( via / via )

Highlands on 16mm Beaulieu R16.

Statue of a fox.

"When we’re ancient people will ask us how we just sat there frozen like dumbass deer and let this happen AND WE STILL WON’T BE ABLE TO EXPLAIN IT." --@catvalente.bsky.social

( max ernst "europe after the rain" [1940-2] / via )

Vanishing Point.

"We put tariffs on an uninhabited island full of penguins but not Russia.

Very normal administration we have here." --@angrystaffer.bsky.social

Blind leading the blind.

"Afternoon

The fear of afternoon
Is called afternoon
Old sleep uptorn,
Not yet time for night-time,
No other name, for no names
In the afternoon but afternoon.

Love tries to speak but sounds
So close in its own ear.
The clock-ticks hear
The clock-ticks ticking back.
The fever fills where throats show,
But nothing in these horrors moves to swallow
While thirst trails afternoon
To husky sunset.

Evening appears with mouths
When afternoon can talk.
Supper and bed open and close
And love makes thinking dark.
More afternoons divide the night,
New sleep uptorn,
Wakeful suspension between dream and dream--
We never knew how long.
The sun is late by hours of soon and soon--
Then comes the quick fever, called day.
But the slow fever is called afternoon."

--Laura (Riding) Jackson

A model of demurral.

( via / via )

Drottkvaett.

"Robe & Sandal Days"

oil leak ill · of wheeled maladies
ring finger shrunken · memory-shred
into pale strings tangling · strange glow
in the gray commute · mute witness
to continuing things · taskshatter
but shadowed still

"Serra’s purpose in Malaparte: A Biography is not to vindicate Malaparte, which he couldn’t do even if he wanted to..."

"Psalmanazar represented himself as a Japanese from Formosa. He published a book which contained an alphabet of his own manufacture, portraits of false gods, pictures of fictitious people, and with them engravings of imaginary shrines. It was accepted as gospel." --Edgar Saltus, The Pomps of Satan

"A metre can ‘mean’ quite different things at different times."

( via / me )

Roma Riot Ska Brigade. (Looks like this may be AI of some sort. I still think it's interesting.)

“Sometimes I feel that it is the room that writes. But it needs the hot nib of my pronoun.”

(Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal) via @yoonkim.bsky.social

Iron Horse.

"Wasa Wasa"

mustyplum sunbrittle plastic
faded · sad fact'ry
platforming sift
of irked airplane parts

study dark promises
study how not to disappear

long table under lights
where we ate languidly
newly minted money
drinking dreams in the night

study dark promises
study how not to disappear

mocking drakes
appear in the turquoise pool
all things xeric dissolve
in the xiphoid process

study dark promises
study how not to disappear

"People live in growing isolation and with the feeling of low-level dread, and these are the defining conditions of living in a secret-police state." (via @ottiliemulzet.bsky.social)

( via / me )

Short shadow puppet thread.

hazmat spider sign
carved into a hunger stone
night sky full of such stars

when will this battery cease
of stones that are the muse’s flowers

Reichenbach's Soliloquy. (via @lastpositivist.bsky.social)

"It would be nice / to interfere with the accuracy of the world."
- Lisa Robertson, Palinode via @jaconwren.bsky.social

Czerwono - Czarni - Sandwicz ( 1967 ).

( via / via )

"But the moral injury feels less acute."

" 'You’re like our Katniss!' No the fuck I am not, the book is about class struggles and set in Appalachia. I was literally born into the aristocracy😭" --@thevivllainous.bsky.social

Treatise of the Three Impostors.

"AND THE CITY STOOD IN ITS BRIGHTNESS

And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned.
And life was running out, Ruteboeuf's or Villon's.
Descendants, already born, were dancing their dances.
Women looked in their mirrors made from a new metal.
What was it all for if I cannot speak.
She stood above me, heavy, like the earth on its axis.
My ashes were laid in a can under the bistro counter.

And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned
To my home in the display-case of a granite museum,
Beside eyelash mascara, alabaster vials,
And menstruation girdles of an Egyptian princess.
There was only a sun forged out of gold plate,
On darkening parquetry the creak of unhurried steps.

And the city stood in its brighntess when years later I returned,
My face covered with a coat though now no one was left
Of those who could have remembered my debts never paid,
My shames not forever, base deeds to be forgiven.
And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned."

