Category: By Cornelius
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Elegie, after the Genjō Kōan
No one hears us now. Good. Praise was always a way of not looking. The boat moves. We say the shore moves. From this one mistake a self is built. Look at the water: nothing on board was ever still. Firewood does not become ash. We do not say winter becomes spring. My mother is not behind me. Her death…
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California, Dreaming?
At the edge of a strip mall, where the Pacific Ocean’s vastness begins, a stark truth emerges. Surfers appear like fleeting thoughts, birds embody ancient hunger, and the ceaseless waves reveal the illusion of progress. This evocative poem by Cornelius Climatus is a meditation on emptiness, acceptance, and the profound truth hidden in plain sight, questioning our restless pursuit of…
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About Cornelius
Cornelius Climatus (b. 1972, Copenhagen) is a Danish-American poet and writer whose work asks a single, stubborn question: whether authentic subjectivity can survive in an age of commodification and digital abstraction. The question is inherited. A distant relative of Søren Kierkegaard — a kinship he neither advertises nor denies — Climatus writes under the sign of his forebear’s dictum that…