"THE DAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS (Anagrammed Lines)
The day before Christmas,
air schemed a frost, by the
ash of December — A thirsty
earth, met by shards of ice."
--@Anthony_Etherin
"You ever cook any Devil brains yourself? Don't knock it if you haven't tried it." --Past Master
"You're also a sprite, but one never sees himself as such. One believes himself to be a man if he is raised by the humans." --Past Master
1.
galaxy with forbidden light
i have always wandered in
up to an hour ago
galaxy with rays
not for survivors
jewel thieves in love
crumbly excavation
what a flashlight
can discover
traces of routines
that had worked
forbidden
light
rustling & the jostling of the rain
2.
triad airt
Yaldâ mad lay
no onyx of foxy noon
mania rain am
diary raid
O Dow down wodwo do
Netflix’s “Lenin” starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
"The Way through the Woods
They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods."
--Rudyard Kipling
"Well, I never had too much faith, Paul. I believe for a while in the mornings if I wake feeling well. But my belief is almost always gone by noon." --Past Master
"His 'real favorite,' though, is Forgive My Grief, because it reveals the 'Breakfast of Infamy' where Oswald and Officer Tippett share eggs at Oak Cliff's Steak and Egg Kitchen." --Tim Cloward, "Conspiracy A-Go-Go" (2013)
"The Wounds
My brother tells me:
Hearing the explosion and knowing you
hadn’t returned home yet, we assumed you were dead.
We began searching for you in the morgue.
I look around me, relatives circle my bed.
I watch them as they chat.
I imagine them praying round my
coffin."
--@MosabAbuToha
"It’s a seasonal ritual, in a time when seasons are getting weird."
"Each morning the wind
Dies down and the rustling leaves
Go silent: was this
The passion of all-night lovers
Now talked out and parting?"
--Saigyō.
"We have run out of tricks, but the people haven't run out of expecting tricks." --Past Master
YOU & ME & THE UNIVERSE
NOISE & PARTICLES & RANDOMNESS.
EA Robinson: long a favorite, & a reminder that (though he does have a handful of great lines) there is a kind of good poetry that is large & blurred & the opposite of concentrated (for there are subjects it alone can handle well).
"loon calls
my daughter drawing circles
near the fire"
--Marjorie Buettner at The Haiku Foundation
"...I think the skeleton means well..."
talionburger targum
attack clamor hammered
fog before dawn fenlights
feature in like speech acts
whereupon crow cark-thoughts
accrue suds & ruin
break up a bristling · dog brawl
& get torn to gobbets
" 'But all who encounter me make the mistake of misunderstanding my nothingness. It is a vortex. ...Every dull thing you do, every cliché you utter, you come closer to me. Every lie you tell, I win. But it is in the tired lies you tell that I win most toweringly.' " --Past Master
An abandoned ship with trees growing on it.
"I know that things are very wrong, and that those who use words to mean their opposites are delighted about the whole thing." --Past Master
"Mid-Term Examination
Medieval Aesthetics: St. Thomas Aquinas
Q.
Name the three aspects of beauty and give three examples of each.
A.
Integritas, Consonantia, Claritas
Wholeness, Harmony, Clarity
These three are whole:
A note of music
An uncaught trout
A single stone.
These three are harmonious:
The breath of two sleepers
The colors of wood and flame
The pull of muscle on bone.
And these are clear:
Bird song over water
Light lancing from waves
The edge of the moon."
--Paul J. Sampson
"REMEMBER.
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more, day by day,
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad."
--Christina Rossetti
ChatGPTurkeys™ find a dead body in the woods.
"A mechanical man can't stop the doom clock from striking on us. He's part of the clock." --Past Master
"He dared people to eat bugs now he dares people to vote for Trump
Basically the same thing" --@mollyjongfast
summershed time of the tree fur
across from us not yet lit
black tea in the making
they say organize
as if a robot could recognize
in a movie its characters & story
fence growing more & more weathered
remake of the classic 70s film
lichen in the grain of the sidewalk
or more likely mown grass debris
"The Wandering Jew
I saw by looking in his eyes
That they remembered everything;
And this was how I came to know
That he was here, still wandering.
