"I saw the window spread its wings a white heron stop

each feather a corridor into the many-storied structure drawing itself skyward stop

the further its remove the more distinct the opening of each pinion stop



just as the past sees more exactingly than this instant in its temporal imprisonment stop

just as looking up through an oak's openwork dome is a kind of falling stop

nothing in the room need foreshorten into perspective stop



not distractions with their complicated nests of stolen fabric stop

not the beating of wings but one wash of the wing my head wrenched back stop

nothing that simply appeases will ever mean vision again to me please advise"


-Rusty Morrison, The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story (2008) [the original is right-justified]


"There was more than one Faust." --George Monbiot, Heat (2007)


Dirt Worship.


Poem for the Rooftops of Iran. (via Harriet Blog)

"In the mid 1940s Lord Buckley founded a mescaline club called The Church of the Living Swing. ...Buckley rented a yacht and threw mescaline parties in the San Francisco Bay with live jazz by Ben Webster and Johnny Puleo and the Harmonicats." --Lee & Shlain, Acid Dreams (1985)

secretly
between those who are
and those who aren't
cephalopods


"It is hard to wring song out of philology." --Hugh Kenner



10 hours ago, in Shiraz.


Manifesting the Invisible Library. (via Silliman)

half-finished sodas
an even heat from one decade to the next
star morning corpse sings
twisted slippery years
what blue hearts are these?

enlightened operatives
floccipoetaster
in cobalt green
do left purlieu flying bleed?
he do the police in different voices

only to be sure
of the diff'rent silences
half-breed cephalopods


Blessed Unrest.


Lost America.


Todtentanz.


The only thing i wanted to see in Topeka.

Shallot ayatollahs
feckless
in cobalt green
the place where i put a word i wanted
to remember & now has vanished
Aldebaran & the Hyades
in another realm
other enemies
no true mirror on the market
only in the underground
bartered
for the experience
a legendary dissolution
meant
not to coincide
inside
the place i put a word
burning desert
if you like burning deserts
the future is for you
xruti
fracas
the galvanized bucket sweats
under the trees i rested
holding a duster
and a hat of straw
my strategy evaporated plumb out of
the game
looking back on steps
that walked across quicksand years
fields of serrated knives
skies of falling shot
and herds of wild cephalopods



MeFi thread with links on "Gothic Belly Dancing".


"There are never enough poets, but we're saturated with poems." (via Lime Tree)


"Poets war against the anthology, but it always wins." --Bill Knott


Fake Iran election tweeters. (via Silliman)

how quickly we are
turning against plastic bags
chiselled out of
bitter fun

dim lands of peace fester
the aluminum bucket sweats
Delysid
and the clutter of red notes

creeping across a lifetime of sands

amber linoleum triggers
glimmer handout
careering into swag
thousands
believing
unbelieving
my tea steeping amberer
and a woodgrain smile

with a gush of blood

from the crook of my arm i wangle
night of power
tales of scarlet conquering
the subliminal keywords over
drip of belladonna
arabesque
picture-disk of Benji
unbelieving
whatsoever in cephalopods


"...the most important meeting of the 21st century so far."


Ethel Smith.


Bill Knott blogging about poetry here.

how clear and bright the jet glints
Glenneagle enneagram

bonfire of the animalcules
war without tears
in all its flatscreen glory

ooh look
a piece of plastic

hieratic head of Amanda Knox
Yggdrasil car tunnel
blanu nobli
a painting by Eisenhower
C P R dummy
no offer
drops of dew · lining a glass globe
operational globular larvae
operational globular larvae
ulna through sternum linebreak
the grass moving as one
on the slope of the levee
as we waited for the right wind
that would lift us
my mind full of acid aftereffects
and the steady undertow
of an unrequited love
like a color i'd no name for
bathing ev'rything
a day of dappled seaborn clouds ching
but the levee was dry
ch-ching
another time cracking acorns
with the convex base of a can
cracked just enough
to extract
without shattering
try not to think of the methane bubbles
at the bottom of the sea
in all our contingency plans
none spares a page for that one
King Harvest
Dancing in the Moonlight
lose count of the systems lapsing
put a good face on the shell collapsing
practice talking to the cameras
of the after-crisis
freezing our eggs
that would hatch cephalopods



Maybe One.

