Move!

Muster the whys
I need them to cling to
Feeble reasons
Will do.

Gather the hows
To have a semblance of a plan
To pretend
To have a chance.

Take what I need
Leave what is mine
Wait; grab my thoughts
Shuffle.

Then - now
Chase after change
Reroll the die
Unsatisfied.

Wandering sewers
I lay my pipe dreams
Backwards, forwards,
Sideways, nowhere.

Upwards?
Not
Yet...
I should go.

Free

Where o' when does happiness lie
There n' then do I fly
With wings that encircle, enchain -
In vain does joy fleet by.

Free of thought
Free of land
Free of people
Free of plan
Free of pain
Free of purpose
Free of care
We despair.

Dig Deeper

Was a
Hundred feet
Not enough
That You dig
Deeper still
Sinking into your pit?

Ev'ry
Fidget and
Gasp for air
Lets you feel
Familiar
With the fine dust beneath

As it
Covers you,
Smothers you,
Holds on like
Lovers do,
Insep'rable from you.

You're a
Goner now
Got no sound;
Buried you
Won't be found;
A loner tilled in ground.
A loner till the end.

The Land of Nothing

This poem is from 2013. It would seem I'd forgotten to publish it.

I welcome you to this land of naught
This place where I am ruler and lord
Where day goes by like it was nothing
And night stands by, will leave for nothing.

Doing nothing - is pleasure, is pain
A necessity, an obligation in vain
A torment from which there is no recourse;
Time stops, as still as can be
And yet I cannot change it.

My heart, it knows, that it must wait
No longer does it know what for
Last it heard, it must wait
There's light at the end, not far.

So here I am, doing nothing
Waiting for what, I know not
Maybe idleness is an end in itself
For it can be a means to none.

Misfit

Shards amidst pieces
That do not fit together -
Yet I pick them up.

Repeat

Repetition
Bears fruition
So once again
Let me repeat,
Do what I did
Yesterday
And reaccomplish
That feat.
Oh such comfort
In knowing afore
What I do
And what I speak;
Why think anew
When I can agree;
Why create -
When I can seek?
Why walk a road
So bleak.
Rather, lather,
Rinse, repeat,

Mirror Images - Why aren't they reversed top to bottom?

I encountered this old puzzling question on xkcd: "When you look at things on a mirror, how come they're reversed left to right and not top to bottom? What's so special about the horizontal axis?" and decided to get to the bottom of it once and for all. So this is how it goes:

Mirrors actually show things as they are: left is left, right is right, top is top, bottom is bottom. The reversal actually occurs when you turn the object around to look at it in a mirror. Say you were holding towards you a cardboard with the word "CARDBOARD" written on it. Now if you wanted to look at it in a mirror, you'd have to turn it around, and that's the part where it gets reversed. People usually turn it around horizontally, so left becomes right and right becomes left. If the cardboard were transparent, then you would be able to see that you just turned the letters around horizontally with respect to yourself. So, if instead, you flipped the cardboard around top-to-bottom (try it), you would see in the mirror that the letters were reversed top-to-bottom, and NOT left-to-right. Now you might say "but that's because I made them upside-down!", but that's the point. Even in the "normal" case, you made the word right-to-left.

So what about words written on your t-shirt? You don't reverse your t-shirt around horizontally to see it. Well actually you do, when you wear it, as opposed to when you are holding it out in front of you. If you somehow wore your t-shirt by flipping it vertically and sliding the neck-hole down to your waist, then you would see the letters upside-down in the mirror.

Also, if you look at a word on a wall, and then turn around HORIZONTALLY to look at it in a mirror, then it's reversed left-to-right. On the other hand, if you turned around vertically by, say, doing a hand-stand, then you would see it reversed upside-down. Sheesh, all the ways this horizontal turning-around has crept into our lives! I guess it's because we're conditioned (by evolution and gravity, perhaps?) to regard objects turned around horizontally as the same as the original object (i.e. a tiger turned away from you is the same as a tiger turned towards you, albeit one may be a bit less dangerous). An object turned over on its head, on the other hand, seems to us as a bit odd.

...Then there's the question: what if you turned around diagonally? Can you turn around diagonally? Well, at least you can turn around a piece of cardboard diagonally, in which case, left would be up, and... gah, that's a question for another time!