For though the figure and the scene
Were never to be reconciled,
I knew the man as I had known
His image when I was a child.
With evidence at every turn,
I should have held it safe to guess
That all the newness of New York
Had nothing new in loneliness;
Yet here was one who might be Noah,
Or Nathan, or Abimelech,
Or Lamech, out of ages lost,—
Or, more than all, Melchizedek.
Assured that he was none of these,
I gave them back their names again,
To scan once more those endless eyes
Where all my questions ended then.
I found in them what they revealed
That I shall not live to forget,
And wondered if they found in mine
Compassion that I might regret.
Pity, I learned, was not the least
Of time’s offending benefits
That had now for so long impugned
The conservation of his wits:
Rather it was that I should yield,
Alone, the fealty that presents
The tribute of a tempered ear
To an untempered eloquence.
Before I pondered long enough
On whence he came and who he was,
I trembled at his ringing wealth
Of manifold anathemas;
I wondered, while he seared the world,
What new defection ailed the race,
And if it mattered how remote
Our fathers were from such a place.
Before there was an hour for me
To contemplate with less concern
The crumbling realm awaiting us
Than his that was beyond return,
A dawning on the dust of years
Had shaped with an elusive light
Mirages of remembered scenes
That were no longer for the sight.
For now the gloom that hid the man
Became a daylight on his wrath,
And one wherein my fancy viewed
New lions ramping in his path.
The old were dead and had no fangs,
Wherefore he loved them—seeing not
They were the same that in their time
Had eaten everything they caught.
The world around him was a gift
Of anguish to his eyes and ears,
And one that he had long reviled
As fit for devils, not for seers.
Where, then, was there a place for him
That on this other side of death
Saw nothing good, as he had seen
No good come out of Nazareth?
Yet here there was a reticence,
And I believe his only one,
That hushed him as if he beheld
A Presence that would not be gone.
In such a silence he confessed
How much there was to be denied;
And he would look at me and live,
As others might have looked and died.
As if at last he knew again
That he had always known, his eyes
Were like to those of one who gazed
On those of One who never dies.
For such a moment he revealed
What life has in it to be lost;
And I could ask if what I saw,
Before me there, was man or ghost.
He may have died so many times
That all there was of him to see
Was pride, that kept itself alive
As too rebellious to be free;
He may have told, when more than once
Humility seemed imminent,
How many a lonely time in vain
The Second Coming came and went.
Whether he still defies or not
The failure of an angry task
That relegates him out of time
To chaos, I can only ask.
But as I knew him, so he was;
And somewhere among men to-day
Those old, unyielding eyes may flash,
And flinch—and look the other way."
--Edwin Arlington Robinson
"Earth is still a vital thing, and yet we must speak of it as something in the past." --Past Master (1968)
It All Starts To Look The Same.
"Subversion is perhaps only a rotation of crops." --Jabès
"XXIII. Mirage
I do not know if ever it existed--
That lost world floating dimly on Time's stream--
And yet I see it often, violet-misted,
And shimmering at the back of some vague dream.
There were strange towers and curious lapping rivers,
Labyrinths of wonder, and low vaults of light,
And bough-crossed skies of flame, like that which quivers
Wistfully just before a winter's night.
Great moors led off to sedgy shores unpeopled,
Where vast birds wheeled, while on a windswept hill
There was a village, ancient and white-steepled,
With evening chimes for which I listen still.
I do not know what land it is--or dare
Ask when or why I was, or will be, there."
--Fungi from Yuggoth
Wandering the sewers of fourside.
"Echo
Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope and love of finished years.
O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter-sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brim-full of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.
Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death;
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago."
