Evil Switches Outfits – from along comes a war to The Trashman

25 February 2026 by Leave a Comment

My new thriller, The Trashman, is launching 23 August.

It’s a global, cinematic Hollywood thriller with a twist of sharp political satire. Luxury noir. Its tagline:

In a throwaway world, The Trashman is king.

The book flits between LA, Paris and Milan. It’s for readers who loved the world of The White Lotus, the sun-drenched menace of Ripley, and the poisoned glamour of House of Gucci.

Interwoven into a modern love story, it’s about image, art, fame and lust, the mechanics of “success”, and working out your own best self and place. It’s fast, satirically funny (you can read the pitch below, or just pre-order it here) – but I’d like to share how it follows on from my previous book, which seems so very different.

The commodification of love, murder, wellness and warfare—all that stuff, I guess—gives a sort of continuity to it:

That previous book, along comes a war, coming from a place of shock and solidarity—my response to the invasion of Ukraine, and how that horror is experienced by civilians—both in Ukraine itself (thanks to Bohdana Bun’s beautiful photography!) and further away, where we watch on screens across the globe. It bears witness, and all its profits go to the Come Back Alive Foundation.

 The Trashman comes from a different angle—but it certainly spotlights similar horror. It follows a digital trail from the hills of Bel Air, the Parisian clubs, to the lakeside glamour of Como, the runways of Milan, the crime-tech intelligence hub of The Hague.

We ‘re in an age where toxic, entitled power pretends to be anti-elitist, where spectacle overwhelms substance,  and outrage out-appeals truth. In this era of the evil clown Trump and performative politics as click-bait, reality feels increasingly staged—curated, monetised, weaponised.

The Trashman is (in part) my response to all that. A story about love, lust and success, and finding your true self in a society at war with itself, where everything, and everyone—right to the very top—seems disposable.

It asks: In a throwaway world, how disposable are you?

along comes a war and The Trashman both bear witness. Their underlying concerns overlap: what happens to our truth when power and image dictate our lives, and what do we become if we let them?

 

— Freddie

§§§

Here’s The Trashman‘s pitch:

In a throwaway world, The Trashman is king.

A global, cinematic Hollywood thriller with a twist of sharp political satire.

When ambitious young fashion designer Zoe arrives at a celebrity Malibu mansion to present her work, she finds her clients’ bodies instead—curated with the artistry, the cold precision of a “Collection”. In the chaos that follows, she meets Jez, a podcaster chasing his viral breakthrough. Attraction sparks among the horror.

Luxury noir with a body count…

As the Trashman goes global, each new Collection—Paris, Como, Milan—becomes more lethally elegant than the last, featuring more high-profile victims, taunts and cryptic clues.

And Zoe keeps appearing near the scenes. Is she muse, victim, or accomplice?

With ICE raids inflaming a polarised America, and investigators from the LASD and Europol closing in across two continents, Jez faces an impossible choice: expose the woman he loves and secure his fame, or protect her and risk everything.

Zoe’s own reckoning is no less brutal—can she build a career on looking away?

Haut-Couture Horror…

This visceral, darkly satirical psychological thriller follows a digital trail from the hills of Bel Air and the Parisian clubs to the lakeside glamour of Como, the runways of Milan, and the crime-tech intelligence hub of The Hague. It’s for readers who loved the world of The White Lotus, the sun-drenched menace of Ripley, and the poisoned glamour of House of Gucci.

A story about love, lust and success, and finding your true self in a society at war with itself, where everything, and everyone—right to the very top—seems disposable.

In a throwaway world, how disposable are you?

Pre-Order The Trashman here.

Filed Under: Neo-Noir, the dark gospel, thriller Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

along comes a war – Ukraine 2022-2025

26 June 2025 by Leave a Comment

My new book, along comes a war – Ukraine 2022-2025, was published by Mad Bear Books on 24 June, to coincide with the NATO Summit in The Hague. I worked with Kyiv-based photographer Bohdana Bun to create a dialogue between poetry and photography and the book quickly became a #1 bestseller in the photojournalism category. You can order it here.

Blending perspectives from Kyiv with those watching in solidarity from afar, it explores all the emotions and passions and the themes of nationalism, resistance and complicity, while probing how (or whether) art can make a difference.

All profits will go to the Come Back Alive Foundation, supporting Ukrainians in their defence.

Inside, you’ll find:

Activist poetry featuring heroic Ukrainian writer-resisters including Victoria Amelina, Volodomyr Vakulenko and Kazimir Malevich, as well as the long, resonant tale of Snake Island, famous from the age of Helen of Troy and Achilles till the day its defenders said “russian warship, go f*ck yourself”;

Sonnets, villanelles, tanka and haiku with civilian perspectives on conflict, hope, and resilience (Ukrainian and global), including blackseafugue (a modern casting of Célan’s deathfugue) and our dreams are filled with drones;

Striking images capturing the surreality of life under attack, showing the great city of Kyiv in all its seasons, with its street-life and street-art, the mythic figure of Berehniya, the iconic Bridge of Glass, knocked out tanks and drones, seas of flags honouring the memory of loved ones, glimpses of Lviv and Odesa, galleries and parks.

You can order the print and ebook here.

We hope you’ll enjoy it!

 

Filed Under: activist poetry, freddie omm, freedom of speech, future of the book, haiku, Love poetry, love poem, poetry by freddie omm, solstice, sonnet, tanka by freddie omm, villanelle, winter solstice Tagged With: , ,

slingshot moon and hungry sun

14 March 2025 by 6 Comments

The moon is seen by daylight between two branches outlined against a sky of cloudless blue

*

A few days ago, the poet glanced at the moon from a garden.

For a second, the moon looked close enough to grasp but – realising it’s receding from earth at the rate fingernails grow (one and a half inches a year) the poet dashed off this poem:

waxing gibbous moon

floats pale between the branches

ghostly slingshot stone

slowly spinning out into

                                          deep space

                        around

                                          the hungry

sun which will consume us all.

Like everyone, the poet feels days getting shorter as life lengthens – but has also heard that days, actually, are getting longer – over a dozen microseconds longer, every passing year.

And all this time, the sun’s expanding, slowly turning itself into a red giant star, growing more than a hundred times larger. It’s getting ready to devour and feed on the planets, with Mercury and Venus first in line to be consumed.

What unspeakable things Gaia has in store for us in 5 billion years’ time, the poet thinks.

They stop reflecting, dazzled enough by these facts to let stillness soothe their mood as the moon inches away.

*

**

Ō

**

*

Photos taken by Freddie Oomkens earlier this week

The moon seems further awy than in the first picture, we see more branches, the moon is smaller among them

Filed Under: poem by freddie omm, Stories of Ō, Tanka, tanka by freddie omm, tanka by ō Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Black Snow

5 February 2025 by 4 Comments

*

One winter long ago, the poet and their partner parted, not hugely distant, but prevented from seeing each other.

Watching the sun set from the edge of a forest, the poet thought:

I wish you were close

enough to clasp you to me—

—but the day is cold

and you’re as far away

as the sun between the twigs.

As darkness spread around them, like a black, silent snowstorm, the poet was overcome with sadness and loss.

It was some time before they found themselves and came together again.

*

Ō

*

**

*

Photo by Freddie Oomkens

Filed Under: freddie omm, Love poetry, love poem, poem by freddie omm, poetry, Tanka Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Prince Li Zhong, RIP Aged 22 – 6 January 665

6 January 2025 by 4 Comments

Long ago, as Prince Li’s enemies were closing in on him, he disguised himself as a woman, seeking refuge in the women’s quarters, where assassins might not follow him.

He was right, but they caught up with him eventually, and forced him to commit suicide.

*

Much later, a poet reflected on Li’s fate.

Inspired by the Japanese tradition of the death poem, the poet wrote these haiku from the prince’s point of view:

*

I am twenty two,

Have lived my life to the full,

Got and given love,

*

The great Dragon Throne

And Princely names, Prefectures

Given and taken:

*

The old Emperor danced

When I was born, but this new

Empress stamps on me—

*

I’ve hidden myself,

Disguised my sex, who I am’s

No longer my choice:

*

My favourite people

Taken from me, I must go

Find my rest with them.

*

Life in the Chinese imperial family could be as brutal as the violent deaths they were addicted to inflicting on each other.

The prince’s namesake, writing a few centuries later, was a great Chinese poet who often reflected on fate, and unfulfilled promise, and may well have done so when pondering the prince’s, on the anniversary of his death, which happened on 6 January 665.

*

**

*

Ō

*

**

*

Photo by Freddie Oomkens

 

Filed Under: haiku chain, poem by freddie omm Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

na-kazora

22 December 2024 by 4 Comments

One of my favourite books, The Tales of Ise, blends history, poetry and timeless gossip, some of my favourite things, stretching perceptions and experience.

Growing up as I did from country to country, floating from Dutch to Italian, French, English, Indonesian, German (and my own hybrid, incomprehensible jumble of them all), I’ve always loved finding new expressions and new ways of thinking – unique, without equivalents in other languages.

The Tales of Ise has lots of that, and more – inexpressible, seldom-thought-about topics, described in words that don’t exist in other languages, whose meaning is hard to pin down.

Writing the inexpressible in non-existent words is as good a definition of poetry as any you’ll hear.

Long ago, I wrote about this in a haiku, an almost untranslateable form in itself:

between any two

untranslateabilities

we find more meaning.

In episode 21 of the Tales, two lovers exchange poems, seven in all.

The final one has the image of:

… a cloud in mid-air

that vanishes in the sky

leaving not a trace.

The translator, Peter Macmillan, comments: “The word ‘mid-air’ (na-kazora), referring to the space between the sky and the earth, is a metaphor for being in a state that is neither one thing nor another.”

Elsewhere, I’ve seen “nakazora”  described as “a Buddhist word” meaning “empty air” or “a state where the feet do not touch the ground”.

Elsewhere still, the etymology of なかぞら is explained as being made up of “naka” (middle, or centre) and “zora” (sky, or empty space).

The range of meanings has made the word understandably popular in Classical Japanese literature and, obviously, to me.

I’m not sure whether the romanisation of the word, hyphenated as “na-kazora”, is strictly correct, but I prefer it to “nakazora”. The word’s dismemberment furthers the ethereal, ungraspable aspect of its meaning.

My tanka poem:

na-kazora

blue sky, wide and still

—all in solitude, so rare,

floats a single cloud,

seen by all, na-kazora,

so untouchable.

*

Untouchable – something (or someone) everyone can see, but out of reach, like a star (either in space or a famous person).

Ethereal, in suspension, between states, shape-shifting, untranslateable.

Like lovers estrangeing, as in the Tales’ episode (or are they really finding true love)?

Or readers reading something new and strange?

In this game, only the reader can tell.

 

 

Filed Under: art movements, cosmic cycles, creativity, Freddie Oomkens, free expression, Gaia, Gaianism, many-branched universe, nature unveiling herself to science, online poem, poem by freddie omm, poetry, postmodernism, religious writings, Tabernacle of Gaia, the duty of modern intellectuals, The O Clan Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Harvesting the Sky

10 September 2024 by Leave a Comment

Look seaward west where

Sun’s gone down pale mauve striped pink

Cloud dimming shadows

*

That photographer

With his spotlight on the beach

Where people are shades

*

The silver ocean’s

Rippled blue reflecting waves

Whishing softly by

*

Offshore windmills stand

Like far off crucifixes

Harvesting the sky

*

Spirits whisper power

To earth and air and water

Resurrecting time.

*

**

*

Photos of Scheveningen Beach, The Hague, by Freddie Oomkens

Freddie Omm’s Sicilian Haiku—Migrant Shadows, published by Mad Bear Books in September 2024, also features sunset-linked poetry, notably in Sunsets.

Sunsets explores how we idealise our lives, while being deeply suspicious of such.

Sunsets’ imagery is filtered through a rich spectrum of sundown light,  albeit Sicilian, rather than Scheveningean.

 

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Rino Barillari, King of Paparazzi

22 June 2024 by 6 Comments

Harry’s Bar, Rome, on Via Veneto –

Where the king of paparazzi waits,

White bandage on his cheek, like a raw scar

Of honour – is heaving, full of Dolce

Vita‘s cream, in Rino’s memory –

Illustrious as some vague delirious fantasy

Of his gilded past… – He’s snapped back to the

Present, as out walks Gerard Depardieu

With his companion, Magda Vavrusova:

Sad scenes of sordid violence ensue –

*

Recalling Rino in his pomp, maybe,

Scourge of glitterati outside all the bars;

But now, he says, the street is like a cemetery

Thronged only with the lonely ghosts of stars.

*

**

*

Photo by Ziogiucas via Italian wiki

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the sea spits out a fish

1 March 2024 by 1 Comment

two crows watch the beach

until the sea spits out a fish

flying and then dying on the sand

*

two crows pick this fish

to pieces, scoff down their feast,

fly on back inland

*

—the crows are lucky

all the gulls were gone—they’d have

had to fight for food:

*

they’d have lost it,

weren’t it only witnessed by

a passing poet.

*

**

*

Omm

*

*

**

*

Photo by F. Oomkens

Filed Under: freddie omm, haiku chain, poem by freddie omm, poetry Tagged With: , , ,

work in progress: sketch of snow, dunes, sea and dog

18 January 2024 by 6 Comments

 

when we want to live

a life more lit and touched with

fire we need the beach

*

where sea throws us waves,

surf singed with feels we can’t share

like words lost in storm

*

light snow drifts on dunes

while wind blows cold and dry, we

walk down to the shore—

*

foam flies from the waves

like smoke, rolls on soft wet sand,

the dog sniffs, bites it;

*

sunlight’s lying on the beach–

wet, shining now the ash-curled waves sink

reflecting sky:

*

clouds of flame and ash

float through blue, hidden heaven

soaking into earth

*

sky, flames, snow and wind, waves, foam and sand,

they and all of it are never still not ever but they move us

through us as we walk, wish, stand–

*

what I see, I write,

and with my words I try to

catch the snow and light

*

**

*

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photos by F. Oomkens

 

Filed Under: freddie omm, haiku, haiku chain, poem by freddie omm, poetry Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Crowning Charles

4 May 2023 by 7 Comments

*

This crowning of a king

Is a strange, uncomfortable thing:

*

Among the watching crowd:

A pleasant peasant madness;

On our screens: choreographed grandness

While unseen cops arrest and make all protest voiceless;

And he who is crowned

Bares visible sadness.

*

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on being conscious:

5 January 2023 by 10 Comments

From a Meditation of Philippe de Saint Maurice, une entité mystérieuse by all accounts, best known for his Meditations, selections of which I’ve been tinkering at these past years. This one skates the edge of profundity and platitude in characteristic, unsettling Maurician manner:

*

**

*

On being conscious:

–We are dewdrops in the dawn

Of sunshine on the thirsty lawn:

*

We are sparks that fly

Through deep and darkening night sky

Till rainclouds quench us.

 

*

**

*

 

Having spent time recently in Thailand I was able to reconnect with Philippe de Saint Maurice and go through some of his Meditations.

These two haiku on consciousness are part of a longer sequence called revelation realisation, but they stand well alone.

I took the photo on Bang Niak beach on the Andaman coast of Thailand last month (December 2022).

For those interested in epic literary hauls, translations of the Meditations are coming along fine and will be shared in Book Seven of The Dark Gospel; I’m sharing the odd snapshot and highlight as I proceed.

