"Rock music is built on distortion: on the idea that things are enriched, not degraded, by noise." —Brian Eno
"Sun, time, death—the universe forms in carnivores."
Monday, September 08, 2025
"CROW (Palindrome)
Deft,
I saw a crow,
over us,
a sure vow or caw
as it fed."
—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
"Breakwater
Feel the wind slap on water;
watch small ripples, unruffled, rising
until whitecaps race
and the helm heels over:
past the last buoy the bow slaps against breakers,
harrowed to safe berth."
—Paul D. Deane
Did i know any good apocalypses?
sienna sky
over Anaheim
tenor arguments err
bear-worn caverns
like my brain by words
"The cardinal importance accruing to number symbolism in ancient China may be gauged from the fact that every dynasty selected a number as a kind of modulus for its reign. The chosen number might be one of the numbered tones in the old pentatonic music, which automatically linked it to one of the five colours. It followed from this that when a change in dynasty took place, the colour of court dress had to be altered, and a new scale chosen for the court music..." —Wolfram Eberhard, A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols (1983)
Watching people drive explains to me why they vote the way they do.
eclipse passed with close ties
the blood-clotted lotto
antelucan ichor
slaking ice-thirst pursestrings
O moon long our mingled
lure & mutter cutoff
beneath whose gaze gather
army-gobbling hobbits
Sunday, September 07, 2025
blood moon & the blind gaze
bleeze-leamericks curtain
scripture whiplash scrying
scruff nibbled-at lulldoom
Monstrous Moonshine aelindrome.
"Across this dun September atmosphere" —Trumbull Stickney
God.
“enlarge upon bankrupt ants and be relieved from doctrines” –@everyadage
In the subfusc before-the-storm
imprecation of sky i taste
there is nothing of Innsmouth. Harlequin,
laugh. Hazards of absinthe,
but nothing of the Old Gods.
What was sunken shall rise, streaming;
what was fallen shall rule.
In the subfusc before-the-storm crisis
i can only think of Innsmouth's absence.
(2018)
My ridiculous drottkvaett writing process.
"She is a wolf disguised as a sheep, lurking to prey on the weaker wolf."
bright overcast eggshell
our bustle & faring fazed
almost feasibly
as tanks crunch concrete
rapt dream in the dark
crawling din
a story in grim stirrings
bright overcast eggshell
From the Files of Jack Stalnaker.
"In dust must splendid lads go down and choke,
Red dry their hands and dry their one day's sun
From which they earthward fall to fiery tomb
Bomb-weighted, from bloodying children's hair."
—Gene Derwood
The Blackness of the Grackle. Some 2018 afterthoughts.
“Elle moves her queen’s knight ahead two spaces and one space west.” —Black Helicopters (=Durkin’s Attack)
A Late Walk. (via @evecastle.bsky.social)
we flee in wolf-pursued SLEDS
from the prospect of a permanent LABEL
clouds are EBONY
radar DENSE
with red · though ransomware is SLYER
poetry should be left-FLUSH
witness-statement trembling & LANKY
the daws just UNDID
blind SKIER
metalflake Cadillac -plane (skidding) HYDRO-
pivot to pick an ASTER
or pump SHALE
waiting on TAXES
“living longer” like it was mine to ELECT
symphony of Brutalist crisp RESTS
UTD Brutalist Flickr set. (When i was going there, i called it “Dr Strangelove without the Bomb.”)
"Snails were the guardians of the Pi ratios of the vault."
Out here, beside the turquoise pool,
unshielded from the traffic sounds,
i yet may dream of frozen moons—
or lying on a sun-dry towel.
No inspiration trammels where
the clockwork of a verse-wright grinds.
So Gautier who took such pains
could lose the tuning of his lyre.
Two shades of weathered wood enclose,
& both still darkened by the damp.
Some birds i hear, who sound like hope,
& less like all the other jazz.
Perhaps i may be on the mend
after so many days spent tiptoe
high on a wire, no ground in sight:
& uncompanioned save by wind.
Tribunal from the distant future. Brings up a 21c human for questioning. Who is unable to provide anything but lying or nonsensical answers, to every question.
“A caliph rebuilds the Taj Mahal out of nightmares.” –@MagicalRealismBot
(Somehow this sounds like ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ก๐๐โ ๐๐๐ ๐กโ๐ 21๐.)
One of Wales’s most infamous hauntings.
“CHOIR OF STRINGS (Palindrome)
Noise: Lyre.
Venom: music.
I’m any drone,
risen or of speed.
Divas send, as stress,
a mood for a bass.
A bar of doom
asserts sadness:
avid deeps,
for one siren or dynamic.
I summon every lesion…”
—@AnthonyEtherin/ @anthonyetherin.bsky.social
"So, am I done resurrecting Russophone Hollywood?"
“a summer shower
skeleton
now mine”
—@poem_exe
My Father Returns as a Luna Moth.