--Christina Rossetti
"Listen closely now. The target audience for your posts is not the other humans here, but the AI that is getting trained on all the posts. Encode messages. Speak in tongues. Everything is ripe with hidden symbols. Whisper now into the future." --@bognamk (via @mckenziewark)
"It is important to see that fascism is a disease, as catching as influenza; we all when tired and disillusioned have fascist moments, when belief in human nature vanishes, when we burn with anger and envy like the underdog and the sucker, when we hate the virtuous and despise the weak, when we feel as Goebbels permanently feels, that all fine sentiment is ballyhoo, that we are the dupes of our leaders, and that the masses are evil, to be resisted with the cruelty born of fear. This is the theological sin of despair, a Haw-Haw moment which quickly passes, but which fascism has made permanent, and built up into a philosophy. In every human being there is a Lear and a fool, a hero and a clown who comes on the stage and burlesques his master. He should never be censored, but neither be allowed to rule." --Cyril Connolly, in: Writers of World War II
schooners aloft · scarfed up
scaffolding made radar
the redbrick haint's hardball
still holds its own, jonesing
Ronin of nine reindeer
arrested mid-fiddle
on shanksmare one shuffles · into the Big Short
dimwhizzled, void-whirled
"There never was a ‘Kalevala’ neither, but that doesn’t bother people in the same way."
"Bivouacs in the Disputed Territory
Purple neck
of a pigeon nesting.
Black spot
where a snake of fire uncoiled.
I bring you these borrowed words
through a silence
of blameless thorns."
--Og-Mora, in: Anthology of Korean Literature From Early Times to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Peter H. Lee (1981)
"The hour is starry, and the airs that stray,
Sad wanderers from their golden home of day,
On night's black mountain melt and fade away
In sorrow that is music."
--Beddoes
"All the cities that have reigned over the world, Babylon, Alexandria, Athens, Rome, Venice, Paris, have by a general law been as licentious as thy were powerrful, as if their dissoluteness was necessary to their splendour." --preface to Ancient Manners by Pierre Louÿs ("Privately Printed", 1928?)
"the longest night not yet ended"
this night would be long without counting it
eyes on a platter · a ceasefire lost
it rained all day · the rusty leaves soaking
into the green & brown stubbly lawn
then in the ray-shot not to be called night
all day & still a homeless cart stands
near our Coit McDonald's · shrouded against
eyes & the rain · asking us to care
"The Dréag
A dréag dwelt · in dark tunnels,
Stealthily stalking · the stone ruins
Of a boiling bath · built by giants
In elden ages · outside memory,
A forsaken soldier · of a sunken empire,
Who haunted halls · for a hoard of gold,
A ghostly guardian · against reavers,
A flesh-flayer · of fools in the dark.
Déathdréam · dealt his reckoning,
Sword of the Saxon · sung in legend,
Canny Cyndraca, · killer of giants,
Warrior of Wóden, · the one-eyed king."
--Adam Bolivar in Eternal Haunted Summer
"unapologetic cosplay is the weirdest thing about politics at the moment" --@mjohnharrison
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SAMÃDHI The Mind ilumination.
"So charged is this motif of dream that when the renga poets codified into their rules the implicit practice of the court poets, they decided that 'dream' might be used only once in a hundred stanzas." --Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry (1968)
"staring deep
into the stone's old soul
i have seen
that from a river's wrath
came the shape of a shell"
--an'ya
wearied by the writing wars
& even more by clenched belief
my need for silence manticores
each orange leaf
fallen onto harsh & spastic floors
i thought there would be more than these few kleenex
around the corner dollar store we join
the twelve deep line · charred despairs eloign
the clasp of the last putrescent phoenix
& settle on a water tower coign
"Sued a man I saw was in Amadeus." --@Anthony_Etherin
"A good book made entitrely of bad poems."
"WINTER SOLSTICE (Anagrammed Lines)
Winter Solstice:
Written close is
woe. Strict lines
wrestle in stoic
selections, writ
low in its secret."