Filed Under: haiku, meditations, by philippe de saint maurice, poem by freddie omm, poetry by freddie omm, the dark gospel, writing Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii

17 October 2022 by 3 Comments


A poem by Ummidia Quadratilla, on learning that her husband, daughter, and son-in-law have been killed in the Vesuvian holocaust. The family’s seaside villa in Pompeii (now known as the Villa of the Mysteries) has just been destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, and the family died while helping their household to escape. Ummidia Quadratilla, a Roman-era Messager of the Tabernacle of Gaia, had stayed in Rome. Selections of her poems appear in The Dark Gospel and are translated by Freddie Omm:

Sweet home, bodies loved

Before the ash and pumice storm:

Thoughts, loves, lives, buried

*

Words too crushed to speak

My loss through lasting love now

Silence covers all—

*

Busts, scrolls in libraries,

(Like grapes left liquid in the press)

Some burned, crushed, some saved:

*

We can only wait

For the centuries to come

To uncover us

*

**

*

Filed Under: freddie omm, Gaia, Gaianism, haiku, haiku chain, poem by freddie omm, poetry by freddie omm, Tabernacle of Gaia, the dark gospel, Ummidia Quadratilla Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

musing

23 August 2022 by 2 Comments

Peaceful as the dawn

of spring above Lake Como

one silent morning

*

the windows open

while the still soft air wove fresh

sweet scented coolness

*

on our skin we felt

our gentle touch our hands our

lips our mouths musing

*

peaceful as fresh dawn

of spring close by Lake Como

that silent morning

*

wrapped in our lovers’

waking warmth—help us remember,

daughters of memory!

*

**

*


Filed Under: freddie omm, haiku, haiku chain, poem by freddie omm Tagged With: , , ,

Meditation LIV (Philippe de Saint Maurice)—on the unknowability of love

12 August 2022 by 1 Comment

This haiku is a translation of one of Philippe de Saint Maurice’s Meditations (the 54th).

As so often with translations of Philippe’s Meditations, whose originals are in a mix of Aramaic, Ancient Greek and Latin (languages in which I’m far from fluent), I’ve relied on intensive discussions with Philippe himself to arrive at the English. This unconventional practice is justified only by Philippe’s perfect command of English in all its forms, as well as of the ancient languages he first used to compose his Meditations.

love is simple yet

impossible to understand:

best just let it be.

The advice—if “best just let it be” is indeed advice—is unlikely ever to have been followed by lovers in the painful phase of passion, but is apt for the kind of unconditional love to which many meditators aspire.

While Philippe never echoes Krishnamurti (say) in injunctions to simplify experience by ceasing to think, love’s simple unknowability is something to which he often returns. He refers elsewhere to love’s “mystical mystery” and in this Meditation seems to say that love should be accepted, left to run its course, and not analysed or attempted to be “understood”.

 

Filed Under: freddie omm, haiku, Love poetry, love poem, Philippe de Saint Maurice, poetry Tagged With:

person

5 June 2022 by 2 Comments

*

**

*

From Tank Person to

Person, transitioning, stillI

Standing up to power

*

I became one with

The tank, then we dissolved, gone—

Person can return.

*

**

*

Omm

from conversations with my friend

Yu Yan Yip

*

**

*

The photo is of a rare and wondrous Inchan tree, over 200 years old, in Thailand, which bears two different types of fruit, the In and the Chan, at alternating times each year. In a similar way, one person may develop two different, alternating kinds of being, at alternating times, while remaining the same, consistent person.

This poem is part of a series inspired by the experience of Yu Yan Yip, previously known as Tank Man, who has been on the run and transitioning for many years.

The previous poems in the series are:

– Tank Man

– Tank Person

Photo of the Inchan Tree by Freddie Oomkens taken at Kanchanaburi, Thailand, in 2022

Filed Under: freddie omm, haiku, haiku chain, poem by freddie omm, poetry Tagged With: , , , ,

Rotterdam, Bright Monday

20 April 2022 by 2 Comments

Rotterdam in spring

sun’s eastering glow—winter’s

in shadows, past us,

*

Past us, waking fresh

soulsakes, godsakes born in light—

burning bright Passion.

 

*

**

*

Poem and photo by Freddie Omm

*
Notes:
– Bright Monday is a name for the Monday after Easter.
– This haiku chain is based on a Meditation of Philippe de Saint Maurice—albeit the original was written in and about Jerusalem soon after the Crucifixion.
– In this poem, as in Port Vendres (September 2021), “godsakes”—and their relations, “soulsakes”—are again evoked. Godsakes and soulsakes are aspects of being human, according to the Tabernacle of Gaia.
– The central wording of the haiku chain—“past us,/Past us”—contains the idea of past selves, as well as the more literal idea of winter now being in the past, in Rotterdam’s hemisphere, at least.
– “Passion” refers both to Yeshua’s Easter narrative (Christ’s Passion) and to the passion all humans can feel, regardless of religion—the word is rooted in suffering, with a transformative tendency toward regeneration (or resurrection).

Filed Under: easter haiku, freddie omm, haiku, haiku chain, meditations, by philippe de saint maurice, Philippe de Saint Maurice, poem, poem by freddie omm, poetry by freddie omm Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

the brave new year wakes

7 January 2022 by 7 Comments

Haiku and pic by Freddie Omm

*

the brave new year wakes

all unconscious of her being

like a child star born

*

on-screen, hopes and fears

of future years—young, unsung

–past all forgetting—

*

puffed, angel-kissed face

unswiped the tears that time will

meanly bring to smudge

*

her moist, smeary cheeks,

dimpled now, her first cry

a wave or blast of waking life

*

washing over us

with some vague sense of our own

blazing potency

*

—yet uncertain too

of fresh madnesses ahead,

the brave new year wakes.

*

**

*

Freddie Omm, January 2022

*

Note: This poem is the third section of a triptych of poems.

The others are: autumn blaze away (and next year be a blast) and new year’s eve, oudejaarsavond 2021.

The triptych starts with autumn (the left hand panel), then comes new year’s eve (central panel) then this one, the brave new year wakes (right hand panel.

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new year’s eve—oudejaarsavond 2022

31 December 2021 by 8 Comments

driving home for new
year blue but hopeful for the years
gone past and yet to come—
******
skyline, trees, headlights
smudged on night’s smeared-up palette
wiping all away
*******
in the wash and wake
of darkness blinded, dimmed by light
while morning’s stirring

*******

*******

*******

31 December 2021

haiku and photo by freddie omm

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autumn blaze away (and next year be a blast)

21 December 2021 by Leave a Comment

cold november mist

dissolving trees in fields of

smudged, frozen furrows

*

there I go dissolving back into my past

*

dim sky shrinks to specks

of spattered grey, behind which,

rumours of daylight

*

lurk, blacked-out memories

of blue, spillage of cold sun

flown, fleeting ashes

*

half-forgotten burned-out futures (some flames could be relit perhaps at last)

*

a breeze to kindle

sparks of pale years’ sunken fire—

blaze up this autumn

*

O autumn please just blaze away (and next year be a blast)

*

**

*

Freddie Omm

December 2022


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winter solstice—yule 2021

21 December 2021 by 3 Comments

the shortest day is swallowed by the longest night

and though the time is festive we can close the darkness out in sleep

until we rise again to greet the waking light

*

last night’s cold moon is waning gibbous and the town shines bright

and while the spreading mist and frost grow thick and deep

the shortest day is swallowed by the longest night

*

we walk this world we wish for warmth and all that’s pleasing to our sight

but nightmare deepfake monsters of perverted dreams disturb us in our sleep

until we rise again to greet the waking light

*

O pity our poor planet filled with foolish deathly viral agents mired in their own shite

they rave and squall around our godforsaken earth and even as we weep

the shortest day is swallowed by the longest night

*

but there’s a ruthless aimless tenderness in nature’s creatures and in you that rare delight

we find when we’re alert to each mere moment whose uniqueness we can keep

until we rise again and greet the waking light

*

now in the southern hemisphere the sun shines at her height

but we are locked in dark and where the shadows creep

the shortest day is swallowed by the longest night

until we rise again and greet the lengthening light.

*

**

*

freddie omm

Filed Under: freddie omm, nature unveiling herself to science, poetry by freddie omm, solstice, villanelle, winter poem Tagged With: , , , ,

tank person

5 June 2021 by 2 Comments


*

**

*

Called a man, then, I

Changed, fluid, freely flowing. Now

I am Tank Person.

*

**

*

Omm

from conversations with my friend

Yu Yan Yip

 

photo by freddie

Filed Under: freddie omm, Freddie Oomkens, haiku, hate crimes, infusion of the holy spirit, meditation on modern evil, poem by freddie omm, poetry, seeds of destruction, sinister forms of mind-control Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Ascension 2021

13 May 2021 by 8 Comments

We celebrated last year’s Feast of the Ascension with a single, potently philosophical haiku based on a Meditation of Philippe de Saint Maurice (Ascension). Focusing on a pebble at the bottom of a pond, it got a lot of comments about the nature of consciousness, the will to rise up from the mundane mud, and suchlike.

It was a rather uplifting item all round.

For this year’s Feast, we have another of Philippe’s mighty meditations, but this one comes at the idea of Ascension from an altogether more provocative angle, wondering whether Yeshua’s ascension wasn’t perhaps the result of his wishing to escape the judgmental coldness of us killjoy humans – a sobering thought, entirely apt on this day of feasting and celebration.

Becoming sweaty,

They feared their bodies’ passions

Would take them over

*

Sometimes forever

They fought their desires to death –

Thought to transcend them

*

Morals to judge them,

Judgment to condemn and kill,

Death to embrace them:

*

They feared their own love

And so blamed others, made up

Sins deserving death –

*

Is that why Yeshua

Rose up to heaven – to escape

Our killjoy death-wish?

*

Tired of being judged,

He left us to our cold, mad,

Delusional lives.

*

**

*

Omm

Feast of the Ascension, 13 May 2021


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real

23 January 2021 by 2 Comments

how if we try to

do something like change the world

we can and we can’t

*

achieve all we want

by force of will alone that’s

just delusional

*

when the world around

is just as real as we are

our will is not all

*

yet in our mind lives

a universe just as real

as any other

*

being all we want

needs an equilibrium

a balance between

*

**

*

haiku chain and photo by freddie omm

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here

14 January 2021 by 4 Comments

I followed a path

thinking that it led somewhere

but it’s ended here—

*

It isn’t the road

not taken so much as the

untakeable road—

*

Follow my advice:

don’t follow a path—choose the

made up, pathless ways.

*

**

*

freddie omm

january 2021

*

with apologies to robert frost’s road not taken

– the poem is based on a meditation of Philippe de Saint Maurice

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Mistletoe

9 January 2021 by 2 Comments

Mistletoe clusters

On tall bare wintry poplars,

Pale, poisoned berries

*

Sowing witches’ brooms

With Saturnalian seed

To spread love’s shrouding

*

Solstice potency:

Nurturing nest, fast food for birds,

Spring’s bees, butterflies

*

But all’s veiled, still, now—

This short midwinter moment

Death’s reared in beauty

*

Breeds life in sticky

Clinging, skeletal branches,

Mistletoe clusters.

*

**

*

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Shall I Compare You

1 January 2021 by 5 Comments

This new sonnet riffs off Shakespeare’s 18th:

…for all those whose love is so fresh and strong it can seem unreal, here’s a sonnet for each and every one of us – Happy New Year!

Shall I compare thee you to a summer’s day… something you’re not?—

To me, you are living poetry

(Not some wordy simulation that can’t be)

And you’re the very essence of what’s hot—

Though similes like darling buds may grow

The sense of us, approximating us,

You’re as unique, incomparable

As our love will always be—deep, unfathomable:

And aren’t all of us much more than sensually defined

Both as couples, and as twinned lone souls (sometimes of one mind)?

Then, in the lives to come, more darling buds shall grow

To blossom free, just like the two of us:

Our loves as indescribable as real

(Although this near perfection sometimes seems unreal).

*

**

*

Freddie Omm

January 2021

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In Chelsea Old Church

28 December 2020 by 1 Comment

In Chelsea Old Church

(December Evensong: 12 Haiku)

*

**

*

In Chelsea Old Church

At Evensong on Sunday

I hope, pray, repent

*

For the coming year’s

Dates – work, duties, dreams – love’s loose

Change of comings, goings:

*

I’m not quite sure who

My confusion of spirits

Would be praying to

*

Jesus seems quite far

Our Father even farther,

Holy Ghost most lost

*

In faith that is ours

To find by quaint disbelief’s

Dark dusty corners

*

Darknesses of this

Church’s memorialised pasts

–

Framing spaces where

–

A handful of us

Sit, stand, kneel, sing and mumble

–

In twilit hangovers

–

There’s darkness that turns

As the world turns its seasons round

To joy and gladness

*

In the shadows, clouds,

Disintegration delights

Dismantling sadness

*

In meadows, poppies,

Gardens by the Thames that bloom

Long centuries long

*

Before Thomas More

Prayed, sang here with Erasmus

Wisteria grew

*

On the Embankment –

Once a low shore – cars now crawl

Past flowers, me and you.

*

**

*

Omm

Note: This poem describes a time when I lived down the road from Chelsea Old Church, along Cheyne Walk where, in Sir Thomas More and Erasmus’ time, what is now a busy road on the Embankment (the A3212) was a sleepy village shore. Sir Thomas worshipped (and was upbraided for singing) in the church, and added a chapel to the river-side of the building which, unlike the rest of the church, survived World War II bombing. The church, rebuilt in the 1940s, retains many of its original features and fixtures – it’s a powerfully atmospheric place.

I used to join Evensong regularly to contemplate the week ahead.

This year, most services have been cancelled – I hope they will soon be able to reconvene, and these twelve haiku (one for each Christmas Day) are humbly dedicated to that outcome.

The painting is by Henry Pether (1800-1865). His father and brother were also painters, known as the “Moonshine Pethers” for their addiction to the hooch and liquors they illicitly brewed in seedy stills on the banks of the river moonlit scenes.

Another of my poems with links to this part of London, Ghosts of Cheyne Walk, was published here last year.

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december blessing (haiku)

13 December 2020 by 3 Comments

days shrink, night e x p a n d s –

light and warmth of close kind friends

make love more intense.

*

**

*

freddie omm

december 2020

*

photograph by siddharth salve

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smile in me

28 November 2020 by Leave a Comment

sometimes when we smile

at some shared joke, it’s as if

you’re smiling in me

*

and we’re one wit (as

it were) in one split

                                                          second

when you smile in me

*

a smile spilt over

from that mere moment of now’s

spillage of pixels

*

past laughter uplifts

us – we’re happiest when shared

smiles float up again

*

**

*

freddie omm

winter 2020

 

Note: The idea for this haiku chain was sparked by Proust, where he describes Swann’s memory of Odette’s laughter just as he is sinking into disfavour with the Verdurin set: …”il voyait Odette en rire, en rire avec lui, presque en lui.” – Un Amour de Swann, p. 282. The memory of shared laughter lifts us, as it does Swann, bonding us in a timeless bubble with those whose passing laughter we share, becoming especially poignant and powerful when that bond feels as though it might break through separation or drifting apart.

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haunts (haiku)

16 November 2020 by 5 Comments

            oaks spread and twist low

            branches close to damp dark earth

            white sand under wind

*

            as time-tinged leaves blow

            rustling past

                                                       migrating birds  

                      vague mists ghost the dunes:

*

          time, fog, wraiths and haze –

           insubstantialities

 

            that haunt us all our lives

*

**

*

freddie omm

november 2020

 

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Loving Light

18 September 2020 by 7 Comments

I

All my life I’ve loved

beaches and the beauty of

being on the edge

*

Where senses merge like

sex in sand and sky in eyes

we are everywhere

*

Feeling a moment

like lifetimes of loving light

from intense shadows

*

While feelings blur like

sea in sand and sky in air

we’re here everywhere.