--Czeslaw Milosz, Selected Poems (tr by CM & Peter Dale Scott, 1980)

Dead Names, Dead Dogs.

( via / via )

"I’m tempted by the arguments that the easiness of all cultural availability does lose a certain intensity, at least potentially, to a certain set of subcultures."

meshes of the thwart
dull gelatinous path
a pus coming-forth
a kicked-through piney slat

the mist stings my face
that has no questions left
by dire minutes strafed
nonexistent address

& gas running lean
years with their brutal toll
say it's no big deal
to perish here alone

"But cloud in stead, and ever-during dark..."

" 'Frog,' asked Toad, 'did this really happen?'

'Maybe it did, and maybe it didn’t,' said Frog."

--@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

The White Heron.

( via / me )

"You told Cædmon, a cowherd, to use his song-making gift in your service to spread the word of God. He did. His song, his poem, Cædmon’s Hymn, was written down in the vernacular, probably at your abbey, very likely at your instigation."

"mournful wind
over quick sand
open skylight
lockdown"

--@poemexe.com

80% of all American bees.

quebrith quisling · in food & air
   the builder & dreamer drive
incongruous is in session · the dark cave
   of the rain-threatened morning
running on fumes · furlglisten
   a blurry machination
Team Quebrith · taunted by the thought of peace
   rips up just-laid floor
looking for a lost · glimmer of hopelessness

his early anth[o]logy of concrete poetry, published as a special issue of the Chicago review in 1967, remains in print.

( via / via )

Norman Rockwell on April Fools.

liberation day

no readability
libation ready

a diatribe only
a blarney idiot

bad airline toy

Most recent painting.

"bright moon
it looks very important
among the blossoming flowers"

--@poemexe.com

"...the worst music ever invented." yuk yuk

( via / via )

"The current record for the longest speech in the history of the Senate is held by the late segregationist Strom Thurmond of South Carolina who spent 24 hours and 18 minutes filibustering against the Civil Rights Act of 1957."

"If life gives you lemons, make giant brass church bells. Oranges: ditto." --@adamroberts.bsky.social

Penguin's Fever Dream.

"LILITH AND HADES (Palindrome-by-Word Shakespearean Sonnet)

'Rise, Lilith, see above the burning light!'
Skies hollow into empty, bleeding clouds.
Death purest, the revenge of weary night,
draws Hades where, below, the answer shrouds.

Breath steady, her resolve to follow snakes
roars measures she demands to ever hold:
Cold visions in opaque and fiery lakes;
lakes, fiery and opaque in visions cold.

'Hold ever to demands!' She measures roars.
Snakes follow, to resolve her steady breath.
Shrouds answer the Below, where Hades draws.

Night weary of revenge, the purest death;
clouds bleeding empty, into hollow skies;
light burning the Above — see Lilith rise!"

--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

The Peace of Wild Things.

( via / via )

Disappeared Tracker.

"first thing
awakened by birdsong
the desire to answer
in kind"

--@sarahhina.bsky.social

Magnification.

"Philosophy is the art of thinking about things we don't know how to think about." --@keithfrankish.bsky.social

Lisbeth Reading.

( via / via )

"That sorrow ended. So might this."

"a world of dew
the melting snowman
teeth and bones"

--@poemexe.com

Tanka.

"Goldberg afternoon"

card there's cash on · bright morning
pants in my size · sold at the thrift
a walk wending · up from the haircut
months overdue · bypass the books
this redbrick · relict district
oddly apt · away fom outrage-
blazing news · none of us wanted
the belly battered · abaft splinters
of a frail future · we ferried long
did not foresee · savage downfalls
citizens shanghaied · off shivering streets
& one wearies · of wanting otherwise
of plenty planning · riven to splinters
can't process plight · unless dark lager'd
hours only · & dollars lost
a walk in sunlight · safe wand'ring
thrift & no threat · though black threnody
tells me toom · of the far boil
& stupor saves · not one wanderer

"We chatted in earnest about the unwritable book and the literary urge to fuck around and find out being no less urgent as the world burns."

( via / via )

"So, the DOGE kids intend to rewrite the social-security administration's COBOL code-base!" (thread)

"meat contraption breaking down"

scolding riddle skydark
a scant quartet banters

when it's gone, gat-lightning
a gas kettle lassos

entails black metallic
totalized fret patrol

i want to see winters

The book with Alastair Reid's famous palindrome.

