(via )

Haiku Pause's Climate Change issue.

poison drizzle drainpipe
adroit conscience stauncher
Anne Frank tshirt franchise

a frabjous dunce hunts us

( me / via )

A Slow Enlightenment.

" 'A sad spectacle!' exclaimed Thomas Carlyle, contemplating the possibility that millions of planets circle other suns. 'If they be inhabited, what a scope for pain and folly; and if they be not inhabited, what a waste of space!' " --from Martin Gardner's Order and Surprise (1983)

No Man's Land.

"The Face

See me with all the terrors on my roads,
The crusted shipwrecks rotting in my seas,
And the untroubled oval of my face
That alters idly with he moonlike modes
And is unfathomably framed to please
And deck the angular bone with passing grace.

I should have worn a terror-mask, should be
A sight to frighten hope and faith away.
Half charnel field, half battle and rutting ground.
Instead I am a smiling summer sea
That sleeps while underneath from bound to bound
The sun- and star-shaped killers gorge and play."

--Edwin Muir

Interesting thread on competitive vs. cooperative games.

( via / me )

Skylab.

"Night Soul

My soul is sad at the end my soul
is sad to be tired at the end is sad
and tired to be in vain my soul is sad
and tired and at the end in vain
I long for your hands on my face

I long for your fingers on my face
like angels of ice your fingers on my face
I long for the ring to be brought to me
I long for their cold touch on my face
like a golden horde deep within the sea

And I long at last for their remedies
in order not to die exposed to the sun
to die in despair exposed to the sun
I long for them to bathe my eyes
where those in despair lie sleeping

Where so many swans are at sea
swans making their way over the sea
stretching in vain their sullen necks
while down in the winter gardens
there sick men are gathering roses

I long for your fingers on my face
touching my face like angels of ice
I long for them to moisten my eyes
the dead grass of my glances the fields
where so many lambs lie scattered"

—Maurice Maeterlinck, Hothouses (1889; tr Richard Howard 2003)

Crepúsculo/Noche.

"Also to be clear, ICE is going to kidnap workers off farms to put in the concentration camp, where they’ll then sell those same workers BACK to the farms as prisoners? Do I have that right??" --@erinvachon.bsky.social

#A11pl3Z.

( me / via )

Immigrant Song.

"...indeed, to combine pleasant discourse and a mind distressed is a sort of moral barbarism." —letters of Sidonius Apollinaris (Loeb translation--W B Anderson) I.iii, to Faustus

East Hastings.

"Sigmoidoscope"

Empires at the first
   amerce.
Empires while they last,
   amass.
Empires when they fall,
   appall.

Empires in the end
   pretend.

01 01 86

A word from Heart Mountain.

( via / via )

Pieces of Cosette.

      “Calamiterror” (--George Barker)

Brittle bones in lands of seiche
   Prowl the omnishambles
Walking shipwreck makes a wish
   In adamantine marbles
Where there is no other course
   Frenzied visions hand us
Intergeneration curse
   Whose riddle is tremendous

Black is white and white is black
   Only in the telling
Cameras on the shuffling cup
   Never catch its stealing
Still this nightmare grows apace
   Waking eyes turn bleary
Will not climb the long abyss
   To morning and its glory

Lightning strike we hope for most
   Out of mere confusion

"Tell me brother, where do we go?" (AI song)

"Frog and Toad jumped away. Toad was shaking.

'I am not afraid!' he cried."

--@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Ushering in the post-search era.

( via /via )

iconoclast.

“All cities are founded on the abyss.”

—Maria Zambrano via @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social

While This Beast Drinks Poison, a Snake Sucks His Blood.

"Orison of the Salamanders

Albino wolves drowse
tonight, albino wolves.
Succeeding waves
on a beach of black glass
whose pauses extend
from the start of my life
to its end.
Albino wolves drowse;
rabbits dig.
Madness is the promised land
sometimes & when it digs
all the way through
to here,
I sit & cannot say a thing
amidst thousands
of blind hands,

albino wolves."

--Camille Meesh, Axis Cookbook (2004)

Total Pixel Space.

( me / via )

War Pigs.

tightrope irruption
funmarole firing line
raven's feather
on the suspect sidewalk

it is no quest quarry
sand to acquire
the burst bibelots hang

in cold constellations

Welcome to the Age of Disappearance.

