling slowly across the leaf searching for the edge. We bid the crow silent, the cat mewling his hunger, just to crawl under a porch awaiting morning, the child to sleep. The stream flows slowly by,…

    Lou Faber