Dean Bowman

2:43 — Cover image: Emerald City Ghosts, Issue #5, December 2025

Poetry

2:43

Recursion, insomnia, and the kind of haunting you can't outrun—a lyric piece born from waking at the exact same moment, night after night.

By Dean Bowman • 2 min read

Latest Articles

Entries

12: Trip

A Tokyo reunion amidst memory, aging, and feeling both at home and displaced across time.

By Dean Bowman • 7 min read

Entries

11: Disconnected

From sea walls to city walls.

By Dean Bowman • 4 min read

Entries

10: Passage

Fragments from an intercontinental journey.

By Dean Bowman • 6 min read

Entries

09: Waiting Rooms

The reason I'm never bored.

By Dean Bowman • 2 min read

2:43 — Cover image: Emerald City Ghosts, Issue #5, December 2025

Poetry

2:43

Recursion, insomnia, and the kind of haunting you can't outrun—a lyric piece born from waking at the exact same moment, night after night.

By Dean Bowman • 2 min read

Shape

08: The Red Bandana

On displacement, memory, and the small red cloth that proved I existed.

By Dean Bowman • 5 min read

Shape

07: Delusion

Without knowing if it matters.

By Dean Bowman • 3 min read

News

Site Updates: A New Home for My Creative Works

11/29/2025: The Shape of What Remains has migrated to deanbowman.com with a new and improved design.

By Dean Bowman • 1 min read

News

Site Updates: A New Home for My Creative Works

11/29/2025: The Shape of What Remains has migrated to deanbowman.com with a new and improved design.

By Dean Bowman • 1 min read

Poetry

Poems from the spaces between worlds—exploring the longing we carry, and the moments that make up a life.

2:43 — Cover image: Emerald City Ghosts, Issue #5, December 2025

2:43

Recursion, insomnia, and the kind of haunting you can't outrun—a lyric piece born from waking at the exact same moment, night after night.

By Dean Bowman • 2 min read

Alice Askew

An usual prose poem about displaced furniture, streaming rabbit holes, and a missing cat.

By Dean Bowman • 2 min read

Arising

A morning routine becomes an exploration of modern alienation. When life becomes unlivable, sometimes the only authentic response is to watch it all burn in rebellion.

By Dean Bowman • 2 min read

remnant / 残滓

Three lines. Two worlds. A trace that never left.

By Dean Bowman • 2 min read

Shape

The Dutiful Daughter

Love found is a debt owed

By Dean Bowman • 20 min read

Lexicon

Reference articles providing context for the concepts, frameworks, and terms that recur throughout The Shape of What Remains.

The End of Meaning: Illiteracy, Digital Addiction, and Civilizational Collapse

Extending Charlotte Birch's 1982 thesis and warning: when literacy collapses, consciousness degrades from reasoned thought to tribal emotion and control.

By Dean Bowman • 14 min read

Botchan (坊っちゃん)

Botchan is Natsume Sōseki’s 1906 novel about a Tokyo man exiled to rural Matsuyama who can’t reconcile his urban identity with provincial obligation.

By Dean Bowman • 2 min read

Liminality

Liminality is the threshold state—neither here nor there, between what was and what will be.

By Dean Bowman • 2 min read

Cruel Optimism

Cruel optimism describes attachment to something you desire that actually prevents you from flourishing.

By Dean Bowman • 2 min read

A collection of Dean Bowman's scholarly research and theoretical writings on Emotional Forensics—a transdisciplinary framework for investigating emotional systems through Emotional Archaeology, Anthropology, and Architecture. For narrative applications, see Cases.