II

All my life I’ve loved

beaches and their hot bodies

heating everyone

*

(Save folks or times with

lack of lust for life in sex through

mood or age or choice)

*

All my life I’ve loved

soft warm curves that turn things hard

tangling everything

*

All my life I’ve loved

those days when outlines grow so vague

you shape in the flow

*

Like waves washing worlds

that wishes made whole, oceans

smooth and connect us

*

All our lives loving

beaches and bodies and love

make us all hotter

*

And all our lives’ love

lifts us from life’s heaviness:

makes our lives lighter.

III

All my life I’ve loved

light, I’ve left darkness behind

when stuff got murky

*

At dawn if things got

sweaty I might stay on till

stuff got cool again –

*

– I get dark sometimes

too, we all do, but try to

leave darkness at dawn

*

**

*

Omm

September 2020

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O My Days All Blue

14 September 2020 by 1 Comment

O my days all blue

With loves like suns that warm and

Burn us up all through

*

Hot nights of turning

On the spit of sleeplessness

Feverish with you

*

Blazing together

– Days and nights of endlessness

For making love to

*

**

*

Freddie Omm

September 2020

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Elysium

8 September 2020 by Leave a Comment

Forever in blue

Light warm day lifts woke souls to

Elysian Fields

*

Light that conceals

Leaks among us and links us

Each in sublime joy

*

West winds fan our passions

Growing golden flowers to garland

Blessed lit up isles

*

Float on light that hides

Night for a bit while gods wake

Heaven is being.

*

**

*

Words and photo by Freddie Omm

September 2020

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Ripening

31 August 2020 by 2 Comments

The vine writhes in wind –

Sunsoaked leaves, darkening grapes,

Ripening season

*

**

*

Freddie Omm

August 2020

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in neverland lost

28 July 2020 by 3 Comments


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Strength (RIPped) – haiku puzzle

28 June 2020 by 2 Comments

To go with this little puzzle, some words by Verity Worth:

Becoming strong can come when you fall apart and break down.

You’re overcome by – you melt in – you surrender to – you give your self up to (and in) the present moment.

That moment can be a space filled with overwhelming emotion.

Maybe you are mourning a loss, someone you loved.

Maybe it is the moment itself you are mourning, the intensity of feeling it has evoked that feels as though it’s passing.

You become the moment – the moment becomes you – give yourself to the moment –

You find strength in pulling yourself together, and every time this happens the extra strength seems more, like building muscles.

And yet another part of you feels wasted, emotionally hungover, psychically drained.

The two sides coexist in you, different facets of the same self, two selves within a larger You, like rainclouds amd sun, selves containing many more aspects like scattered pieces in a jumbled jigsaw puzzle.

Neither gains the upper hand for a while, the two sides just about balancing, then matter resolves, the hangover dissipates, it drains away, as is natural, it passes like a cloud.

The pieces can be reassembled.

There’s enough strength in you to grow again.

*

**

*

Verity

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tank man (unknown rebel)

5 June 2020 by 4 Comments

I stood up to you,

Then disappeared.

O

Even now

                                up to you

I stand

*

Not invisible,

Although unseen, unknown, still

O

I stand up to you.

*

**

*

31 years on.

We greet and salute you, Yu Yan Yip—and all who stood and stand up to faceless tyranny.

Peace.

§

freddie omm

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Ascension

21 May 2020 by 26 Comments

Sunk in the mundane

like a pebble in a pond.

*

How rise up again?

*

**

*

Freddie Omm

Feast of the Ascension

21 May 2020

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an empty beach in summertime

1 May 2020 by 5 Comments

Freeform sonnet and pic by Freddie Omm.

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the new normal (haiku chain)

26 April 2020 by 2 Comments

What is it to be

Normal when our past, now, is

Newly abnormal?

*

Wasn’t it always

So, and don’t we overstate,

Slightly, the moment

*

We live in – strange times,

Strangely recasting our selves

For the new normal?

*

Isn’t it normal,

When living’s new and strange, to

Hope past lives survive?

*

**

*

Freddie Omm

April 2020

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Distanced Days (April Blooms)

6 April 2020 by 3 Comments

Here in the now we think of then

And them – of times when we

Could meet outside – touch, kiss, hug – when

We felt like it, so free –

*

That world of honeyed dreans is lost

In isolated dawn

It succumbed in the last spring frost

And cannot come again

*

In April blooms the bees are woke

And drunk on nectar as the evenings wane

They seep and melt through air like smoke –

They may not come again

*

We sleepwalked into viral purgatory

Long distanced days of social dystrophy –

But nightmares fade away at dawn

If we can wake again.

*

**

*

Freddie Omm

April 2020

 

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spring 2020 (health, love: spring springs)

25 March 2020 by 3 Comments

in times of sickness

it’s hard to see spring’s beauty

in the littlest things

*

(all the world’s beauty

– sun, skylarks, cherry blossoms –

can’t make this spring spring

*

when all the world’s sick,

only health, love, could ever

make spring spring again –

*

pale flowers grown on graves

look like little things of health,

love: the seeing is all.

*

**

*

freddie omm

march 2020

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Love in Times of Quarantine I

19 March 2020 by 3 Comments

This Spring’s a Psycho

Come to take our lives away

While we hide inside

*

This March, Spring is Loss

Of what we thought was control

Of our little worlds

*

This March, Spring’s gone mad –

Scattering buds of sickness

Seeding fit bodies –

*

This Spring is Zombies

The Undead with the Living

(No one knows who’s who)

*

This Spring is stealing

All our money, our nest-eggs

For a rainy day

*

This Spring spawns madness

We hide ourselves away but

Still the virus comes

*

(No wonder we’re scared

And sad and buying loo rolls

To wipe it all away)

*

Crazy thief of Time

Of plans, hopes, closeness, futures

Still the virus comes

*

While we stay inside

The season of life unfolds

Sick blossoms of death

*

Days stretch into days

Blank nights of feverish dreams

Of gone, better times

*

Like blossoms floating

On vague streams our memories

Drift down to the sea

*

Those gone, better times

When once we sang in crowds now’s

Still, deserted streets

*

As we shelter from

These threats we’ve never seen

One small comfort’s true:

*

While you come for us,

Psychoid virus, we know death

Soon will come for you.

*

**

*

Freddie Omm

March 2020

*

**

*

 

I took the photo in Villach (once the home of Paracelsus the Alchemist) last month.

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Love in Times of Quarantine II (Lockdown Loving)

17 March 2020 by 1 Comment

Still deserted streets –

Spring’s forgotten earth, lovesick

in times of quarantine

*

We’re isolated

Beings – lone, socially-distanced

Bodies in disease:

*

Now in spirit we

Should touch each other’s hearts, share

Droplets of airborne love

*

Spread lockdown loving

Through springtimes of quarantine

Till the virus leaves.

*

**

*

Freddie Omm

March 2020

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– love’s words run still (twelve haiku)

20 February 2020 by 1 Comment

things we feel will not

die for want of words to speak

them – those feels will stay

*

your breast warm on my chest

heart and tongue’s incoherence

dissolving in sex

*

how our words run free

of sense when what we feel speaks

more than we can say

*

love shifts forever

infusing lust’s hot moist mouths’

fluent sweet nothings

*

the love we feel gone –

ghosted, holed in our hearts alone

swells in silence still

*

love remembering

each wordless stroke of the tongue

bodies becoming

*

that loss sends us mad

whose griefs we know shall not pass

so we stay still, still

*

love like roots in earth

grows deep, inarticulate

all through tacit seasons

*

till we cry our loss

pain blurred blind – we’ll not be heard

nor seen as we are

*

love is a virus

spreading our sweet infection

mingling genes, bodies

*

this is how these words

might speak to those who hear and

feel their inner sense: –

*

if what we felt died

through lack of words to speak it

this is how it ends –

*

**

*

freddie omm

20.02.2020

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February Ink

5 February 2020 by 2 Comments

February ink

Scrawls dark promises on sky

Written in love’s shade.

*

**

*

Freddie Omm

February 2020

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Untitled Haiku

30 January 2020 by 2 Comments

Poets play with words

like kids with toys – in this way

We all are poets

*

(When our thoughts are cut

up full of rage we need a

Monosyllable

*

If we want to make

things complicated we get

Polysyllabic) –

*

We all play with words

to shape our worlds according

to our needs and wants:

*

Whether or not we

think life’s a game, only words

can change the metaphor.

*

**

*

Freddie Omm

30 January 2020

*

**

*

I wrote and published this one on the same morning – this morning. Like many other recent haiku, it is based on one of Philippe de Saint Maurice’s Meditations. The photo was taken on Scheveningen beach recently. The pawprints in the sand are Coco the Dog’s (the copyright, to all of it of course, remains mine!).

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Coming Together (haiku chain)

29 January 2020 by 6 Comments

In the still soft hours

Of night I wake as if alone

In bed although we’re not

*

Still there in each space

Between kisses in each breath while

We sleep love completes us

*

When we’ve way too much

Unsaid we want to say and

Much unshared to share

*

Even in silence

Our closeness warms us fills us

Speaks us forever:

*

Coming together

After time apart too long

Fills a voiceless void

*

Our lovers’ talk so close

Lasts longer far than mere remembered life

Never really ends

*

While we’re together

Hold each moment hold each one

In fullness of love

*

Even in silence

Still warmth eloquence love

Speak us forever

*

**

*

Freddie Omm

(very loosely translated from an original Meditation by Philippe de Saint Maurice)

*

**

*

I took the photo of the sunset through a window, quite dirty, in San Francisco.

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Stranger (haiku chain)

23 January 2020 by 3 Comments

For millenia, humans

waited for god to show up

Now we are furthest

*

from belief – closest

to meeting god in person:

Unwelcome stranger –

*

Forever mortals

on earth forget our fate is

Eternal promise

*

Eternal waiting

for the life that has no end

Mortals forever

*

Unwelcome strangers

to their own lives and planet:

Strange and unwelcome

*

Until they embrace

the passing of all that flows

and streams us is all.

*

**

*

Haiku and picture by Freddie Omm

(Loosely translated from an original Meditation by

Philipe de Saint Maurice)

*

**

*

The photo was taken at Scheveningen on a windy afternoon last month when the sand was seething along the beach in noisy funnelflows.

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for josephine kate – haiku chain

6 January 2020 by 5 Comments

hey josephine kate

welcome to this wild wide world

you will grow in love –

*

each newborn baby

has wise ones who come to bless,

bring gifts, praise, omens:

*

caspar, melchior,

balthasar – kings with gold, frankincense

and myrrh – following a star.

*

written in the god book

we glow like spells of unspelled words

on the unscrolled page

*

will we float in light

like morning mist on frost still white

as night’s evening dawns –

*

will we make our homes

watched by the gods of ourselves

scanning our future?

*

written in that god book

spells untold on unscrolled page

speak the unspelled age.

*

**

*

freddie omm

epiphany 2020

Our cousin, Josephine Kate Bader, was born on Christmas Day 2019, making triply apt this Epiphany welcome on Twelfth Night, the night of the Magi’s visit.

The Magi, or Three Kings, bringing their gifts to the baby Jesus, from a 6th century mosaic at Sant’Appolinaire Nuovo, in Ravenna.

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streaming (haiku chain)

31 December 2019 by 3 Comments


at year’s end we try

to let what’s done and doing

settle in our minds

*

our memories edit

us in a flowing sequence

like a narrative

*

mishmashing hot nights

that wake lush fantasies of

love made (up) just right

*

as kaleidoscopic

impressions make up all our lives,

bye bye bygones stream

*

a vision of us

on waking up in beds we

don’t quite remember

*

to be joyful we should

see life as though providence

really worked for us:

*

(without edits like

random words our streamed stories

make no kind of sense)

*

our dreams of bliss are

real when woke in each other’s

arms in homely beds

*

each day we give fresh

meaning to lives streaming by

loving each other

*

**

*

freddie omm

new year’s eve 2019

*

The kaleidoscope collage is made up of kaleidoscope photos which I shot of various subjects over the past few days, including Coco the Dog, trees and skies, our Christmas tree, etc.

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chiffchaff (haiku chain)

20 December 2019 by 7 Comments

 

*

before the snow falls

this winter, we’ll warm ourselves

with wine and firelight

*

within tall sheltering walls

we’ll lighten lovelost shadows

through this longest night

*

green-winged chiffchaff calls

warbling from the weeping winter willows: –

woke spirits take flight

*

**

freddie omm

the hague

winter solstice, 2019

*

The chiffchaff has an onomatopoeic name, supposedly evoking its song (cf Dutch: tjiftjaf; German: Zilpzalp) – even though the trilling chirrups of the chiffchaffs I’ve heard sound more like chee chee than chiffchaff.

(And how, in any case, could a bird produce an ff , let alone an lp sound?)

§

Most chiffchaffs who breed in Europe migrate south in winter, but they seem quite keen on the continent, arriving earlier in spring, and leaving later in autumn than other birds.

Avian heralds of global warming, many of these summer colonists are now becoming permanent residents, overwintering by Dutch and Belgian coasts, the English Channel, on southern Welsh and Irish shores, in Normandy and Britanny, and along the Mediterranean.

§

For all that, this slightly bastardised haiku chain isn’t exclusively about chiffchaffs, much as I love their presence and the vigorous, spirit-enlivening brio of their song.


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when we make love a billion cells break free (villanelle)

13 December 2019 by 11 Comments

when we make love a billion cells break free

our bodies flowing fluid like disgendered

creatures of great beauty growing unbound gloriously

*

although we’re only human too and so quite ordinary

we spiral into plasmic dust as spores sprinkling our eggshell world

while making love a billion cells break free

*

in some identities we hardly see

among us – beside, within, beyond us – enraptured,

creatures of great beauty rising upward gloriously

*

like stars that gleam and glow in space and transiency

like birds in deep still forest undergrowth unheard

love is made perpetually so billions of our cells break free

*

our love in life is that which lets us be

ourselves in an intensity of moments scattered

creatures of great beauty growing unbound gloriously

*

we find new freedoms freeform ecstasy

now top and out of mind and sight no need for thought nor any word

when we make love a billion cells break free

like creatures of great beauty growing unbound gloriously

*

**

*

griffith park

LA

*

**

*

Photo  of LA by Freddie Oomkens, taken from Griffith Observatory, September 2019

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again

1 December 2019 by 4 Comments

we had such careless loving times back when

we sheltered on the shore as storm and sleet swept in –

we hugged each other hot and close again

*

and with each kiss our mouth and tongue would send

such warm and wordless blissful touch and then

we’d find each other’s joy in hot wet carnal time again.

*

those deep cold nights of storm that draw us in

together closer than we’ve ever been

to kiss and fuck each other warm and well again

*

against the pain that cuts us deep when wounded by a friend –

we long to make it up but can’t begin –

we miss those carefree loving times back when

*

so young and fresh, with sunlight prickling our skin,

we spread our arms and let the sunlight in –

we hug and hold each other hot and close and mingled up again.

*

so to pick up the heartloose wreck of storms (which time will also mend)

our edgy lust and love that longing doesn’t end

we’ll have such careless carnal time and then

we’ll hug hold kiss each other hot and close again.

*

**

*

freddie omm

december 2019

Filed Under: poem by freddie omm Tagged With: ,

we come alive

12 November 2019 by 11 Comments

from the way we act
when we’re in love you’d think love
wounds and hurts us most
*
in life – though things far
bitterer are daily thought and done –
love hits us hardest
*
– at times though we seem not
to even know we’re alive
while we’re here living
*
we can’t remember
our births, don’t believe in our
deaths – all too human
*
errors throughout life
shape our being – our delicate
small blue fragile world –
*
it’s quite likely that
love changes us because love
makes us come alive
*
as time goes past pain
fades but love’s the thing that lasts
to save us from ourselves
*
when we kiss and touch
our loving tenderness makes
hard living softer
*
we come alive then
love ourselves into being
loving mortal gods
*

**

*

freddie omm

*

**

*

This haiku chain is loosely translated from a Meditation of Philippe de Saint Maurice.

