"Apocalyptic Vampire Cats of 2012"
Why do i always get
falling leaves
In twilight you stop a bank,
wishing around you
lawn, cordial from nightfall
At a high soul fang
into flurry
Cordial from nightfall
A wind beneath the door whistles
Amado Mio.
Chinese mystery author Qiu Xiaolong.
Planet without laughter.
Wondering (you know me) how to say 'prophet' in Klingon. E.g. "Ambassador of the Great Truth": vIt'a' Duy'a'
"Provenance Unknown"
Although i am gloomy
That flight is yours
Sand to sand
What did its throat
Do until it find a wind
Bringing communion
Onyx ranging
In front of
Us
It has no illusions
Touching for a frost
Nothing so annual as
Taking sort
"One of [James] Hogg's proposals was to 'collect a poem from every living author and publish them in a neat volume...' When Byron's submission never arrived, and Scott ...refused outright, the entrepreneurial James just sat down and wrote new works by these authors..." --Stuart Kelly, op cit
Hey, Eugene.
At the college the new fashion is fur-lined boots, which the girls wear even with shorts... Which amounts to a seasonfuck.
"The Lost"
The death of a trampled temp
in the crush of Black Friday Morn
the furore of getting in
for the gimcrack toys and sculshgorp
they're off at the starting gun
doesn't matter if steel gray skies
preside at a wake--to guzzle
is human; to murder, divine.
Again i emerge to drive
and again my LeSabre rolls
and i will achieve those aisles
and arrive at the halls of Jove
U Plavu Zoru.
Rap around the world.
Dark Side of the Moon.
Since gas is so cheap, i've started buying premium again; my car runs better, and i even get better mileage. I had been adding octane-additives regularly, because my old car wasn't built to run on gasohol. I think today's premium is the regular of ten years ago...
"Sugar" radif challenge.
"A Manual for Visions"
triphibian temperance
ogive
agave
burgundy trees
the old music
A vampire psychiatrist protagonist.
"Making mysteries through tenderness
They do not
feel your tenderness, your fear,
your reverence
They do not ask
you. They do
not ask you at
all.
A mystery is
great
This eloquence bears no relation to mystery,
faith, hyena, privation
They are possible
These move
They are
They have no remorse
Like an amazing tree
That need is yours
They are
Find a wind
Those are pressing
These are inconceivable
Should they be an
antiquity?
They conceive the vein, potential as men
Conceivable, great, large
as these antiquities
Their existence is their existence, and understanding
that, they are not possible"
--Robot X, 719
Demonic Males.
"Marti Capgras Syndrome"
Places where the Empire has already fallen.
Disconnected thoughts in passing, their origins lost, no place for them to go.
Carry all the things you need
or might need, antly laden under immense skies.
It is no longer a question of where to put the words.
Faint sparks die in the air after leaving half a trail.
You look at stories of struggle, cardboard stage decorations, broken
attempts to put something right. This mix is contemptible.
Like villagers who've discovered the spot where a meteor fell,
we come together for a time to discuss it, but nothing gets decided.
"The GDP of East Germany declared the triumph of scientific socialism to be the Third Part of Goethe's Faust." --Stuart Kelly
Faux Histories.
If 8 was 6.
"The Courage to Hydrate"
Rumors about LuLu
i walk on vulture shadow
you are not the answer
it is the tug's din
transplanted into harum scarum
backgammon cheating
cold, cold the wind on the parking lot
Wishin' and Hopin'.
"A poet almost has to invent his own land and then has to defend it." --Spicer
"Tibetan Book of the Undead"
This tomb may decline and begin, but
it is smoothly true
Cydonia's far aspired glare
praised never
Sedna is Tutsi Andes, despair's a book
our mammoth kin twine in the kind Maremma
a coral tor spiralling woe
arm of rorqual half vending mercy
"Mikhail Bakhtin, exiled in Kazakhstan, used his work on Dostoevsky as cigarette papers, after having smoked a copy of the Bible." --Stuart Kelly, The Book of Lost Books (2005)
1952 Vincent Black Lightning.
"Muphrid's Law"
part of me will forever
be rooting for the hunted
though sometimes i lapse reiver
part of me will forever
i know which army's braver
in these swart woods so haunted
part of me will forever
be rooting for the hunted
"You have to be happy and full of hope for the Leander swim." --Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)
"There is an even stranger synchronicity lurking in Spicer’s California mysterium. In 1948, back in Berkeley, he and Duncan roomed briefly with a peculiar young man named Philip K. Dick, who once supplied an LP-recording device for their parlor games of poetic performance. As Killian and Lewis Ellingham point out in their definitive Spicer biography, Poet Be Like God, the books of Dick and of Spicer later became mirror images of each other, in theme as well as in imagery—grasshoppers, Martians, radios, salesmen, cities. Like Dick, Spicer was an impoverished and alienated artist for whom writing was, as Darko Suvin famously described the genre of science fiction, a motor of "cognitive estrangement." Both are cult artists who wrote, it can seem, as much for our time as for theirs." --Erik Davis (via Silliman)
Bibelot, byblow bodkin
evokes bonobo bodkin
Thoughts of autumn, like the thrust
from a tornado bodkin
What future dwells in a word
or Sarajevo bodkin?
