( The Donroe Document / via )

Jarmusch again. Can these forms ever be defined except in retrospect, except in the subjunctive?

"When the War Is Over

When the war is over
We will be proud of course the air will be
Good for breathing at last
The water will have been improved the salmon
And the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly
The dead will think the living are worth it we will know
Who we are
And we will all enlist again"

—W S Merwin via @rabihalameddine.bsky.social

Manuport.

"It’s sobering to look back on the run-up to the Iraq war—a period of unceasing chattering-class debate, elaborate official lies, media complicity, unavailing global protest, in the end a giant stitch-up—and have it seem like some sort of paradise of public deliberation compared to these gangsters." —@kjhealy.co

"Enough is enough."

( via / via )

Archduke Franz Ferdinand posing as a mummy.

"finally, we're living through precedented times" —@dieworkwear.bsky.social

Likely depicting a jaguar, puma, or pampas cat.

exhume remnant Ralston
rose quarantid floes of

Märkish Evening Landscape.

( via / me )

Grandmother's Attic on a Winter Night.

haggard Wolf Moon, hanging
hoist on its own moist fathoms,
war & all that; ullage
island & its lensed pylons

What birds are actually up to.

"Is how tasteless it is, this lamp, known in underworld Esperanto as La Lampo Plej Malbongusto."
—Shadow Ticket

Everybody Knows.

( via / via )

Gnossienne in Asia Minor.

"Frog and Toad looked into a mirror.

'We look brave,' said Frog.

'Yes, but are we?' asked Toad."

—@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Sakura.

cold toast
& a castoff
accord still no borderline
stunts, while over Ant Farm
unknown pleasures break, Kitëzh
& cold toast

Ulysses' Gaze.

( via/ me )

Quadrantids.

clown-ruinous riot
derived from fibthrive frolic
still unclear though stareskull
stunned screens of the scorch thunder

To the Parting Year.

"sadness/ remembered/ and/ some/ gardens/ had tears in them" —A Humument

The end (the doors cover) jam over the abyss.

( me / via )

This morning in Caracas.

"this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth" —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

Peaches en Regalia.

it will happen
& it will be long
world for which we pine
it will happen
after more than enough pain
lungfish uses the lung
it will happen
& it will be long

Satire: Veritas scanned. Star-crossed stanzas. Both? A postscript of sorts.

( via / me )

Winter.

Crassus
who left a street
lined with crucifixions
of our mad foreign policy
father

(2018)

Drone tornado footage.

"Like precognitive mass-images of the nearing future, the reek of inflammation brought its early pain and redness to the fatidical flare." —Barefoot in the Head

After the air raid.

( via / me )

"The Garden of Allah is perhaps the only representation we have of what a genuine Ronald Firbank film would be like."

"what with moltapuke or voltapuke" —Finnegans Wake

"Look toward the Dallas skyline on a cloudy winter night, for instance, and watch the buildings and monuments flow like wax into strange and fascinating new shapes."

athwart thunderation
threshold breached & veshch tree-chain
sprite lightning, belated
labyrinth of drab footlights
envelope empty
athwart thunderation

Thrushes.

( via / via )

Not Quite Music.

"former profession"

lay of the leaf-blower
later given shiv sharpness
ancient vanish-venom
verge of the known sheer stonework

Capitol Mall, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

“ 'I don’t know what it is, not to be ordinary. Most people must be that, or it would be something else.'
'Well, a lot of people think they are not,' said Julius." —@ivycomptonburnett.bsky.social

Books in the Classical world.

( via / me )

From the very top.

It's not that no one cares, it's that the Machine 𝑑𝑜𝑒𝑠𝑛'𝑡 𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑜𝑟 𝑛𝑜𝑡; it already has decided what you're going to get.

Are you really going to read all those books?

"Incarnations

Do not deny,
Do not deny, thing out of thing.
Do not deny in the new vanity
The old, original dust.

From what grave, what past of flesh and bone
Dreaming, dreaming I lie
Under the fortunate curse,
Bewitched, alive, forgetting the first stuff...
Death does not give a moment to remember in

Lest, like a statue's too transmuted stone,
I grain by grain recall the original dust
And, looking down a stair of memory, keep saying:
This was never I."

—Laura (Riding) Jackson

Moons of 2026.

( via / grosz (?) & gesualdo by joe coleman )

Free Bird. Though naturally i had to doubt for a second if it was real.

"True poems are fires. Poetry is propagating everywhere, its conquests lit with shivers of pleasure or pain.
One should write in a language that is not the mother tongue.
The four cardinal points are three: South and North.
A poem is something that will be.
A poem is something that never is, but ought to be.
A poem is something that never has been, that never can be.
Flee from the eternal sublime, if you don't want to die flattened by the wind."

