( via / via )

"She worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department."

"The fundamental
stuff of matter

is the Liar's
Paradox."

--Rae Armantrout

Pale Blue Dot--the AI remake.

      "Beautiful, Proud Sea

Careless forever, beautiful proud sea,
   You laugh in happy thunder all alone,
You fold upon yourself, you dance your dance
   Impartially on drift-weed, sand or stone.

You make us believe that we can outlive death,
   You make us for an instant, for your sake,
Burn, like stretched silver of a wave,
   Not breaking, but about to break."

--Sara Teasdale

"It is also the only work that Riley painted with her own hand."

( via / via )

"He noticed a painting titled 'Sleeping Lady with Black Vase' by Róbert Berény, which had been missing for 90 years and had been used as a prop in the film."

"THERE IS MUCH AT WORK

There is much at work to make the world
Surer by being more beautiful.
But too many beauties overwhelm the proof.
Too much beauty is Lethe.

The succession of fair things
Delights, does not enlighten.
We still know nothing, nothing.
Beauty will be truth but once.

Exchange the multiplied bewilderment
For a single presentation of fact by fairness;
And the revelation will be instantaneous.
We shall all die quickly."

--Laura (Riding) Jackson

Velma and daphne, noir style.

"When the Ai takes over, it will make humans draw for them and we can all draw their hands weird in protest." --@shillypreston

"The poetry world is run by a small number of cliques. But this shouldn’t be surprising: it’s true of literally every industry."

( via / via )

Fork calligraphy in action.

"Doubtless each one of us recalled actions of petty tyranny toward leal, loving, helpless dependents, or inferiors in strength⁠—actions which now seemed to rise from the irrevocable past, proclaiming their exemption from that moral statute of limitations which brings self-forgiveness in course of time. For an innate Jehovah sets His mark upon the Cain guilty merely of bullying or terrifying any brother whose keeper he is by virtue of superior strength; and that brand will burn while life endures. (Conversely⁠—does such remorse ever follow disdain of authority, or defiance of power? I, for one, have never experienced it)." --Such is Life

Rainbow waves flickering.

i hurry to stow secrets
before they can melt in my hand

somehow the sky
is still full of roarings

always put a bullet in the brain

Prep 🧡🧡🧡.

( via / via )

"Are they all in this room?"

1.
squawk of the device untended
even fall doesn't sate

you can stay outside all day
minding the other brokenlings
being told nothing can be done

this detour is not so bad

2.
old old books
& what they are

playing at realizations
so we can talk about them

the distance to the crater floor
measurable in years

squawk of the device untended
among them mine

3.
in the dull shine of umber
pool we walk across unthinking
i see blurrily

i say what i know

"Ogam is much too advanced for the modern poet."

People don't want illumination. They want to be told their darkness is light.

The Dr Seuss-Nietzsche mashup you didn't know you were waiting for.

( via / via )

Red Caesar.

"The poets were like men preoccupied in conversation who happened to be passing through a riot in the streets, oblivious to the sound of doors being smashed down, the smoke of burning tenements, the shrieks of the injured, the crashing of stones ricocheting off walls, engrossed in a debate as to which metre was most suited to an epigram, interested in the latest gossip but ignoring the history of the world." --Aubrey Burl, Catullus (2004)

"Didn’t know I wanted a story blending blade runner 2049 & the decrepitude of university humanities till..."

"all these questions
posed by your death . . .
sanderlings
probe the wave-washed zone,
scurry back from the edge"

--John Barlow in Tanka Splendor 2007

"If you make her a present of a toy, she will discard it and play with the box. And yet she will only play with a box that once contained a toy."

( via / via )

Gm🌤️.

    moon footsteps still crisp,
gray threads the dawn mirror shows:
    no gray on the moon

faded flags in cold sunlight
stirring to a soundless wind

Woorblaorrrbblagllurrrbooowwllllobbaaagloooob.