Filed Under: freddie omm, haiku, haiku chain, love poem, meditations, by philippe de saint maurice, poem by freddie omm, poetry Tagged With: , , , , ,

hurrian hymn

1 November 2019 by 3 Comments


Sounders of the Depths is Emma Talbot’s exhibition at GEM in The Hague (next to the Photography and Kunstmuseum). It features brilliant, visceral installations (photocollage of selected works above). The show’s soundtrack, serendipitously, is a recording of Hurrian Hymn 6, the earliest piece of transcribed music (c. 1400 BC) – and it’s serendipitous because I wrote this haiku chain about it, some of whose preoccpuations resonate with Talbot’s work:

hurrian hymn

as we humans sing

for the goddess of the moon

singing creates us

*

now we come alive

in a forgotten language

past and unsurpassed

*

words from long ages

of birth, death and love relived

make us only us

*

being an offering –

the oldest song in the world

written in our blood

*

printed on this clay

by god through genes of humans

words and melodies

*

our voices swelling

the endlessly singing silence

breath of timeless sound

*

thirty three centuries

in a blind eye’s blink – always

we sing of presence

*

always we are song

mostly so when discomposed

in discord suffering

*

we’re never to be

silenced or wiped out as we

sing ourselves alive

*

**

*

omm

Filed Under: freddie omm, haiku, haiku chain, poem by freddie omm, poetry Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

haiku

31 October 2019 by 2 Comments

in case you’re puzzled –

these are my latest haiku

fresh from instagram

 

freddie omm

*

**

*

The haiku on the bottom right (“Ego Fires”) is based on a Meditation by Philippe de Saint Maurice.

Filed Under: freddie omm, haiku, meditations, by philippe de saint maurice, poetry Tagged With: , ,

dialogue

15 October 2019 by 6 Comments

Meditations of Philippe de Saint Maurice, which I’m turning into English haiku, will be published by Mad Bear Books. The Meditations give insights into spiritual growth, so I’m posting a few here, interspersed with other work.

The first was gulls, the second surf, and the third is dialogue:

dialogue’s great but with

each their own idiolects

words spin their own worlds

*

**

*

freddie omm

october 2019

The spider sculpture is called “Maman” and is by Louise Bourgeois who associated her mother with spiders (“spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother”). This casting of the sculpture (there is one original in stainless steel at the Tate Modern and six in bronze that go on tours) is visiting the lawn outside Museum Voorlinden in The Hague.

Instagram

Filed Under: freddie omm, haiku, poetry Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

moving

10 October 2019 by 6 Comments


we humans stand alone and still in life until

love takes our hand  and kisses us and helps us walk and talk

*

loveless, the passing hours through which all things must pass

stand still the days succeeding days stand still

and all is focused on ourselves alone

as if the universe herself is holding breath

*

we humans stand alone in life until

one day we find our love and it is good

while loving lasts all lives are rich in joy

and come together we all taste the fruits of heaven.

*

so can we forget a while that sometimes

a human stands alone in life until they fall apart in death

and make our wishes all come true with hope

and faith in love to keep us humans moving?

*

**

*

freddie omm

venice beach

september 2019

Filed Under: Love poetry, love poem, poem by freddie omm, sonnet Tagged With: , , ,

essence

9 October 2019 by 3 Comments

the imagination required to see

how life grows through a series of moments

*

(at once selfcontained, static and timeless

yet flying yes swarming into infinity)

*

like flocks of geese breaking from an amber

sunset into invisibility

*

like summer nights fading in september

flown into those endless twilights of eternity

*

where sensation is becoming to where

we run blindly into fresh horizons

fading as each sunrise into darkness

this warm fleeting intimacy we share

created from those moments is the essence

*

**

*

freddie omm

big sur

september 2019

 

Filed Under: love poem, poem by freddie omm, sonnet Tagged With: , , , , ,

ventura beach revisited

25 September 2019 by 10 Comments

 Freddie in Ventura

*

those amber sunsets

never set but hung in mind

resplendent always

*

many years before

this beach and all that’s on it

were now, were mine

*

time was not what it

now is nor is becoming

each moment stayed whole

*

the waves held me fast

while the wind blew permanence

over solid sand

*

gulls sat in the sky

as if transfixed or painted

by a maker’s hand

*

 

*

a kid on a beach

– in the timeless space of life –

that kid’s always now

*

**

*

freddie omm

ventura, september 2019

*

The first of my haiku chains about Ventura beach was published here in December 2014: on ventura beach. I wrote this new one and took the photo while revisiting the beach last week. 

Filed Under: freddie omm, haiku, haiku chain, poem, poem by freddie omm, poetry, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

comets

20 August 2019 by 1 Comment

we don’t honour time

enough sometimes we forget

each moment’s passing

*

life’s woke in a dream –

desires’ dissolving seasons –

delusional days

*

sprung on by mad gods

our fantasies in the flesh

dissipating time

*

narcoticised nights

splinter in breaking trance beats

time’s passing fancies

*

like comets’ bright tails

outgassing in orbital

periods of coma

*

millennial hours

centuries past in seconds

lit by mortal suns

*

we wake in our beds

making lifetimes’ catwalk love

cosmic comedy

*

ethereal hopes

brighten our dreams like comets

blazing through black night

*

**

*

omm

Filed Under: Uncategorized

narcissus

15 July 2019 by 4 Comments

i see you my love

as clearly as reflections

in dark water

*

as clearly as the light

i see you stark and unblurred

in the noonday sun

*

perfection of love

that shatters into ripples

when i kiss your lips

*

**

*

omm

*

haiku by freddie omm; painting by john william waterhouse

Filed Under: haiku, haiku chain, poem by freddie omm Tagged With: , ,

surf

21 June 2019 by 5 Comments

Meditations of Philippe de Saint Maurice, which I’m editing and transforming into haiku, will be published by Mad Bear Books. The Meditations offer insights into spiritual growth. I’ll be posting a few in advance here, interspersed with other work.

The first was gulls.

The second is surf:

our loves are dolphins

weaving wild unwinding waves

in and out of sight

*

our sentiments are seals

on rocks submerged in ocean

slicked in ceaseless tides

*

our thoughts’ sea lions

flap and flip on cold bare shores

to breed in rookeries

*

our lives’ deep mysteries

will swim and sink and drift through

phosphorescing seas

*

like drops in quick waters

loves, thoughts, lives are liquid

flowing surfing beings

*

**

*

freddie omm

june 2019

text by freddie omm, header pic by pagie page, footer pic by daniel h. tong

Filed Under: haiku, haiku chain, Love poetry, love poem, poem, poem by freddie omm, poetry, poetry by freddie omm, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

gulls

17 June 2019 by 3 Comments

Meditations of Philippe de Saint Maurice, which I have edited and transformed into haiku and haiku chains, will soon be published by Mad Bear Books. The Meditations offer insights into spiritual growth, and I shall be posting some of them in advance here, interspersing them with my other work.

The first is gulls:

since I first could think

I always thought that thought

will turn me mad

*

like gull-crawing skies

thoughts can sound portentous as though

from other species

*

voices like aliens

we think into being as

thought will think us mad

*

words crawl crazy like

lingual creatures who can fly

from our mind’s planet

*

whether in rage or

loving-kindness – we know no more

than if we were gulls

*

fly into the sun

illuminate a last thought:

they. we. light. are one

*

**

*

freddie omm

text by freddie omm – title pic by thought catalogue – footer pic by yifei chen

Filed Under: haiku, haiku chain, meditations, by philippe de saint maurice, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

still

5 June 2019 by 1 Comment


*

**

*

Decades pass by, while

Moment of eternity

Stands still, like a tank.

*

**

*

Omm

*

Photos of tank in Ukraine taken by Dmitri Bukhantsov in February 2022 and added, with thanks to Dmitri, to this post later.


Filed Under: freddie omm, haiku, poem by freddie omm, poetry Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

i burn for your love (lit lust) – may haiku

11 May 2019 by 6 Comments

fresh spring rains pass by –

mist like smoke seeps up from earth,

buried burning warmth

*

i grow in your heat –

pulse beats in the furrowed hearth

of this maykissed field

*

moist excited skies

spread out wide like heavy thighs

fecundating space

*

i burn for your love

lit lust lifts my loins my life

planting fresh new seeds

*

**

*

freddie omm

Filed Under: freddie omm, haiku, haiku chain, Love poetry, love poem, poem by freddie omm

woke like song (haiku chain invocation) – for all the lovers everywhere

5 May 2019 by 2 Comments

I

open up like song

let music play us sing us

melodising us

*

we two wrapped in heat –

loose entangled limbs like riffs

of carnal melody

*

interlaced and lit

lasciviously dangerous

lullabying life

*

our bodies pick up

the pumping of each other’s

heartbeat rhythms

*

in our love for us

we’re lyrical and languorous

climax in chorus

*

wild music wakes us

enchanting and shaking us

open like song

*

our skin pricked with notes

glissando licks quickening us

like a morning shower

*

in our love for us

in trust in truth we give tongue

to life’s loving song

*

II – envoi:

*

for all the lovers

who grew lonely as time passed

silencing their space –

*

music of the spheres

come join us close together

sing us woke in song!

*

**

*

freddie omm

may 2019

*

photo by spencer imbrock

Filed Under: bevrijdingsdag, haiku, haiku chain, Love poetry, love poem, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

veneralia (love changelings) – haiku chain

31 March 2019 by 7 Comments

love is unchanging

but like the moon looks different

with each month coming

*

from bright new closeness

of a full worm supermoon*

illuminating us

transfiguring all

the sleeping world with budding

love awakenings

*

as each mood succeeds

mood and sad and happy mix

we’re changelings in love

*

our inconstancy

moves, begets us, forgot in

guiltless venery

*

our loves’ festival:

bathe in the pools of Venus

crowned with myrtle

*

rediscover the

endless beauty of new fresh

never ending loves

*

**

*

omm

  • Veneralia was a festival held on 1 April in honour of Venus, Goddess of Love (Aphrodite to the Greeks). Women bathed together, crowned in myrtle, in the goddess’ honour. The festival was specifically focused on Venus’ attribute as Venus Verticordia – alluding to an aspect of the goddess as a “changer of hearts” – in this case, her ability to transform lustful love into chaste or platonic love. In this poem, the changing of hearts is seen in the context of a constancy of love that continues even when the love objects change.
  • *On 21 March 2019, the Spring Equinox, there was a full worm super moon. Looking from my window in The Hague, I saw an irradiated sky of swift moving clouds whose intermittent gaps opened a flood of stunning illuminations. They lit up everything like the flash of sudden universal compassion that can come with a new love, undermining cynicism and suffusing all in a bath of warm golden light.
  • Photos by Timothy Dykes and Guzman Burquin; Venus Verticordia by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Filed Under: freddie omm, haiku chain, poem by freddie omm, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

there’s something wrong with… (V)

4 March 2019 by 3 Comments

#haiku by freddie omm; photo by saltanat zhursinbek

Filed Under: Uncategorized

there’s something wrong with.. (IV)

27 February 2019 by Leave a Comment

#haiku by freddie, pic by david clode via unsplash

Filed Under: Uncategorized

there’s something wrong with… (III)

26 February 2019 by Leave a Comment

#haiku by freddie, photo by charles via unsplash

Filed Under: Uncategorized

there’s something wrong with… (II)

25 February 2019 by 1 Comment

#haiku, photo by freddie

freddie omm’s Sicilian Haiku, illustrated by lucy henshall, will be published by Mad Bear Books this summer.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

there’s something wrong with…

24 February 2019 by 1 Comment

#haiku

Freddie Omm”s Sicilian Haiku will be published this summer by Mad Bear Books.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

valentine possibilities (haiku couple)

12 February 2019 by 4 Comments

each love is a kiss

melting and mingling – messed-up

unmissable bliss

*

each kiss is a sign:

unspoken love awoken –

timeless Valentine

*

**

*

freddie omm

14 february 2019

*

(illustration by annie spratt via unsplash)

Filed Under: Festivals, haiku, haiku chain, love poem, Love poetry, love poem, poem by freddie omm, Uncategorized, valentine haiku, valentine poem Tagged With: , , , ,

faults and good bits

8 February 2019 by 2 Comments
photo by matthew rader on unsplash

we own our faults but

all those faults do not destroy

the good bits in us.

*

Omm

february 2019

Filed Under: haiku, poem by freddie omm Tagged With: , , ,

ghosts of cheyne walk

20 January 2019 by 4 Comments

one night in London

I saw the ghost of a child

behind my old house

*

dressed all in white

from another century

in the basement well

*

I watched a while

– she was absorbed in herself –

diffusing through light

*

a veil of darkness

her little body lit up

void translucent shades –

*

face expressionless,

quite absent, as if her spirit

had drained her hereness

*

flowing past in light

like the sun’s in moony night

shining chimera –

*

I could not read her

state nor story from her looks:

she stayed still, mute, slight,

*

radiating calm

acceptance between us. I waved –

then went up to bed.

*

**

*

next night, another

ghost came through the bathroom wall

into the sitting room

*

whilst I sat talking

with my ex-girlfriend’s mother

sure I was mad, drunk

 *

visions and sirens

called me, but maybe it was

the ghost of our love

*

the evening after

I’d seen that blank ghost daughter

in not to be light.

*

***

*

Omm

*

freddie omm’s Sicilian Haiku, published by Mad Bear Books in September 2024, also features ghostly presences, albeit in Sicily, not London.

Filed Under: ghosts, haiku, haiku chain, poem about cheyne walk, chelsea, london, poem by freddie omm Tagged With: , , , ,

salle des pas perdus – poitiers

1 January 2019 by 12 Comments

hall of lost footsteps

fugitive hot whispered words

scabrous ancestral songs

*

judgments from the court

of love whose lust-drunk troubadours

inspire my spirit:

*

a joy for living

a past that never passes

a loss yet unlost

*

in this hallowed space

– oak beams, flagstones, marbled walls –

still footfalls echo

***

I long for you much

as I listen to music

whose sadnesses touch

*

my heart still aching

from madnesses and rage that

haunt this rabid present –

*

let’s celebrate life

in songs of now, here, as in those

footfalls of the past

*

we find in absence

a beauty missing in presence

sometimes, timeless love

*

**

*

Omm

1 january 2019

Filed Under: haiku chain Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

here right now (lit like sparks in rain)

31 December 2018 by 7 Comments

lost in your head

– a maze in shade, leaves in fall

blown autumnal memories

*

your mind’s lost and found

place of missed discoveries:

space to be, begin

*

become right here, be

fresh and free like that loved child

you were and yet will be

*

in this place of warmth

(this then’s the only way in?)

welling from your core

*

and you’re here right now

as these words flit through your brain

lit like sparks in rain

*

in our synapses

no unlinked unwoke spaces

no clueless faceless faces –

*

flaming in the flow

of watery reflections

you are here right now.

*

**

*

Omm

december 2018

Filed Under: haiku chain, poetry Tagged With: ,

gods glowing golden

24 December 2018 by 8 Comments

warm lights of Christmas

cradled in the dark like faith’s

blessed, blissed mysteries

*

illuminating

wonders in the everyday –

stars reflecting us

*

link us to each other

and our gods glowing golden,

lighting our lives in warmth

*

**

*

Omm

24 december 2018

Filed Under: Christmas haiku, Christmas poem, Holiday haiku Tagged With: , ,

canoes in the dusk

9 December 2018 by 3 Comments

splintering sea – deep

troughs of sunset waves – shade, swell,

breathing dreams of sleep

*

lost in waking waves –

our canoes launch liquid lives

in limitless dusk.