"Green Tongue Print" by Howard Sherman


fragrant haunting of Morella
the ache of the storm
halcyon longing

i carry the trash
maintain place in the steel regatta
take pictures as i steer
ambient world
travel cup of Sumatra

i park out from the tower
singular
a shipwreck working
some kind of weird squeaking
such as puppies might make
only rhythmical
traffic jam in the aisles
Sunday promenade
of the scatheless breeders
who have all the time in the world
to shop for cephalopods

The Maze Game.


"Whatever else it is, that is a strange and unique kind of reading." (via Sugergee)

qadhulu sidhe khanjar
perfidulo
Tryphiodorus
unwet in the sea through water
visiting the tombs
greasy dark evil.;
Homely souls and hungry
fields
sweatshop chopsticks ply
teach ourselves dokhma
spliff Tryphiodorus
Ofte desiros la
miskredantoj
straining, humming noise
esti
pay off my debts in
Islamanoj
nine years
fox shoethief
greasy dark watermark
having emerged
out of a hectic season
images of trees shaking
black & white 80 years back
the shadowy overhead pipes
at WalMart
my hour of carting trash
twilight & whatever falls
switchback
circle once or twice
the larger picture all but lost
is anything helping
is the war still on
British Racing Green the pushbroom
gladiator glove day & night
i could get a record made
in ununbium
decorated with cephalopods


"I don't believe the Etruscans or the Mayans
lacked poets, only victories." --Marge Piercy


The one thing we do need a word for, is: "thirding".


The Umbrists were not dead...! (Though apparently they will still be around in 2066.)


"Sith poetry – of any type – is a rarity, as Sith Lords rarely waste their time with such worthless artistic efforts and intellectual pursuits. Most are more concerned with ruling their tracts of territory and combating various internal and external rivals. What Sith poetry there is, is usually kept under lock and key in secret Sith libraries, away from the prying eyes of the public. The only poems that are open for examination are imperfect copies smuggled out by servants, who are usually killed shortly thereafter if their thefts are discovered."


2M1207b blogged about in Welsh.


A podcast on Dritok.

visiting the tombs
ununbium bum
our flashlight accrual
slow sift of ceiling debris
on the floor of tattered textbooks
night of thunder fading already

night of thunder fading already
on the floor of tattered textbooks
slow sift of ceiling debris
our flashlight accrual

ununbium bum
visiting the tombs
of the god-king cephalopods


An architecture for people.

"Transition-Sky"

telefoto walking-away-from-fire shot
smudge of judges

night of thunder
shipwrecked in a Starbucks
radar red & storm rains full
my deletes have returned:

now · it is all ours

ours, and the cephalopods'

Some violin music. (via Metafilter)

And we fall in the
pouring rain
teach ourselves a pentagram
connected to the hammer of the dot-com
sing in the pouring arglebargle
as the stones and the ribbons complain
pluviaminatory empty storefront
vomit good and part bite pour
and we fall
stone cephalopods
aerial cephalopods



"I remember the feeling of being alone in those damp, echoing places, the cold silence of the long-vacated morgue, its steel corpse drawers haphazardly opened and closed." (via Incoming Signals) (Read the follow-up too.)


"...coolest album cover ever." (My vote.)


black: dm001 (2247)

