My Five Year Plan? Read A Lot Of Books. Visit Museums. Walk Through Woods. Stand In A River. Adopt A

today has been very pleasant

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place // Chen Chen, When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities // Warsan Shire, Conversations About Home // Fatimah Asghar, Partition // Aysha, Diaspora Defiance // Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous // Kaveh Akbar, Do You Speak Persian? // Safia Elhillo, Date Night With Abdelhalim Hafez // Gustavo Perez Firmat, Bilingual Blues // Scherezade Siobhan, How to Welcome the Dead

When Mahmoud Darwish said, "A University degree, four books and hundereds of articles and I still make mistakes when reading. You wrote me 'good morning' and I read it as 'I love you'."

Rained yesterday. went upstairs and sat on a wall for the best part of an hour with my legs folded and eyes closed. spiritual experience. 

keep thinking about that richard siken interview where he's talking about simplifying the metaphor, by removing the "is" — and the moon, terrible. the distance between the object and the thing to which it is likened to falls away, it feels [it reads], smoother, unhindered by simplified vocabulary. and so, it becomes alive, breathing.

its the same way sally rooney has removed quotation marks, and her writing feels smoother from it, subtler, a more coherent story where there is no stepping in our out of characters. everything falls in line, the veil draws back: the distance between character/reader is removed and instead of having the feeling be cut up by speech marks – there is a greater intimacy. the boundary is gone. the feelings of the character no longer at a distance to yourself, the reader is immersed in the skin of the character. no longer a book away.

i see the same thing in the internets refusal to Capitalise. (realise how you just read that word differently? your internal tone of voice heightening at that C?) thats again, removing the distance [!], keeping a hold of that intimacy with the reader. cherishing that tender bond.

its interesting, because siken says he needs to rely on the reader to make the associative leap when the "is" is left out. the same is true for rooney, i think. the lack of quotation marks demands attention. with an unfocused an divided mind, the lack of speech marks can easily be more annoying than smooth, stopping the flow of which the text invites the reader into. the capitalization of words is a stop too, a poem with uneven syllables: an irregular heartbeat ruining the pulse of the rhythm.

comparative words, quotation marks, and capitalized words – they all stop the blood-flow of the text. disrupt the rhythm. cut the flow short. maybe im simply very sensitive to these things, maybe i think too much about literary devices, but i love this style of writing. this stripping down – this removal of boundary and convention. the moon, terrible [how incredible!!] more please <3

the soft courage and freedom that darkness brings

It is dusk and I am currently wandering in the outskirts of town with no destination in mind. An enchanting perfume is borne to me by the wind. I have been strolling around in this fashion for the last half an hour and have met with multiple very interesting things. The sky is blue, a clear, Misty blue. The blue of a summer evening,Freckled with Opal and violet clouds. I can hear water trickling into the soil nearby, a delightful group of crickets have decided to favour me with their songs. I recall reading once crickets were the souls of poets, poets that never attained fame or wrote much in their lifetime, who sang of kings and queens, hopes and dreams, love and hate. Alright then, I shall stay and listen to them. Listen until their music becomes stitched into my very bones. I lost my way in an dimly lit street, without much care or alarm, I wondered what were the names of those flowers on the corners were, if flowers indeed they were, those witchy looking things. I walked on and found, rather to my disappointment, that I recognised the road, I sighed silently and proceeded.

I stopped at multiple patches of wildflowers and asked them if they would let me in a secret. “Of course not!” Exclaimed the little yellow cousin of the daisies. “Why would you think we would reveal our secrets to you, foolish human ?” She asks. “Because I am but, as you say, a foolish girl, will you not bequeath a ray of light to my clouded heart?” The bluebell laughed, as she swayed in the breeze. “I will, maiden,I will.” She mocked. “But only if you show yourself to be worthy of it.” before I could return her impish greeting, a sudden gust of wind blew them all away, to a faraway place which I would never see. “A secret”, the bracken chuckled. With a wistful parting gaze at the direction in which they had floated away, I turned and started for the house, running along roads where there was no one to see, brushing my hand against bushes, lingering only to observe lizards and gather flower spoil. Gosh, what an armful! I had dark inky bluebells, little daisies, something that appeared to be what I thought was bracken, a perplexing bunch of nettles, a clump of daffodil-like things that looked suspiciously elfin, and a while lot of ferns, ranging from bright yellow to faint purple. The rest of the walk was spent in pleasant dreaming, largely abstract. When I reluctantly returned to the car, it was properly dark, and my twilight of wandering had ended. After I returned home and had taken out my souvenirs and laid them out on the bed, I reached for my books and left flowers and ferns at specific passages. The scent I mentioned earlier still clings to me, and I am surrounded by the ghosts of flowers I vainly plucked for adornment.

It’s odd how the only time you are hit with a profound feeling of despair or any kind of hopelessness is when you either have nothing to do or when you are at least not actively engaged in something, I’ve had people tell me that that is why they keep themselves busy all the time, boredom breeds nihilism, etc. But isn’t that also implying - basically acknowledging, however unconscious that might be - that without the presence of an ever hovering distraction, everything is essentially arbitrary ? ( i.e the current state of matters is so terrible that you need a constant diversion to keep from falling into depression) How inattentive do you need to be to not notice that ? Maybe, just maybe, everyone is always in a hurry because of this need for their thoughts to revolve around some external thing ? Societal Indoctrination of behaviour ? Inadvertent familial conditioning ? What is it ?