*

**

*

Omm

Filed Under: haiku chain, poem by freddie omm, poetry Tagged With: , , , , , ,

grounded – a thing for me – split-line sonnet

23 November 2018 by 3 Comments

not for me

those clouds that fluff the sky and

shift their shape like ghosts

*

haunting heaven,

inhabiting while whiting out

our snowy floating formless hopes –

*

not for me

the worn-in practised phrase

that targets

*

some soft weakness of our stricken hearts,

but always misses,

misses

*

tittle-tattling flattery that bigs

us up

yet disses, disses –

*

o not for me

those chilled and flaky

trout-lipped puppet tendernesses

*

nor for me

those strung-out wants that need yet never do,

they’ll never do:

*

not for me a life that’s lost for lack of you.

*

for me then what is left to make my day?

for me your hand and head and heart and kiss

*

that permeate

the mark of love which others miss,

miss

*

mashing us while world spins on around us in its feckless way:

*

but all those flakes

who flurry through the sky, who

flourish infelicitously

*

without a touch from you

to ground them cannot be

a thing for me.

*

**

*

omm

november 2018

Filed Under: poem by freddie omm, sonnet Tagged With: , ,

reignite – haiku chain

30 September 2018 by 6 Comments

Night. A single star

Burns, smudged by smog, smokelike clouds

Then blotted out. Dark

*

As my mood when you

Are gone – warmth and light snuffed out

Like a single flame

*

As the waxing moon

Is smothered behind storm clouds

Passing blind below

*

We absent ourselves

In darkness, deep depressions

Hiding from the sun

*

We dig a hole in

The plot of our own story –

Gotta stop digging:

*

Look up, wrap ourselves

In glowing glory, endless

Potentiality

*

Sea, sky, stars and moon

And this solitary earth

Spinning round the sun

*

That storm seething past

Stokes our sluggish blood till time

Reignites the sky.

*

**

*

Omm

September 2018

Filed Under: haiku chain, poem by freddie omm Tagged With: , , , ,

come to me – sonnet

18 May 2018 by Leave a Comment

Come to me in the blind and breathless passion of a night

Spent loving free full feral without thought

For morning – climactic darling hours that brought

Us here as one and yet so other, clasped tight

 *

As here in bed between these warm and crumpled clinging sheets

We bask our bodies in the glow and gladdening glory of the sun

Each rapt and untamed moment which our lives have left to run

Each moment while in each of us our wild heartbeats

 *

With that loping looping rhythm pulsing love

Outpacing secret cadences of time.

*

Charged with that beat, may tantric rhythmic rhyme

Flow through our coupling, energy-infused from high above

 *

And let our inner powers grow and set us free:

May we become ourselves again, each time you come to me.

*

**

*

Omm

Filed Under: love poem, sonnet Tagged With: , ,

blessing for a child – haiku chain

18 May 2018 by Leave a Comment

open your eyes, love –

begin the unending day

of beautiful play:

*

ripeness of moments

fall into your lap like fruits

of bliss from the tree –

 *

song and carefree smiles

wrap you in the warmth of love,

forever happy

*

together with those

whose arms hold you close and safe

wherever you are

 *

and when your eyes close

may you see beautiful dreams

and wake to fresh dawn

 *

whoever you be

come in your unending day

of beautiful play.

Filed Under: haiku chain, poem by freddie omm Tagged With: ,

song of the morning muse – sonnet

2 May 2018 by 6 Comments

Every morning I sing – the birds above

And earth below move in those dawning musings –

Those twists and turns of dream and thought, those swings

Of mood that drive us off course when we love

*

But when we think we have the lives we hoped we’d live

We sometimes see ourselves as creatures that we feared we’d be –

Monsters of imagination, whom we

Fed because of what we dreamed they’d give –

*

We travelled far through countries strange, and stranger time

Wore out our wishes, blotted all that dreaming shaped in rhyme:

Our vital hopes were blurred – still, half-asleep –

Although throughout it all our vocal passions stirred: racing deep –

*

Till one fine day (like now) we wake, we rub our eyes and then

Realise we’re singing songs of morning once again.

*

**

*
Omm

May 2018

Filed Under: love poem, Love poetry, love poem, poem by freddie omm, sonnet Tagged With: , ,

holy ghosts – haiku chain

19 April 2018 by 4 Comments

all our holy ghosts

live in us, and we in them –

love’s eternal haunting:

*
blithe spirits spook us

from deserted dunes – singing

sands, rustled by winds –

*
heartbeat-storms roil round

the beach, rouse stomping wildness,

clamour in our veins:

*
we are the children

– and parents – of the past

in love’s family

*
whose children succeed

give birth to generations

for eternity

*
mother father child

live and grow and give their love

timeless trinity

*
all our holy ghosts

live in us as we in them

we are love eternal

*
Omm

Spring 2018

Filed Under: haiku chain, poetry Tagged With: , , , ,

the alien within us – haiku chain

28 March 2018 by 2 Comments

we photoshop out

the alien within us

retouching our selves

*

to present profiles

that are shareable and bland

we become other

*
migrating exiles –

those aliens outside us

beyond the pale walls

*
and who am I then

an alien inside you

apt to be expelled

*
when you draw borders

for my refugee heart, we

live a little less

*
free to be as we

are in our core and essence,

unretouchable

*
irretrievable

inalienable us:

search for us in vain

*

Omm

March 2018


Filed Under: freddie omm, haiku chain, poem by freddie omm Tagged With: , ,

wake for the winter – cold front, february-march 2018 – haiku chain

27 February 2018 by 2 Comments

we all have it in us

this dying for summer this

dawning in darkness

*

like buds at the tips

of february twigs we grow

and feel its stirring

*

springtime inside us

until a cold front snuffs out

our wake for the winter

*

a crocus-white chill

grabs us not from the grave but

its deep dark bed of earth

*

winter clasps us tight

anew and what we wished gone

we take it back again

*

like people waved goodbye

come back and kissed afresh our

winter wishes woke

*

we hug them to warm us

our needs and loves we never lose

we have them all in us

*

Omm

Filed Under: haiku, haiku chain, winter poem Tagged With: , , ,

st valentine’s eve – anna and floris: 1270

13 February 2018 by 1 Comment

at dusk she kisses him

mushymouthed and clinging breathless breast

to breast their smooth commingling

hard then fluid tender melting

*
cool hot creamy sex when two

so made so shaped for one another

couple up as one in one

*
dissolving her in him in her like milk in tea

and in the pearl-pale moisture bleeding from those honeyed lips

and in the sweet salt sweat of thighs and loins

*
she cries he too

for in that kindling consummate moment

they come consumed to be together

*
all thought given up

yesterday today no more tomorrow

she wonders how such mindless mindfulness surrenders

*

she wonders is that it then when valentine dawns

*
when is tomorrow then

when I and you become us

and she conceives as day in night is born

and fused and found forever lost that moment

*
when together now

we come as close as one can be to one

then is tomorrow and tomorrow’s past

*
Omm 

valentine’s eve into day 2018

Filed Under: historical poem, love poem, poem by freddie omm Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

space in our mind

9 February 2018 by 2 Comments

there is a space in our mind

where thoughts are formed

which we do not express

when let’s say you catch a glance of someone

in the street

who smiles and you smile back but pass by

and forget about them

although you’ve never known them to start with

until days later you wake

in the night

from the darkness of a vanished dream

about some other person and their smile

that passing instant returns like a flash

to you vivid as lightning and fades as quickly

in bleached black

yet has left its impression

as if imprinted on your brain

so when you look away a shadow

of it still is there smudged

in faded pigments

like the glimpse of a ghost

of something you don’t quite believe

in

or a déja-vu of such familiar oddity

that it’s unsettling and draws you close

in

as a lover lost from long ago

who seems suddenly close and wants to hug

you back from your absence to feel

the sort of things that you cannot describe

*

 Omm

8 february 2018


Filed Under: freddie omm, Freddie Oomkens, poem, poem by freddie omm, poetry Tagged With:

twelfth night, 1296 – floris’ epiphany in the hall of knights – as if feasting

13 January 2018 by 1 Comment

Floris V van Holland

Early in January 1296, Floris V leaves his court in The Hague for Paris, where – against his better wishes – he switches Holland’s ancient alliance with England to one with France. This sparks off treachery among some of Floris’ nobles, leading to his murder in June.

*

in his hall of knights –

mental topers, tumblers, ravers

– mad din of needy bingeing gluttons

*

smoke-shrouds cling to blackened beams

minstrels mock those braying, belching goblet-brandishers

ranting voices drunk

*

alone in that crowd

and at its centre, he sits

a silent moment.

***

*

thoughts like words unborn

in a womb of forgetting

flit through his spirit

*

scared of too much thought

(which drinking puts a stop to

– as if thoughts could drown):

***

*

sacred hopes, our wished-for dreams

float off like swans when we awake

they glide off on the glossy glassy lake

*

worn out by living

(which dying puts an end on

– as if our lives first wear, then strip us bare).

*

as if as if as

if, in drinking, sleep and dreams

and thoughts and words all drowned like shipwrecked memories

*

and yet and yet and

yet we live and breathe and feed our fates,

our lives float free of us.

***

*

he sits with his knights,

his ladies, fools, his dogs and serfs and clowns

one sated, bloated, slumbering moment

*

comes as if to himself

in the din of that great hall

on his island in the lake –

*

sees in that moment

the ghosts of future feasting,

woken when he wakes.

 

Omm

twelfth night, 2018

 

 

Binnenhof The Hague in about 1290

Hall of Knights (Ridderzaal), Binnenhof, The Hague in the eighteenth century


Filed Under: poem by freddie omm, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

new year 1296, the hague – floris wakes in the binnenhof (five haiku)

1 January 2018 by Leave a Comment

fazed, floris looks out

across the lake from his tower:

chilled, sluggish morning –

*

his household sleeping

off the feast, he’s alone, but for

the stork and the swan

*

one roosting above

on the roof, one swimming below –

fog-filled sky foreboding.

*

he rises from the bed

behind the banqueting hall,

kisses his lover –

*

blessing his domain

– his folk, that mindless morning –

his dark fate untold.

Omm

new year’s day 2018

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evening, munsterkerk roermond – seasonal remnants: four haiku

27 December 2017 by 1 Comment

´

round the munsterkerk

the Christmas market’s dark, stands

and stalls shuttered up:

*

seasonal crowds withdrawn

– spaces of singular silence –

no one left but us

*

contemplating change

in the temples of our heart

where gods die and live

*

lamps hung from abbey trees,

spotlit abbey walls, cast light

over us remnants.

*

Omm

december 2017

Filed Under: Uncategorized

winter solstice: christmas blessing – five haiku

21 December 2017 by Leave a Comment

this winter solstice

as I love you, love me –

our Christmas blessing:

*
living loving both –

 if life means anything

let our thing be love.

*
longest, darkest night,

while Wodan hunts with ghosts all yearning

through skies of glowing spirits

*
may that night purge us all

those ghosts be at peace, in love

again with living

*

in shadowlands of love:

as I love you, love me

this winter solstice.

*

Omm

winter solstice 2017

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scatterseeded love – a sonnet

25 November 2017 by Leave a Comment

IMG_0297

because I am a poet I love words
that cover up as much as they discover
my otherness, my flights so fanciful to you, my lover
whose wit and song and thought fly free like bees, like hummingbirds –

because you are my lover my true words
close in zooming close-up on our love, which uncovers
inborn lusts, carnal nectars nestling embryonic deep in us – we lovers
so innerly loved – when up we pair in passion, flock as birds

to cling and fuck and flick like flames all through the sweet warm night
like lit, scatterseeded sex, love’s godlike joy’s in flight –

because our gods come multiply, we lovers
– synthesizing each in one, seedlings whose flowering recovers

lush, latent lyric life – transplant into our words
love’s being, life’s meaning – innate and fecund like nectar, bees and hummingbirds.

*

Omm

Filed Under: Uncategorized

sex and being (three haiku)

10 November 2017 by Leave a Comment

 

pulsing passion fills

our veins – our bodies

cleave together, one.

*

now in our oneness

grows a seed of otherness:

each of us is both

*

oneself, and a part

of another being born

of us, though not us.

*

Omm

Filed Under: love poem, poem by freddie omm Tagged With: ,

 hollywood kilonova

20 October 2017 by Leave a Comment

in hollywood, our

sublunar gutter-cosmos,

the walk of fame shames

*

collapsed stars, black holes

collide, merge – an afterglow

of platinum, gold

*

counterstellar dust,

like that brute shapeshifter’s lust

ravishing Leda

*

rapist in swan’s form:

sky father, king of gods, power

launched in Helen’s face

*

engendering revenge –

Iphigenia, Clytaemnestra

and Argos dead (the dog…)

*

this darkwebbed media:

supernova’d starfuckers

named, shamed, bollocked up

 *

chorus of neutron sleaze:

lost starlets – tricked-, sucked-, fucked-up –

patriarch swansong

*

now mobs bay and rip

lives apart in shitstorm tweets

of #metoo fascism

*

in our black hole of fame

everyone’s-got-it-infamy –

carry on hollywood.

*

Omm

october 2017



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zuiderstrand, the hague

15 October 2017 by 2 Comments

from boardwalks buried
in the bed of that steep dune

you step on the beach –

*

sandscapes shift, air-borne,

you’re a visitor here, as

timelessly moving

  *

as sea waves wash off

infinite fictions of earth –

mere specks on a spot in space.

*

Omm


october 2017





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1989 – everything is now – 2017

24 July 2017 by 7 Comments

Photo by Filipe Almeida via Unsplash

 

our summer of love:

high on hope, hardcore uproar

remixing our lives

*

dance in those muddy tribal fields –

surging acid nights – wild orgasmic waves

entranced, crowdy hazy drums

 *

all one together

when sunset shades to sunrise –

stay up forever!

 *

heaven in a rave

morphing bodies, spaced-out time:

starstruck eternals

  *

raucous, thrilled and chilled

travellers, mutating beings

stagger on the stars’ stoned threshold

*

in love’s euphoria:

kiss our forever lovers –

softcore love hardwired in all of us

  *

heartbeat to heartbeat

ecstatic, loved-up pulses

– everything is now –

*

Omm

summer 1989 & summer 2017

         Photo by Muhammed Fayiz via Unsplash

Filed Under: cosmic cycles, creativity, darkness fades, Festivals, freddie omm, Freddie Oomkens, free expression, god, haiku, haiku chain Tagged With: , ,

sun, sand, sky and sea – haiku chain

7 May 2017 by 1 Comment


sun, sand, sky and sea:

here i sit and write my words

elementally

*
as my dog chasing birds

– or their chatter when they flee –

sense is to words

*
seeking expression –

while we too might seek release

in sweet sensation

 *
loving inner peace,

our minds, our bodies set free –

revel in release

  *
merge into ocean

like a riff of poetry

in tidal passion

  *
shore’s simplicity

sweet edge of comprehension:

sun, sand, sky and sea

          *
Omm
zuiderstrand, the hague – 6 may 2017

Filed Under: beach, Uncategorized

misty snowy easter – zell am see-kaprun – a sonnet

17 April 2017 by 4 Comments


every time I glance out of the window, love,
grey clouds slink down into our valley deep

and filter out all colour: grey above,

below, and grey behind our balcony when sleep
creeps up like time on light, and all around our space

the mist coils spreading from the glacier

of kitzsteinhorn, and river salzach’s waters race

and roil beyond the moor’s dark clumps of birch and alder
where wagtail, dipper, and sad willow warbler

chatter cross the fens beside the spa’s hot springs.
around us in the town, the fog clings

to the streets, a scattering of ghosts without a face –
we sip a schnapps, our spirits warm, and love

each other, smiling, dissolved into the place.