You get used to being cold, you get used to being tired, you get used to being hungry, you even get used to being in pain, but you never get used to being disrespected.

Eldritch Horror Final Form.

( via / via )

"Elon Musk is directly responsible for 14 million coming deaths. 4.5 million will be children."

Most poetry chapbooks are like one course of tapas. At the time you think, "This is really sort of interesting," but afterwards you wish you'd gotten more for your money. (2004)

"What if your reality, lived at the edges of accepted norms, can’t be translated into plot without distortion?"

knack vanitiously · connived to swerve
or drawn through · thrashing rocks
basket escape · a scant freedom

Trip Thru Hell.

( via / via )

"And then your country, for no discernible single reason but a host of creeping ones, decides to tear itself apart at excruciating length and horrifying cost, and you are in the middle of it all, just a flake of shale in a great juddering upheaval of the earth."

"Judgment at Westchester"

Two crows clyted in the burnt-out hulk of a house.
They shook the rain from their feathers, then one said,
"Those who made this landscape must be proud."
The other: "Havoc is power, nonetheless."

06 12 04

Alligator Auschwitz.

Predation the only logic that still obtains.

The whole process in a few words.

( via / via )

South Uist.

"summer
you have survived to feed
the chimney smoke
a seagull's cry"

--@poemexe.com

Because nothing says “Land of the Free” like hiding from your own government.

Today, free day at the [Seattle] art museum, i watched an hour long video on Francis Bacon. I was appalled to hear how he uses the unprimed side of the canvas--technically unsound--but it suits his brooding sense of mortality (as does his gambling). I still admire his work tremendously. Almost alone it seems to capture our late twencen reality (rather than its myths about itself): & afterwards, as i stood before the one painting of his they have, i reflected that my own paintings would be no real loss to the world, since one of his contains everything i've tried to say in all of mine. ...it occurred to me that Bacon's point of view (if something so visceral & nonintellectual can be so designated) is Jacobean, without the moralistic tone. Whereas most contemporary painters begin frivolously, from theory & career considerations, or from ego's frolics. Bacon identifies with his subjects so completely that it becomes impersonal...--but not in our usual hackneyed sense of "objectivity"; rather, feeling suffering & decay & degradation as the essence of life itself, or what (i would say) life has become for us, in the absence of myth & creative meaning. And the only transcendence, apart from sex, is the fact of the painting itself... My one criticism of Bacon, then, is that he depicts a world in which his paintings are impossible. Or (as he does show them!) a world without art's power. --a mistake all too common since humanism has lost its moral authority-- But after all, that's the world most people do live in!

...one night here they had on TV some show that was like real life cop stories--straight documentary footage--for the entertainment value of its morbid disorder. I can easily imagine, in front of every TV set, a whole tribe of Bacon grotesques, fixated like lampreys on their own imminent ruin.

(1992)

Sharing this for no special reason.

( via / me )

"Just imagine — your brother, your nephew, your niece, your uncle, just being mindlessly shot in the head and the spine."

not enough · protest songs
   & stations that'll play them
pale cerulean rigor · restless habit
   i stopped after scrolling
no nearer · to any answer
   nor the face of my neighbor

Tanka.

"They came to the top of a mountain. The shadow of a hawk fell over them." --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Little Weaver Bird.

( via / via )

The vintage.

"night traffic
the hum of insects
shadows of night birds
crocodile tears"

--@poemexe.com

If you sit next to me on a train and put your litter on my table.

"near enemy"

kevlar ramikin · roughshod bilge
   all is as foretold
Godzilla vermin · vertigo assails
   parable
bulimic tank barrier
in this year of disunion
oppugn bleeze-leam mirrorblack

"One thing you have probably noticed is that the people prophesying defeat almost never come back to admit they were wrong; usually they're off prophesying some new defeat instead.."

( via / me at abbieanna )

Muddled Mind.

"contrapposto"

i heard ft sumter
i didn't look up
a click like a shutter
i heard ft sumter

only scimitar
is the killer app
i heard ft sumter

i didn't look up

Holy Bomb.

"The gold long dim in Herculaneum..." --Clark Ashton Smith

The Chess Players.