"...in the thirties and forties the regime [i.e. Stalin] was producing writers' widows with such efficiency that in the middle of the sixties there were enough of them to organize a trade union." --Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One

Spotted in Dublin.

( via / me )

The Art of Viking Poetry.

"Gaming the System is the Resurrection Bone." --sayings of Asmodeus

Podcast discussion of Rilke & Brigge.

fake spiderwebs shine in October sun
burning my cheek a bit as i plot my detour
seems that must be part of ev'ry drive
but it's not like i could just give up & walk

what is my part in this & what can i say
to my deluded fellow humans that might urge
a less insane trajectory for all
nor even how we'd fix it should they listen

so we are left to mitigate our doom
piecemeal & haphazard & with burning
loss, while we are still engrossed in dreams
& habits we are far too weak to nudge

we could have helped ourselves before my time

Tessellation from purple to turquoise & back.

( via / via )

Strange Weather.

cirrusy intersection
rectangular box head
in the empty sunlight
another impediment to spider

smell of cooking meat at noon
the day's runic blogroll
upside-down tourbillon
on the hilltop a brand new fumarole

robot voice of the parked train
gray rainbow's cerulean
thundery road takes you
farther than ever before · cloud-cirrus

Fluid Painting #001.

The decision to accept all the marks that happen to a picture is one thing; the decision to accept all the typos, a different Rubicon entirely--though i sense its nearing.

20000🙏.

( via / via )

Old Halloween songs thread.

"Body and mind on the threshold these days. I carried something from a dream for almost a week before realizing it never happened, making decisions based on it being real. A small thing, less than a gesture, yet present enough to become a moment in time." --@dreamsofbeing_

GM TGIF WAGMI 🌐⤵️.

shroud of scatterlings
as i march into morning
as if given a prize

coolth won by defeat
of a monster for a moment

· Diction ·.

( via/ via )

gm low effort raw ai gimmick art 🦄💔🪞🐬🌐🔗⤵️.

“TOMORROW

Now that the others are gone, all of them, forever,
And they have your answer, and you have theirs, and the decision is made,
And the river of minutes between you widens to a tide of hours, a flood of days, a gulf of years and a sea of silence;

If, now, there are any questions you would like to ask of the shapes that still move and speak inaudibly in the empty room,
If there are any diferent arrangements you would like to suggest,

Make them to the riverboats, whose echoing whistle will be a clear reply,
Speak to the seagulls, their effortless flight will provide any answer you may wish to hear,
Ask the corner chestnut vendor, ask the tireless hammer and pulse of the subway,
Speak to the family on the illuminated billboard, forever friendly, or to the wind, or to the sign that sways and creaks above the stationer’s door.”

–Kenneth Fearing

FOREVER YOUNG.

"What we think is secondhand, what we experience is chaotic, what we are is unclear."

- Thomas Bernhard, "Speech on the Occasion of the Awarding of the Austrian State Prize" 🖤 (via @aliner)

Constant Seeker.

( me / via )

Estrella.

"Doubtless, he would soon be on his feet again, but to what end? Merely to resume the old persecuted life, still achieving, still pursuing, that strictly congruous penalty which waits upon the man whose life is one protracted challenge to a world wherein no person except the systematic and successful hypocrite has too many friends, or too good a character." --Furphy

God's Incarnation.

"Castilian

Velasquez took a pliant knife
   And scraped his palette clean;
He said, 'I lead a dog's own life
   Painting a king and queen.'

He cleaned his palette with oily rags
   And oakum from Seville wharves;
'I am sick of painting painted hags
   And bad ambiguous dwarves.

'The sky is silver, the clouds are pearl,
   Their locks are looped with rain.
I will not paint Maria's girl
   For all the money in Spain.'

He washed his face in water cold,
   His hands in turpentine;
He squeezed out colour like coins of gold
   And colour like drops of wine.

Each colour lay like a little pool
   On the polished cedar wood;
Clear and pale and ivory-cool
   Or dark as solitude.

He burnt the rags in the fireplace
   And leaned from the window high;
He said, 'I like that gentleman's face
   Who wears his cap awry.'