 

Omm
Mid-April 2017




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la muse et la petite mort – a sonnet

12 April 2017 by 6 Comments

la muse et la petite mort

 

i sometimes wish I didn’t love you yet

so much that I do I do for you but

nothing ever works for us both, and words mistook cut

us up and out of our connection, when we let them.
*
i always love the way you never get

stuck on stuff – some folk would fall into a rut

when hard and heavy tribulations put

their lives on hold – thoughts mired like fish in a net.
*
but you, you seem to blithely slip

through that wide open ocean of freedom

from all the drifting flotsam pains you ever met
*
setting sail on a climactic far-out trip

through wine-dark heavens, where you and all our friends can come –

loving, yet somehow wishing we didn’t love you, yet…
*

       April 2017

Filed Under: Love poetry, love poem, Sonnet, poetry by freddie omm Tagged With: , , , , ,

in our happy hour 

8 April 2017 by 2 Comments

  in our happy hour

  blooming among wild tulips

   sappily sprung in spring –

  *

   fresh April showers fall,

  sweeten earthy sluggish veins –

    riffs of birdsong wake

    *

       liminal lovers

    on the season’s bare threshold,

     shivering off the cold –

       *

    shed our chrysalis clothes,

      winter’s pale accessories,

        emerging nude, fresh –

         *

    limitless like love

    shaken from hibernation

        in our happy hour

__________________
freddie omm , april 2017

Filed Under: freddie omm, Freddie Oomkens, haiku, haiku chain Tagged With: , ,

sexy, slightly scary (her sweet self)

11 March 2017 by 1 Comment


She’s sweet like a friend

Yet sexy, slightly scary

Like no one other

  *

You like her. She smiles

The smile of one who knows that

That liking you feel

    *

Likes her for her self

Like she wishes she could too

But she doesn’t like

    *

Like herself… She says

She can’t explain how she likes

What she likes in words

   *

She has this dream

In which she merges in her

Lies of love with others like

     *

She’s living some truth

Neither selfish nor selfless

– Like her to be both –

     *

Sweet, wholesome, love-scarred

And sexy, exposed – scared that

She’s just like herself

     *

But is not herself –

Like no one else is oneself:

We’re like each other.


Filed Under: freddie omm, Freddie Oomkens, haiku chain Tagged With: , , ,

soho sunday

16 September 2016 by Leave a Comment

image

Ganton Street Soho.
At a café called Sacred:
Cloud-splodged blue sky crossed

By pink, white lightbulbs,
Old facades of painted brick.
The dog is panting

On a pavement stained
With smudges of the unknown,
High sun casts shadows –

This poet’s waiting:
On the walkways footfalls pass
Shut shops, tourists snap.

Summer 2016

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on ventura beach: haiku chain

31 December 2014 by 2 Comments

ventura keys bay

ventura keys bay

*

borne on a loose-tongued tide

when dolphins sang in our bay,

i swam alongside.

*

i learned my english

in california, oh yeah –

surfing on meaning

*

strange new kid from lands

far-off with paler beaches

i dug those endless sands

*

west of ventura keys

soaked up the lingo in waves,

loghorreic seas,

*

chilled long days drunk down

so deep, my first summer of love,

synaesthetized like

*

a child of the sun –

honey-skied strands, peacemeal love,

kool-aid cookied, fun!

*

like surf out of reach,

lyrics drift through smoke-tinged breeze

on ventura beach.

 

kool-aid cookies

kool-aid cookies

 

photo(2)

Filed Under: haiku, haiku chain, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

shoredays, yoredays: seven haiku on a beach

30 January 2014 by 6 Comments

DSC02124

now, then, soon – shoredays,

wave-lapped hours, wind-spun and warm

like summer kisses

*

blown in midwinter

distillated on our lips

blissed out, oh! timeless

*

yoredays – flown, but here

with you forever, come spring

and the buds and birds –

*

skies drunk on light, blue

till blacked-out, then flopping blank

on a spinning globe

*

summerled like myth,

tripping out on dewy toes –

yoredays, yours, mine, theirs,

*

the only sure thing

left is love in all our lives,

strewn along the dunes

*

days of sun, shoredays –

all transilluminated,

hewn in memory

DSC02120

Filed Under: haiku, haiku chain, poem, poem by freddie omm, poetry Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

who am i (lana wachowski)

23 January 2014 by 6 Comments

for lana wachowski

001Lana-Wachowski

… who am i, and when

wachowski to wachowska

metamorphosized

♥

was there a moment

before i became me? – no,

and yet i wonder…

♥♥

what turns us queerly

recast in a different film

to act against type?

♥♥♥

(type?) (without a face?)

life’s not some single screenplay…

(type?) (without a cast?)

♥♥♥♥

we ask ourselves this

not knowing if an answer

ever was, will be:

♥♥♥♥♥

never yet someone,

neither a nonentity

nor quite nobody

♥♥♥♥

mostly we don’t ask

for fear of wondering, lost

in rapt selflessness

♥♥♥

one eye on the road

which tears our lives inside out

one hand on the wheel

♥♥

and we become one

body, not anybody,

don’t ask who am i…

♥

♥♥

♥

22nd January 2014

note:

i admire lana wachowski’s work a lot and also her general attitude to stuff (as far as one can make out from her few public statements) – she combines humour with intelligence and experimentation – artistic bravery, openminded energy, a sense of inspirational anarchy…

i wrote this poem in one go last night just after i’d been thinking about her life so far.

(it is likely to get edited, tweeted and played with, being in the nature of an experiment, one of my haiku chains…)

Filed Under: haiku, haiku chain, lana wachowski, poem by freddie omm, poetry, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

endings & beginnings

31 December 2013 by 5 Comments

my new year’s message this year is this quaint little ditty. i was writing out the fair copy this morning when i was interrupted not by a man from porlock but a mother-in-law from neuss bearing presents. so i had to finish it on a fresh sheet of paper which i then stuck together so you can see that the interruption came at a pertinent point:

endings & beginnings31122013_00000

for those who cannot decipher my writing:

 

                                                                  endings & beginnings

                                                                  (in a winter’s garden)

BEGIN with the word that comes first, like light

from a twilit winter’s garden, when soft rainfalls

drop on dewy, leaf-pocked grass, showering bright

like a sudden flow of MOMENTS through the calls

of a goosequilled V tooting past, this starry night…

*

I sometimes try to freeze TIME, so it stops

and in an INSTANT feel and think all blend

and merge within MOMENTS—consciousness drops

like heaven’s rainfall in a winter garden—

inconsummate, unbegun, word without END,

*

but now SOMETIMES I forget such somethings,

and in your love I’ve found SEASONS to care

about the here, NOW, not some perfected place where

there are no more ENDINGS and BEGINNINGS.

                                                                                              freddie o

                                                                        viersen, 29-31 december 2013

 

Filed Under: poem, poem by freddie omm, poems by f.k. omm, poetry, sonnet Tagged With: , , , , ,

love became a lonely land: autumnal haiku chain

12 September 2013 by 12 Comments

leaves on loam

leaves like love let go

spiral down to snoozing earth,

dark, russet-brown loam.

*

when fall took those leaves

love became a lonely land—

warmth withdrawn, wan sun’s

*

waning light bled slow

blind trails of mud and sodden

footsteps veined with ice

*

wan sun's waning light bled slow blind trails

where ghosts shadowed past,

skulked all through that leafless land

to haunt our autumns…

*

stark, unfelled, strange-boughed—

love’s remains in lonely land:

bare old beeches, clumped,

*

storm-ridden and gaunt,

sheltering our homeless hearts,

winterblown—like us,

*

love’s a vagabond

wandering to a nameless place

of endless leaving—

*

on tracks untravelled

from fall to spring, we will see

leaves, let go, return.

leaves, let go, return

leaves, let go, return

___________________________________________________________________________________

 – I originally wrote this haiku chain on Twitter — a bad habit of mine — poetry on Twitter being so hit and miss, nobody’s looking for it — but I find it a good place maybe for knocking out a first draft.

– When I’d written it I thought Love is a lonely land was a new phrase but then I checked and I saw I had actually lifted it (subconsciously…) from an old, sweet song.

–  This was Billie Holiday’s beautiful, mournful Deep Song (by Cory and Cross), which includes the line:

Love lives in a lonely land

and ends:

Love is a barren land, a lonely land/A lonely land.

–  That’s a song I must have listened to more than a couple dozen times since childhood (my parents also loved Billie Holiday).

– At any rate, my haiku chain has ended up as a sort of retort — a positive echo if you like — to the somewhat bleak sentiments of Deep Song…

– So thanks to Billie, Cory and Cross!

– And here’s their song in all its glory:

Billie Holiday: Deep Song

Filed Under: haiku, haiku chain, online poem, poem, poem by freddie omm, poetry Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

earthgrazing haiku

9 September 2013 by 10 Comments

moon and bay

moon and bay

In Dorset last month one evening after tea – and till well after midnight – there were some excellent meteor showers.

Spread out on our backs, on a tumulus on the clifftops above Higher Eype, we watched them.

I wrote this haiku chain about it:

earthgrazers
(meteor showers over the dorset coast)

peckish at tea-time:
pot warmed, kettle on the boil
as the light draws in

around the cottage –
fog furling up from the sea
all this moist evening

our minds soaked, softened
in warm cups of reflection,
dunked choccy biscuits –

scones with clotted cream
and jam, gentleman’s relish
on hot buttered toast.

we climb up the hill
to the clifftop tumulus,
sheep and cows around –

the sky inking in
those unscrolled constellations
crawling with time’s myths,

scanning heaven for
asteroids and meteorites,
bright trails clustered in

radiating lights,
mirrored waves, blank deep waters
where night takes a breath,

and then we look out
– wide-eyed, longing no longer –
appetites replete,

scattered meteor showers
sketch the intermittent sky
with points of parting:

radiant perseids,
earthgrazers, cosmic debris –
while we watch, starstruck,

and only the dog
is still on the hunt for more,
chasing her own tail…

dorset, august 2013

coco looking for her own tail

coco looking for her own tail

(“earthgrazers”, by the way, are meteors which fly close to the horizon, slowly, in the early evening… i like the way it could just as well describe us humans – and animals, too – grazers all upon this earth)

 

 

Filed Under: haiku, haiku, haiku chain, poem, poem by freddie omm, poetry, writing Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Van Gogh’s First Literary Appearance Discovered

10 July 2013 by 1 Comment

starry night, by van gogh, 1889

starry night, vincent van gogh, 1889

Van Gogh is often seen as the epitome of the tortured artist – misunderstood, rejected in his lifetime, and only slowly building up a posthumous reputation after his early, self-inflicted death.

This supposed obscurity has been shown to be a myth before. But that legendary image still clings to Van Gogh, helping to make him one of the world’s most popular, iconic artists.

vincent van gogh

vincent van gogh

Now Dutch journalist Sander Brink has unearthed the first mention of Van Gogh in a piece of fiction. It throws up some fascinating insights and surprises.

Because Van Gogh’s first appearance is startlingly early – 1903, in a novel called De Winkeljuffrouw uit Oiseau d’Or – Chapeaux pour dames et enfants. (translation: “The Shopgirl in Oiseau d’Or – hats for ladies and children”)

The novelist, Cornélie Noordwal, far from being some kind of avant-garde writer at the cutting edge of modern art, was a hugely popular writer of mainstream (arguably middlebrow) bestsellers, romances and childrens’ books.

Van Gogh’s fleeting mention in De Winkeljuffrouw will thus have formed the first exposure thousands of readers ever had to the artist…

cornélie noordwal, turn of the century blockbuster writer

cornélie noordwal, dutch blockbuster writer in the 1890s and 1900s

What interests me first is the relative standings of Van Gogh and Noordwal.

In 1903, Noordwal was a famous, rich, successful writer (albeit one many critics despised), whereas Van Gogh, thirteen years dead, was only just beginning his phoenix-like rise from obscurity.

In the 110 years since, of course, their positions have radically reversed. Like most middlebrow blockbusters of bygone ages, Noordwal, for all her merits, has lapsed into relative obscurity, while Van Gogh has become the elemental incarnation of genius, whose works sell for hundreds of millions.

The second thing which interests me is the nature of Van Gogh’s fictional début. Because he is sketched in terms remarkably close to his alienated, self-dramatising self-image (as expressed in his own letters), which has driven another core aspect of the Van Gogh myth.

In the novel, Jan, a poet, is writing to Nora, his beloved, and he mentions Van Gogh as being similar to her:

Of course you won’t know who that was. He was a man who was nothing but soul, like you, and his life was violently troubled by it; he painted and drew things, considered laughable and insane by laymen, and yet showed himself more of an artist than a mass of famous painters who create impeccable landscapes and  pictures.

(translation, by Freddie Oomkens, from the Dutch quoted in Sander Bink’s piece of 3rd July 2013)

The third interesting thing is that this figure of Van Gogh already seems fairly close to being a stock character, a Romantic literary archetype of a sort popular in the period. Think of the Les poètes maudites (1884), or D.H. Lawrence, or Leonard Bast in Howards End (1910), or a host of others.

It may sound fanciful, but it is almost as if literature, by means of this dainty little novel, were co-opting Van Gogh to join this gallery of characters whose noble sensitivity ejects them from society…

The final interesting thing, one which also intrigues Sander Bink, is the part played by letter-writing in this story.

Van Gogh’s letters had been published well before 1903 – indeed Albert Aurier’s famously influential article about him (Les Isolés, published in 1890) was heavily influenced by Van Gogh’s letters.  Noordwal, who lived in Paris (she died there in 1928), may well have read the article, which appeared in Mercure de France, a magazine popular among lovers of modern art, as well as extracts of the letters which appeared in Holland and France throughout the 1890s.

All in all, a fascinating insight into how consistently, and from its earliest days, Van Gogh’s iconic international image was shaped by literature, as shown in his very first (so far!) fictional entrance.

Filed Under: literature shapes reputations Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jackals and Arabs

28 June 2013 by Leave a Comment

This little parable, like a fairy story, is utterly unlike most people’s idea of Kafka, reading like an enigmatic tale for children:

Jackals and Arabs

a place where jackals and arabs might meet

a place where jackals and arabs might meet

Reading this story to his daughters – and seeing their delighted reaction – inspired Matthue Roth to create My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents, and Giant Bugs, which is published this week.

The idea is long overdue – for almost a century, Kafka has been imprisoned in a Kafkaesque prison not of his own making.

It’s high time someone set him free.

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translating keyserling

30 May 2013 by Leave a Comment

eduard von keyserling’s masterpiece of literary impressionism, waves (wellen), has never been translated into english before.

it is now being attempted over on oomkenscom…

the bay of puck on the baltic sea, setting of keyserling's "waves".

the bay of puck on the baltic sea, setting of keyserling’s “waves”.

 

 

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The Great Gatsby (the novel) Flayed

7 May 2013 by Leave a Comment

Great Gatsby movie poster

Hilarious debunking, by Kathryn Schulz, of The Great Gatsby.

If I don’t agree wholly, it’s because I think the novel’s iconic stature is deserved. In persuading us of its greatness, its shortness helps, too – allowing readers to supply a lot of the thematic power Fitzgerald merely sketches in.

Having said that, Schulz does land some telling punches – “third person sanctimonious” is good as the narrative voice Fitzgerald gave Nick in Gatsby – and this was something which someone just had to say roundabout now, with the umpteenth (well, fifth) Hollywood treatment  hitting the screens.