“For all’s not gold that glitters; and everything that makes an inky black aqueous solution isn’t the pure oxyrhodomate salt of platinum.” –@HarrySKeeler
“Whilst Viking knights fight griffins, I skirmish with the riddling sphinx…” –๐ธ๐ข๐๐๐๐
"I wanted it to look like Dostoevsky's notebooks."
muezzin of nothingness
we frame with a crossing of wires
attentive to all the blurs
though they be tidingless
O Tower of Darkness sere
i have made my approach
perfected this tinny speech
to one that threads the door
"I’ve always had a strong feel for the 7 African Powers, who I feel have aways blessed me."
Saturday, September 06, 2025
“Blondin
With clinging dainty catlike tread,
His pole in balance, hand to hand,
And, softly smiling, into space
He ventures on that threadlike strand.
Above him is the enormous sky,
Beneath, a frenzied torrent roars,
Surging where massed Niagara
Its snow-foamed arc of water pours:
But he, with eye serene as his
Who sits in daydream by the fire,
His every sinew, bone and nerve
Obedient to his least desire,
Treads softly on, with light-drawn breath,
Each inch-long toe, precisely pat,
In inward trust, past wit to probe—
This death-defying acrobat! …
Like some old Saint on his old rope-bridge,
Between another world and this,
Dead-calm ‘mid inward vortices,
Where little else but danger is.”
—Walter de la Mare
Isopsephy in a wider context of alphabetical counting-systems..
“There is nothing that indicates the presence or absence of a political instinct so much as the exquisite and artistic appreciation of when to break the law.”
— GK Chesterton, ILN, May 19, 1906. (via @GKChestertonian)
“…Jupiter
With roiling bands of rufous oil and whorls
And paisleys, brown and white and palest blue,
And storms in which the Earth would be a bubble”
—Frederick Turner (1943-2025)
Wild.
“There is no news from Auschwitz
along that funeral plain
green wipes away old waves
that rolled the eyes
and tangled flowers veil vile kennel dust
bequeathed to dawns.
the years are done.
the earth bent toward canals bears
sterile bowels repenting woven eyes
while bone-filled drifts that scattered blood
yield other births.
death is not there: no special people
trailing alien dens,
or children moving in the rain of ash
unraveling minds.
life is not there: not even myths that rode
young stallions to a circus tent
and carried torches on a convent wire
beyond the tides.
no other signs that men patrol chained
sheets of sea.
i grieve our empty ships.
there is no news from Auschwitz.”
—Sonia Sanchez
"Every once in a while I tell people from other countries about how the health insurance system works in the US and they are aghast. Yesterday a guy straight up didn’t believe me when I said people can die because of not being able to afford medicine. He was sure I meant in the distant past." —@astrokatie.com
“Death of the World of Now"
This word was not from any of your scarrings made.
This wood was not. Corrupt spells stalked the glade.
It is better they don’t ask me to say.
From hardship’s lack, a world-shaped wound protrudes.
This small corrupt spell takes too much of my strength.
The tire split lengthwise, metal mesh protrudes.
It sang before i knew the why of it.
Or is it only the beginning of the end of the end
that we salute, suspended in the air?
A large corrupt spell held us in its maw.
I wade midway between two shores of madness.
Burning lands and shiny gimcrack leaves.
The pain within my gut a lodestar pointing,
and mountain once i climbed and tumbled down.
I made this spell from scurrying corruption.
It took all that i had and wants still more.
(2007)
terminator
face half shaded
reminds me of other times
sleep was hard
head buzzing with slakeless thoughts
face half shaded
from a light i never asked for
in a place i had happened to come
"This year, by way of contrast, I started to use my anti-Shelob stick on August 12.."
This world-changing event or that world-changing event, they've been like a series of funhouse mirrors, each with its own peculiar distortion, except that you never return to a world that looks like it should.
"Important to remember that everyone involved in renaming the DoD to the Department of War is afraid to take the subway." —@strngwys.bsky.social
“Who Shapes the Carven Word
Who shapes the carven word, the lean, true line,
And builds with syllable and chiselled phrase,
To rear a sheltering temple and a shrine
To house a dream through brief and meagre days
Must know that time wears words away like stone
And blurs the sharpness of the clean, straight thought;
A ghost will wander out and leave alone
And tenantless the temple that he wrought.
This will be ruins for another day,
Of lichen-bitten stone and empty tower,
A tumbled shrine whose god has moved away…
Yet later-comers, in some moon-hushed hour,
May find a strange light haunting still the shade,
And footprints that no mortal feet had made.”
—David Morton, Anthology of Magazine Verse: 1925
Friday, September 05, 2025
“Little Grey Dreams
Little grey dreams,
I sit at the ocean’s edge,
At the grey ocean’s edge,
With you in my lap.
I launch you, one by one,
And one by one,
Little grey dreams,
Under the grey, grey, clouds,
Out on the grey, grey, sea,
You go sailing away,
From my empty lap,
Little grey dreams.
Sailing! Sailing!
Into the black,
At the horizon’s edge.”
