an old writer and his words

  • NIGHT

    In the end, it always comes down to night, regardless of the moon, if any, it’s faint light drowned by the city’s oppressive glow, headlights, streetlights and once, spotlights painting the sky, traceable down to that new place we don’t wish or can’t afford, would never dare to go. Death is omnipresent, his shadow is…

    Lou Faber

  • REMEMBERING ANOTHER FATHER

    It was scrawled on the back of a grocery receipt, barely legible. Charles H. Boustead Tunnel, fryingpan river. The river is lower case, its capitals dangling by serifs in one of the tunnel grates that constricts the water’s flow. Outside the full moon is ensnared in the gnarled, barren branches of the white birch. She…

    Lou Faber

  • THE PROMISE

    The moon has gone past full and as waning as I write, it’s slow retreat hopefully taking with it the burden of winter, that we now must measure in feet, the inches having been heaved up, one upon another. Spring will come soon for a taste of it, for spring is an inveterate tease, preferring…

    Lou Faber

  • 33,000

    As 33,000 feet, you want the smoothness that experience tells you, the sky will once again deny. Strapped in, you contemplate cursing the gods of travel, but no, they are simply meeting your expectations. Getting this close to heaven was once, she says, a mystical and spiritual experience, but then we transcended all of that…

    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

  • CRAFTY MOON

    The moon hid from me last night in a cloudless sky, and only a week from full, so we both knew it was there, peeking for a brief moment from behind the old oak in the neighbors yard. It wasn’t the first time the moon had done this, it will not be the last either,…

    Lou Faber

  • COUNTING TIME

    I was honored to have this recently published in Arena Magazine: A Magazine of Critical Thinking, Issue 162 from Victoria, Australia This river has for endless time flowed from the distant hills on its winding path to the waiting sea. The river has no need of clocks, cares little whether the Sun, Moon or clouds…

    Lou Faber

  • RISHO’S POEM 鐵笛倒吹 三十語

    Have you been here – who will know? The sun and moon record your journey. What you release gathers joyously around you, what you cling to flies off on the slightest breeze, mountain and cloud enfold each other. Will you join them? A reflection on case 35 of the Iron Flute Koans

    Lou Faber

  • ASTROGEN

    I could never understand as a child why the moon was female, the sun always male, and most stars but ours had Arabic names. Now makes much more sense to me, the moon is never one to hog the sky and even when she commands more than her usual space, you only want to stare…

    Lou Faber

  • FLAME

    He watched as the flame licked at the lip of the candle, the wax slowly conceding and falling in, forming the cradle on which the flame danced. He wondered how something as simple as a wax cylinder could have an inherent knowledge of beauty and simplicity and yet he stared at it certain the knowledge…

    Lou Faber