Schulz: Why I Despise The Great Gatsby — Vulture.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

4 years’ prison for stabbing sister in Swedish ‘honour killing’ case

7 May 2013 by 1 Comment

swedish honour killing victim

Her brother was only 16 when he stabbed her more than 100 times, in April 2012.

She’d returned to Sweden a year before, fleeing an arranged marriage in Iraq.

Knowing the possible consequences of her brother’s concern for the family “honour”, she always slept with a knife under her pillow.

Local authorities, terrified of upsetting sensitivities, ignored repeated warnings from the anti-honour-killing group Tank.

The boy duly killed his sister. Originally sentenced to eight years, that sentence has been halved in light of his age at the time of his crime.

 

Court slashes sentence in ‘honour killing’ case – The Local.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

david foster wallace on planet trillaphon

14 March 2013 by 1 Comment

david foster wallace–lavishly admired depressive and novelist who killed himself eight years ago–is the subject of three new books now reviewed by thomas meaney, who concludes, in a mixed metaphor of baroque exuberance, that:

to be the master distiller of the times for a generation is no small feat. It requires a willingness to dirty your hands in the culture to a point at which most novelists would flinch. It means being willing to swallow boredom whole.

wallace’s greed for drugs was, apparently, as epic as the taste for tedium meaney ascribes to him, but neither could numb his life-consuming depressions.

he poured his preoccupations with modern life’s minutiae into knowing post-modernist prose, intellectually flashy, emotionally absent.

his reverential treatment of items which used to be thought unworthy of such (TV pre-eminent among them) is getting tired and dated today, but his books are beautifully emblematic of his time.

David Foster Wallace on Planet Trillaphon | TLS.


Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

she lifts her veil: a vision – three rondelets

24 May 2012 by Leave a Comment
 

I was in the Musée d’Orsay last week and took this picture of a striking sculpture by Barrias (Nature Revealing Herself to Science).

(From this angle her limpid marble eyes have a disconcertingly full, yet vacant look, brimming compassion yet somehow indifferent – although that may be a fanciful not to say pretentious notion…)

Coincidentally, I have been working on a poem called She Lifts Her Veil.

It consists of three rondelets – a charming medieval French lyric form.

The subject of the poem isn’t medieval exactly nor is it really about the grand Victorian personification of Nature Unveiling Herself to Science. It’s more about modern men and women and how they see each other:

 

she lifts her veil –
a vision: blank, dilating eyes,
she lifts her veil.

you breathe, the smell of her inhale,
flushed lips mouth fire – as flames chastise
brazen flashing immodesties –
she lifts her veil:

*

they see her face –
fragrant and nude, beyond the pale:
they see her face

itching to put her in her place –
frustration makes them bluster, flail,
so helpless – lewd and sexed and frail –
they see her face:

*

she drops her veil
lets it float, fall, fade where it lies…
she drops her veil

to speak her peace – a piece of tale
embodies what she prophesies,
when in the mirror of our eyes
she drops her veil.


freddie omm, spring 2012

Filed Under: barrias, musée d'orsay, nature unveiling herself to science, poem, rondelets, she lifts her veil, veil

My Novel "Honour" Published

20 March 2012 by 1 Comment

My best-selling thriller “Honour,” published by Mad Bear Books, is available in paperback and e-book from Amazon stores worldwide:

(USA Amazon – UK Amazon)

Paperbacks are also available from Barnes & Noble and CreateSpace e-store: Honor (USA edition) –  Honour (UK edition).

Shocking, darkly funny, edgily post-feminist, “Honour” is about men who kill for honour, the girls who “drive them to it,” – and love in an age which consumes it…

Filed Under: black comedy, consumerism, dark, edgy, feminism, hate crimes, honor, honor crimes, honour, honour killing, Islamism, Islamist violence, meditation on modern evil, satire, vagina warriors Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

the enemy within

19 March 2012 by 1 Comment

Paul Berman, in the New Republic, reviews Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide by Paul Marshall and Nina Shea.

It is a disturbing book showing how Islam is being corrupted by an aggressive and intolerant ideology.

The late Abdurrahman Wahid, once President of Indonesia, described radical Islamist political and terrorism as the product of an “extreme and perverse ideology.”

This ideology, as Berman notes, contrasts with

other, more tolerant and traditional currents of thought within Islam, more compatible with modern liberal ideas—such as the peaceable Sufism endorsed by Wahid, together with sundry humanist currents that descend from Islam’s medieval Golden Age.

Yet it is the radical Islamists who are making the political running in Islamic societies worldwide.

They wage a campaign of violence and intimidation whose most high-profile events were gruesome – the hacking to death of Vincent van Gogh on an Amsterdam street, the murder of Salman Rushdie’s Japanese translator.

But less high profile victims (Christians in Egypt, Somalia and Algeria, for example) abound, and the campaign’s success is partly the silence in which less spectacular events pass us by:

Incidents in which artistic or intellectual presentations have been cancelled without any accompanying violence or arrests have become fairly common: the sandblasting by the Dutch police of a mural in Amsterdam protesting the murder of van Gogh; the removal of artwork from London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 2006; the cancellation of a display at the Tate Gallery; the cancellation in Geneva in 1993 of a production of Voltaire’s play Fanaticism: or Mahomet the Prophet (followed, a dozen years later, by a minor riot when Voltaire’s play did receive a French production); the quiet removal of artworks from display by the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2010 (though I wonder how Marshall and Shea would judge the Met’s ambitious new wing of Islamic art); the removal in 2009 of the Danish cartoons from a scholarly Yale University Press book about the Danish cartoons; the cancellation in 2009 of a German mystery novel about Muslim honor killings; the flight underground of a threatened cartoonist, Molly Norris, of the Seattle Weekly; the decision by eight hundred newspapers in the United States not to run a syndicated cartoon by Wiley Miller. And so on.

 Meanwhile, campaigns against “hate speech” and “Islamophobia” proliferate, often based on quaint paranoia about Western intentions:

 The doctrine postulates a conspiracy theory, according to which Crusaders and Zionists have been plotting to annihilate Islam for many hundreds of years—in the case of the Zionists, ever since the Medina controversies of the seventh century.

 The legal systems of the West have been instrumentalized to silence Islamism’s critics. Geert Wilders in Holland and Mark Steyn in Canada are well-known Western victims of these bizarre and shameful prosecutions, but many more are from Muslim backgrounds:

 the Anglican bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, who converted to Christianity; the brave and morally precise Italian-Egyptian journalist Magdi Allam, who also converted (at the hands of the pope, no less, such that his middle name is now Cristiano); the writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Holland, until she left Holland; Necla Kelek, a German feminist from Turkey; Ekin Deligöz, a German Green politician from Turkey; Souad Sbai, the head of Italy’s Association of Moroccan Women, and too many others to list.

 Finally, perhaps most fatally, the campaign is leading to self-censorship of a kind which cannot bear even to acknowledge itself – a literally self-effacing cowardice.

Filed Under: apostasy, ayaan hirsi ali, cartoons, free expression, freedom of speech, geert wilders, honor killings, honour killing, Islamism, islamist terror, mark steyn, muslim feminists, muslim moderates, vincent van gogh

umberto eco flayed for anti-semitism

12 March 2012 by Leave a Comment

in daniel johnson’s hatchet job in standpoint, umberto eco is accused of flirting with anti-semitism.

johnson says eco tries to pass off a chesterton quote as his own (When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing: they believe in anything) – a moot point, given chesterton himself didn’t actually write it…

johnson has no time for eco:

His novels are case studies in postmodernism, which elides all categories of truth, beauty, morality and politics into an esoteric game.

the article’s payoff:

The doubts sown by the book fall on fertile soil, for ours is a culture that long ago lost its bearings, thanks to the prestige of postmodernists such as Umberto Eco. He stands for the intellectuals of the 21st century who, like those of the last century, commit trahison des clercs by flirting with anti-Semitism when their duty is to take a clear stand against it.

if postmodernism truly is nothing more than a futile, meaningless game, it seems harsh to accuse it and its practitioners of fanning the flames of anti-semitism.

Filed Under: anti-semitism, daniel johnson, foucault's pendulum. g k chesterton, god, name of the rose, postmodernism, standpoint, the duty of modern intellectuals, trahison des clercs, umberto eco

poetic parataxis

12 March 2012 by Leave a Comment

robert moore’s article in n+1 explores the e-book from its inception in 1971 to future adumbrations, including interactive texts and those which rearrange themselves anew with every reading.

impressive and involving as a lot of these are, the future of linear text and storytelling is still (- i think, and i think robert moore thinks so too -) bright.

as moore puts it: Writing is a miraculous technology all its own—a code that, when input through the optic nerve, induces structured, coherent hallucinations.

Filed Under: al gore, books as apps, e-books, faerie queene, future of the book, linear text, n+1, poetic parataxis, robert moore, spenser, storytelling

blurbs, blaps and blovers – one hell of a ride

3 February 2012 by Leave a Comment

article by alan levinovitz (in the millions) looks at the history of the blurb from roman times to now.

the template was set by erasmus of rotterdam’s puff for his friend and fellow humanist thomas more:

“All the learned unanimously subscribe to my opinion, and esteem even more highly than I the divine wit of this man…”

george orwell excoriated blurbs, describing them as:

 “disgusting tripe,” quoting a particularly odious example from the Sunday Times:

“If you can read this book and not shriek with delight, your soul is dead.”

the ubiquity of blurbs by generous writers like (say) salman rushdie makes some readers wonder about their sincerity.

even so, a blurb from a famous writer for a new one must increase sales, otherwise no one would bother.

Filed Under: alan levinovitz, barack obama, blaps, blovers, blurbs, disgusting tripe, erasmus of rotterdam, george orwell, puff, salman rushdie, sir thomas more

our epic birdsong (haiku)

22 November 2011 by Leave a Comment

online utterance

a perpetual orphic stream –

our epic birdsong:

*

the greatest human

works and thoughts, our dearest dreams,

will end in a tweet.

Filed Under: freddie omm

James Patterson Swallowed My Goldfish… And the Bowl With It!

12 October 2011 by 1 Comment
a goldfish
james patterson

Rumours about James Patterson and his voracious appetites take on increasingly bizarre forms.

Patterson shifts more books than anyone on the planet (14 million copies in 2009, says the NYT).

His books straddle the thriller, YA and romance markets.

With his co-authors, he publishes 9 or more new titles a year.

If he didn’t invent this “studio” approach (it’s reminiscent of Rembrandt, Van Dyck, et al) he certainly practices it more successfully than anybody else..

But he always wants more:

When sales figures showed that he and John Grisham were running nearly neck and neck on the East Coast but that Grisham had a big lead out West, Patterson set his second thriller series, “The Women’s Murder Club,” about a group of women who solve murder mysteries, in San Francisco. (quoted from NYT article)

 When he heard that he was a key player on five of Hachette’s six imprints, he asked which one he was missing. Told it was the religious imprint, he said, “I can do that.”

Patterson’s aggressive branding and marketing supports books which millions happily devour. And he gives back, too, with his ReadKiddoRead platform to encourage literacy among the young.

Combining his unquenchable hunger for success with his intolerance of others’, however, it can surely only be a question of time before the headline James Patterson Swallowed My Goldfish – And the Bowl With It! appears.

Because Patterson doesn’t want to be the biggest fish in the bowl. He wants to ingest the whole bowl – gravel and plastic props included – into his insatiable maw!

Filed Under: bizarre appetites of bestselling authors, elasmobranchs, james patterson, james patterson swallowed my goldfish, john grisham, religious writings, thrillers

postmodernism is dead

18 August 2011 by 3 Comments

Edward Docx says Postmodernism is Dead – in this article in Prospect.

Appropriate that the announcement should come via an exhibition, at the V & A no less.

Docx gives his definition of Postmodernism and says its death is heralded by

three ideas, of specificity, of values and of authenticity, (which) are at odds with postmodernism. We are entering a new age. Let’s call it the Age of Authenticism and see how we get on.

“Authenticism” (to me) sounds rather too worthy but it’s a persuasive line for all that.

Although I sometimes wonder whether there isn’t as much of value in the concept of Trash as Authenticity. Put another way, what, au fond, is more authentic than trash?

But maybe those are post-postmodern questions?

Filed Under: art movements, Docx, postmodernism, trash, Victoria and Albert

lovelife mutations

14 June 2011 by Leave a Comment

life is a ghostwritten script
a half-heard whispered soundtrack
of cues and quotes we’ve ripped
from old remastered notes, unverified facts…

                    *

life is an unwritten message –
never sent, unborn, undead,
relating a world without age
where words merely babble, only read

                    *

to alter their sense
and scatter random clues which give
us relics of self, and change the tense –
a poem of birth to live.

                    *

and we retrace our poems of birth
alive in love in every time
and every breath
whose heartbeat pumps our rhyme –

                    *

our poetry mutates
us and those who heed
our words in altered states
wake love out of need.

                                freddie
                                june 2011

Filed Under: birth, infusion of the holy spirit, love, lovelife mutations, pentecost feast, poem by freddie omm, poetry

darkness fades: equinox (villanelle)

18 May 2011 by 2 Comments
saturn at equinox

*

**

*

when darkness fades, and dawn lights up your eyes,
deep in the morning silence we make love –
melt in the dream of a day as night dies.

i come to life in your love, and realize
you’re the sun-cusped girl i’ve always dreamed of
when darkness fades, and dawn lights up your eyes.

you turn me on each waking hour, sunrise
to sunrise, all radiating love –
melt in the dream of a day as night dies,

as earth tilts, night and day merge, and we rise
at the equinox – emotion’s axes move
when darkness fades, and dawn lights up your eyes.

spectral in the shadows, dark matter flies
while we explore each arc of our subsolar love –
melt in the dream of a day as night dies.

we find ourselves – feverish fantasies,
bodies in ethereal motion, orbiting love
when darkness fades, and dawn lights up your eyes –
melt in the dream of a day as night dies.

                                                                         freddie

Filed Under: darkness fades, equinox, poem by f.k. freddie omm, villanelle

who knew when they loved how to love?

6 May 2011 by Leave a Comment

this is the third and final part of this triptych of easter poems.

i mean to illustrate them with a tasteful and beautiful picture of easter eggs.

who knew when they loved how to love?
wasn’t love being the same as the loved
one – one – one could never disentangle?

and being apart, wasn’t it not like life
at all, unwhole, the atom split in two,
something alone no one could do?

so was this whole undoing then a way to become whole
when they loved – but who knew how to love?

                            *

who knew when they lost how to lose?
wasn’t losing it all the only way to find your
self: self – selflessness being everything to have

in nothing, and to gain by giving it all
away for a kiss of the air
and find our heartlove beating everywhere –

we love and feel our lives a universe
which when we lose, who knows what we lost?

                            *

who knew when they lived how to live?
or be the one that wasn’t just alone to
live: live – live recording loops unending

till the next verse overwrites us?
to be reborn’s to think those other unbecoming lives we had were fakes
being we alone have now got what it takes –

maybe another life to be the ones
who knew when they lived how to live?

freddie
easter 2011

Filed Under: easter 2011, poem by freddie omm, third of easter triptych

othertime

2 May 2011 by Leave a Comment

othertime

i dreamed a dream of life, and lived it in my sleep
and when i woke i saw through a ghost’s eyes:

a scrawling world of vacant cemeteries,
queasy seas of memory, reflections deep,
and muffled beyond purple coral banks, skies
unfathomable as eternity…

… i thought it was the vanished i could see –
void significant nothings, truth-packed lies,
unrisen suns, eclipsed in tenseless space.

for i was a poet of when
and now and then
saw written in your face
love stuff that words forgot to write –

while palpitating in our hearts tonight
are words in blood which leave no other trace
but of another self, another place
whose vanishings recur, but always out of sight.

