No Individual – 24th February 2025

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 6 Comments

I understood it

At least, I thought that I did

Just an illusion

This haiku was inspired by this quote:

Even the feeling of having understood is likely to lead one into a sense of illusion because the individual thinks he has found something to impart to others, but there is no individual.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

I’m still contemplating the complexities of the idea that there is no individual, because, despite feeling that there is, deeper down I seem to understand that there isn’t.

SpaceBeat – 23rd February 2025

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 4 Comments

time and space make melodies
soulful sounds become sublime
beginnings of memories
ear-worm-holes of our spacetime

Shared with No Theme Thursday (picture prompt) and using the form Ae Freislighe:

  • Quatrain stanzas (4-line stanzas)
  • 7 syllables per line
  • Lines 1 and 3 rhyme together, but they rhyme as three syllables (xxa)
  • Lines 2 and 4 rhyme together as two syllables (xb)
  • The final syllable, word, or line of the entire poem should be the same as the entire poem begins (the poetic term for this is dunadh)

Tell Yourself – 22nd February 2025

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 29 Comments

Your mind believes what you tell it
So let’s fill it full of golden voices
til overcome and overrun – rejoices

Any trouble becomes easy to dispel it
Once you’ve given yourself the choices
Your mind believes what you tell it
So let’s fill it full of golden voices

Good or bad – now you can smell it
Understanding what the right choice is
Filter out unnecessary noises
Your mind believes what you tell it
So let’s fill it full of golden voices
til overcome and overrun – rejoices

An English Madrigal shared with dVerse and initiated by the attached picture from the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation as the form is often connected with themes of love.

Charlie Zero The Poet Music picks & Reviews #12 and my quick thoughts:

The Teskey Brothers – sounds like it is last century. Makes me think of Django Reinhardt a little. Also reminds me of a straight Fred Lane. Fred Lane fucks with this genre somewhat.

Steve Lacy – nothing against but who listens to this and when? What mood would you be in to listen to this? Kinda elevator/background music to me. It’s music that you don’t listen to.

Dabeull – No surprise that I’m not into this but the album covers are amazing and remind me of Toecutter and his take on Captain Ahab – this is fairly obscure reference to a memory of a Toecutter show in Sydney around 2006! I’d never heard Captain Ahab until just now trying to jog my memory. Their music is not similar at all to Dabuell!

Witch Egg – This is interesting. Has some Sunday morning vibes along with tripping out Friday 4am madness. A new one for me to check out more.

Lustmord – A familiar name but never heard before. This one doesn’t win me over.

Emptied Life – 21st February 2025

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

It seems I held the knife
A body lays still and silent

The chattering of the skies
Question this emptied life

Here the fear arose inside

Hell showed itself red and hot

I must endure the torment
Am I insane or justified?


Emerging from the silence
I heard my own voice scream

Fists shaking at the sky

To question my own violence

No sense to the weeping
A twisted melody in song

The agony burns deep

To see this body sleeping


And in the quiet sown
A question from the skies

I stole a man’s life
That life was my own

This is basically a rewrite of the following text, which I can’t remember (and didn’t note) where it came from. It seems to be a sort of synopsis of Dante’s Inferno perhaps?

I killed a man. He is gone. He is silent. I heard many things from the fish of the ocean to the birds of the sky. Why I took his life I do not know. It was perhaps the phobia of which I trembled in fear. The petrifying portrait of a demon from the depths of hell. I may be crazy. I may be right. But was I wrong? Then I heard it. “Why! oh! why!” I shrieked. “Why am I destined to be tormented by the demons of hell.” I screamed and yelled. Was it not yet? Was it here? I killed a man today. In a violent nature. Nothing makes sense. The weeping tears of gore. The symphony of smiles and laughter. The searing pain of death. Was it worth it? And from the fish in the ocean. And the birds in the sky. I took a man’s life. And that life was mine.

Same Stones – 20th February 2025

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

Through perseverance
Resistance to adversity
Is the thought the death of me?
A symptom of melancholy

Is the place of setting down
The same place that I began
The rocks remain the same
Yet I feel a different man

A picture in sepia tone
Each life adding to the play
To improve or enjoy
How shall I plan the day?

Waking to the sunlit welcome
Why the yearning for old home?
The journey wasn’t just mine
Until I found myself alone

Inspired by this quote from Daniel Z. Lieberman, on balancing ambition and contentment.
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

You Said It! – 19th February 2025

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

Announced outrageous and absurd
It’s the freedom of the word
Away from interpersonal affairs
Nobody listens, nobody cares

There you go, it’s done, you’ve said it
With the minimal thought you fed it
No need to worry about splitting hairs
Cos nobody listens, nobody cares

‘Death to the Arabs’, ‘death to the Jews’
The meaning is difficult to confuse
If there’s one thing everyone shares
Nobody listens, nobody cares

Welcome through the gates of the west
Those that failed the intelligence test
Say what you want, no need for prayers
Cos nobody listens and nobody cares

Inspired by these words I found online somewhere (but forget where):
In the West, we have the freedom to say anything we want, simply because nobody listens and nobody cares.

Big Joke Brother Translation – 17th February 2025

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

A familiar face
Staying still is sleeping – moving is falling
Keep walking diligently
I FREAKING HATE YOU !!
”Shaved head ghost“
Each meal, each day – leak, brother
The song has to come, brother

These words are not mine but are arranged by me. These were posts translated from Thai after the politician Prawit Wongsuwan pushed a female journalist in the head after she asked him a question. The translations are poetic to me. The title is connected with a disgraced (?) police chief whose nickname is Big Joke and ‘Brother’ indicates the relationship between such elites.

Laugh In Company – 16th February 2025

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

When I woke that morning
finding that I no longer had all the answers,

My life changed forever
and I could become a friend

I will follow your hand when you say ‘look’,
I will follow your eyes,
to laugh in the company
of a friend.

A thought after reading these lines from Mary Oliver here:

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.

And thinking about how I was always doubtful about my friendship with George, someone who seemed to have all the answers. But then I turned it around to my young arrogant self when I thought I, too, had all the answers. Realising that I didn’t have all the answers allowed me to be able to invite the kind of friends that I wanted into my life. And I wonder if this might be why the ‘wonderful, always smiling, wise’ George, who always professed to have all the answers, actually has few friends.