Mary.
"The toad could not think of a story." —@frogandtoadbit.bsky.social
Nobel Prize speech. I had not previously read more than excerpts of this, but a student brought it in & it is really good.
On a sentence of Wittgenstein's.
Monday, September 29, 2025
"fox made of flowers"
ever anxious · in the rotten place
no bolt hole · no bugout kit
the front finds you · up to here in shadows
This light fraught with loiter.
"When she came last week, I wanted to explain that I had an online meeting. I didn’t know the Russian word, so I tried meeting. She looked puzzled and broke into a vigorous mime of someone waving a placard and shouting ‘Putin, Putin’, which took me by surprise. Next she tried a French word, démonstration, and the penny dropped. Meeting is Ukrainian (and perhaps Russian, too) for a demo – in the English sense; though actually the French word isn’t really démonstration (you use that for the demonstration of something, like a method or technique), but manif (for une manifestation). My husband tells me that meeting used to have this sense in French as well." —Virginia Moul via
Rain.
Sunday, September 28, 2025
They're grilling Grok right now as to whether to invade Venezuela, Greenland, or Lemuria next.
"idolatrous dotings"
the strange shapes of straying
strewn with bitter spindles
windows on the walled darkness
watch us find no purchase
enough years of yarrow
to use for maps whiplash
you learn some lame story
along with burnt fingers
then the full-flensed nightmare
follows with land gillslits
then your words gears gather
gallumph in blood headlines
poem without a pithy
pittance to close bus'ness
another excuse nattered
where nabbed subjects swelter
& strange shapes go shatter
"...it was the Arkansas of it all that blew me away at first."
"ground offensive"
post-talion payback
porn—victimhood's rumble—
& i am tired, told of
tolls' murderous flurry
whereupon more melted
march difficult fictions
here mis'rable hostage
hurled lucrative glut-leagues
watches stern distractions
stilb brutal & fulcrum
Robot offering to summarize Capitalist Realism for me.
"...anti-trans campaigns are largely funded by the fossil fuel industry."
Saturday, September 27, 2025
Lost while writing is the best lost.
"death in flavor town"
thin crescent
crawly-mawly
staring back
down mountain steps
dust gathers
in each gully
moon spirals
closer to span
& i ask
in my eyrie
how far along Crazy Horse
sat on plains
of sere grasses
learning time
tempered by calm
sea bed once
where flukes bandied
groan epics
& attitudes
as ours will
theirs wore away
how far along Crazy Horse
how far along
In war-ravaged Portland, detailed oil painting, salvador dali.
Thread that turned out to be way more interesting than i thought it would be!
"a lecture on the warrior ethos"
plant based deep cut · dillydallying
as one does, if · the arch-tinchel
rustles around · reas'nable folk
caught at counting · fast feculence
flicker arcade · comes unravelled
even on this · iridescent
fall street of a · strict composure
& i argue · ultimate things
against people · pared of faces
The secret grimoires don't tell you.
"No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons."
– Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down via @jacobwren.bsky.social
"When it comes down to it, I always pick the Plutonian over the elf..."
"The Palace of Fine Arts is, and always has been, an experiential venue. Where once it housed art exhibitions, it now hosts concerts, an escape room, and surge-priced multimedia attractions. But as originally built, it was the slop installation of its day, a disposable plaster-and-burlap shantytown intended to stand only for the duration of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. By the mid-1960s, it was every bit the ancient ruin it was modeled on, until a group of civic-minded preservationists marshaled public will (and funding) to rebuild it." —Luke O'Neil via via @kyloboomhauer.bsky.social
"With the Face
With the face goes a mirror
As with the mind a world.
Likeness tells the doubting eye
That strangeness is not strange.
At an early hour and knowledge
Identity not yet familiar
Looks back upon itself from later,
And seems itself.
To-day seems now.
With reality-to-be goes time.
With the mind goes a world.
With the heart goes a weather.
With the face goes a mirror
As with the body a fear.
Young self goes staring to the wall
Where dumb futurity speaks calm,
And between then and then
Forebeing grows of age.
The mirror mixes with the eye.
Soon will it be the very eye.
Soon will the eye that was
The very mirror be.
Death, the final image, will shine
Transparently not otherwise
Than as the dark sun described
With such faint brightness."
—Laura (Riding) Jackson
There are two rabbits inside me.
How to disappear completely and never be found.
"Adán a la manada sobornó.
Sí hay DNA.
Sea con amparo o rap, mano: caes.
Andy: ¡ahí son robos!
Adán ama la nada."
—@merlinaacevedo.bsky.social
(Google translate:
Adam bribed the pack.
Yes, there's DNA.