"As far as my inquiries have extended, there is not a building in Venice, raised prior to the sixteenth century, which has not sustained essential change in one or more of its most important features." --Ruskin

Hindemith String Quartet Op. 22. (via @violanorth.bsky.social)

( via / via )

The Lady's Not For Burning.

I want my writing to do to people what catnip does to cats.

Fairly Relentless Quartet.

"zero sum game
how much a warplane rises
as bombs fall away
the air expanding
with a terrible silence"

--John Hawkhead via @evecastle.bsky.social

Jisei call.

( via / via )

"...more optimistic take, predicting that the translators will lose their jobs but the historians will survive."

“Season Finale”

When i return, it will not be to smile
At these bizarre shenanigans, or judge
By darker portals’ wisdom, how the play goes.
But let me return as one whom fresh delight
Or terrible fear can move, having partaken
Of that forgetful potion once more proffered;
I want to return as a child, with empty hands.

From Apostrophe (2002)

Pi (1998) online. Haven't seen it in forever, but i found myself thinking, "I'd rather watch Pi again, than Requiem for a Dream." ☆☆☆

"And out we flung and on we ran or reeled
Romeward. I have no memory of our way,
Only that, when at intervals the cloud
Of horror about me opened to let in life,
I listened to some song..."

--The Ring and the Book

Feuilleton on Meyrink's Prague.

( via / me )

Creation.

"The locust armies warping, on the bark" --Royston's Lycophron

Gardom's Edge Rock Art.

"DEATH ROOM BLUES

Before the songs I sang there were the songs
they came from, patent shreds
of Babel, and the secret
Nineveh of back rooms in the dark.

Hour after hour
the night trains blundered through
from towns so far away and innocent
that everything I knew seemed fictional:

the squares of light beyond the paper mill
where wolves crept from the woods and found their way
to soft spots in the slick of memory;

the boy who killed his mother in her bed
for Jesus' sake.

Small wonder that I overcame my fear
of sweetness, when the only white I knew
was first snow at the margins of the world,

and any chore is sweeter, now,
than scripture, where the hand that smoothes away
each local asterisk of stripped desire

can seem so much like something I once lost
I'm half convinced that childhood never happened."

--John Burnside, Black Cat Bone (2011)

Mother and Daughter.

( via / via )

ICE follies. More ICE follies.

we sent our weatherman out in the rain
to see which way is darkest

it's the future

That's no moon.

"Toad walked along the path. A large, soft drop of chocolate ice cream slipped down his arm.

'This ice cream is melting in the sun,' said Toad."

--@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Mingkiri Tjukurpa.

( via / via )

No terrible thing.

"We are but a moment's sunlight
fading in the grass"

--The Youngbloods, "Get Together"

My Flowers To Those Who Love Peace.

what spoiled chances tinchelled
chimp-questionnaire glairy
built as a halt boxcar
bonegate with a tone arm
defunct mall where mocked-at
messages are resting
too much of the turmoil
taps on eclipse rhapsodes
fangles a beast bargain

One voice that would be silenced.

( via / via )

Freedom Seeds. (via @diotimaellen.bsky.social)

enigmatic limericks

gem milk intricacies

desaparecido

cop-sided area

"This is about living day to day and adapting to fascist oppression as it becomes more and more dangerous and violent."

“The credulity with which we entertain the idea that software can become sentient, while finding any excuse to deny the sentience of our living animal relatives, is a deep, dissonant, incoherent psychosis.” –@Unpop_science

Hidden medieval courtyard in Angoulême.

( via / me )

"Glitch Art, which emerged in Chicago during the early aughts, attempted to mobilize the formal affordances of digital error to point toward the artifice of the interface." (--wait, "enigmatic limericks"??) --Hannah W. on Youtube.

"The inside of a man is a subway, there are levels and more levels—the lower down you go the more disgusted you get, but there are still vending machines at the lowest level, with chocolate, little treats, candies…"

--Céline, London via @avecsesdoigts.bsky.social

Clairvoyant Journal.

"Vita Nova

You saved me, you should remember me.

The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats.
Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.

When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling.

I remember sounds like that from my childhood,
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,
something like that.

Lugano. Tables under the apple trees.
Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags.
And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water;
perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him.

Crucial
sounds or gestures like
a track laid down before the larger themes

and then unused, buried.

Islands in the distance. My mother
holding out a plate of little cakes—

as far as I remember, changed
in no detail, the moment
vivid, intact, having never been
exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age
hungry for life, utterly confident—

By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green
pieced into the dark existing ground.

