Nowhere Kid.

It's not called a writer's block, this one; it is an emptiness. Not the sad sort but the given-up sort, the cynic's sort, the old man's sort. There is no heart-wrangling melancholy in this emptiness -- just a quiet shudder time to time to make sure I am alive.

I feel alive, yes. As long as I can expel blood and poetry from my body once a month.

The time in between is strange. Small things help though.

Bread with Nutella, Anour Brahem, tick marks in to-do lists.

A friend emails me poems and I write back something from rearranged words.

I cook on a Sunday, pack my bags to New York sometimes.

Or buy myself books after books and read compulsively.


Staring at the maple tree outside my door, the pumpkins outside the neighbor's door, I realise this is my first real autumn. The leaves are changing colors and the campus looks beautiful. "What luck to have traveled three continents, to have seen things", I think.

What misery to have traveled and tired but gone or stayed nowhere, I think.