About

Every poem on this site was composed from real sentences found in news articles. The language is the journalist’s — only the arrangement is ours.

Each poem is guided by a Lojong slogan — one of 59 Buddhist mind-training aphorisms. The slogan doesn’t appear in the poem. Instead, it shapes the selection: which sentences are kept, which are cut, and how they’re ordered. The goal is structural resonance — a news story whose shape mirrors the shape of a teaching.

Occasionally, a word is struck through and replaced. These interventions follow the method of Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s “The Ultra-Black Fish” — substituting official language with something more honest.

The closing line of each poem is the only original language. Everything else was already there.