Plague Blessing
Panicked disorientation in the predawn gray.
We steep the tea three times before throwing it away.
It is certain
every landscape vanishes into uncertainty.
It is impertinent
how therapeutic sunlight feels on your face.
The original purpose of a countdown was letting observers know when to cover their ears.
The last generation to remember life before the internet
giving birth to the last generation to remember when strangers could touch.
The worst thing I can think of is that as long as suffering gets worse in the future, the suffering of the past becomes instructive, even something one can be glad of having happened, since without its lessons the suffering to come would be even more painful, perhaps even unbearable; and yet, if suffering doesn’t get worse than it currently is, then the current and past suffering (or whenever suffering was at its climax) becomes comparatively pointless. If life is good and only gets better, then one would have been better off without having suffered beforehand, and one is doomed, it seems, to drag the negative fruit of that suffering endlessly forward, sullying the absence of suffering the future would otherwise be made of.
Every day you die a little bit, but up until the moment you’re done dying, you’re infinitely young.
Poetic language coalescing on extremities of feeling like frost on a window you wouldn’t otherwise realize floated between you and the world.
“Since I am not connected to or affected by their suffering, I will go out and spend time among them.” vs. “Since I am connected to and affected by their suffering, I will not go out and spend time among them.”
Grief doesn’t break your heart; it expands it. It breaks your brain; nature’s whispered gibberish is suddenly intimate.
Every movie is the sequel to the movie you last saw and the prequel to the movie you see next, regardless of quality, regardless of genre. One cinematic saga per person per lifetime is created, curated continually with each movie you view no differently than a poet choosing the word that comes after the previous word and before the subsequent word to make a poem.
May wisdom’s sweet resplendent light sweep the darkness and pain from the plain of your striving cognition.
May the cradle of nothingness hold the wilderness of you in its furious sway.
May you weep with the numinous delirium of those reborn who were born before.