Whether it's through protection or rap, man: you're going down.
Andy: That's robbery!
Adam loves nothing.)
"I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance." —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social
Heather has the skinny on Wounded Knee. (Then there's Little Big Man [1970].)
Hell & forced gaiety are coterminous.
"cancelling Banned Book Month"
flicker arcade, fleer-swarm
flags—centipede upshot—
furry memes on murder
means following botox
talking heads on TikTok
turn scrolloping tip jar
in the cold gray kismet
Mingus and Dolphy in Belgium - 1964.
"thousand-year ratfuck"
handmedown half-bread · a hero scores
where the dark · dangles a glimmer
in ev'rything, otherwise · this beige toast
fiestaware plate · except flatness
conjoined riddle · jest of rising
& myself suited · up like an astronaut
"Frog tied some string around the box. 'There,' he said. 'Now we will not eat any more cookies.'
'But we can cut the string and open the box,' said Toad.
'That is true,' said Frog."
—@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social
"So this is the latest evolution of band kids." (via Mefi)
Friday, September 26, 2025
I Think We're Alone Now (Japanese Version).
"So much of the work of oppression is policing the imagination."
--Saidiya Hartman via @communitynomad.bsky.social
"autumn evening
the wren chooses
our railing"
—@naumadd.bsky.social
"the cold equations"
ant traps never opened
gathering ash flesh-shed
spiralling cant-chaos
lost because of nostrums
Plimsoll plaint Titanic
red pluvial movethwart
ohaeng hidden witness
ghosts rehearse their cursive
in the pinball Bering
Strait it's a bike saeclum
wan radios warring
convince wasted insects
dark current of cutthroat
mood or call it fallout
to see all this acted
without any input
to know what can never
swerve Nemesis' grimhent
to write as one abject
among ogre shoguns
ant traps thus i try now
against trouble bubbling
with an eye turned timeward
as other torts sport here
one-storey the staunch coign
no witness storm of doormats
to tell future faceplants
this droll fury cured us
"I am in love with whatever is eccentric, devious, strange, singular, unique, out of this world—and with life as an incalculable, a chaotic thing, meaningful above and beyond the necessary and elemental data of my subject." —Marguerite Young via via Mefi
"Rapture theology & the Tribulation idea were largely made up by Charles Nelson Darby..."
"idolatrous dotings" —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social
"The future was, if anything, murky."
"Aire soy, abre ya.
Lo anulé.
Seda de lo salado,
toda de sol,
o la calle yo sería.
Otra pasó,
nos apartó.
Aire soy.
Ella caló lo sedado;
toda la soledad es él.
Una ola, yerba yo sería."
—@merlinaacevedo.bsky.social
(Google translate:
I am air, open now.
I annulled it.
Silk of the salty,
all of sun,
or I would be the street.
Another passed,
separated us.
I am air.
She penetrated the sedated;
all loneliness is him.
A wave, I would be grass.)
The Existential Despair of Waiting for the End. (via @tribe.bsky.social)
Thursday, September 25, 2025
"autumn dusk
silvering
the crow’s feathers"
—@joypops.bsky.social
Two negative-polarity coronal holes.
"We can no longer dodge climate catastrophe
A Pliocene climate (3C hotter, sea levels 20m higher) is now certain
We are now fighting to stop a return to the Middle Miocene: 7-8C hotter than PI, sea levels up to 50m higher"
(Bill McGuire) via Ian@collapseaphorisms.bsky.social
"...those rebel angels--the prime numbers--" —Francois Le Lionnais, OuLiPo (tr Warren Motte, 1986)
When that Man is Dead and Gone.
immarcescible ponder · pockmarked orb
another day passed · we didn't leave
exhumed nun · Zoilist's rose
in the cark-canyon · of the escalator balk
devouring alienation · vifgage dance
star swells · in the momentary sky
“On Betelgeuse
On Betelgeuse
the gold leaves hang in golden aisles
for twice a hundred million miles,
and twice a hundred million years
they golden hang and nothing stirs,
on Betelgeuse.
Space is a wind that does
not blow on Betelgeuse,
and time - oh time - is a bird,
whose wings have never stirred
the golden avenues of leaves
on Betelgeuse.
On Betelgeuse
there is nothing that joys or grieves
the unstirred multitude of leaves,
nor ghost of evil or good haunts
the gold multitude
on Betelgeuse.
And birth they do not use
nor death on Betelgeuse,
and the God, of whom we are
infinite dust, is there
a single leaf of those
gold leaves on Betelgeuse.”
—Humbert Wolfe (via Lieder.Net)
"Colonialism was not just theft. It was the invention of a moral language to make theft look like salvation." —@karimwafa.bsky.social
"Take them, Grisly Posterity! I am not sure that you deserve even this much of the Shelni."