1. h3 Nf6
2. g4 d5
3. d3 e5
4. Bg2 Bc5
5. c3 Nc6
6. Qc2 Bb6
7. Nd2 d4
8. Nf3 Bd7
9. O-O h5
10. g5 Nd5
11. Ne4 f5
12. gxf6 gxf6
13. c4 Nb4
14. Qd1 Rg8
15. Kh2 a5
16. Qd2 Qe7
17. Qh6 O-O-O
18. Qxf6 Qg7
19. Bg5 Re8
20. Qxg7 Rxg7
21. Nf6 Re6
22. h4 Rd6
23. Nxh5 Rf7
24. Ng3 Rh7
25. Rh1 Rg6
26. Kg1 Bg4
27. Kf1 Bc5
28. Nd2 Ne7
29. Ne4 Ba7
30. h5 Rb6
31. h6 Ng8
32. c5 Rc6
33. a3 Na6
34. b4 axb4
35. axb4 b5
36. Nd6 cxd6
37. Bxc6 Nxb4
38. Be4 Rh8
39. Rxa7 dxc5
40. h7 1-0

watching a green and mauve flag waving
you two would have played
contributions to the understanding of the colour of water
or limeybean
the light glance hiding
you two would have played
islamified
my quick, furtive temple turns

it is the pliant clearing
Tololo
bonfire of cephalopods

puSlogh vagh.

"Office 97"

we will talk to the mouse
Tololo walking with my feet ten
feet off the
pier
fear the solution
fear the despair but don't
fear the Reaper
deeper than the heart's truth
now is the heart's lie
keeper of miracles
loud inky alibi
talk to the mouse's mouse
mustang sushi
cars without hubcaps
lallibellule
ruggedized dokhma
epimeletic
mouse-drawn Gliksin meilerwagen gone
mouse-drawn Gliksin meilerwagen gone
feature-creep leets absorb the crunk rebus
emu oil badabing
badaboomlay boomlay boomlay duke's mixture
the politics of apocalypse
insane Adam Ant for the Oughts
Aral Sea serpent
Trinity billabong
hagasagan anthem
talk to the mouse's shrink
keeper of miracles
What can the lip do
without arm to silence?
silence the cephalopods

Just Above the Lunar Surface.

Ununbium.


Society of Primitive Technology.


Animal Attacks in Movies.


"As the music biz teaches us, lack of control is the chief misery of the struggle; and the first price of success." --Gwyneth Jones, Bold as Love (2001)


Custom-Made Records.

"ink & memory"

Eleatic davenport
Sumatra Saturday
after the fire
la fajro
What sort of frost
is it? It isn't grave, it isn't
lip. Standing on the surf
watching the sun split into
two suns. Eleatic tinsel
drapes the garden. No garden
if a fine dragon.

Song of the injured bird
in the beak of the cephalopods

"He further claimed that one of his books, Living WIth The Lama, was dictated by his cat, Mrs. Fifi Greywhiskers." (via Crowleycrow)

"...one US reviewer said it 'inhabits the blurry region that separates embarrassingly misguided and inept pop from brilliant outsider art'." (On YouTube.)

"By 2001, when I first made contact with George, I believe all of his published work was out of print..." (via Metafilter)

Holy Toledo!

"Thus, God is not actually presented. Without KNOCKING wanted people burst into the kingdom of heaven, then, in Babylon, with the help of a gigantic tower. That was not only rude but also rather presumptuous. So angry God and punished: He took the kit for Homo sapiens, kramte all sorts of languages, and poured it on from the site. If the people but watch as they klarkamen if they no longer understand each other! The Tower of Babel remained unfinished." --machine translation of the beginning of a German article on conlangs (via Rick Harrison's blog)

the problems of the world
will not be solved with words
i hold in hands grown gnarled
the problems of the world
against such griefs i've hurled
honed chatter of the herds
the problems of the world
will not be solved with words

we would be as gods
to teach cephalopods

Betty Bowers Explains Christian Marriage. (thanx Melanie!)

"Though every passing yearner for the skies
Out of his glass construct a secret hell,
If with our own reflections we must dwell
Let them be seen in one another's eyes."

--Roy Campbell



Obsolete.


A new meaning for spended: "wearing suspenders".


"There may not be such a thing as “women’s poetry.” But, as long as women’s voices are capped at a third of poetic discourse, we will never really know if there is or not." (via Dumbfoundry) Also, "In the late 18th and early 19th century, in a deadent sultanate of Oudh, poetry in woman’s voice was penned by poets as a form of protest." (via Silliman)


"To our knowledge, πεπαίκοιτον "you two would have played" is not attested anywhere in Greek."


