an old writer and his words

  • FIRST TIME

    It looks perfectly normal, the kind of restaurant you would seek out on a Friday night in a distant city. The people look like those you know or could know, those from home for instance. She is not remarkable, blonde, older, a slightly twisted smile, blue eyes, but on meeting there is a sudden distance…

    Lou Faber

  • ACT IV

    He knew he should not have brought the gun. He hated guns, they served no purpose in his world of words. He wanted to look at it, to stare at it, really. He thought that if he did so he might be better able to write about the senselessness of the world in which he…

    Lou Faber

  • ONCE

    There was a time not all that long ago, he reminds me, when the event of an eclipse was a certain sign the world was ending. Prayers were offered in profusion, and the event proceeded and passed, so faith in prayer was restored, if not in astronomy. Today eclipses are viewed as just other celestial…

    Lou Faber

  • RE-ENTRY ALLOWED

    He sits on the cushion staring through hooded eyes at the wall in front of him. He expects exactly nothing to happen, expects there to be no sound within his mind, only what happens without, expects that time will cease for him, or will at least cease to matter. He is not disappointed. The bell…

    Lou Faber

  • FIFTY-EIGHT MINUTES, MORE OR LESS

    In a bit less than an hour a new exhibit will open empty space will be occupied with moving bodies of artist and viewer, universes will form a thousand children will be born an old man in a distant city will slip away a contented look pressed into his face world leaders will ask why…

    Lou Faber

  • A DIFFERENT WORLD

    In a different world, I would write you stories, poems, that would bring a tear to your eye, that would make you laugh even when your mood would deny joy, that would bring freedom to some and loosen the shackles on many, that would reflect peace, that would lighten your burden, that would heal, if…

    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

  • HOPE ETERNAL

    First day of the new year and there seems an almost palpable malaise that things are not suddenly different, as though the turning of a page on the calendar might somehow set us and world events on a radically different course: the fool would become wise, the sage would smile knowingly and all that to…

    Lou Faber

  • DAIZUI’S GREAT KALPA FIRE 正法眼蔵 二十四

    All things are born and die so if this world dies at the end of its cycle of life and we are here, do we die with this world and which of us will be first reborn. Only when the mind collapses is the world born only when the mind collapses does the world die.…

    Lou Faber

  • SLOW TIME

    Time slows inexorably with the approach of sleep, the other world prepared for arrival as the awakened world falls away into ashes. Some say it is all dreams, but they have their own reality until they, too, retreat in the face of the great rising Bird that precedes the morning sun.

    Lou Faber