In the debate between dubbing and subbing
I side with subs to savor the original
mellifluous French, Tamil, Korean, Italian...
Reading the subtitles assists the deaf
and hard of hearing although voiceovers
benefit the blind and vision impaired.
Historically dubbing was employed
by fascist governments to advance
the nationalist agenda. In our own time
the tendency to consider dubbers dumb
implies reading’s the indispensable skill.
My wife reads her mail while watching movies
so she prefers dubs. I admire her mastery
of two idioms simultaneously
but my limited bandwidth favors subs.

Are we but pawns on a chessboard
That God just moves about haphazardly?
Or are we placed strategically;
And through God’s plans can claim: “Checkmate!”

Sharp as an edge that does not ask what it is cutting.  
whole as a thing that does not need proof to exist,
thought arrives in full motion before meaning—
color before shape, light before weight,
not as process, not as method,
but truth already formed, unwilling to be held,
which needs no tending, refining,    

It is not a single stroke, a mark left in color.  
It is a corridor of light bending toward a vanishing point,  
a figure suspended in the breath between surrender and flight,  
a mouth parted—not in speech, but in revelation.  

It is an ocean poured into the shape of a body.  
It is a body without weight,  
held between the living and the remembered,  
flesh turned to pigment, pigment turned to memory.  

But thought is a language without translation.  
A thing seen without being rendered.  
It lives complete until the body interferes.  

Lift the brush.  
Already the destruction begins.  

The stroke was not supposed to be a stroke.  
It was supposed to be the collapse of sky.  
It was supposed to be the sound of a name  
spoken for the last time.  
It was supposed to mean something that words do not hold—

a woman made of light, moving without movement,
She is not illuminated by it, but shaped by the silence.  
She is made of it, pressed against its shifting edges,  
her figure stretching into the dusk behind her,  
her outline bleeding at the edges, the last smear of a dream.
a composition of gold and violet,  
her hands lifted not in greeting, but in knowing.  

Yet, what arrives is not what was imagined.  
It thickens where it should have unraveled,  
it bends where it should have stretched,  
it hesitates where it should have declared.  
the perfect thought impossible to render
that does not belong to canvas, to translation,  
the body’s limited means of making.

She moves too fast, escapes too easily,  
is undone in the visible, can not be held.
She will die in the weight of execution.

He will bury her, mourning and living
with the reality that her beauty
can only wholely be seen by him.

Passing Through


The city recedes, and in the dim hush of the bookshop, she stands—  
a shadow among shelves, folded inward,  
something bent in her shoulders, a shape recognized but unacknowledged.  

Once, she had said nothing but told everything—  
the stagger in her step, the new weight in her limbs,  
the way she lingered at the edge of the studio light,  
no longer the form he had wanted to capture.  

He watches now, tracing absences—  
the ***** of her shoulders once held tension, a poise  
that suggested movement even in stillness.  
Now she carries herself differently,  
the lines of her frame settling rather than waiting,  
her presence less an idea, more a fact.  

Once, she was all gold-lit angles,  
the right lines, the hush of reflected glow—  
a frequent hire, the form desired,  
an artifact of someone else’s vision.  

She had belonged to the eye before she had belonged to herself—  
posed into being by hands that never touched her,  
rendered in strokes that softened what was sharp,  
every detail adjusted to fit a world not her own.  
She had been borrowed from that illusion,  
but had never been made to stay.  

But too often seen, too often known,  
a form rehearsed until it dulled,  
the lines that once shimmered with possibility  
grew fixed, predictable.  
No longer his vision, only a presence—  
no longer his invocation, only a fact.  

Now she moves with a tired grace,  
her skin softer, edges blurred,  
a body gone through motherhood, through ruin, life—  
the exact silhouette that he will never sketch again.  

She does not see him watching.  
She does not recognize the shadow he has become.  
She steps out through one door. He chooses another.  
Two figures, moving apart,  
the way a vision unspools,  
the way a muse disappears.  

He does not linger, does not reconsider—  
what was once luminous has dimmed,  
what was once rare is now merely seen.  
Yet what is art if not the wreckage and the salvage—  
the ruin and the radiance, the lifted and the fallen,  
the flawed, the irredeemable and the redeemed?  

He will not ask. He will not answer.  
And so, what he creates will never hold her.

You are in the bathroom,
Fixing your hair the way you like it.

The steam from your shower
is setting into the bedroom now.
I can smell your shampoo.

