“The breath of the passers-by…

Consider this: You can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not “you.” The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato. The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photo-receptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most direct protests against social injustice were in prose. They were reasoned arguments written in the belief that, given time, people would come to see reason, and that, finally, history was on the side of reason. Today this is by no means clear. The outcome is by no means guaranteed. The suffering of the present and the past is unlikely to be redeemed by a future era of universal happiness. And evil is a constant ineradicable reality. All this means that the resolution – the coming to terms with the sense to be given to life – cannot be deferred. The future cannot be trusted. The moment of truth is now. And more and more it will be poetry, rather than prose, that receives this truth. Prose is far more trusting than poetry; poetry speaks to the immediate wound.

why the fuck does english have a word for

Because you’re not looking hard enough! ;)

english has some of the best examples of stupidly specific words, tbh

fun latin word of the day

I am trying to love poetry again. My love is not like a muscle, that withers if you let it lie unused, or a vegetable, rotting unseen in the refrigerator. It is more like one of those rivers that is renewed only by snowmelt, or a bear, that, waking after hibernation, struggles to recall why it left its cave, blinking its eyes against the pallor of the sun.

“Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor. With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn’t choose them, I don’t fault them, but it took time to reject them.”

I try to write the ghost into my poem by writing like the ghost, but that’s not it either. Unable to write the poem I dream, I follow the ghost home. I whisper to the ghost. I whisper to the ghost. I whisper to the ghost.