( via / via )

"What is the overly long, pretentious German compound word for 'that keen awareness, when leaving a place, that you will never see it again'?"

On thinking in images/thinking in words: there is the metaphor of "more image-like" & the metaphor of "more-verbalization-like", but its actuality is rather far from the perception of either, externally.

"He erected a barbed-wire fence between himself and the common reader, like a man planting ‘Danger’ signs around a minefield."

"Decolonization ghazal with smartphone in my hand

You doomscroll every night or become apocalypse-denier, lol.
Count the headlines that unsay genocide, unsay ceasefire, lol.

Hey Siri, is this El Niño or are they bombing the ice caps too?
Siri says: prepare to dance on your own funeral pyre, lol.

True friends send me memes when I’m depressed, sink ships, scheme,
clog the Red Sea with dollars dead to the empire, lol.

Gun aimed at a burning martyr, at Truth ablaze yet intact: this
clarity of the livestream, as if God attempts satire, lol.

They shadowban resistance, though terror sees raised fists, laughter.
They want to be the heroes, of suffering never tire, lol.

WebMD has no diagnoses when symptom is silence, nor cure.
Are bitten tongues complicit? It’s complicated?–enquire, lol.

ChatGPT does homework: can once-colonized turn colonizer?
Algorithms wipe out mosques, victims pray at temples for hire, lol.

When my love had to leave I became a blinking heart on her phone.
Seas and moons have emojis, not what divides us–barbed wire–lol.

Select all images of peace–from mansion, factory, palace, zoo,
army checkpoint; no bot, only human is this kind of liar, lol.

Lonely, at rock bottom, you reach for a cobalt sedative–phone.
Eyes blur, thumbs numb–of the people who make it, wheeze, perspire, lol.

We’ll picnic and take selfies with the living and our dead one day–
feast, fly kites, kiss–at the grave of every last occupier, lol.

Their calm sniper’s sane, our freedom fighters, animals; so even
tiny fly, #BurnDownAllCages, revolt’s in your name, fire–lol."

--Tanima in Only Poems

The Great American Novels.