"I think the ridicule part is over, and the fighting part has started in earnest."




The mystery of "fanmo jimte" somewhat elucidated.

"The Islam at the Top of the World"

coming down
from that impossible height

sleepwalkers cold it;
Li diros: Por cxiuj estos duoblo,

sed vi ne scias. Listen: here's the
plan. In this solidity

of morning
rays rain night ice acid we have loved

the terror beyond mud we have fled ourselves
the house up for sale

the position lost through a mere thoughtlessness
coming up to the store screaming blind

as the vapors lift
that reveal

off-brand interrogatives
in the embattled dealership
linoleum brood wharves
bring your toys to life
the seeming triumph of evil
three quarters of the way into the movie
headless body in tapas bar
woodchuck pot pie

a portal to the source
Capricorn-One

vi le dimna danmo
oval demand on me

the Old Man of the Mountain
alone with the cephalopods


Oriental. (via Metafilter)


Edge of the Abyss. (via Systemic)


Abandoned Wonders of the World. (via Beyond the Beyond)


Immense forward-thinking overview of, er, people starting to talk about what to do.

I came into the meaning of that underpass
crouching for shelter, roar above; i came into
countries where minarets flash, their taut Byzantine
spools and the crates of laughing people turned to soap.
The malls are full. Radio tells me all i need
and now as storage fails the lots divided up
are auctioned, and the books set free till dusk from dawn
come trundling in. The middlemen enough get paid
to always return again, our skeleton crew provides
labor for the carrying part. No meaning's blizzard
shall yet accrue while underpass and bedroll part
stealthily at first cold rays when i was not
there, my books in storage now were yet to gather:
through avenues to verge of sight the maggots troop
led by shining cephalopods.


Dead is the New Alive. --"I learnt to walk in the backstages of theatres and opera houses, amongst the beautiful chaos of costume changes, circus performers, sweaty ballerinas, dripping make-up, and far too much glitter. Then, I went mad and was locked up. What did you think that would sound like?" (Emilie Autumn seems like the real-life equivalent of"Fiorinda" in Bold As Love by Gwyneth Jones that i am reading now.)

Airship Pirates. Cool. Steampunk music.


Remembering: "Shibuya-kei is Dead". (1996?)


And i suppose i'll be reading Notes on Conceptualisms...though maybe not this years--!

never very bright
between these towers
Elvis goblin dome
the zeros swarm
something once i saw

raki in a cup
half water
and only one ice cube
haze transfigured
morning forest

diff'rent kinds of crunch
litany of gravels
would this catalogue the days
granite cyst
Elvis goblin dome

a garden where spended
odes prowl
chamber for a kraut pope
never very bright
lift the fragrant tome

silky sizzling
at the much repaired seams
zeros swarm
and only one ice cube
remains in the old aluminum tray

convex mirror told
something once i saw
sideswiped by a firetruck
on the road
to tell it to cephalopods


"Mixing Rome and the snow in his song" --Mandelshtam (tr R Tracy)


Now on Amazon.


Zsuzsa Polgar's blog. (via Brian Barker) --One of her 7 languages is Esperanto.


21 Kinds of Goth. (via supergee)

no firetruck curter if on
Taliban vow
tin to stand for other metals
same cup of tea as me
hurdy gurdy
hurdy gurdy
hurdy gurdy HURdy gurDY
shinyblack heart-music
walking my unconstitutional

a try not to inhale day
glittering roadside audiotape snarls
the fate of all my glues
i use it once then years go by
i need it again & it's dried up
& i have to buy another

something once i saw
takes its place in the catalogue of signs
i am to Langpo what
a Sufi is to Islam

cerni tcadu nenri

we must have music while we wait
gargoyle arglebargle
could ya'll use some extra money

Evita vive
the zeros swarm like bees
out of the mouths of the cephalopods


"Two weeks before flying a plane into one of the World Trade Center's towers, Mohammed Atta phoned Ramzi Binalshibh asking help with a riddle: Two sticks, a dash and a cake with a stick down--what is it? Binalshibh was baffled. After the attack on September 11, he realized that two sticks stand for 11, a dash is a dash and a cake with a stick down signifies 9." --Roy Sorensen, A Brief History of the Paradox (2003)


I Eat Cannibals.