—Altazor

Goddess of Liminality.

"I was a string in the harp of enchantment for nine years." —The Book of Taliesin, tr Gwengvryn Evans (1915)

Never letting go.

( via / via )

Tornado genesis in South Dakota.

"To speak of the future is to use a language that is forever ahead of itself, consigning things that have not yet happened to the past, to an 'already' that is forever behind itself, and in this space between utterance and act, word after word, a chasm begins to open, and for one to contemplate such emptiness for any length of time is to grow dizzy, to feel oneself falling into the abyss." —Paul Auster , writing on Royston's Lycophron in: "The Invention of Solitude," Collected Prose (pp 107-110)

Absalted.

pallid hills · piled in earlylight
hard to rejoin · the rude jostle

talk unceasing · sessile flurry
tornado network · nods vanishing

thick description · scrawls runnels
golden train · gallivants without me

Meditations in Time of Civil War.

( via / via )

Archive stories.

   plant · struggling somehow
near wolf moon & the road's sheen
   old betrayals stripe

dusty nostrums in back drawers
no guarantee the lid fits

On Power.

"SOLEMN (Palindrome)

I sat, solemn.
I saw time open one poem.
It was in me, lost as I."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

London Calling.

( via / me )

Podcast on Vanessa Redgrave & that Oscar speech.

"Oregon has two seasons: blackberries and moss" —@johannawinant.bsky.social

Monostich Sequence I.

sorrows made of knowledge
sorrows built on cold
crisscross sirens hold
suspended with the winning & the ullage

this most desp'rate cusp
calm at once & fevered
madly undelivered
children seeking guns twiddle the hasp

bettors bank on burgers
hoodlums masked grab prey
colored flickers stay
untouched by thoughts or prayers or bardic rigors

high overhead & dance
atoms sun-tormented
across void space & shindig
only this night & just for the price of a glance

A drone show in Chongqing.

( via / me )

"...we are not really living in a decentralised network at all, but a chaotic hybrid of the two models."

"December

From the sad leaves withdrawn,
Remote, estranged and cold,
Forgetful autumn's gold
Alone abides in some December dawn.

Tearless and clear and chill
As eyes that have forgot
Far love, or find it not,
The pale bright heavens arch the barren hill.

Now, in this afternoon
Enchanted, blue and brief,
The year has lost its grief
In valleys mute below the spectral moon.

For here no mourning-dove
Laments the season flown:
On love that wanders lone
Falls the blue balm of silence from above.

For here no zephyr grieves
To tell the year's dead dream;
And down the pine-lulled stream
Lost memories drift and loiter with the leaves."

—Clark Ashton Smith

Walking in Space.

"Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories." —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

Choral Rohirrim.

( via / via )

Troubles in single file.

"Ukrainian intelligence foiled an assassination plot targeting Denis Kapustin, the commander of the Russian resistance group RSV, they faked his death and collected the $500,000 bounty on his head..." —Anonymous (Can we borrow some of their smart people? We seem to have a serious shortage.)

The trope of the cursed book.

      🧿 ["Nazar"]

axolotl Bletchley
cleans dynamite embers
funest gnomic hymnal
Ignotus-joust Kotex

Lalibela molybdenum
nonlocal oak peckish
quark rista surrealist
Tarot ukase viewkiss

why xerox your zircon
a bzura coloratura

Just making sure.

( via / via )

Responses to “A Defense of LLM-Assisted Poetics”.

"For Auld Lang Stain

The new year arrives
trumpet-skinned,
a blister of split clocks
bursting
confettied suns,
half-remembered moons,
delight hammering
its hooves through wine-fog.
Dawn unbuttons
its seam
coaxing the day to spill open
just enough
for me to smudge
its shine."

—@thedevilstuna.bsky.social

The problem now is real papers citing real papers that cite fake sources.

"Bury him deep. So damned a work should lie
Nearer the Devil than man. Make him a bed
Beneath some lock-jawed hell, that never yawns
With earthquake or eruption; and so deep
That he may hear the devil and his wife
In bed, talking secrets."

—Beddoes via

Forskalia.

( via / via )

"Rekhti poetry used a female poetic persona addressing, most typically, a female beloved, and the language used was everyday female-coded language rather than the male-coded and higher register language typically used in other ghazal poems."

"Morte… morte… Bruges-la-Morte… — the cadences of the last bells, weary and slow, little, worn-out old bells which seemed to be shedding petals — was it on the town? Was it on a grave?"
—Georges Rodenbach via

"In a sense, frottage is all about riding the glitch and agreeing to dabble in the hauntological."

   but mystical hope
in the dregs of the winter
   rabbit disappears

moon that from a western shore
tracked my shadow on black ice

Carrington tarot.

