Like everyone else around the world, I too woke up on Sunday morning to the news of the attempt on the life of Donald Trump.

There are few places where the art of storytelling has been woven into the fabric of societies as persistently as in the magical and mysterious lands of the Balkan Peninsula.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

Today is the 19th of June 2024. Three decades to the date since I landed on New Zealand’s shores.

I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.

On Sundays, my friend comes to visit
he brings a brown dog and packets of treats;
for the dog and for me.

If you didn’t see the six-legged dog,
It doesn’t matter.
We did, and he mostly lay in the corner.

Paul Benjamin Auster, known as “the patron saint of literary Brooklyn,” according to The New York Times, and “literary Brooklyn’s first great pinup,” according to the Guardian, passed away at the age of 77.

On Saturday morning a young man half-walks, half-jogs into the mouth of a giant, steel-glass-and-concrete temple where other men and women worship gods of plenty every day of the week, and sometimes even on the in-between days, pulls the blade he brought with him and stabs six people to death.

How hard it is not to be strong,
how hard it is to be alone,
and to be old, yet to be young!

Give me hunger, 
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.

The room is bright from the cold, electric lighting. An exposing, stripping light that allows no shadows or soft hues. Its presence simultaneously useful and intruding.

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else.