"I wouldn't go anywhere near Jupiter even if you offered me a safe trip, a safe visit, a safe return, £2 million and coffee with Clarice Lispector in Torquay in 1950." --@mjohnharrison
Music for Crawling Through Abandoned Cities. (via Mefi)
problems to be solved in their time
even the philosopher
finds exigent
too restless to sit
& far too weary to rise
"Is there anyone who posts like me but about a language that’s not Old English?
It might be the first free jazz recording (totally unissued) of History of Music.
will we find at last that all
our starry Eden-worlds
were only travesties of what
here we lost--
or will we ever even know?
"it’s so soothing finding another chat gpt student essay. the calm that sweeps over me as i drink deep of the smoothly grammatical sentences containing no key term definition or evidence, in a voice unlike any 19 year-old ever, style and detail-less, an analgesic for the brain" --@dee_of_e
"And as the World upon her victims feeds
So She herself goes down the Way she leads.
For all her false allurements are the Threads
The Spider from her Entrail spins, and spreads
For Home and hunting-ground: And by and by
Darts at due Signal on the tangled Fly,
Seizes, dis-wings, and drains the Life, and leaves
The swinging Carcase, and forthwith re-weaves
Her Web: each Victim adding to the store
Of poison'd Entrail to entangle more.
And so She bloats in Glory: till one Day
The Master of the House, passing that way,
Perceives, and with one flourish of his Broom
Of Web and Fly and Spider clears the Room."
--FitzGerald's Attar
"Ashes denote that Fire was -
Revere the Grayest Pile
For the Departed Creature’s sake
That hovered here awhile -
Fire exists the first in light
And then consolidates
Only the Chemist can disclose
Into what Carbonates -"
—Emily Dickinson (via @timesflow)
"Maybe inspired by these records Brain, Jon and I fantasized about making a series of recordings based on an imaginary culture. (via The Progressive, Psychedelic, Krautrock & Jazz Music Official channel on Fb)
"A scribe's work writ awry and blurred,
Scrawled after the blind evensong--"
--Swinburne
instagrammaton
corrosive stillness
tireless cataloguing
of the newly dead
& where would i walk to
that the dust doesn't fall on me
from our constant jangle
under the giant's sole
to feel the tug of the tideghost
& have nothing to offer
not even in the scrambling
of my resistant wits
"Far off,
pink-colored herons
and the spent volcano."
"The area even has a Sizewell cafe, implying the sort of cash-in on some famous monument or attraction, only with said attraction being a dystopian-looking nuclear power plant rather than something more typically picturesque." (via @psychojography)
"When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes." --Auden
Live footage from Dabda Asia tour in October 2023.
Not quite underwater chromatic pulses.
"Through the blue Sahara of Substance
journeys a gray verse, a dromedary."
--Seiferle's Black Heralds
Discalced masses just for you.
"prized asteroid canister"
discalced masses just for you
enigma in deep space
enigma & paradigm
of bright sunlight on the dead grass
There is no such thing as an accident.
“Poem Ending in a Line by Ludlum”
An acrid edge to that far-fabled smell
I bring to mind, a knell from far away.
C'est Bruges-la-Morte: city i never saw
I sing today.
Dowson & Lojban emerge then turn as one
Upon a purple plain, strange heptagon
Remembered in all the ways it brings to pass
Poems beyond my ken at the time i made them.
The indigo star is a stone i carried back,
An acrid edge to that far-fabled smell
A knell from years before. “The smoothly tarred
Surface of the road abruptly stopped.”
(via)
"Some poets need to get into architecture cause US cities are all starting to look like the headquarters of a failed tech company" --@Harmony_Holiday
"Fool am I,
sad as I'm aloof."
--@Anthony_Etherin
"Defier of Gravity
Up is his down, · his easy path,
Down his downfall. · Death can win him
Through his own gorging, · this guest’s custom
When all unbidden · he breezes in
And loud, arrogant, · eats poor wretches
Out of house and home. · But heaped tables,
Meats in abundance, · manage no more
To ease his hunger · than empty ones,
And dinner over · he dies on the spot,
Or unappeased · prowls to the neighbors’,
Merry fellow, · for more glutting,
Then, dead or alive, · leaves his hosts
In the black, bankrupt, · brief though his stay was,
A monster, clearly, · missed by no one,
His rude arrival · rued and lamented.
How different, though, · when, duly met,
Calm and engaging, · he graces a room,
The loved center · of circled talk,
Fed, though not petted, · a peerless uniter.
At length, when left, · he lingers all night,
Dying, paling, · till people stir
And a breathed greeting · brings back his smile."