                            *

we live a poem of when, but otherwhere
and othertime – like ivy spread on vines –
creep through our veins: chance, undeciphered signs,
runes and symptoms of things which are not there.

like shadows in a maze of moonshine
we black out, eyeless and pale in the night –
but when cold dawn dissolves us, hold on tight
together, two syllables that overspilled the line.

being alive at all
even hearing quite another call
is being blessed
in incomprehension, in difference;
and inner reflections on our innocence
are inattentive to our interest –

all to the good – beyond reason and rhyme
we live a poem of when, that otherwhere and othertime.

                                                                            freddie
                                                                            easter 2011

Filed Under: easter 2011, freddie omm, poems by f.k. omm

happy snaps – easter haiku

23 April 2011 by 1 Comment

i snap happiness
and in an easter egg-hunt
i happen on it.

       *

i happen on it
like an egg under a bush
in springtime hatches.

       *

snip-snap-happy now
a shutter on opening
floats in reflections.

       *

float on in a flood
sun seasoned petals swirling
butterfly wings past.

       *

i happen on you
no matter what the season
springs of happiness.

                                       freddie
                                      easter 2011

Filed Under: easter 2011, easter haiku, freddie omm, happy easter snaps

the vase of soissons

31 March 2011 by Leave a Comment
Filed Under: Uncategorized

skim, scan and scroll

3 March 2011 by 2 Comments

nicholas carr, in the shallows, says the internet saps creativity.

by altering neuroplastic highways in our brains, it erodes our memories: thanks to google, we don’t have to remember anything anymore.

it is a sinister form of cortical re-mapping.

for, if creation is combining cognitive fluidity with intuitions and memory, a dependence on surfing is bad for it.

carr’s book is well reviewed by jim holt in the london review of books.

Filed Under: cortical re-mapping, creativity, freddie omm, internet saps creativity, jim holt, london review of books, memory loss, neuroplasticity, nicholas carr, poincaré, sinister forms of mind-control

Bunny de Neude

7 February 2011 by 7 Comments

bunny de neude is a burlesque artiste in the thriller i’m writing.

by coincidence, there’s a square in utrecht called de neude, on which stands this statue, thinker on a rock, by barry flanagan.

it is a cross between rodin’s thinker and bugs bunny.

Bunny de Neude (Thinker on a Rock) by Barry Flanagan

Filed Under: Uncategorized

the cold lady drops by to warm herself at the fire

3 February 2011 by 8 Comments

i’ve loved les tres riches heures du duc de berry, by the limbourg brothers (in dutch: de gebroeders van limburg) since i was a kid.

here’s february:

Filed Under: de gebroeders van limburg, february, tres riches heures

verbosphere

27 January 2011 by 4 Comments

(this is the first poem i wrote on my bebook)

verbosphere

can’t feel – no sound, no birds
here in the verbosphere
there are no stars
(except as four-letter words)
nothing rough nor nothing blue
no knives to hack you scars
no coldnesses of words untrue
uncut the story clear
(we are all a missing clue).
but what could be more dear
when we is me and me is you
than this silent verbosphere?

Filed Under: bebook, freddie omm, online poem, poem, poetry about the internet, verbosphere

the wisdom of old folk sayings (1)

20 January 2011 by 6 Comments
angel, by melozzo da farli, c. 1480

“… be satisfied with your Lot.”

 a highly unfashionable, heretical notion in our age of aspirational discontent.

(and yet, one would do well to ponder what one’s Lot was…)

i’ve recast the line for a cult-leader character of mine:

“… take your Lot lightly.”

in line with g.k.chesterton’s curiously new-agey:

“Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.“

(which, in turn, was given a spin by our current pope, benedict: “Die Engel können fliegen, weil sie sich leicht nehmen.”)

chesterton was brilliant with that idea of lightness and not taking oneself seriously:

“For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”

Filed Under: angels, aspirational age, be satisfied with your Lot, engel können fliegen, g.k.chesterton, new age, pope benedict, wisdom of old folk sayings.

past lost love (procrastination)

14 December 2010 by 2 Comments

i have been tinkering with the poem, past lost lies, i put on this blog last week.

i remember when i started writing it, it was with the intention of writing a sonnet –

(and maybe it is fanciful but as i posted it, it did seem truncated – the truncation however, being somewhat apt to the subject, didnt jar too much in my head.)

but now having tinkered, it is duly a sonnet, and completes a procrastinated teenage impulse, a true embodiment of what it is about…

here’s the text:

past lost love (procrastination)

… i have spent my life procrastinating
each hour postponing the next, so sad

to be without the love i want so bad
as my past lost lies, insinuating…

a sense of wantonness into my head,
her warmth between my sheets –

                                       – i remember
fucking and kissing in cold november…
the smell and feel of her fresh in my bed

and she so unexplored, driving me mad
with lust to be once again without lust

to lose her, let her go in timeless trust,
the best i had, or ever dreamed i had…

… but you today are all that time postponed
and past lost love deferred but not disowned…

              freddie omm

Filed Under: past lost love, procrastination, sonnet, teenage impulse

particles of light

14 December 2010 by 1 Comment

this review (god’s equations?) by john leslie of new books by roger penrose and stephen hawking/leonard mlodinow, deals with penrose’s theory of cosmic cycles:

 “…infinite time doesn’t look infinite to photons, “particles of light” without mass (more technically, without “rest-mass”). To a photon, traversing an infinite distance seems to take no time at all. Particles possessing mass are tiny “clocks”. The photon isn’t. It doesn’t “tick”. And, immense ages after all black holes have evaporated entirely through the process discovered by Hawking, the universe may contain nothing that could act as a clock. Particles possessing mass may one and all have become massless very, very gradually. Well, in Einstein’s world clocks are crucial to measuring distances. If eventually there were no clocks, just any distance could readily be traversed. Not only could the universe stop getting older and older; it could actually lose its vastness. This would allow things to carry over smoothly into a new Bang.”

leslie also discusses hawking and mlodinow’s ideas about the many-branched universe:

All branches are equally real, for despite appearances superpositions never collapse. They instead grow to include whomever observes them; any observer develops seemingly incompatible properties. In a complex sense, the observer splits or branches. Well, scientists in the “quantum cosmology” community mostly accept this. However, they would typically reject the book’s idea that all branching depends on observations. Suppose your double, your “other half” with seemingly incompatible properties, inhabits a universe-branch where a cat is alive. In your branch a double of the cat is dead. Looking to see which branch you inhabited needn’t, most of them would say, be what killed that cat.
The book’s ideas about creating the past render matters worse. “Observations you make on a system in the present affect its past.” This is proved, the authors say, by “delayed choice experiments” where any question to be asked experimentally is decided at a late moment. Yet couldn’t you instead claim that past events merely looked as if they’d taken particular forms, or else that they took them, but only in a universe-branch into which the experimental decision helped to place you? Either way, nothing ever reacts to a choice which hasn’t yet been made.

in limiting our consideration only to dimensions which are known, however, we must all be missing a few tricks (not that i think theories should be built on unknown dimensions…).

Filed Under: cosmic cycles, hawking, john leslie, many-branched universe, mlodinow, roger penrose, unknown dimensions

past lost lies

5 December 2010 by 3 Comments
past lost lies, by f.k.omm

it’s an old poem i wrote back in the day.

it is an octet and goes like this:

. . . i have spent my day procrastinating
each hour postponing the next, so sad
to be without the love i want so bad
as my past lost lies, insinuating
each one into my soul, driving me mad
with lust to be once again without lust
to lose you, let you go with timeless trust,
the best i had, or ever dreamed i had . . .

Filed Under: f.k.omm, lust, octet, past lost lies, poem, poetry, teenage angst, trust

twisted algorithms – amazon

1 December 2010 by 5 Comments
books, by ian britton

this article by onnesha royschoudhuri sets out a familiar tale about amazon’s aggressive marketing of books as if they were cans of soup.

twisted algorithms recommending “books you might like” lead you to books whose publishers have paid for the privilege, it isn’t based on previous purchase or personal interest alone.

publishers who don’t play along and give amazon the discounts it demands are delisted or have their books’ “buy buttons” removed.

it is a depressing, predicable tale of market dominance and the arrogance it spawns.

although happily for consumers, writers and publishers, of course, such arrogance tends to lead to its own destruction.

link to the full article on the boston review.

Filed Under: amazon, buy buttons, e-books, onnesha royschoudhuri, seeds of destruction, soup, twisted algorithms

narrative – the story of our selves

25 November 2010 by 5 Comments
page from prelim draft of “the dark gospel”, by f.k.omm

*

**

*

our selves are narratives written out of (or into) our experience.

each self is a story, or a series of stories.

neuroscientist michael gazzaniga writes: These narratives of our past behaviour seep into our awareness and give us an autobiography .

this is not quite joan didion’s classic “we tell each other stories in order to live” line – it is less causal, less contentiously debatable, and more scientific:

the left hemisphere’s language areas draw on information in memory  (amygdalo-hippocampal circuits, dorsolateral prefrontal cortices) and planning regions (orbitofrontal cortices).

damage to these regions disrupts narration, leading to such things as unbounded narration (our narratives are unconstrained by reality) and denarration (we are unable to generate any narratives, external or internal).

john bickle and sean keating suggest the narrative self is written by “our little inner voice”. they specualte that as traditional narratives are joined by digital ones, our sense of self may see a corresponding change:

Digital technologies… are producing narratives that stray from this classic structure. New communicative interfaces allow for novel narrative interactions and constructions. Multi-user domains (MUDs), massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), hypertext and cybertext all loosen traditional narrative structure. Digital narratives, in their extremes, are co-creations of the authors, users and media. Multiple entry points into continuously developing narratives are available, often for multiple co-constructors.

even so, they concede that “Unbounded digital narratives, unconstrained by familiar temporal, causal ordering, seem psychologically implausible as sources for enduring, communicating selves.”

and yet, “the self as a story on social media” – where millions of people are both writing their own narrative selves, while being concurrently influenced and reshaped by other narratives – is a self that is fundamentally different to the selves that were possible before the digital age.

having said that, the kinds of narrative selves thus created do not necessarily deviate from pre-digital story arcs, of course. our urges, motivations, personal growth, dreams, conflicts, ideals, resolutions and melodramas still exist as before.

defining the self may still be a matter of projecting our experience onto “classic” narrative templates.

but perhaps digital intercourse and storytelling do create new storylines and templates. certainly there will be a greater drive to simplicity in the stories that become widely popular.

and this may be true of broader narratives, too – the ones about groups of people, not just individuals, but shared identities, or regions, countries and the planet – the purpose of (and our place in) the universe, even.

link to bickle and keating’s article in new scientist:
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/11/storytelling-20-when-new-narratives-meet-old-brains.html

Filed Under: bickle, cybertext, gazzanigo, hypertext, keating, multi-user domains, narrative, neuroscience, self, selfhood

ampullae of lorenzini

24 November 2010 by 4 Comments

in my new book, the dark gospel, the main character has the skill of psionic projection.

l
lorenzini pores on snout of tiger shark (pic by albert kok)

this has set me thinking about electroreceptivity, a related function channelled (in sharks and other elasmobranchs) through the ampullae of lorenzini.

The ampullae of Lorenzini are complicated and extensive specialized skin sense organs characteristic of sharks and rays…electroreceptive units in sharks. They are jelly-filled canals found on the head of the animal which form a system of sense organs, each of which receives stimuli from the outside environment through the dermis and epidermis. Each canal ends in groups of small bulges lined by the sensory epithelium. A small bundle of afferent nerve fibers innervates each ampullae; there are no efferent fibers (Murray, 1974). The ampullae are mostly clustered into groups. Electroreceptors enable the elasmobranchs to search and locate prey and navigate through the earth’s ocean and seas. Electroreception allows these animals to sense the presence of their victims long before the victims have the chance to see their predators. This awesome advantage has made these animals into one of the most threatening predators on earth.

(faramarr samie, “electroreception in elasmobranchs”, full article here: http://wrt-intertext.syr.edu/ii2/samie.html)

Filed Under: ampullae of lorenzini, elasmobranchs, electroreceptivity, sharks

beer good for babies

23 November 2010 by 2 Comments
beer

thanks to http://owni.eu via sandie zand.

Filed Under: beer, breast-feeding, nourishing effects of beer drinking

lilith

22 November 2010 by Leave a Comment
lilith, by john collier

lilith was created at the same time and from the same earth as adam, according to 13th century rabbi isaac ben jacob ha-kohen.

she left adam to find herself, mating with the archangel samael.

to stop lilith and samael’s demonic children lilin taking over the world, god castrated samael.

today she is often associated with demonoid lore and with the kabbalah.

Filed Under: demonoids, demons, john collier, kabbalah, lilith, rabbi isaac ben jacob ha-kohen, samael

the dark gospel, by f.k.omm

22 November 2010 by 3 Comments

i am in the middle of writing an alternative opening for my thriller, the dark gospel.

lex, the hero of the book, has recurring dreams which come true, and this opening describes one of them at the moment of becoming so…

i’m rather down on prologuey type openings usually – it can spoil unity and flow – so i may yet discard it.

as i am interweaving past and present throughout the book, though, it may work better than usual.

Filed Under: prologues, the dark gospel, thriller

burning books, silencing words on campus in the usa

22 November 2010 by 2 Comments

an article about speech codes and hate speech and the notion, quite established nowadays, that

to be really tolerant, to be really multicultural, you… suppress hateful, mean, cruel, discriminatory thoughts and speech. To ensure civility you… suppress harsh or hurtful speech…

‘I always like to put the Buddhist argument for freedom of speech’, says Lukianoff. ‘Buddhists believe life is pain and they have a point. You do someone a tremendous disservice if you teach them that pain in life is a distortion of life. Because as soon as you start seeing hurtful things as being aberrations rather than part of normal human existence, then you start to see robust debate and disagreement as a distortion of the human experience rather than a part of the human experience…

Lukianoff says we have to move away from the idea that ‘words are like bullets’, that speech is a form of physical assault, and recognise that being argued with, even vociferously, is not the same as being beaten up. However, he says, ‘maybe words should wound. What’s so bad about that? The fact that words can hurt feelings, the fact that they carry emotional charges, is all the more reason for protecting them from censorship. Because the whole point of free speech is to have deep, meaningful, robust debates. We have to have deadly serious discussions about deadly serious things – and we can’t do that if everyone is listening out for potentially offensive words rather than thinking about and responding to the ideas being expressed.’

link to the full article in spiked:
 http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9905/

Filed Under: be... lukianoff, book burning, censorship, hate speech, university speech code

be…

22 November 2010 by 2 Comments

mr wind reminds me there was once a calvin klein be, too!

a long time ago

Filed Under: be...

lady with lapdog – beret vs toque

21 November 2010 by 8 Comments

rereading lady with lapdog again (in translation) i was struck by the brilliant omniscience of chekhov’s narrative, and then enraged by the inconsistency in the translations of the lady’s hatgear.

in constance garnett’s translation it is a béret, in david magarshack’s penguin translation it is a toque.

berets are fairly ordinary working class items; toques are much more glam – napoleon replaced crowns on family crests with a nicely codified system of toques:

a Napoleonic Duke used a toque with 7 ostrich feathers and 3 lambrequins, a Count a toque with five feathers and two lambrequins, a Baron three feathers and one lambrequin, a Knight only one ostrich feather. (wikipedia)

i wonder what made constance prefer the beret over the toque?

Filed Under: beret, chekhov, constance garnett, hatgear, hats, magarshack, napoleon, omniscient narrative, toque

be… by f.k.omm

21 November 2010 by 2 Comments

my new novel is

be…
by f.k.omm

Filed Under: be..., f.k.omm, honor, honour, killing, new novel, publishing, writing