My Mother's Friend

my mother
had a schoolfriend
she shared the war with

my mother
looked after her friend
in the ghetto

she laid her out
as though she was dead
and the Gestapo overlooked her

in Auschwitz
she fed her friend snow
when she was burning with typhoid

and when
the Nazis
emptied Stuthof

they threw
the inmates
onto boats in the Baltic

and tried
to drown
as many as they could

my mother
and her friend
survived

in
Bayreuth
after the war

my mother’s friend
patted my cheeks
and curled my curls

and hurled herself
from the top
of a bank.


by Lily Brett

Fed up. So fed up. People are hopeless. Life is miserable. I want to die.

If Pig can't fight it, I can't either.

Twilight Gloom

Smoking on the porch with my dying dog, and no one can save us.

Quotes for Encryption

"I sit in place for days. There's nothing I want to do, nothing that gets me up. The world is too rotten. I'm not so convinced that existence precedes essence, because what's so inherently bad with the world that we turned out this way? In fact, the material story is quite beautiful. Only with consciousness does death come to life.

'The flaw is in that which finds the flaw.'

Judgment is not the perpetrator; it is perspective. There ought to be no perspective, and I mean that technically. Our bodies tuned to pleasure and pain are not just the framework for evil but its catalyst. Experience turns the eternal dance of atoms into moral pandemonium.

'And whatever's charming disappears, while all things lovely only hurt my head.'

Any fascination with the world is in vain. The charm of physics is mere witchcraft, warped by our metaphysical projections, our conquests for glory and the causality between mind and body, so to speak. Even consequences might be local to our perception, so if there was hope - hope for change - would it just be an illusion?

'Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.'

I can't find anything worth living for. Ambition is spoiled by human dominion; I'm bound to this wretched place. Ten billion innocent and harmless creatures are murdered in the United States every year for two reasons: power and pleasure. I can't live with this, and it's only one of society's countless transgressions. I don't understand people, and the only person who might understand me is fictional. I hope there is a God, and I hope he is good."

Driving Inspired

warm music behind your head as you drift to another body
now walking with purpose down crowded streets
the lights are dim, but you are in control
sudden red fading and brakes
all power is lost

Screaming bridge, heart racing and thoughts of going over.