Op-ed

I suck the hard thing. A bitter pill, it makes me ill with yellow sorrow. My heart aches from lessons never learned, life never earned. A hollow muscular organ that pumps the blood through the circulatory system by rhythmic contraction and dilation, it says boom, boom. I gulp down oblong globs of regret that nothing……

Number 73

The number 73 bus drove into my life with a spectacularly high statistical probability of opening its doors to me. I distrust poetry. It makes language perform and turn tricks. It is algebra without the proofs, alchemy without the excuse of ignorance. It yodels into the void. It scans and jams. It pitter-patters. It tells……

Misty-eyed

I take a toothpick to clean my teeth; an urge comes over me to stab my eye with it. The urge is sharp and swift, far faster than my conscious awareness of it. I am left confusedly holding the tiny, harmless-looking weapon in my hand, imaginary blood dripping from its tip. What the hell just……

Love, anyone

Good morning, ladies and gents, I’d like to begin by saying it’s an honour to be here among the not-all of non-you. Let me cut straight to the chase; I want to speak about being transhuman. My pronouns (for today, ha ha) are I, it and its. There is an enormous DIY store I often……

Kakorrhaphiophobia in Kaunas

Juju was substandard, a (type 6 on the Bristol scale) piece of doo-doo induced by the hoodoo at the heart of darkness of the whodunit in the basement of my overexcited brain. The (entirely self-generated) pressure of racing to finish my book (blovel?) leads to lapses in judgement. Phrases slip through my alarm-rigged filters that……

Juju

Her body, like so many bodies, was found buried in a forest. The discovery of the (26-yr-old) corpse was announced on the news as J was driving to pick me up from Jonava railway station. She was crying as we hugged on the platform, passengers, visiting for the weekend, streaming by. The senselessness and randomness……

I-love-you

Vilnius is locked into a looped conversation with itself through the sloping banks of the River Neris. The right bank flowerily says: I LOVE YOU. The left bank flowerily echoes: I LOVE YOU TOO! The petal-strewn dialogue ricochets back and forth by the Green Bridge. It has a certain charm – who can begrudge a……

Hope Found Buried in Forest

Language is the (frayed, overused) net we cast when writing, in the hope of catching some of the fishy throbs that resemble reason and art when they emerge flapping and floundering in the slipstream of consciousness. We credit language with an authority it does not merit because religion and law set it in stone, a……

-Gate

There were hardly any -gates around when I was young. By that, I do not mean the world was a safer or better place (the proverbial “people could leave their doors open at night”), but that the suffix was generally reserved for the most serious scandals. The original -gate – Watergate – busted open a……

Fake News

The light is a damning revelation: life is a worthless miracle, a brilliant deception. My limbs and heart are pulled in contrary directions. My tongue spouts love and blurts hurt because it is in a tug of war with stringy urges and inhuman edicts. It is an ugly miracle because it dissembles its true intentions……