The perks of being on the sidelines

One of the most beautiful poems I have recently read is this: a breezy august sweater she wore bearing me around my shoulders (Kate Kaulakalna) The picture is perfect. The time stands still, projecting a feeling of emptiness, simultaneously reflecting the temperature gradient of late summer and a filial sensation of continuity and memory. The…

what students write

one of those moments in a teacher’s life. those moments. when the truth is spoken by the lips of the infants. terrible truth, too. from a student’s paper, analysing translation: He (Newmark, 1988) has categorized cultural words in five groups; words related to: Ecology; Material culture (food, clothes, transport, etc.) Social culture (work and leisure); Organisations,…

This is how he does it

My ingenious Kat getting out through the kitchen window. I probably have to secure my computer and other electronic things before he secretly takes them over.

trivia

behind the sunglasses you wore your tired eyes; reflections of sparrows mated vehemently across the space of fresh minted sunshine. the wetly-thawed earth was fragrant with emerald moss. starlings chirped darkly, looking for morning worms under the din of the city. i saw you sitting alone, at a crowded bus-stop. the traffic went by unrestrained…

the cactus plant blossoms gloriously

for another year we two have been separated by a common heaven. for all this time, i’ve been writing letters to you in my head.  i miss you. and this is a cactus that decided to blossom on the window-sill. apparently, it likes it there. sometimes, i meet you in my dreams, and we do…

what students say

so i am sitting in the class, where the students have to prepare and present a news report about anything they found interesting. and so there is this girl reading hers. what i hear, is “scientists have discovered a cloak which they called the curse of the gays…” so i walk up to her to look…

sometimes post

dear diary,  i know you are not my real diary, because i have no diary, only a scrapbook, and nobody addresses a scrapbook with ‘dear scrapbook’. well, i am rambling. and using my poetic licence to write imaginary things as i imagine them. so, dear diary… sometimes life tastes of dry leaves and burnt cabbage.…

the taboo words

and so i said – i will die one day, that’s a fact. and my colleagues at work went berserk with ‘shush, don’t say so’ and ‘you do not mean it’, and ‘how can you say so, we must think of living forever’. and i thought – why should i succumb to the cult of…

a brief meditation on John 6:68-69*

Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words that give eternal life. We believe, and we know you are the Holy One of God. (Jn. 6:68-69 NLT) Jesus stands in the middle of the road and looks at those who find his words offensive. They are the same people he fed, healed and…

was clearing the rucksack and found this

a little winter poem*. i think it will look fine in the heat (such as it is) of the summer: today it snows right out of the blue they fall, correct in every aspect, criss-crossing the near to the far, cross-stitching the perspective to this silence, this mute mobility outside the glass. Snowflakes, little feathers…

a fledgling sparrow

found this one today. too many feathers to sit in the nest. too few to really fly. pity, it would have made a wonderful sparrow one day. mother nature sometimes goes for the smartest, not the fittest, it seems (sigh).

apparently, people contract insanity in spring

here’s this, from a student’s paper:  ‘The pathetic fallacy is a term that uses nature to express the characters or their emotions.’ this somewhat makes me wonder (annually) about what i am actually doing there at the uni. maybe i should use some nature to express my emotions. such as birches. or that would be…

the truth about my Kat

my Kat is not mythological. he has no healing powers. he sleeps everywhere. he makes weird grunting noises when happy. he wakes me up at unseemly hours. he does not even pretend to understand what i say or feel. he is easy to wash. he likes drinking from the tap, and tries to open it…

when the sun shines long enough (a limp allegory)

when the sunlight comes into my room, and i, too, am at home, i see cobwebs in the normally dark places. some are ornamental. some are dirt. ultimately even the originally ornamental cobwebs turn to dirt. who’s to blame for that? the spiders, who have laboriously woven their little webs to catch whatever insects happen…

resizing of cats

my Kat changes his weight and size depending on external conditions. he becomes small when he wants something. he becomes light when he walks on the banister. when he decides to wake me up by jumping onto me from the window-sill, he becomes heavy. at night, when he guards me as we sleep, he grows very…

upon the event of death of Terry Pratchett

death is efficient. what else shall i say – it is efficient to the last minute detail. which makes it … deadly, i guess. or welcome, if one knows of its coming, and knows its purpose – to release the living from the burden of life. Terry Pratchett is among my favourite authors, together with…

upside-down sky with peach-coloured dolphin dreams

peach-coloured sky breathes the pale dust of ships splitting towards heaven. stars creep out from their dents in the firmament, and drop, shooting, growing tentacles, acquiring a life of their own ——————– down down into the endless sea, blue as the night giving it birth. dreams like dolphins surface to breathe, shoot up into the stars,…

random fact

i dream in code. this time it is php and variants of html. i organise my dream sequences, using CSS. i wake up with a New paragraph (<span></span>) aargh.

the ultimate test*

death is the ultimate test – it is irreversible, a one-way-only gate, a membrane that filters you out and then returns to its stillness. death is both never and near, certain and so unknown that those who live the illusion of total control spend their days in fear. the ultimate test, where the win or the…