What happens when the floodgates are broken — The Crimson Face of a Maniac In an arid wilderness The spade-like contours Of a preying vulture pacing shamelessly Loom dangerously in the stale air The crimson face of a maniac stares down Scanning the scorched sun-drowned earth For decay, frayed skeletal remains With two black windows Eclipsing a soul that isn’t there Broken Floodgates Basking in buoyancy Spirit…

A collection of six poems about being plunged into darkness and finding a way out of it — January’s Cold Hostility A dark energy floating around my soul eerily I plead for the peace of summertime Where levity and the welcoming comfort of warmth Replaces the weighty days of January’s cold hostility Shivering as I make my way through barren paths alone Crunching snow beneath my trembling feet Wandering aimlessly in a direction…

Surrendering to the they essentially amounts to surrendering to a faceless mediocrity, and who in God’s name wants to surrender to something like that? — I’ve been thinking a lot about what Heidegger calls “the they” or “the one” lately. I personally like the sound of “the they” better because “the one” has a ring of mysticism to it and “the they” just plain sounds like conformity… which is essentially what Heidegger intends the word…

Ten things I wish I knew then — Sensitivity is a gift, not a curse. It’s more powerful to speak from a place of vulnerability than to speak from a place of anger or to not speak at all. Silence will bury your words and haunt you with them until they’re let out, anger repels and will only…

“Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities” — To give myself a break from practically staring at a screen all day, my pre-bedtime routine lately has been lying on the couch, closing my eyes while submerged in a hodgepodge of blankets, and alternating between the audiobooks of Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower (which he also narrates) and Heather…

Thoughts Inspired by Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act” — I tend to forget that what I write is, in a way, entirely beyond me. Yes, the craft of writing is within my power — how to fit one word after another, how to technically get down the best flowing sentences I can through practice. But, oddly enough, good writing…

How my favourite song of 2022 embodies both a doomed flight and a doomed relationship at the same time — The throughline of Black Country, New Road’s Ants from Up There is the metaphor of flying: it’s in the album’s title, it’s in the album’s artwork, it’s in the many lyrical references that Isaac Wood makes to Concorde, comparing the once tantalizing supersonic aircraft experiment that ended in abject failure…

A meditation on Kanye West’s antisemitic tweet and why it’s not necessarily so easy to separate the art from the artist — About a week ago, with my morning ritual of scouring the internet for something interesting to read while eating breakfast underway, one headline, in particular, grabbed my attention: “Kanye West Locked Out of Twitter Following Antisemitic Tweet.” Huh? My immediate reaction was somewhere in between a kind of dissociative shock…

What the tragedy can and cannot say about the problem of evil — If God is all-powerful, all-good and all-knowledgable, how can there be evil in the world? This simple question — one that has, on its own, inspired a whole branch of theology called theodicy — has remained a constant source of anguish throughout human history. One needs to look no further…