--Donald Mace Williams [fire]
"The Joycean Irish linguistic pungency protrudes through Firbank’s mental Frenchness."
fiendship
across icy banks
decant dint darkness
addicted · thin trickle
the bass fiddle · bad news
pillbug
necropsy · line
of the fude smoothly
crosses serrated lips
of glass
glare thumbed back · glom onto
gleeful clue on cliff walk
labyrinthine robot
rearing monkey's mirror
to be wit's wick lackmeet
"Somebody asked what the Old English word for a librarian was. Unfortunately no record of it survives, BUT Old English did have bōchord ‘book-hoard’ as a word for library, so can invent *bōcweard ‘book guardian’ by analogy. The same word, bókavörður, actually exists in Icelandic!" --@wylfcen
"I drank the violet shadows, drank the imprint of others, the accumulation of other hours, other rooms, other odors, other caresses." --@anaisninlovebot
❖.
steering fluid flareup
afflatus · blue ruin
as we pay tart portals
pared down from a clown act
corolla-gleam rumble
Michael Jackson on Fire Diorama.
"I considered myself a digital Pessoa influenced by Gramsci." (via Mefi)
"WON’T
One solid idyll,
a totem,
its tides:
a reign.
I was I & you,
—banal plan:
a buoy & I sawing.
I erased its time totally.
Did I lose?
Not now."
--@MerlinaAcevedo
" 'And I don't get the train that goes back, made up ever before 3 a. m. ; while the pull-out on same is set for 5 ; and the porridge in the electric cooker in my bachelor shack at Slagville Heights Crossing is set for 6. Satisfied now, Lacy-Drawers?'
'Plenty, Shuttlecock,' conceded Kel. 'When the great and only choo-choo-shifter of this great transcontynental line--the Tippingdale and Slagville!--gives me the 24-carat lowdown, I am satisfied!' " --Murder in the Mills
"Effective Public Speaking (palindrome)
Dogs are drowsy.
Be more lurid, rawer,
a lion in words droll...
'At Rome, rut, pace, race.
We kill like we care.
Capture.
Mortal lords drown in oil!'
A reward:
I rule Rome by sword,
era’s god."
--@SpoonerRhythms
"Some evenings, when the weather is damp--and I happen to be upstairs in my room, which looks out, as I think I told you oce, some eight feet or so above the roof of this porch--and consequently above the top of that fence yonder--I gaze over there into the mills at those three strands of wire--going out of the plant across the east fence--and all surrounded with that peculiar blue haze--and I can't help but think of them as three strands of death." --Murder in the Mills
Favorite poems to teach new writers about line?
"If work is the Vietnam War, our homes are now Cambodia under secret bombardment." --Justin Smith-Ruiu
"a wet road
flowing into sky at the top
of the hill
twin lights appear to descend
a friend is coming to visit"
--Jane Reichhold
"Not even death could put a stop to his photobombing of Keats’s life."
"At first I didn’t take the situation seriously, but it didn’t fucking go away for weeks."
"From a Full Heart
In days of peace my fellow-men
Rightly regarded me as more like
A Bishop than a Major-Gen.,
And nothing since has made me warlike;
But when this age-long struggle ends
And I have seen the Allies dish up
The goose of Hindenburg—oh, friends!
I shall out-bish the mildest Bishop.
When the War is over and the Kaiser's out of print,
I'm going to buy some tortoises and watch the beggars sprint;
When the War is over and the sword at last we sheathe,
I'm going to keep a jelly-fish and listen to it breathe.
I never really longed for gore,
And any taste for red corpuscles
That lingered with me left before
The German troops had entered Brussels.
In early days the Colonel’s 'Shun!'
Froze me; and, as the War grew older,
The noise of someone else's gun
Left me considerably colder.
When the War is over and the battle has been won,
I'm going to buy a barnacle and take it for a run;
When the War is over and the German Fleet we sink,
I'm going to keep a silk-worm's egg and listen to it think.
The Captains and the Kings depart—
It may be so, but not lieutenants;
Dawn after weary dawn I start
The never-ending round of penance;
One rock amid the welter stands
On which my gaze is fixed intently—
An after-life in quiet hands
Lived very lazily and gently.
When the War is over and we've done the Belgians proud,
I'm going to keep a chrysalis and read to it aloud;
When the War is over and we've finished up the show,
I'm going to plant a lemon-pip and listen to it grow.
Oh, I'm tired of the noise and the turmoil of battle
And I'm even upset by the lowing of cattle,
And the clang of' the bluebells is death to my liver,
And the roar of the dandelion gives me a shiver,
And a glacier, in movement, is much too exciting,
And I'm nervous, when standing on one, of alighting—
Give me Peace; that is all, that is all that I seek…
Say, starting on Saturday week."
—A.A. Milne on Behind their Lines blog (via @amjuster)
"My son asked me whether,
when we return to Gaza,
I could get him a puppy.
I said, 'I will, if we can find any.' "
--@MosabAbuToha
A sunlit corridor inside an abandoned industrial bakery in Buffalo, New York.
“An honorable human relationship – that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word 'love' – is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”
― Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (via @gpl_writes via @lapsuslima)
"Shine, Perishing Republic
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass
hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and
home to the mother.
You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or
suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center;
corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the
mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable
master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught–they say–God, when he walked
on earth."