Archipelago of Weird. (via Supergee)


37 Heaven.

"Wooden Yorky"

coltan coral flarf
starts falling into science
so trawl pang blamed uffish slitherings

fake crystal officer ash · stockpile fathoms
briskly stoop
is of fatal blurt

slowing fingers Antioch agony lit
and story
goes tsar scrape without cephalopods


The String Quartet Tribute to Gwen Stefani.


Kunstler also invokes HPL.


A New Beginning.


Lojban literary forms. (old Wiki page)

black speckled blue
for a moment as the lid lifts

wearing an orange vest
watching the price of gas go up
hypoglycemic
MoPar
cerulean
sweepings
frayed cloud snuggy
hidden under kudzu heaps
the time to hesitate is through

sweating in my gladiator
glove the color of cappuchino
more church steeples
under construction
in meat space
home of all my turnings
twitter from the other side
Ghayb bugbear
skatepunk scarab
reads these parkinglot fissures
flies and a tepid trickle
to wait without expectation
maybe some injuries smarting
lilac tyvek multiple arched galleries
now and then a sudden dip
this is Plano after all

the overtaxed motor throbs
a superior indigence
tableau replicates this half the room
so you might think it's a mirror
in which you are absent
people walk up in the store
and you have to dodge them
without any acknowledgement
and this is a weather
crawling out of the rubble
with visions of the lost towers still
Koran shadowed castaway
ino Djedi Haziz frolicsome
whose elapsed odes pale
like magnolia oolong at Javalato
.o'unai
.o'onai The small
birds converge, converge With their
gifts to a
difficult borning Annunaki
DIbmey ru'Ha' mazarin cephalopods



Tank Man follow-up.

Qatlh klama
comment Blériot

mere anarchy
successful refuge of words

three chartreuse deck chairs
that wonderful day

things gone into storage

they crystal do them desert
a heavy dew has soaked the lawns
they were never more green

in the days of the mixed-speaking
in the days of the cephalopods



"I first heard of and became interested in Umm Kulthum when Bob Dylan said in a 1978 interview that she was his favorite singer." --Paul Williams, The 20th Century's Greatest Hits (2000)


(a painting byRichard Hanson)

Truth Commission.


The Science News Cycle. (via Metafilter)


VB 10b.


"...music that can't be heard right without knowledge of a particular, isolated historical context..." (I was musing the other day about the artistic polarity of immediacy/interpretation. Of course, nothing exists at either pure extreme--not Abstract Expressionist painting without Existentialist theory, nor Ulysses with the pleasure of its sounds & their artful combining--but if conlanging is an art, it's an artform of the assemble-it-yourself variety. In order to appreciate a constructed language, you have to start learning it; & learn enough of it (& also enough of its predecessors & contemporaneous-peer languages) to form a sense of it as an object, at all, before you can begin to aestheticize it. --I realized that after modernism, poetry (one part of it) also took off in this direction--along with much else.

But if In the Land of Constructed Languages furnishes us with a groundwork for the first conlang-criticism, that can only be a good thing.

(And i want to find the polyvalent-logic answer to that polarity as well... Perhaps one can say that an artwork gives texture to the senses, meaning to the imagination, impetus to the emotions, and conceptual significance to the mind (=Jungian quaternity).

(What i have been (in a desultory, unsystematic way) doing with my poetry in recent years, follows a development that is analogous to the elaborate contextualizing of something on the order of classical Tamil poetry, in which the least gesture carries much significance precisely because of the density of its traditional background. Only, with mine, it is an ever-shifting background--melting, metamorphosizing from one imaginary-tradition to another; with my reading & everyday life poking through on occasion. I think of my blog as a kind of running commentary, though you would still have to guess at how the pieces connect up.

This, in lieu of a culture, or in spite of it.)))