The skylight casting an early summer glow
across the tiny water droplets speckling your skin
makes you look studded with rhinestone.

The subtle shifting of your weight
creates a curve in your side
and as you drop your hip and bend your knee,
I think for a moment,
that you look like art.

That moments like these are what inspire
The greatest artists in the world.

That I might be like them
if you were my subject,
But I am too busy loving you
To lift a paintbrush.

Mind, stop trying to solve this old problem in endless cycles,
This door is closed, don't you see?
All these doors are closed,
But you still hope that by knocking hard or long enough,
One of them might open.

This dark and empty corridor has been where you
Spend your time day in and out, but why?
Aren't you tired of all the disappointment and frustration?
This self-abandonment keeps you looking for answers,
YOU WISH TO BE FOUND! I KNOW!

Desperately and to be honest, stubbornly, you keep your nose pointed into this one direction.
As though this corridor never had an entrance and all the ways out were through these doors,
BUT THEY DON'T WANT US!

Mind, this exhaustion brought us nowhere,
Wallowing in suffering consciously and subconsciously,
LET IT GO!

The problem is the truth you keep believing,
Your TRUTH keeps us trapped in here,
But I am tired.
Summer is coming,
This search has not helped us all these years.
Please, PLEASE, STOP!

Mind, this feeling of dullness
And this stinging emptiness,
This is not how I want to spend my life.
I am 30, let me live and experience all that is out there for me.
I WANT TO EXPLORE!

New ways of thinking.
You don't seem to notice but there is
One door missing at the main entrance
Of this long corridor,
Where we have been lost for ages!
Remember, mind, we have once come so close,
There was light, new perspectives arised,
There was happiness, gratitude, freedom!
There still is!
We need the courage to believe in it again,
LEAVE IT ALL BEHIND!

Mind, you are constantly searching for what you FEAR,
And what you fear you always find!
Then you implode, make my body go through painful waves of emotions,
Distortions, this is a self-harming behavior,
Don't you know?

Dear mind, all these thoughts you keep sending me,
Make me be ashamed of my body,
You have created a self-image for us,
Which makes enjoying life so difficult!
BUT I WON'T GIVE UP!

Mind, your creativity is astounding,
Honestly,
So is your ability to analyse and identify,
How within seconds you compare my body to others',
Point out its weaknesses,
Make it the reason to not feel enough,
Find prove for not being love worthy...
DON'T YOU SEE, MIND!

You keep your loved ones at bay,
Constant chatter of overthinking is your veil,
Looking for a sign that everyone else
Judges us in the same way that you do,
We never move beyond these walls,
Never NOT believing into the terrible curse,
This story, Mind, you keep repeating to yourself.

Now I realize that indeed we have been trapped,
We have buried and abandoned ourselves for good.
You, Mind, because you believe in this madness.
And me - who is this anyway? I am still longing
For this freedom. I have not given up.
And I WON'T!

I have made myself your slave.
Why? Because I used to rely upon you
Day and night. You have saved my life.
By building our own protective bunker,
You helped us survive!
Though THOSE DANGERS ARE OVER!

Can you hear me?
The purpose of this bunker is gone.
I am 30 now and I wanna live.
Yes, I want to let my loved ones touch my heart.
Yes, I want to experience hurt if I have to.
Yes, I want to believe in the GOOD
And not in what I've been told in childhood.

Mind, herewith I am cancelling my agreement with you,
I cannot trust your solutions without questioning them,
Lately, I realized that I have been denying my heart,
By keeping company with you for too long.
If you still want to stay in this bunker,
Knocking on sealed old doors,
Where really no one and nothing is waiting for us -
Then do it. I won't fight against it.
But I'll stop believing your stories and arguing with you.

It may take time to unbury myself and get back to light,
But I promise, I will look at myself as a young sprout,
Because I owe it to myself.

Dear mind, consider my invitation to leave the bunker
And your old beliefs behind,
To restart as a beginner's mind.
I know my heart will receive us with love and compassion
In its beautiful and peaceful chambers of light.

This is poem written by Lisel Mueller (according to google). I just wanted to share it because I couldn't find it on here and it's one of my favourite poems ever.

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

oh dear, oh woe is me,
my sight is blurred,
so I can't see,
yet this opaque nature,
deems to be free,
my ensconced vision,
is turning on me,
sheltering and comforting,
the me I could be,
yet with these lenses,
I still can't see.