( via / via )

Vivisection.

"pulled my baby’s arm like a slot machine and won a jackpot of dookie" --@lacroixboi.dadguy.online via @kimmysunshine.bsky.social

Meteorite.

"Not
After Seamus Heaney

Not the listless woods these days,
their ongoing summer song
same as the year-round sound in my head.

Not the thick bottomless mud in gateways
hard as winter to cross, or the next
unbridling rain

wrung from any torporous hour—
dark, light, morning, night, nor
the suffocating breath

in the sun-soaked air, but you,
four years gone come September
like a whole calf crop one quick day,
with only us to say you were ever
here at all."

—Sean Sexton via @voxpopulisphere.bsky.social

"We've got showers." (via @isotopeeffect.bsky.social)

( via / via )

This is the car for the Lilacene.

"And when your beauty, washed away
In impure streams with my desire,
Is only topic for ill-mannered minds,
Gifted and glassy with exact recall,
Gossip and rancid footnotes, or remote despair,
Let ruined weather perish in the streets
And let the world's black lying flag come down.

Only in calendars that mark no Spring
Can there be weather in the mind
That moves to you again as you are now:
Tired after love and silent in this house,
Your back turned to me, quite alone,
Standing with one hand raised to smooth your hair,
At a small window, green with rain."

—Weldon Kees, 1942

"Wanting is neither policy nor procedure, neither present nor material."

Louis Wain: the only painter of cats who painted cats as if they were painted by a cat.

No longer permitted on the patio.

( via / via )

"I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath reading. It was not anything like I could have imagined."

It will take some doing to out-Nazi the Nazis but they've got the plan.

" ELBOWS UP, for example, is loaded with meaning in Canada."

"a field of bush clover
one night's lodging
for a wild dog"

haiku poems of Matsuo Basho between 1684-1688
translator: Jane Reichhold via @evecastle.bsky.social

"Maybe he's buying a 19th pool."

( via / me )

Future Dusk.

"clairaudient gecko"

   stitch wretchèd
raw virulence
   in the gray
grommet welter
   the willed sieve
of sumptuous
   grievous churn
achieves freedom
   spiralling
a fractured spore
   subfusc sky
full of scrim drones
   bearing down
dunk false witness
   roaring song
& the soft wheels
   of knowing

Pus Rag.

"morning dew
on the neighbor's grass
a newspaper
in its pale neon sleeve
holding all the world's ills"

--@evecastle.bsky.social

"I’m trying to argue for a particular, one-might-call-it Chestertonian paradox: that the paintings that seem, on the surface, most religious (like ten thousand smilingly beautiful Madonnas) are actually the least religious art, and the art that seems on its surface furthest removed from that, like Hogarth’s ‘Gin Lane’, is actually the most religious."

( via / me )

Working on my tight-five.

"I promised myself weapons." --Joris's Celan

Cat's Nightmare.

"riddle of the comic sans"

groks grapefruit jinx
agroof stannous roof
poison drizzle dryght
through the drab spooled rule
congregate our caught
decay girning stern

Cairnhead Bay.

( via/ via )

Breakwater.

"Christmas Walk

Here a pond-surface peaceful,
mirror though moved by the mallards,
the murk-sky repeats.

Leafless aloof-tilted,
an ash-tree up-angles in ire-taut
lour at my act.

All is wattle of withy
in the fencing that fends me off from fair-pool,
with a full worn face."

—Thaliarchus

Aelindromes: Advancing the Palindrome.

" 'Peter Thiel' is an anagram for 'The Reptile.'

Just sayin’." --@tinyklaus.com

"The culture didn’t lie to us, exactly. It just wrote itself into process documents, backed them up on servers, and declared them compliant. The future broke, and we filed it under completed."

( via / me )

Kigo essay.

"bells chime
and sleeps again
imperceptible
the chess pieces"

--@poemexe.com

Volcán de Fuego.

"Empty

Outside an owl calls to the empty sky,
As October prises him open
And drains each day into darkness.
He waits for these words at his window,
And lamplight falls on the linked letters
Placed to no purpose on an open page.
Their land lies open also, exposed
In all its folds and fields to frost,
They feel its fingers write in the furrows.
Soon they will sleep, not side by side,
But each with another, each turned away,
Letting the letters unlock, that linked them.
They lie, like these letters, like the land around them,
Under a dark sky, open and empty."

