an old writer and his words

  • BALANCE

    The young man says, “I cannot comprehend how karma can be balanced.” The woman laughs, says, “you remember but I was once a stripper, that I took off my clothes, and being naked in the presence of men was nothing, since to them I wasn’t a person, just an object of momentary desire, but that…

    Lou Faber

  • SLOW STREAM

    The river that I imagined, a torrent of words and images is little more than a dry trickle, construction cranes along one shore hauling away half- and ill-formed thoughts, leaving only desire and frustration as a marker of what might have been. I looked at each bend, hidden from sight as harboring that epiphany that…

    Lou Faber

  • RHINOCEROS

    If I ask you to bring me an atom of oxygen, where will you search for it, how will you isolate it, so that you have captured a single atom that you can bring in response to my request? It may take some time and great effort to satisfy my desire. Or you may simply…

    Lou Faber

  • DESHAN’S “NEITHER ASKING NOR NOT ASKING”

    If you very much want something you must ask for it clearly, but if you ask for it, it will be denied to you. If you do not ask for it, you may be certain you will not get it no matter how much you want it. If you sit and think about this, you…

    Lou Faber

  • THE THING OF IT

    The thing he wants most is to experience life and all it offers. By that he means he wants to see what is there, to smell it, to engage it with all of his senses, for those are what he trusts, they provide him reality, without them his mind could not frame the moment. The…

    Lou Faber

  • DISTANT SONG

    I thought I heard a woman singing somewhere in the distance, an ethereal song whose melody floated over me, dropping momentarily into my consciousness then as quickly flitting away. I walked off the carefully tended path stepped into the clutching brush, the smell of Juniper filled the air. Pushing through a thicket I thought I…

    Lou Faber

  • CHORUS

    The man sits, waiting patiently for the wolf to arrive. It has been far too long, this wait, as the Wolf has his lair in the distant mountain, and has little use for the people in the city, in the place where the man sits waiting. The man is sure they met once, although he…

    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

  • BROKEN VOW

    Then there are the days when the promise to write hangs over me like a curse, when the words are just loose associations of almost random letters and they deny, defy real meaning. It is on this day where, when all is set on the page, I move slowly on leaving this behind.

    Lou Faber

  • PEACE, PAX, SHALOM, SALAAM, SHANTI

    There is certainly a reason, though in the time it will take us to find it, we likely will no longer care. The easy things so rarely matter, and we turn our backs on them hardly thinking, only to regret it when they slip away, and only then does their value appear.

    Lou Faber