“Imbosked dysodile vaults of dwale” –de Esque
"autumn shakes
the old mischiefs fizzy
daring drink me
he opens my last bottle
with his too many teeth"
—@jennygaitskell.bsky.social
"My quarrel with THE LONG AFTERNOON is that it is an easy story which you have written in a hard way."
“Scorn of Rays”
Soft viridian light,
And a voracious call throbbing.
Falling mists.
You will know an arrival by.
If inch.
If furlong gilt with,
So your gain.
Rays from it glow on surf-curlings.
But who has such?
I flow toward not.
(2001--fridge magnet poem [?] )
" 'We can make quite a useful world out of our imagination. I don’t know why falsehood does not do as well as truth.'
'It often does better; that is why it is used instead.' " —@ivycomptonburnett.bsky.social
"Their only real weapon is despair." (thread)
All of a sudden my feed is full of trains.
"The Snarchivist
Caprice,
purest flit-logic,
a swhirled pool
ravelling in spidermilk,
lightly salted, gloam-burnt,
clocksnared at half-pulse.
Itching
an inkblot treaty,
a tongue-spill
in the margins,
a datum-hush
flackering through
a well-thumbed
snarchive."
—@thedevilstuna.bsky.social
"Joe Camel"
awaytide
on your white steed
never mind
that 'no one knows'
mild cool dawn
forged the motive
ev'ryone
aches the danger
pretendworld
tug encroaches
stochastic
the cage creaking
sleepwalkers
cross a slag field
"...what Wayne Booth called 'unstable irony': '...we know that something is being undermined...we don't really know where to stop in our underminings.' " —@kevinrothrock.me quoting Ruby Hamilton [This may turn out to be the hallmark of our age.]
"Even a seventy-million-trick pony is still a trick pony."
"THE TWO DRAGONS (Consonant Palindrome)
Our red dragon
silences the white.
A scene lies
in a guarded roar."
—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
even the slow lane
is a rush · now-cool mornings
dressing in darkness
between werewolves & vampires
potholes & sheer genocide
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
See That my Grave is Kept Clean.
"XII.
Their spades grafted through the variably-resistant soil. They clove to the hoard. They ransacked epiphanies, vertebrae of the chimera, armour of wild bees' larvae. They struck the fire-dragon's faceted skin.
The men were paid to caulk water-pipes. They brewed and pissed amid splendour; their latrine seethed its estuary through nettles. They are scattered to your collations, mouldywarp.
It is autumn. Chestnut-boughs clash their inflamed leaves. The garden festers for attention: telluric cultures enriched with shards, corms, nodules, the sunk solids of gravity. I have accrued a golden and stinking blaze."
—Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns (1971)
"The rocky Apennine backbone of Italy sends out curving ribs and throws up harsh vertebrae of stone."
"My friend’s autistic friend said: 'I'd like to let you all know that I now consider autistic a slur, and I want to be known as a Tylenol-American.' " —@ericmgarcia.bsky.social
Giant squid & sperm whale footage.
Double eruption from opposite ends of the Sun.
“Those who believe in a God of punishment & repression, worship the Devil in the name of God.” –William Blake
"Exile
By the sad waters of separation
Where we have wandered by divers ways,
I have but the shadow and imitation
Of the old memorial days.
In music I have no consolation,
No roses are pale enough for me;
The sound of the waters of separation
Surpasseth roses and melody.
By the sad waters of separation
Dimly I hear from an hidden place
The sigh of mine ancient adoration:
Hardly can I remember your face.
If you be dead, no proclamation
Sprang to me over the waste, gray sea:
Living, the waters of separation
Sever for ever your soul from me.
No man knoweth our desolation;
Memory pales of the old delight;
While the sad waters of separation
Bear us on to the ultimate night.”
—Ernest Dowson
"Anschluss"
in the mist net gnarly
i know utter woodness
subfusc scintillation
aside from thin gunshots
still there's the stern grue jay
staring out of firebreaks
"Who will be the first to carve a bit.ly link into a shell casing?" —@taylordotbiz.bsky.social
Esperanto version of Pere Català Pic's famous and powerful 1936 poster "Let's crush fascism".
The real epidemic is lack of critical thinking & we are going to die of it.
"tangled up in bleen"
slosh this lane
with slag washing
derne foundry
fumarole churn
the lie sags
magnet lidless
we who moil
wasting our glee
gray rubble
stubborn grailquest
the lie sags
magnet lidless
"You know, this has always been the Polish way: cavalry against tanks!" (via @rhunedhel.bsky.social)