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nnemmanuels.bsky.social
I should have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but I could not stop pressing my phone.
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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.

Writing a profile of a dead author under the sweltering sun and pretending to know what I am doing with my life seems fine my favorite hobby. Now I think, like Kafka said of Joyce, I am washed by divine fire.

I have a theory that poetry died the moment political poetry became a genre of poetry.

Not every suffering is made of blood. Some are a handful of roses you keep in your pocket, then watch them die.

One day I woke up and found myself in a strange place, but I didn’t take a leap or beg to be saved from the approaching enemy. I think I was quite comfortable in my undefined love for self-condemnation than in the quest to be alive and free.

Please repost.

All fictions are ordinary inventions of our private truths, bending inward, branching out into multiple streams of consciousness. There are no absolute truths: Even what’s remembered can be a myth lodged between a dreamer’s song and a realist imagination.

Hello Booksky, I seriously need writing/editing/teaching gigs. I’m short on funds right now, and with bills mounting like bulls on heat, the pressure is somewhat inundating. Please if you have any job for me, or know anyone who does, or come across any job opportunity, please share with me. Thanks.

There is language, and there’s the theory of language. What borders both is attention.

Bark all you want in a poem, but if it doesn’t bite off my head with the delight and sensuality of its language or leave teethmarks on the soles of my feet and walls of my heart with awe or land me in a hospice for the inundation of hard thoughts, you are a walking contradiction.

Whenever the god of capitalism answers the call of death, I’ll surely be there to pour the first shovel of sand.

Bark all you want in a poem, but if it doesn’t bite off my head with the delight and sensuality of its language or leave teethmarks on the soles of my feet and walls of my heart with awe or land me in a hospice for the inundation of hard thoughts, you are a walking contradiction.

Birds at the window every morning don’t know how to knit a Mozart, they scream—chaos: noisy wingflaps, beaks violently pecking my glass window. Before you begin your vanity talk, there’s nothing poetic about the ordeal. Sometimes a poem can be a metaphorical attempt at escaping.

Affordance versus relevance. The risk of seeking relevance is that there’s always a tendency for self-abandonment. When you lose selfhood, which I have always believed is where the true image of God dwells, you are whatever the world deems you to be. I choose affordance, always.

I had to become aware that I had lost my soul. — Carl Jung

Hey baby, love me in this minute of silence, so you can love me in the storm.

Back to writing poems after months of digging through slices of life with a toothless fork. Although right now my lines seem a little jagged, a little pretentious, I am delighted to make something out of the void. Oh god, maybe language doesn’t heal, but I can bet on my life it absolutely redeems.

Personally reading has become a chore. Lack of concentration is the ultimate propeller. But I do not blame myself. You don’t tell someone running away from rabid sharp-teethed dogs to sit down and perhaps ponder the metaphysical consequences of reading nineteenth-century Norwegian authors.

Don’t visit the library alone in the dark. Those books lined up on the old rickety wooden shelves see and hear you, and they know who you actually pressed the blue ink for during the last election, and they are coming for you.

If you haven’t noticed, people are utterly tired. Less posting, less drama on the timeline—just plain old inertia thrown in by the radical moment we live in. It looks like the teeth-baring wolves has finally won. But don’t be deceived: we are here, we are the other, and we shall prevail somehow.

The word is in the craft. The word lives in the craft. The word is God. Nothing else makes sense in life than the mastery of one’s god-given craft. The end isn’t always a circumference of perfection. Let the first walk wobble. Your job is to learn tricks to keep your feet firmly on the floorboard.

Another day to subscribe to my newsletter: open.substack.com/pub/sparetim...

Endless January just added an extra queue.

“My roommate raises a question, "Who do you think you are when there's no one watching?" I say nothing because I'm suddenly thinking about what the news headlines would look like if I go on and annihilate myself tonight, on my birthday.” A lil revamp. Subscribe. open.substack.com/pub/sparetim...

I dare you to read a little Dante or Milton at a mental facility in Suho where every patient is being held against their will and therefore walks around looking for someone to kill.

I can’t imagine anything sexier than having a lover read you a Siken or Bukowski poem after a rough love-making — medusa hair, catching of breath, a sinful amount of want and softness and smooch. I don’t know what you mean by you are tired, we might as well switch roles and get to the doing again.

If you think my dreams are enchantingly beautiful, you haven’t lived my life. I found beauty in chaos and transformed it into my favorite element.

My greatest fear is to get a bad rep after excruciatingly long lonely years of writing out the red seeds of my heart on paper, especially in this hyperjudgmental generation that presumes being a writer automatically turns you into a sort of moral Argus. You can be super talented yet be a bad human.

Clarity of mind is arguably the most underrated ingredient for great writing. If you can figure out how to walk on water on your own, you can be well be Jesus or Quixote and nobody would care an inch. God resides where efficient craft meets efficient intention at the site of efficient execution.

Another day of asking y’all to join my Substack. Hemingway doesn’t care if he was shouting to the void. I am not Hemingway, and I would love people to actually read my works. That’s how I learn, through engagements, whether for or against my undisciplined l, sometimes extremist, thoughts. SUBSCRIBE!

Suffering and writing in the same breath belongs to the Ninth Ring of Hell. Yes, I must write, but to write I must stay alive, and staying alive means eating and dropping shit. Nothing Golgothian than to rebel against little capitalist gods whose singular job is to shoot you down from the high rope.