clinician

i’ll never forget
how when my heart was breaking
you went to see a foreign film in the suburbs with your family
like it was nothing,
the next day, proceeded to tell me about Korean film and
K-pop like an old man who was just hearing about it for the first time in 2022,
like someone who never knew anyone and who traveled to Korea, for a semester abroad or to teach English, or anything, despite your worldliness and AAdvantages,
like someone who never heard
of BTS, Map of The Soul,
or Carl Jung
it was then i realized how
ignorant and insular,
and Lechter-like you were,

you eat people to feed your ego,

and i was a fucking feast

your heart rate never rose the whole time

your dick sure did

Neologism: Amscape

Amscape : (noun) [ am-skāp ]
(am + scape)

The exclusively self-knowable inner landscape encompassing the psychic and pneumatic terrain of a person;

the complex of inner consciousness, metacognition, and intimate, private and transcendental experience that comprises the deep self of an individual; a human being’s interiority as distinguished from one’s outward persona, personality, biography or physical identity — and as distinct from the familial, professional, interpersonal, or social psychological evaluations, analyses, perceptions or stereotypes rendered, imposed or held by others.

Your amscape is the “you” that only you can explore, traverse and know.


This neologism is inspired in part by the late, Irish poet, philosopher and once-priest +John O’Donohue+ , who himself was inspired by the 13/14th century German mystic Meister Eckhart, speaking in his final appearance and in one of his last interviews ever, on On Being with Krista Tippet, before his untimely death in 2008. It is a compelling, life-affecting and -affirming conversation.


“That a person believes that if they tell you their story, that that’s who they are, and sometimes these stories are constructed of the most banal, second-hand, psychological and spiritual cliché. And you look at a beautiful, interesting face telling a story that doesn’t hold a candle to the life that’s secretly in there.

There’s a reduction of identity to biography – and they’re not the same thing. I think biography unfolds identity and makes it visible and puts the mirror of it out there … but identity is a more complex thing.

[As the 14th century German mystic, Meister Eckhart wrote:] There’s a place in the soul that neither time, nor space, nor no creative thing can touch.” And if you cache it out, what it means is your identity is not equivalent to your biography, and there is a place in you where you’ve never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. The intentionality of prayer, spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.”

John O’Donohue

from the Online Etymology Dictionary:

am (v.)
first-person singular present indicative of be (q.v.); Old English eom “to be, to remain,” (Mercian eam, Northumbrian am), from Proto-Germanic *izm(i)-, from PIE *esmi- (source also of Old Norse emi, Gothic im, Hittite esmi, Old Church Slavonic jesmi, Lithuanian esmi), first-person singular form of the root *es- “to be.”

landscape (n.)
c. 1600, “painting representing an extensive view of natural scenery,” from Dutch landschap “landscape,” in art, a secondary sense from Middle Dutch landscap “region,” from land “land” (see land) + -scap “-ship, condition” (see -ship).

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poem for poet: Warsan Shire

drink


her voice, delicious, spiced rum
her intellect, clear, Russian vodka
her truth, painful, white lightning
her beauty, full, Mourvèdre
her medicine, holy, mezcal

intoxicated and wrecked

you will drown willingly
soberly denouncing air,
pulled into the depths of her luminous current


and for women, womxn, womyn, womqn – who are difficult to love, click & hear

this


have mercy, also hear Warsan Shire here, and here.



Continue reading “poem for poet: Warsan Shire”

poem for poet: Nayyirah Waheed, Salt

[ The Lethal Salinity of The Truth ]

Her words are not for me
not about me
Her words are not for me
not about me
Repeat

am i allowed
To float Her words aloud
To sink them in my mind
To lap them from the page

i accidentally swallow,
then gulp down Her Salt words/
like when the surf breaks
and surprises an exhilarated, Great Lakes girl
with a mouthful of seawater
during her first swim in the Ocean

Her words were not meant for me
Her words were not meant for me
Repeat

but

they quenched then drowned me anyway

Continue reading “poem for poet: Nayyirah Waheed, Salt”