Plaint on a bright winter morn
this worn indigo bodkin
Game and despair of the game
deftly catch and throw bodkin
A terrible cold hovers
and drives home one slow bodkin
Writing, Graywyvern drives through
the cut sheaves of no bodkin
Frightened Global Overdose.
"The supreme ideal of the Aztec warriors was to fulfill their mission as the chosen people of Tonatiuh, the Sun, who needed the precious liquid [blood] if he were [sic] to continue to shine over Cemanáhuac, the world. At the same time, however, many of the wise men, living in the shadow of the great symbol of Quetzalcóatl, attempte to discover the meaning of life on an intellectual plane. These almost diametrically opposed attitudes toward life and the universe existed side by side--a situation similar to that of Nazi Germany in our time, where a mystico-militaristic worldview and a genuinely humanistic philosophy and literature coexisted." --Léon-Portilla, op cit
New Arthur Phillips.
Alex Beecroft: "I'm hearing that LuLu is in trouble at the moment..." YIKES!
"Lament for Ur"
Dread is so bold it looks
like us
Carcosa curse · but guest
of sand
the nectar shore · of Ithuriel
where we ply oodoolay
Cerulean airspace
charade
pour joker work Tokay
furl robe
dragon rigor · not against slavery
spokesdog · for whirligig
A vindication that didn't want to be.
"In Llave del Náhuatl, a study of certain stylistic traits of the Nahuatl language, Garibay noted one of the principal and peculiar characteristics of the language. He called it 'difrasismo': 'It is a procedure in which a single idea is expressed by two words, either because they are synonomous [sic] or because they are placed next to each other. Several examples in Spanish will more suitably illustrate: a tontes y a locas, "recklessly"; a sangre y fuego, "by blood and fire"; contra viento y marea, "against wind and tide"; a pan y agua, "on bread and water," etc. This stylistic form, so rare in our languages, is usual Nahuatl. ...Almost all of these expressions are employed metaphorically...' " --Miguel León-Portilla, Aztec Thought and Culture (1963)
Gertrude Stein, detective.
"The Desire to Paint"
Motley written without benevolence
in amber sleep as the clouds chime
of Fomalhaut
Was ever there anything
except motley
Our deeds that strive to cast a shape
on Fomalhaut
And not his amber sleep
And not these crowds of gong-tormented shapes
come to me bearing musical aldehydes
in Fomalhaut time
I am one with the dark and the crescent
i accept all this, and the chords of Fomalhaut
"The last American president to write a book all by his lonesome self..."
Peace Train 2006.
"Existence written inside existence
Thirsting like a man the mighty doors,
presumed by a bony supplicate, hope
In early spring he
hides it
The landscape of presence alters to death
in the eyes
Nothing so departed as
an initial or a life, making a
late memory
Between these lives and those
lives
Between this side and that
side
Anterior sides in little memory, where initials
wander
He has walls
What is this? It isn’t ear,
it isn’t memory.
There he is,
an audible bachelor in
a side
Late cave beside it
on a side
It could be that it is to
lean on a
late afternoon, a visible
usher, an impotent guide, love, a
great breath, a queer exponent
whose door is big, contenting on a
cloud listening beneath a wall
Its thigh a life in the
sunset
There he can be an
exponent though he remains like an
usher
Now the departed doors hide
in the breeze
An ear is late
He is no act, though for
weeks he has born turns, acted routines
with his limited
body and seen his creation stoop
He sings it creation of
conceptions
He continues among the numbers of the
house
Behaving special peculiar
existence from over limited exceptional creation
While he playacts it, a sort of institution, looking,
healing, like peculiar
acts."
--Robot X, 463.
Syzygys. (via Metafilter)
"The Leonids"
The beige butterflies of anguish will lend
Their weight to the work in progress
Frequent as stilb mercy, fragrant as Nemesis
Oxter of the chong suspenders
Melanie's "perfume company" website is up!
A phonetic joke and its Klingon shadow.
"The Return of Dr Secular"
Mocha marbled makes morbid
The circuit of the culver
Marathon wheel of hamster
Hanging vacant canvas
Heart chamber is chert foundry
With finite Tlaloc havoc
Wry malaise of realm dampen
Beaucoups of YouTube goodness.
Two bites from everything and throw the rest away: and we don't even realize what we've done.
Closing Guantànamo.
"CRALPIR"
1.
work · and things breaking or broken
rain · and the unrelieved dark
hnefatafl · antler rental if
vacant stained
plastic ice Cerebus
usually
lysergic icosahedron
the wrongness of space
2.
They are economical
That is the charge's simplicity
Eeyore feebled guest
Wild with false simplicity
The amber sleep of ideogram
Ghost whisperers
Darkly blockading our airspace
3.
spider eyes again
appall final adjective
set CRALPIR
were by hearing asked back Ogpu balm
link indigo bark oppugn upcoming barm
flowering blister
of time and man flatulent
rank idiom ajaja be icicles
stoop wimpled avion setback ash
net stigma scrytch prang
Four new planets photographed--including one at Fomalhaut. (via Systemic)