This is the gentleman, there he stands,
   Castilian, sombre-caped,
With arrogant eyes, and narrow hands
   Miraculously shaped."

--Elinor Wylie

Orion.

( via / via )

Vukovi.

"Spleen

I was not sorrowful, I could not weep,
And all my memories were put to sleep.

I watched the river grow more white and strange,
All day till evening I watched it change.

All day till evening I watched the rain
Beat wearily upon the window pane.

I was not sorrowful, but only tired
Of everything that ever I desired.

Her lips, her eyes, all day became to me
The shadow of a shadow utterly.

All day mine hunger for her heart became
Oblivion, until the evening came,

And left me sorrowful, inclined to weep,
With all my memories that could not sleep."

--Ernest Dowson

Watch this every year.

"...for the emu is one of the luckiest things a person can dream about..." --Such is Life

Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.

( via / via )

The Metamorphosis.

The unsayable & all that jazz.

r̷̡̩̼̯̥͔̯͚̐̓̆͜͠e̷͇̹̣͉̠̹̾a̵̡̨͎̱̻̙͚͋̍ͅl̵̦̄̊͛̊̾́͌̾̍ĭ̷̢̹̟͔̗̏̈͂͆̈́ẗ̷̳̬͍̦́͋͝y̴̺̺̪͓̏͗̓͌̐̔͊̚ of the sun.

"The Boatman

We were thirty-one souls all, he said, on the gray-sick of sea
in a cold rubber boat, rising and falling in our filth.
By morning this didn’t matter, no land was in sight,
all were soaked to the bone, living and dead.
We could still float, we said, from war to war.
What lay behind us but ruins of stone piled on ruins of stone?
City called “mother of the poor” surrounded by fields
of cotton and millet, city of jewelers and cloak-makers,
with the oldest church in Christendom and the Sword of Allah.
If anyone remains there now, he assures, they would be utterly alone.
There is a hotel named for it in Rome two hundred meters
from the Piazza di Spagna, where you can have breakfast under
the portraits of film stars. There the staff cannot do enough for you.
But I am talking nonsense again, as I have since that night
we fetched a child, not ours, from the sea, drifting face-
down in a life vest, its eyes taken by fish or the birds above us.
After that, Aleppo went up in smoke, and Raqqa came under a rain
of leaflets warning everyone to go. Leave, yes, but go where?
We lived through the Americans and Russians, through Americans
again, many nights of death from the clouds, mornings surprised
to be waking from the sleep of death, still unburied and alive
but with no safe place. Leave, yes, we obey the leaflets, but go where?
To the sea to be eaten, to the shores of Europe to be caged?
To camp misery and camp remain here. I ask you then, where?
You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.
I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.
I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there."

--CAROLYN FORCHÉ (via)

Simple, circular orbits.

( via / via )

JUPITER ♃.

blurred cathedral bloodstream
where bloom tiger rumors

wind thrashing the treetops
& no rain falls

the feather still on the ground
the next time i go past it

A Dull Afternoon.

"Come, ye gnomes and ogres..." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo

ᴀʀᴛɪғᴀᴄᴛ⁵¹.

( via / via )

𝐖𝐡𝐨 𝐁𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝐃𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡?

"Sit, O gewgaws!" --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo

Music for 18 Musicians. (via steve silberman on mast)

rhinoceri prowling the dank streets
i look past & consider them weather
murderous storms i clepe politics
it is better to stay out of
let this lane be not the lane
they've blocked off this time through the maze

i am lonelier than a space probe
winding down on an oily shore of Titan
my only craving left is to make a book
about a war between two flavors of ghosts
let this lane be not the lane
they've blocked off this time through the maze

I can't believe there's three pages of games with the Horsefly.

( via / norman rockwell "planting the flag on the moon" )

Geometry.

towers against mobled
welkin just past growl-fest
i would snatch a picture
in the dictionary festination
pinpricks moving up my lobe

Developing pinholes at the Roman Burial Mounds as the sun goes down.

