the username's timeturner. it shares an amusing coincidental existence with a magical artifact in the third Harry Potter book, but aside from that it has little meaning, being derived from a simplified image of an hourglass that cropped up frequently in high school notebook marginal doodles a few years ago.

i'm a poet. i started out writing prose, but quickly abandoned it due to a perceived lack of talent and drive to actually create something worthwhile (at least by the standards of prose). the one piece of prose in my gallery i think is worth anything you can find here.

as a poet i am unconcerned with traditional standards of coherence and comprehensibility. paradoxically one of the things that i have been most interested in in my writing is condensed meaning, which is a nice term i just invented for the ability of language to convey meaning even when gramatically what is being said may be nonsensical, by removing or eschewing many "linking" parts of our language. you can take this paradox to be a sign of my own massive failures in these experiments. if, after reading any of my stuff, you wish to comment, i ask that you first simply describe what the poem conveyed to you--beyond that, feel free to say whatever the hell you like.

art interests me primarily as forms of a) experimentation and 2) catharsis. i am not particularly or categorically interested with creating entertainment, beauty, scene, sense, meaning, emotion, thought, or smiles, but as you might imagine this is more of a disclaimer than a general statement about the work you can find here.

i do not write poetry for anyone but myself, both due to my own use of poetry as catharsis (see above) and due to the fact that one is frequently one's harshest critic. that said, poetry is inevitably a form/play/cipher of language, and language is inevitably about communication. as you can probably tell, i am a fan of contradiction and paradox. one of the most interesting qualities of language is that it has no fundamental truth quality--it can lie. poetry, like most art, being unconcerned with morality, is full of lies, hopes, dreams, falsehoods, observations, and the occasional reality.

in short:

i write stuff, and my name is zak. what's yours?