Little James Baldwin

No epiphany is worse than realising that you do not matter in the grand scheme of things. Like dust on a window pane—something to be wiped off without second thoughts, something forcibly left to brood in an untamed emptiness. Your first and only mistake was believing you mattered

To watch an Iranian movie is to become a tissue wrapped inside a wet cloth. Oh Children of Heaven, pity me, I am still a hard man, so you have no right to make me weep.

Guillaume Apollinaire’s Zone is a complete masterpiece. You appreciate its brilliance more when the reading is done on transit. A whole new planet of linguistic/imagistic possibilities captured in 4k by a wandering French maddie.

"Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider."—bacon

Cupid laughed in my face and told me that I should buck up and be a man. Freaking Ovidian gusto.

Sometimes you take a picture of a house down the street and spend the rest of the day wondering what the owner was doing at the exact second the camera light shined on the house. Here, a house is a memento. A secret verb. Something so ordinary yet full of extraordinary questions.

And the days are not full enough

And the nights are not full enough

And life slips by like a field mouse

Not shaking the grass

-Ezra Pound

On nights like this I crave aloneness with a demystifying touch of belonging.

If you are awake reading Deleuze on a creaky bed while the world goes to bunkers, I want to say “congratulations, my friend, you just discovered the secret recipe for ruin.

Beautiful, rainy morning swaddled by a nostalgic husk. Got remembered of one of my earliest poems published in 2019 via Praxis Magazine.

Adding something is enough.

Brian Gyamfi

We never truly realize we are living in a sort of historical bubble until it becomes history. Time is whatever we say it is. The man existing outside time’s kinetic space lives more freely, more beautifully, more rebelliously against the immortally dark-hearted purveyors of nature.

I have a yearly ritual of sharing this Keith Leonard’s poem, almost like a personal tradition. Some poems are perfect, beatific things you want to wear for the rest of your life. If you have ever wondered about the navel at which philosophy joins with poetry, here’s your answer.

The wound was eternal, but the mind was God.

Stay alive, learn, study, think, read, build, invent, create, speak, write, dream, design. Stay alive, stay alive inside you, stay alive also outside, fill yourself with colors of the world, fill yourself with peace, fill yourself with hope. Stay alive with joy.

Joan Didion

Dreams are as much relevant as your nightmares. Trust whatever it is you have been shown, told, and dealt. Your God doesn’t need a shuteye as well as the devil you so much despise, and their knowledge is eternal. They may not have equal power, but what power have you on earth?

My love story resides between constant awe and arrant nudity.

“My doubts stand in a circle around every word. I see them before I see the word.”—Kafka

The Naming of Ghost Lettermen Resisting the demise of African literary tradition

Subscribe for free, people.

open.substack.com/pub/sparetim...

As a young writer, you want your writing to change the world, or someone, or something other than yourself. But then you hit a certain age of sustained experience, and you realize that the person you ought to change is you. That somehow the world will always reflect the trueness of our spirit.

I’m not in the US. But thank you so much. Please do share more opportunities with me, if you come across anyone.

You must wash your bedsheets while they are still clean. If you wait till they’re glaringly dirty, it might be too late. You might never be able to get them clean.

I don’t think any great poet actually sat down at their writing space and told themselves, “Well, I’m going to write a political poem.” However, I’d want to know what you mean by poets ending their poems on an up note—a typical example, if possible.

Great observation. Do you think the whole decadence began at the level of language or craftsmanship? I thought I think language as a moving animal got slayed. Also, Burns had a pretty good run if not for his sometimes overtly moral vagueness.

That was the first knifepoint. But the modernist poets left a smooth kill and we now blame the postmodernists who inherited the stinking cadaver.