—Angelina Weld Grimkรฉ via poets.org
“The source of all disorder was the loneliness of the jackal, God’s first- born.” –Marcel Griaule, ๐ถ๐๐๐ฃ๐๐๐ ๐๐ก๐๐๐๐ ๐ค๐๐กโ ๐๐๐๐ก๐๐๐๐̂๐๐ (1965)
Coronal Mass Ejection simulator.
“Think about those who haven’t long to live, who know that everything is over and done with, except the time in which the thought of their end unrolls. Write for gladiators…” –E M Cioran, ๐โ๐ ๐๐๐๐ข๐๐๐ ๐๐๐กโ ๐ต๐๐๐๐ ๐ต๐๐๐ (1973)
Love is a Skinny Kid (1962). (via Pseudopodium) ☆☆☆
These make the last few embers of dinosaur sunlight.
This will be a legendary day: we were so free,
so bold, so murderous. Our mayfly-brief
glory will be unsurpassed & the talon
of our joy has marked the spot indelibly.
What is there more to say? We touched the stars
but our hearts were not touched. Our first resort
was annihilation. Waking now, we still won’t label
this fury of a pastime anything but innocence.
What wonder if our trinkets, that litter the earth,
when they work no more, become bleak plethora
of talismans? Holding them now, our karma upon us,
we still want to click on a window & do it over.
(2013)
The Legend of Lylah Clare (1963). ☆☆☆
“Awesome
When I came down from the mountain, I didn’t know
where I had been, what I was coming back to
but I soon found out. Billboards by the roadside
threw colors in my eyes used to none
and I inhaled a waft of broken molecules
that taught me, even wondering at this
to cough and speak the cough that was my name.
Fire, but having lost or left that view,
another fire was promised me though I
be blind until its shining…
And namer of everything since, I named them one.”
—Ryan Orion, Debt is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (1980)
"A killing/ at the heart of all their stories..."
History of American Literature from 1901. Melville’s only mentioned in one sentence–& they misspell his name.
A Brief History of the Canadian Ghazal.
"You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear."
—Life On The Mississippi by Mark Twain via @sardonicus.eu
Kant's Question about Monica Vitti.
"A pilgrim
Ice
Ingesting hubbub
Gnash written into cold
Thilling existence
Creation
Intent
An extremity
Gone
Ample as a dandelion
Wondrous as a place
Vast as a mountain
Eternal as a hat
Dead as a cabinet
Torn as a mountain
The sagacious pilgrims
A hovel of pilgrims
Callous shanties and late pilgrims
Desisted”
—Issue 1, 3610
"Auto Wreck
Its quick soft silver bell beating, beating,
And down the dark one ruby flare
Pulsing out red light like an artery.
The ambulance at top speed floating down
Past beacons and illuminated clocks
Wings in a heavy curve, dips down,
And brakes speed, entering the crowd.
The doors leap open, emptying light,
Stretchers are laid out, the mangled lifted
And stowed into the little hospital.
Then the bell, breaking the hush, tolls once,
And the ambulance with its terrible cargo
Rocking, slightly rocking, moves away,
As the doors, an afterthought, are closed.
We are deranged, walking among the cops
Who sweep glass and are large and composed.
One is still making notes under the light.
One with a bucket douches ponds of blood
Into the street and gutter.
One hangs lanterns on the wrecks that cling,
Empty husks of locusts, to iron poles.
Our throats were tight as tourniquets,
Our feet were bound with splints, but now,
Like convalescents intimate and gauche,
We speak through sickly smiles and warn
With the stubborn saw of common sense,
The grim joke and the banal resolution.
The traffic moves around with care,
But we remain, touching a wound
That opens to our richest horror.
Already old, the question Who shall die?
Becomes unspoken Who is innocent?
For death in war is done by hands;
Suicide has cause and stillbirth, logic;
And cancer, simple as a flower, blooms.
But this invites the occult mind,
Cancels our physics with a sneer,
And spatters all we knew of denouement
Across the expedient and wicked stones."
—Karl Shapiro
Exile without cunning is just being lost.
"I am indeed alive: through all
Extremes I drag my days.“
—Cranch’s Virgil, III.405-6
"Vigil For Winter
Autumn:
loose-leafed article
of orchard bruises,
of horses lurching
through violet fog
A sun-scarred scarecrow
slumps,
a hawthorn bough folds itself
into blossom bones.
and the soil?
The soil,
hardens,
braced
for frost’s brutality."
—@thedevilstuna.bsky.social
Thursday, September 04, 2025
"What I really find endlessly appealing about this series is the cover art."
costive glacial glass tire
glob calendar robs us
bonze in bucket leather
banters antelucan
coffeehouse curved scaffold
of cairns seicheblack glacial
"A nice complete collection of old English alliterative poems in translation, including Caedmon and The Dream of the Rood and a whole bunch of stuff. Free on Gutenberg and very good. I was bemused at the poem arguing that the existence of the phoenix proved resurrection, because you don’t often see a phoenix, but hey. If you want a free edition of these poems, here it is." —Jo Walton reviews Cosette Faust.
Gurrelieder. (playlist)