Austerity Nostalgia.

"Pyongyang"

lost scriptures of cagmag purled
about one blue twinkle
sex scene with basketball
kvazaw kameralon
Varg gravitas
jumpin'-est Ralston
taH pagh taHbe'

la soldato nekonata
the Taliban have morphed
Libereco Dawranta
sugar gliders as your new pet
ridicule
is little use against
insanity

widazhad
munje fi le xomei

gray clouds
gray cephalopods



"What Sappho conceived on one occasion on Mitylene is gone beyond reconstitution; the sole proof that she ever conceived it is a scrap from a parchment copy made thirteen centuries later; on an upper left-hand corner learning assisted by chemicals makes out a few letters; in Berliner Klassikertexte, V-2, 1907, pp. 14-15, type stands for those letters with perhaps misleading decisiveness:

.Ρ'Α[...
ΔΗΡΑΤ .[...
ΓΟΓ'ΓΥΛΑ .[...

...plus the beginnings of a dozen more lines: very possibly, so modern editions indicate, the irst aorist of the verb to raise (conjecturing ηρ α), and a word unknown, and the name of a girl of Sappho's. Or you can remember from Alcaeus and Ibycus ηρ, the contraction of springtime, and derive the unknown word from δηρος, too long, and write

Spring........
Too long......
Gongula......

heading the little witticism 'Papyrus' and printing it in a book of poems called Lustra as an exemplum for resurrection-men. And wait decades for someoe to unriddle it." --Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (1971)


"It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete."


"...there is an element of truth in the argument that the recession has opened a space which we aren't necessarily filling with a viable vision of the future, but I wonder if that's more to do with the vacuity of the media, old and new, and the necessary length of time it takes to construct a new politics or new forms - we can't just wish them into being." (via Beyond the Beyond)

"Epic Writ on Chinese Ghost-Paper"

sivyj welkin o'er
the blind depot
the blind despot
"Dilbeck" sign knocked down
& lies there sev'ral days

beneath this bowl we call the Economy
beetles full of gears evoke
'learning assisted by chemicals'
kitten who thought he was a mouse
dum pesttempo

the epic three-way battle between good
and evil and mediocrity continues
as does that between cetaceans
and cephalopods


"It seems to be about the time of Coleridge that we begin hearing poetry identified with what cannot be translated, a notion which would have puzzled Chaucer and Dr Johnson alike." --Hugh Kenner


"Who releases essay collections by big-brain philosophers and Yale professors aimed at the average Stargate geek?"


A Brief History of the Paradox.


9 gas-saving driving techniques. (via Rebecca Blood)


I am to Langpo as a Sufi is to Islam.

"The best hope a language inventor has for the survival of his or her project is to find a group of people who will use it, and then hand it over and let them ruin its perfection." --Arika Okrent

"Stop-Loss & Quit-Claim"

hours a day for water
write
until the page is covered
no fixed meanings
te munje
to this or that mem'ry
a poem
vlach onyx
that could once have been about death
sin plomo; mallumo
is now about cephalopods


"The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat." --The Picture of Dorian Gray


New Lynx.


War on Kittens.


G K Chesterton, detective.

"The Mocking Bird

Like an old Cobra broken with a stick,
As in the ward with other crocks I lay
(Flies on the roof their sole arithmetic
Which they must count to pass the time of day)--
Born of my wound, or out of Bosch remembered,
Or by my own delirium designed,
A strange blue bird, it seemed I knew the kind
And the fierce look with which his eyes were embered,
For they had been spectators of the Fall--
Perched on my foot, I knew his ringing call,
And 'Shoo!' I cried, 'you phantom, fade away!
For here are canyons forested with sleep,
The woods are silent, and the shades are deep,
While you intrude the colours of the day.
I flinch before your lit triumphal pinion,
Your bloodshot gaze, the memory of strife,
Your cry, the laughing mockery of Life,
So raucous here, where sleep should have dominion!'
But as he would have flown I rose to follow,
A will was born where all things else were hollow,
And through those caverns of ancestral cedar
Where all but downward streams had lost their way
His voice of mocking laughter was my leader--
The blue hallucination of a jay!"

