Writer Between Worlds

Soulful writing about humans and places

Category: Creative writing and fiction

Immersed

I’d like there to be only quiet between us. Let us swim in a sea of quiet, lurking below the surface like the basking sharks or with our heads bobbing above the waves like two forgotten buoys far from the freighters’ routes or, better yet, let us make somersaults like the dolphins. I’ll know what…
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Quote of the day

“In the world of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. (…) But the people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and…
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Quote of the day

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. (…) There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning,…
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Meditation

tonight I am the sky. its scattered stars beneath the tattered tarp of cloudstill feebly glinting on the inverted retina of a dark, blinded world, as from said sky now snow, in microscopic crystals, pours down, tangoes around the silence, accrues on steps and ledges, and on thresholds hisses like the big swooshing ocean, “behold…
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In love

with our bodies we prayed in their mutual giving, and our souls we laid bare in hope-laden heaving – our hearts, back then, a warm, welcome den, irresistible to each other, like water, like fodder, our chests throbbing magnets with manifold facets, now trifling clocks counting down the roadblocks to fame and to glory, our…
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Blinding

blinding the sun in the autumn leaves after yesterday’s rain the smile on a child’s face when she’s healthy again headed to school to meet friends trying on a new outfit her and the planet both like plugging back the missing link in the circle of life. I need to go back to sleep but…
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The thicket

people have forged a pathway through the undergrowth, trampled the soggy earth, folded in leaves and twigs and absences, wet foliage overhead, burdened by clouds the color of sadness. my daily walk. I sidestep, eschew, go around greedy damp vegetating hands incessantly grabbing the narrowing light. I slither like a shadow among thorns. a stretch…
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People call it October (IV)

it’s fall. inexorable falling. the sun, now, nothing much but a hazy blotch of heat looking up from the water: sprawled, splayed, just light pouring, floating atop the river, blended with the chill. eddies of light quiet and deep crude glitter amid the discovery that foliage, quivering foliage can’t last; and time itself, being stripped,…
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People call it October (III)

the air is crisp and cool the leaves are crisp and dying your walk on the levee, now, a brisk jog home. the horizon, burgundy, ashen, like a once raging fire put out by the night. from the river banks, a spectral mist, rising – reeking of sweet rot, all-engulfing – makes everything forgotten: the…
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People call it October (II)

it’s always best when you don’t know where you’re going. let the path take you where you need to be. if your feet hurt, sit on the bristling grass, straddle the shoulder of that hill, whisper a loving prayer, or maybe even weep a little. put one foot forward – doesn’t matter which, but don’t…
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People call it October (I)

I walk. I think nothing of it. I walk. I hear nothing but the raspy sound my boots make on pebbles the wheezing past of dragonflies in their autumnal attire the leaves – still green, crackling dry, floating in silence without aim. people jogging, imagining they’re going places. dust. hearts beating, heaving, panting, the trunks…
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Quote of the day

“To pit oneself against the mountain is necessary for every climber; to pit oneself merely against other players, and make a race of it, is to reduce to the level of a game what is essentially an experience. (…) What he values is a task that, demanding of him all he has and is, absorbs…
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