--Robinson Jeffers
1.
buried
by a bomb blast
still alive & sending
from under the rubble the street
address
2.
genocide buried in the back pages
ongoing · no new developments
America showed them how
3.
ice left
in the shaded
places · pale cerulean
interrupted drive · i ponder
detours
4.
all things are signs · cluster
of mistletoe in the bare trees
bright blur stabbing
gas has gone up twenty cents
since yesterday
those others were the better gloves
"Or like to Children after Bubbles run
That still elude your Fingers; or, if won,
Burst in Derision at your Touch; all thin
Glitter without, and empty Wind within."
--FitzGerald's Attar
"Since Old English had no word for an armadillo, what word should we create?"
"After the last undomesticated stretch of land is brought to heel, there will only be old records — rolls of film, computer printouts, books — of these lost immensities of nature...And the naturalist will become an orphan, a dealer in myths." ~Barry Lopez (via @EFrost_Wildwood via @ae_stallings)
Schneider Portable Television with Tulip base.
"the flame"
wreak the parade sickly
rotate jobs & lobsters
fadge solider soldier
semi-frozen limbec
a sphere's anxious sphinxquiz
phosphoric tinged vortex
reports of my passing · pylon shadow
gibberish-led leylines
GM👾.
"It moves me to see,
Burning above the mooring poles,
Fireflies
For I could cry out loud
At this world of ours."
--Minamoto no Toshiyori [aka Shunrai]
The Great Hipster Mystery (a listicle).
"Based on words like tungolġimm ('star-gem': a star) and næhthelm ('night-helm': the overarching night sky), we can make a new word: ġimhelm ‘gem-helm’, meaning a helmet studded with gems or a night sky full of stars..." --@wylfcen
"To be FORFOUGHTEN is to be worn down by fatigue or constant struggle." --@HaggardHawks
"For My Daughter
Looking into my daughter’s eyes I read
Beneath the innocence of morning flesh
Concealed, hintings of death she does not heed.
Coldest of winds have blown this hair, and mesh
Of seaweed snarled these miniatures of hands;
The night’s slow poison, tolerant and bland,
Has moved her blood. Parched years that I have seen
That may be hers appear: foul, lingering
Death in certain war, the slim legs green.
Or, fed on hate, she relishes the sting
Of others’ agony; perhaps the cruel
Bride of a syphilitic or a fool.
These speculations sour in the sun.
I have no daughter. I desire none."
--Weldon Kees
From the Jack Johnson Sessions. (via Mefi)
Every Decision You Make Creates A New Universe.
"Your shadow
on the page
the poem."
— Cid Corman (via @Isidro_Li)
"Be the elephant you wish to see in the room." --@EverySongIveEve
The rain washes the people off the streets.
"MAGA: We need to run the country based on the Bible
Leviticus 19:34: 'The foreigner who resides with you must be to you like a native citizen among you; so you must love him as yourself.'
MAGA: Not that part
Deut 27:19: 'Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner.'
MAGA: Or that part"
--@QasimRashid on Mastodon
"BOÖTES VOID (Palindrome)
Pure, vocalic nets I radar:
I fill a sure vowel, Boötes’ umlaut.
I rip, say, a radio;
vanish;
taper a web;
beware paths in a void...."
--@Anthony_Etherin
Darwish translations. (book)
"bird alights on a nodding stoplight"
snag · an eerie snoring
snack food a yare mood-clyte
ragged claws a clog wears
cloud among plain hungers
umbrageous woe · brow-score
abruptly worn gumption
gumshoe clueless to claim my guerdon
drowse in the wrong drivethrough
"Since ‘tide’ used to mean time, and ‘ghost’ used to mean a spirit, *tīdgāst would be an exact Old English equivalent to ‘Zeitgeist’. So it's just a historical accident that we say ‘Zeitgeist’ or ‘the spirit of the time’ instead of ‘the tide-ghost’." --@wylfcen
4000 of My Closest Friends. (via Mefi)
Friendly reminder that osama bin laden had this image saved on his hard drive.
"The suitcase was very much like some humans, she reflected, apparently decorous and dignified outside--yet inside--paperoid!" --@HarrySKeeler
snag · geason
never random
munch has scoot
twyborn nestling
ginormous
spraint · teeming glaze
ensue erst
terroir roster
ruinous
🌈🌈.
"Here be Monsters (palindrome)
No deep siren, I ram —
Art lunar, eveless even.
I ram busy swordfish-tail ogres,
old loser Goliaths if drowsy.
Submarine vessel,
ever an ultramariner,
I speed on."
--@SpoonerRhythms
Octa.
"Stretching out before me was a broken plain, fantastic and irregular a[s] the floor of a glacier; huge bluish white masses, piled and tumbled together in crazy disorder, were varied by smooth glistening spaces as flat as a table; twenty-foot mounds and hummocks stood up here and there, and long twisted furrows or cracks spread a spidery black network across the scene; while the prevailing hue, in the wintry gray light of the far, far glittering pint of a sun, was that eerie, spectral mixture of blue and white, reminding me of the cloud-filtered moonlight peeping down upon a lake of ice." --Stanton Coblentz, Into Plutonian Depths (1931)