—Malcolm Guite

Henry Gould's elegy for Melissa Hortman.

( via / via )

A song about R A Lafferty.

"THE CHRYSALIS (Anagrammed Lines)

A shy echo splinters
those shiny parcels.
The chrysalis opens
physical otherness...."

--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

"Perhaps if that field hadn’t been on the verge of its own stylistic revolution—the 'New Wave,' as it was called largely in retrospect, borrowing not just the name but also the attitude, the techniques, and a host of preoccupations from French cinema—then Lafferty would have struck out there as well."

“What’s important for the journalist is not how close you are to power but how close you are to reality." --Bill Moyers via

Tornado footage.

( via / via )

Floating over the sea.

"At the bow of the boat the anchor chain girned with a faint but surprisingly serious sound, as though the stone knight on a tomb were waking and beginning heavily to stir in his burdensome carapace, the stone conjunctions of his armour beginning painfully to grate into articulation." --Debatable Land

"Alligator Alcatraz is going to be complete by Tuesday and open for operation on Wednesday."

eyelid flutter · flungshadows cross
no-change channelling · chapel garrulous
two birds fightnig · wirehigh farrago
unmarked vans · absence of street signs
   boil on my left calf

The Avenue at Middleharnis.

( via / me )

Tanka.

aim ceramic apple
ain't no sunshine scrunchies
   atlas of losers
gosvranyo of frassfire
afraid hues on radar
   frigidaire wonky
& it's tharnwork worn out
weather to drudge grudgeserve
   wispforest trekking
   withering apple
   written with sheer cleats

A Shared Sense of Purpose.

"Standing here now, it’s easy to understand how a false sense of security could have anesthetized so many there, so much so that they were not concerned despite the rising chaos surrounding them. They believed what they had previously heard rather than what their eyes were now telling them. Even as the beams beneath their feet gave way, they assured themselves that all was going to be well, if for no other reason than up until this point, it had always been well." --John Pavlovitz via

Student Days.

( via / via )

The Maastricht Hours.

“Everything including dreams is meteorological.” –R A Lafferty

Primordial Deep Time.

veneratingly rued
wranglers of the vouchsafe-vine—
wendings we might wish them rid
gild their elf putty, even

Vranyo.

( via / via )

Oranj Album.

"The Higher Throw Weight"

tree answers tree · in chittering waves
fading from one · to revv at another,
the final buzz lapped · by the ascendant.

like leaping fire · the cry carries.
seventeen years' · dark-hoard, bursts
out of each emerald thorax · clenched on a twig.

shuddering with impatience · they fly when they must:
a dull careen · to the better outpost...
and their brief grim grapple · this season's for?

to scatter one further · generation
of crunchy casings · among the branches;
more dreamless gray grubs · in shallow silos.

God Reasons.

"Faith, I would string my lute
With hangman's hemp, if it made music."

--The Roman

Ali Baba.

( via / via )

99 years ago in Guatemala.

“Listen, you money-plated bastards. When I shout love, I mean your destruction.”
- Milton Acorn via @jacobwren.bsky.social

Shell.

"i too do not like a party too childreny

I too do not like a party

Too childreny

Because then I think

How many will my witch eat

And will she be too bloated

When the sponge of passion

Fruit and lemon cream

Is hoisted up the altar

With its crown of fire

Obviously there are more seriousy problems

When a party is childreny

The drinking songs are all fucking wrong

The slippers shrink and my foot

Must be crammed like walnut meat

The virgin sacrifice is poorly received

My witch eats her weight in feelings

I drown my sandwich in donkeys blood

All that rich food

None of my bottoms fit right

I must walk about nakedly twelve days

The children laugh and rub a butter on me

They believe a body like me

Will not happen to them

O but they have tasted the cursed food

The costco sheetcake

Fit for a mormon family reunion

The costco chickenbake

With the blood of a caesar dressing

We jump into the air in unison

When we land the earth ruptures darkly

The blind honey of a melon"

—Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi in Electric Literature

"The memory of violence pollutes the city’s air like plumes of stale tobacco, ebbing and flowing with the zephyrs off the Bosphorus."