--Roy Campbell


"Had she [Christina Rossetti] not given up playing chess because of her 'inordinate pleasure in winning'? " --Thomas M Disch & Charles Naylor, Neighboring Lives (1981)


Car. (via Metafilter)


The Deora Story.


Apophenia.


Memorial Reading for Dick Sevrens.

"Silence of the Lamia"

a crow clucks
over my head
a world called Time
my gladiator glove
hecho a la orden
shimmer clutch huzzah!
pang

loss

cephalopods





"...what Gödel discovered was just the tip of the iceberg: an infinite number of true mathematical theorems exist that cannot be proved..."


Lojbanist John Cowan's blog. (via [ex-?] Lojbanist Nick Nicholas's blog) (his language blog) (all via Language Hat)


Ginger and Fred.

"Bats in the Blue Hour"

garrulous churl, mortgage comes
twin whisperings gaunt

easy enough to put it aside for now
with lobykai etoso to spare

giant cats
or rather, kittens

apostate viridian
snatched from Mongolian folk music

dry in the sea through water sails its water
when it comes

the ferrous cephalopod


fanmo jimte.

the small things wrong
in this time
which is also other times
morning's shadow krokodilas
with the sole bortaS
possible for cephalopods


Ram Tzu.

twin whisperings
vanilla latte lamplight
drift selfishly
from queue to queue

what was squandered
burns at the jade horizon
maybe it isn't so
that we are cephalopods


According to Sarah Anderson in the introduction to Sullivan & Murphy's Beowulf, Tolkien described the poem as "a drink dark and bitter: a solemn funeral-ale with the taste of death."


Divinyls.


Sing for Absolution.

halcyon foreclosure
of the brummagem mortgage
vlach onyx
sing tumerous cephalopods


"In 1908 the tiny neutral state of Moresnet, the orphan of a border dispute between the Netherlands and Prussia, rose up to declare itself the first free Esperanto state of Amikejo (Friendship Place). More than 3 percent of the four thousand inhabitants had learned the language...and their flag, stamps, coins, and an anthem were ready to go." --Okrent, op cit




In Your Eyes.


Okrand on YouTube. (via Omniglot)


Aggressor.


"taHjaj wo' " performed by Captain Krankor.


Vulcan Language Institute Reclamation Project. The LuLu book.

we waltz with necromantic cephalopods
dwell in tangled red-brick cephalopods

Leviathan came near and wheezing expired
who could not thole these Sputnik cephalopods

rotunda holds terse destiny in splinters
it's all about the lovesick cephalopods

crunk flamewings vie in harrowing the source
foxtrot alcove's Arctic cephalopods

teammates, think Graywyvern lacks a plan
to cut through walls of mile-thick cephalopods?



The Ten Trusts.

"Pictures of Nietzsche"

triphibian
this shell of relative order
sjambok oxter
replace my eyes with cool jewels
the honeysuckle-fragrant night
survives
its cephalopods


At one point Okrent (In the Land of Invented Languages) essays to translate into Lojban this sentiment of Borges: "It is clear that there is no classification of the universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what thing the universe is." I came up with roda poi te munji zo'u da jivykai je smadykai .ini'i sa'u na munje jimpe falo remna, though perhaps a native [jbejbo] Lojbanist might simplify this to jinvi je smadi le te munji .i na jimpe.

jonoj
narwhal jonoj
maybe i only dreamed that i
wrote that poem

the sunlight
never gleamed as it smote that
poem a thousand hours have
i sat beside
the athanor

it seemed as

i wrote that poem
one still unbroken taillight
in its perch like cliff's edge star-gasp
beamed as i wrote

that poem

and did Graywyvern follow its demise
or birth? "Tim-ber!" he
screamed as he wrote that
poem

to the cephalopods


Rick Harrison's Book Note on Okrent. (Review to follow?) He also mentions...the LOLcat Bible project.

plastic in its descent
to nanospheres
quick sparrow over the black earth
where shadows pool
loops of entrails dancing
if the gods ever listened to me
my old first car would still be running
now we trade pictures of ruins
each of them a story
in the octagon house
of the spooled cephalopods

dokhodyaya
derevaun seraun
the shadow of his equipage
emerging beneath a/ crescent
palmer with the Fraser Defense
the lavishly colored triremes and jaunty play-barges
unsayable mu'
Shooter and the Large Glass
we grab our crampons
golf in the killing field
and in time ev'rything gets fixed
why not talk with cephalopods


The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story.