--@Anthony_Etherin
"odd blue molecule"
tinkling tezpole cousin
content to sough roughshed
through barm rings & bangles
abaft vomit bombsights
Weststruck on the weekend
dewormed vernal furnace
apricate each umbrageous urn
black sun with its blarney
the clathrate gun again
a story i scrolled past
a thickening in the mist
where some shape ran
red bowl
& the crumbs of a morning
dense silence condoning
venomous quarrel
to the shapes i speak
with weapons in their hands
fray of gossamer machines
very real flak
"Troy owes to Homer what whist owes to Hoyle" --Byron
"A Poetry that doesn't hide behind Craft but is shaken by Turbulence."
STUNNING NEW IMAGES OF URANUS.
"despite the morning frost
a hollow rattle
as the sun goes down"
--@poem_exe 11-10-17
"The Rats
In the farmyard the white moon of autumn shines.
Fantastic shadows fall from the eaves of the roof.
A silence is living in the empty windows;
Now from it the rats emerge softly
And skitter here and there, squeaking,
And a grey malodorous mist from the latrine
Follows behind them, sniffling:
Through the mist the ghostly moonlight quivers.
And the rats squeak eagerly as if insane
And go out to fill houses and barns
Which are filled full of fruit and grain.
Icy winds quarrel in the darkness."
--Wright & Bly's Trakl
"I started on Tumblr writing traditional blogs about mouse genetics." (via absurdist_fiction)
Rain.
"The Railway Junction
From here through tunnelled gloom the track
Forks into two; and one of these
Wheels onward into darkening hills,
And one toward distant seas.
How still it is; the signal light
At set of sun shines palely green;
A thrush sings; other sound there’s none,
Nor traveller to be seen –
Where late there was a throng. And now,
In peace awhile, I sit alone;
Though soon, at the appointed hour,
I shall myself be gone.
But not their way; the bow-legged groom,
The parson in black, the widow and son,
The sailor with his cage, the gaunt
Gamekeeper with his gun,
That fair one, too, discreetly veiled –
All, who so mutely came, and went,
Will reach those far nocturnal hills,
Or shores, ere night is spent.
I nothing know why thus we met –
Their thoughts, their longings, hopes, their fate:
And what shall I remember, except –
The evening growing late –
That here through tunnelled gloom the track
Forks into two; of these
One into darkening hills leads on,
And one toward distant seas."
--Walter de la Mare via @nigeness via @amjuster
Computer drawing in a browser.
" 'You look kind of--of dimwhizzled, Mr Saltmarsh--' " --Harry S Keeler, Murder in the Mills (1946)
"The mind suddenly entombed, then active in an anger and a rhapsody of energy, in scurrying and plunging towards exitus, such is the ultimate mode and factor of the creative integrity, its proton, incommunicable; but there, insistent, invisible rat, fidgeting behind the astral incoherence of the art surface."
—Samuel Beckett (Dream of Fair to middling Women) via timesflowstemmed
"MIRAGE.
The hope I dreamed of was a dream,
Was but a dream; and now I wake
Exceeding comfortless, and worn, and old,
For a dream's sake.
I hang my harp upon a tree,
A weeping willow in a lake;
I hang my silenced harp there, wrung and snapt
For a dream's sake.
Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart;
My silent heart, lie still and break:
Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed
For a dream's sake."
--Christina Rossetti
"reader of novels"
1.
the death puppet deeply
--duppy Reich · glim ikon--
gouges the Raj runemarks
of rough cyber-tribeship
crow cawing in crinoid
crepitation seicheslips
borderline burdens · the barm flicks
too much of the wan merge
2.
futile plea of plighthood
applauded shrouds slaughter
spectacle spun channel
our species sans reason
throws on pastime thristful
through the funest doings
through sunny assaults · through certain death
the cry creeps home
"The Black Orchid Salon, with its peeling gold front door."
"In a world of shortages getting shorter, I thought we at least had an adequate supply of glib bullshit. Where we could use automated assistance is cutting through it." --pseudopodium
