The face you see in your mirror is another miracle. It is a reflection of a reflection — of your life and times and the place you live, and wherever else you roam. It is a reflection of what you think, of what you believe about yourself and about others, and of what it means to you to be alive. A face is a story, told without words. It is […]
James Joyce aside, there’s a complexity to simplicity we humans create seemingly for the joy of wallowing in the confusion that results, and seeing the puzzlement it brings to others. An instance of this can be found in A Listening Thing, wherein Stephen tries to make sense of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, which, like Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, have been causing confusion for ages, some of which is quite […]
I have no idea what possessed me, just as I have no idea what possesses me now. Possessed, in the way a leaf or bubble is possessed by a slowly moving river, just before it reaches the falls. Three Drawings — I invite you to look at these. At the time they were first published, very few did, Poems, Notes, and Drawings then being only in its third installment. I […]
Not long ago, in a letter, I told a friend that, these days, The blog kettle is on low, on the back burner…. pending a time when I find I have something to say that I haven’t said already many times before…. Since then, I’ve been thinking about that, and what it might truly signify. For one thing, over the years, upon beginning any new piece of writing, it has […]
I do not carry a notebook or a pen. If I write it down, what then? Best to leave it be, and let it pass through and over me. And even that is arrogant. As if I will be, a moment hence, what I thought I was, and who I think I am. Yet I write it now — a willful child, a fleeting man — a penance of the […]
So old, memory failed, he’d forgotten he was ready for death — one last star at sunrise, just beyond his grasp. Joy! Bookmark, Page 470, Poems, Notes, and Drawings Miracles I sat on a rock in the shade, not far from the water’s edge. Three small boats were out, each carrying but one person. Two were floating with the current. The other, by means of an uneven-sounding outboard motor, […]
The flesh in dreams is as real as it seems. And this is a dream. Bookmark, Page 455, Poems, Notes, and Drawings Portent I heard a sound, turned, and saw my father approaching through the mist. He was smiling, as usual. “Your mother told me to come and get you,” he said, “so here I am. Are you ready?” I told him yes, that I was ready, and that […]
Is the early-morning tapping of woodpeckers a form of communication? Is it song?
Is the mind’s ear the source of an echo?
And what of the mind’s eye? Is that where we go when we’re gone?
Canvas 1,176 — March 14, 2018
Anonymous
I see you on a swing in a doorway
between two failing timbers,
caught by an echo
in the black night beyond.
Recently Banned Literature, May 23, 2011
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As individuals we are often our own worst adversaries, asking of ourselves nothing and demanding everything. There comes, though, a day of reckoning, when our dead and wounded must be carried off the battlefield, and another, more enlightened approach considered. We may think of it as an act of personal diplomacy. And yet, as private as it might seem, our decision to listen to ourselves in light of our natural […]
The rude, crude person who grates on your nerves, and who, perhaps, has even entered your family circle like a bull in a china shop — what are you to make of him? How are you to survive the onslaught of his ignorant, opinionated noise, and the upheaval he brings to your digestion? You cannot avoid him, and you certainly cannot change him, nor would you try. You take a […]
William Michaelian 
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