The Gender Fuck Blues.


Historians in Trouble.


Online Pure Saxon English. (via Language Hat)

"Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence." --Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning...Was the Command line (1999)


"Derivatives"

caltrops, tacks, and broken glass

talisman eloigned
set page scaling to none
I wait · for you there
like · a stone
the magical efficacy
violets are blanu
of chicken blood
lime-green spongy vortex
on a dark desert highway
von Winde verweht
among the cephalopods


"Binoculars fixed on a strange new bird..." --Jimmy Carter


Cerulean.


Speaking through erasures. (via Silliman)

A song that explains the world; a sculpture; a dance.


"Miss California"

keyboard made of light
se ili toleros pacience,
tamen la fajro estos ilia logxejo
shimmered and dissolved to let him through
lode traipsing
by the first rule of Fight Club
dark turquoise
nocturnal altars trilled
and the figure slumped unconscious
on the sidewalk
on the way to the dumpster stirred
fluidly
like sev'ral cephalopods


"This was no time to consider the mother-baby aspects of the firebeast ecology nor to quote from Edgar A Guest at great length." --Emil Petaja, Lord of the Green Planet (1967)


Chanel Segway.


This reminded me of something i wrote earlier.


Stephensville.

"Godlet"

plum carpeting, a chill in the air
the red badge of zugzwang
connives
ranid Talos
i don't have time to bleach
dandiacal knowing
the dark secret of this river
cephalopods


"Throughout its long history all over the world, lyric poetry has been less fanciful than fiction. A book of lyric poems is most often a collation of interpreted facts. Poetry's materials, its characters, objects, and events, its landscapes and cities, its mornings and afternoons, are far more likely to have been actual than fabricated. This means that poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion." --Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction (1982)

Body Piercing Saved My Life. (via via SuperGee)

I don't hear newsmen voicing their concern for the demise of smallpox like they do the Republican party--& yet it was a plague more savage, and of wider and more lasting devastation.

"Talos"

vinberonigra vIt'a' Duy'a'
reprieve again
for the ant heap
i don't have time to bleach
as i walk past
on the way to the car
drained
like this unvarying sky
colorless
as by themselves cephalopods

just to have found this
a momentary rightness
not rest or relief

the myriad fine droplets
that condense on my glasses

rest is for cephalopods


Stuart "Monkey" Smith on Deviant Art.

"From the Melting Children"

khanjar whelm tall fnord Ojai
lack frith twinge
whelm bearing flooded · amulet stag · wallop

cluster · all of onset rotating
broken adorn bot
fjord fallen
silted black catalogue occupit

skim after crust linch · stereo whelm attend
dwine millipede ink
agaric cephalopods


Poets, like dogs, whether large or small, all think they're the same size.


"We all need, as the novel’s protagonist confesses, a legend where we can take cover, a myth that can serve us as a shelter and allow us to survive and continue moving forward."

opague ecovore cashflow
face transplant boink
accident blocking the left lane
flames of anomie

from having too little
to having nothing
walk through
fog of the cephalopods


"The dark secret of this river..." (From the comments stream: "The number of autos sold (monthly) in China is now greater than the those sold in the USA. Four years ago it was around three in the US for one in China.")


"The phone lines light up with young women who want to share their own love poems; a poetry-loving police sergeant calls in to every show." (via Silliman)


Geoffrey Hill on YouTube. (via)





On a lighter note, "Gen. Bonaparte forbade the use of torture by French military interrogators in Cairo, on the grounds that it produced too much misinformation..."