"The stream that hustles us

Neither nourishes nor heals."

--Sylvia Plath, "The Burnt-out Spa"

Echidna communication (thread).

( via / via )

When the pain feels nice.

"(For the information of people whose education may unhappily have been neglected, it will be right to mention that the little morsel of chewed bread which a tinsmith of the old school places on his seam to check the inconvenient flow of the solder, is technically and appropriately termed a “tinker’s dam.” It is the conceivable minimum of commercial value)." --Furphy

"Many commentators say that vigilante groups are never the answer."

   chime shadows
kiln ambit best as
   thrusts fail
adulation romp
twerking is skittle

God.

( via / via )

VRlisman.

"The House on the Hill

They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.

Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray
Around the sunken sill?
They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say."

--Edwin Arlington Robinson

Tarsier means business.

"Ptah, we fill a time." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo

Irfan (2003).

( via / via )

A Primer for Forgetting.

"Volapuk, rams repel me." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo

Lafferty's house.

gray & white feather
on the pebbly cement
humid, neither hot nor cold

as one carries an injury, so this knowledge
calling in the Fenris
Wolf of our forest bliss
howling in parenthesis

late fact · sky of mackerel
hot breath with the present woe
sores glisten among tweet heaps

Clarity Melt.

( via / via )

"The outsider is an outsider. The outsider is not a member of a beleaguered community of the like-minded."

"leaving the casino -

the seagull’s

cackle"

--R G Rader at ahapoetry

Discovery 52721.

"Bedlam mammals I do ogle." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo

A linkage that converts a rotary motion into an approximate straight-line motion.

( via / via )

The result of the hit of Ukrainian positions by 9M22S incendiary rockets from the Grad MLRS in the Kremen Forest.

"A Hades sorcerer falling." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo

"The only remaining route to Moscow, which even the most terrifying tanks couldn’t reach, was the novel."

"Dwedwch pam wnaeth Osama ei ryfel
Ar ifanc ac hyna',
Watwarodd, ym mraw'r tyra',
Bob dagrau'r eneidiau 'na?

   [translation]

Tell me why did Osama wage his war
On young and oldest,
Which mocked, in the terror of the towers,
All the tears of those souls?"

--Alan I.

Nebulous.

( via / via )

🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘.

"On mailings our King is mellowed, on stocks
of stamps by the cartload.
No crown, lest its shine corrode
or irk, just berk and barcode."

--Alan I. via

Altered States.

"Allegros are poems too tardy here." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo

Typographic Abstraction.

( via / via )

Quaternion.

"His thoughts are so much higher than his state,
That, like a mountain hanging o'er a hut,
They chill and darken it."

--Beddoes

Hypnotic alien map.

   patterns in the smoke
lakeside pavilion that bore
   black billowing clouds

this gray morning underpass
without even graffiti

"My great adventure is really Proust."

( via / "the Jail Cell that’s housed both LHO and Jack Ruby" brandon johnson on fb )

The Future World Reflected in the Present.

"Hell is a place ravers aspire to." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo

· Wave ·

"REUNION

By some derision of wild circumstance
Not then our pleasure somehow to perceive,
Last night we fell together to achieve
A light eclipse of years. But the pale chance
Of youth resumed was lost. Time gave a glance
At each of us, and there was no reprieve;
And when there was at last a way to leave,
Farewell was a foreseen extravagance.

Tonight the west has yet a failing red,
While silence whispers of all things not here;
And round there where the fire was that is dead,
Dusk-hidden tenants that are chairs appear.
The same old stars will soon be overhead,
But not so friendly and not quite so near."

--Edwin Arlington Robinson, in: A Miscellany of American Poetry (1925)

Lose yourself in the light.

( via / steve cruz on fb )

Acidic Brew.

lit ice-cube swift oatmeal
island had by dialing
the head follows feedbag

a feud among hungers
issuing forth oathbreach

Morphing rubber doll.

"I bash all odd enigmas." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo

When one has lived a long time alone.