Sympathies – 16th June 2025

June 16, 2025June 14, 2025 ~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 11 Comments

thetenzenmen · Sympathies

I neither cared for you one way or the other,
your virtues and character were unknown;
Ambivalently sympathetic to your suffering
after all the horrible things I’d been shown;

But slowly you were revealed by yourself
to be equally similar devils in disguise;
Impossible to be unaware of the irony
of your actions and repeated ridiculous lies;

And if you were not hated before this
you are now surely bound to be;
To inflict a holocaust for any reason
removes all goodwill and previous sympathy;

There are those who still sit complicit
in their silence, they are justifying;
As if their own fingers pulled the trigger
and, not so quietly, cause all those dying;

What goes around will again come around,
this is the beginning of your own demise;
With no moral high ground to stand upon
there’ll be no one left to sympathise.

Final Solution – 10th June 2025

June 10, 2025November 23, 2025 ~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 3 Comments

thetenzenmen · Final Solution

Inspired by a thought (‘magic blood’) from the Change My Mind Substack here.
* Repurposed from Chris’s poem ‘The Phoenix Tree Writes’

I am born of the magic blood
and God made his promises to me;
Envy and hatred are my razors,
the disease of nations lurches towards
a final solution.

I’ll not fight for your freedom
when there’s still history to be written;
Blessed for one thousand years,
one thousand years nearer to
a final solution.

Rough drafts scratched with dead desires;*
my maps are majestic cities in the mud;
The great insignificance, smaller than a secret
must not be told to a reliable witness of
the final solution.

Thomas On The Fence – 26th October 2024

October 26, 2024September 5, 2024 ~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 2 Comments

I don’t know what I believe anymore
The fence gets more comfortable every day
The Holocaust, massacres and genocides
Did they really happen that way?

Is it all a facade, my own Truman Show?
Is the grass actually greener over there?
To discover my world was built on lies
I wish to remain blissfully unaware

Now reality assaults me at every turn
Left guilty and helpless at the pain
Paralysed by the bystander syndrome
The fence is where I choose to remain

Vendetta Generation – 25th July 2024

July 25, 2024July 25, 2025 ~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

Voices trembling, yet as one to sing
A collected mind travels the crow road
Where prayers and prophets seek to bring
The moon silk dreams once borrowed

A shatter as the violence worshipped returns
A zigzag missile homes in on the heart
Faced with the darkness, the torment burns
The moon silk dreams soon fall apart

Submitted to The Sunday Whirl Wordle 664 wordlist.

Today I’m feeling:

I woke up with the light before 5 am and knew I wasn’t going to get enough sleep, so I reset my alarm for a little bit later.

Even then, I still felt like I could go back to sleep easily, even after breakfast, driving to school and coffee!

As it was a special event day today, though (Thai Language Day), I soon perked up walking around school and talking with students. There were very few classes going on, so there was a fair amount of excitement in the air.

I cancelled my grade 12 class, giving them a small assignment to do instead and took it easy with the grade 8s in the afternoon.

The best thing about today was:

Chatting with students Jee and Pemai this afternoon. It started off with their gossip about Freya and helped me understand their point of view about her behaviour. More interesting, though, was discussing differences between schools in Thailand and the West and also talking about some of the teachers and other students that they like and admire.

Something I learned today?

Amy’s mum has shingles on the right side of her face. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the effects before but it looks really bad and painful. I need to investigate more about it so that I can try and avoid ever having it too!