Surely spring has been returned to me, this time
not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet
it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly."

--Louise Glück via @rabihalameddine.bsky.social

Unauthorized remake of Georges Méliès's 1902 film.

( via / via )

"American children are about twice as likely as Danish children to die before the age of five." (via @timothysnyder.bsky.social)

“Heroics

Though here and there a man is left
Whose iron thread eludes the shears,
The martyr with bosom cleft
Is dead these seven heavy years.

Does he survive whose tongue was slit,
To slake some envy of a king’s?
Sportive silver cried from it
Before the savage cut the strings.

The rack has crumpled up the limb
Stretched immediate to fly;
Never ask the end of him
Stubborn to outstare the sky.

Assuming an heroic mask,
He stands a tall derisive tree,
While servile to the speckled task
We move devoted hand and knee.

It is no virtue, but a fault
Thus to breathe ignoble air,
Suffering unclean assault
And insult dubious to bear.”

–Elinor Wylie

First Word on Horror: Liz Hand.

“Skirr gloppened worriers thro’ the night;
Roar puteals that toads eschew”

–Betelguese: A Trip Through Hell

<0|\|7r0|_ P4|\|3|_ 3rr0r.

( me / via )

The Birds of Ancient Battlefields Visit the Suburbs.

“…I founder in desire for things unfound.
I stay amid the things that will not stay.”

–Geoffrey Hill, “Pavana Dolorosa”

Black Metallic. (Palate-cleanser?)

“Address to My Soul

My soul, be not disturbed
By planetary war;
Remain securely orbed
In this contracted star.

Fear not, pathetic flame;
Your sustenance is doubt:
Glassed in translucent dream
They cannot stuff you out.

Wear water, or a mask
Of unapparent cloud;
Be brave and never ask
A more defunctive shroud.

The universal points
Are shrunk into a flower;
Between its delicate joints
Chaos keeps no power.

The pure integral form,
Austere and silver-dark,
Is balanced on the storm
In its predestined arc.

Small as a sphere of rain
It slides along the groove
Whose path is furrowed plain
Among the suns that move.

The shapes of April buds
Outlive the phantom year:
Upon the void at odds
The dewdrop falls severe.

Five-petalled flame, be cold:
Be firm, dissolving star:
Accept the stricter mould
That makes you singular.”

–Elinor Wylie

"I don’t know if bringing you into this world was the right thing to do." (via @kameronhurley.com)

( me / via )

"One California-based writer, in a private correspondence, mentioned they had proposed a panel on wildfires, but it was rejected."

I die of thirst beside the fountain.
None of us has tried the fountain.

At night the fountain glows within;
dark bits of flotsam ride the fountain.

The desert-builders hedge their words
but drink, however wide the fountain.

The grotto seemed today run dry.
Just to be sure, we pried the fountain.

Let Graywyvern whisper deep
and you yourself provide the fountain.

Seneca (who i always thought had one of the most eventful lives for a philosopher).

One refuses self-improvement, one disdains the didactic, not because they're useless but because they're keeping score in a game that's no longer playable.

The marshy hinterland.

( via / via )

A new Scottish tartan.

Normalcy as denial. Normalcy as resistance. Normalcy as the balance one can't quite remember the trick of.

This was such a satisfying project, and one in which I realized for the first time how much my whole life had been spent in a manscape, in places where almost everything was named after men.

manageable Fillmore
murders offstage, soft-pedal
the road riddled · with dark red radar
   haze across land's end
   hazard in dream-words

brillig in the Braille days
abrasive-muse newsreels
swerve ichneumon · in a Nakba rain
   shattering cardboard
   eyes on the welkin

Storming a Quaker Meeting House with weapons drawn.

( via / me )

"At Cadiz he saw a (polychrome 😉)..."

“From a Book of Hours

Bearing white myrrh and incense, autumn melts
Through flower and fruit and combed blonde straw;
Thunder looms on the mountain forest-belt;
The winter firewood purrs beneath the saw.

Our garden scents upbillow like the veils
Of Solomon’s Temple, shimmer in the rain,
And all is peace. Slowly the daylight falls,
And voice and lute bring back the stars again.”

–-Charles Spear

The Cause.

They've never met a problem yet that "more surveillance" wasn't the answer to.

Two Parrots Took a Walk Together in Spring.