( via / via )

Indie bookstores comeback.

   so sinuously
the motorized wheelchair threads
   this glut of tables
while i am thinking my own
labyrinth is all wrong turns

On the Physiognomy trilogy. (via @adeniro.bsky.social)

"Oh, gross time passed–ah, yes, a jag of time, till a day came. A day of stupefaction.” —Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo

Masterful drawing of a microscope.

( via / via )

Mnemonic for the Futharc.

"I can tell you that whatever you might assume, it is in fact difficult to convince people to talk to a stranger about being tortured, even when they understand that torture as an injustice against them. Imagine having to tell them that the piece they retraumatized themselves to assist won't air." —Spencer Ackerman via

The Village in Winter.

perineum noir
enacts field of cracks
red, blue, green chagrin
griot rehearses curse

It's not thinking, but it's language.

( via / via )

Double feature.

Sergey Esenin: A dream: black road...

A dream: black road.
White horse. Stubborn foot.
And on the horse
rides someone dear,
rides someone dear
I do not love.

Ah, Russian birch,
narrow pathway,
only that one
dear as sleep, her
hold with your boughs
like expert hands.

Moonlight. Blue, sleep.
The horse clops well.
Such music light
for that unique
one, she who holds such light,
but not exists.

A hooligan,
maudling with rhymes.
At a mad career
to keep the heart hot,
through birchy Russia
to meet with her,
my non-beloved.

Translated by Geoffrey Thurley

How i'm leaving 2025.

With Finnegans Wake my memory is also jogged. Why did i start reading it [in high school]? I was investigating the quark model, in subatomic physics, & heard that they got the name from "three quarks for Muster Mark" in FW. So i wanted to see for myself. This particular edition, with a gray & maroon dust jacket, also means something. There were, for whatever reason, several copies of it at Half Price Books at a decent price; one i bought for myself (my first reading of it was as a library book if you can believe it-- i kept renewing my checkout all summer), one i donated to the free library at Chumley's, my favorite coffeehouse, & a third copy i gave the poet Robert Trammell for his 50th birthday.

Air-breathing Millipedes from Scotland is the name of my new band.

( via / via )

Frankenrecipe.

"villapleach, vollapluck" —Finnegans Wake

Hasta la Raíz.

"Lardil"

house driven to—haven
costlier—hoarse morsel
& our sleepwalk slaughter
drops slag on this ragtime
mirrordark reminded
page of melting feldspar
eclipe dust soft dithers
the old door of glory

when the gurgle's gurney's
trundle's gone i'll pawn it
sun that won't rise, ruin
to dwell, rudely welling

Lardil.

( via / via )

"In what written language would the same book have the least pages?"

"Sonnet 65

Once when they found me, some refrain Quoi faire?
Striking my hands, they say repeatedly
I muttered; although I could hear and see
I knew no one. --I am silent in my chair,
And stronger and more cold is my despair
At last, for I have come into a country
Whose vivid Queen upon no melody
Admits me. Manchmal glaub' ich, ich kann nicht mehr.
Song follows song, the chatterer to the fire
Would follow soon... Deep in Ur's royal pits
Sit still the courtly bodies, a little bowl
By each, attired to voluntary blitz...
In Shub-ad's grave the fingers of a girl
Were touching still, when they found her, the strings of her lyre."

—John Berryman

"At least when we’re all unemployed you’ll have your career as a comedian to fall back on."

"After weeks of watching the roof leak
I fixed it tonight
by moving a single board"

—Gary Snyder, from “Hitch Haiku” in The Back Country, 1967

On Ernst Fuchs. (from 2015)

( via / via )

My Mother Would Be a Falconress.

" 'It is not the last straw that breaks the camel’s back,' said Thomas. 'It is all the others.'

'It can hardly matter which straw one is,' said Bernard." —@ivycomptonburnett.bsky.social

Under the Bridge.

embryonic brainwash
allotropes of corpse tallow
lit in the moon lungfish
lasting terror from scarecrow
ev'rywhere-lost isthmus
allotropes of corpse whisper
red, blue, green chess moves

Hetconned.

( me / via )

Katzenklavier.

   arsuocya
orchid isopsepha
   tundra
fortress sculsh
fylfot rant box
   trickle scourge
shadowy billabong
   edtech filch
ashen ropetrick
   spiralling

-----------------------------------------------------------------

arsuocya (Taneraic): 'bad title'

The avatar's day in court.

"...something is making a chill creep across Hicks's scalp, the Sombrero of Uneasiness, as it's known in the racket." —Shadow Ticket

Meanwhile on Truth Social...