"holiday but not for me"
turmeric days · downloading loss
my shorn shadow · in dark shivers
brittle story · of a bruised stilb
briny desires · snowing softly
at dusk down · the deserted lanes
"actually the correct way to destroy art is to destroy children who might grow up to make it, the schools where they might learn it and the institutions where it might be shown" --@peterdkmitchell
"love reading about quantum physics because it makes German idealism seem sensible in comparison" --@cominsitu
"Homewards runs heart-path, · of holm singing,
song of one soul-worn, · summoning land,
land with lake-pools · luscious in summer;
its summers soft, · the Sun shielded,
by shield-cloud’s shine-care. · Shade leaf-mothered,
from leaves’ low-roof, · loves the hedgerows.
Hedges hustle, · and hold as wards
ward-worthy wheatfields. · From wheels on railway,
raillery racket, · row ear-charming,
in our ears augurs · ale-towns rune-rich,
by runish wrights · once raised mighty,
might-skill’s memory. · With mood lifted,
lift I lag-foot, · launching homewards."
--Thaliarchus
"The thread that dangles us..."
"to meet halfway"
awake as the light wanes
that stern tapering
whisper targum
a peace oft reprised
while other battles burgeoned
in the poor body
this mere message
she heard, he heard, harrowing
to meet halfway
"...the orb I sought
To serve, those glimpses came of Fomalhaut..."
--Sordello
"Strongly feel we are entering a renewed and more explicit style of reaction—not new, old in many respects—where 'psychological' safety will be harnessed and deployed across the board as a pretense of the state for all kinds of heinous ends." --@re_colston
"Wodwo
What am I? Nosing here, turning leaves over
Following a faint stain on the air to the river's edge
I enter water. Who am I to split
The glassy grain of water looking upward I see the bed
Of the river above me upside down very clear
What am I doing here in mid-air? Why do I find
this frog so interesting as I inspect its most secret
interior and make it my own? Do these weeds
know me and name me to each other have they
seen me before do I fit in their world? I seem
separate from the ground and not rooted but dropped
out of nothing casually I've no threads
fastening me to anything I can go anywhere
I seem to have been given the freedom
of this place what am I then? And picking
bits of bark off this rotten stump gives me
no pleasure and it's no use so why do I do it
me and doing that have coincided very queerly
But what shall I be called am I the first
have I an owner what shape am I what
shape am I am I huge if I go
to the end on this way past these trees and past these trees
till I get tired that's touching one wall of me
for the moment if I sit still how everything
stops to watch me I suppose I am the exact centre
but there's all this what is it roots
roots roots roots and here's the water
again very queer but I'll go on looking"
--Ted Hughes
"The Hawk in the Rain
I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up
Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth’s mouth,
From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle
With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk
Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,
Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air.
While banging wind kills these stubborn hedges,
Thumbs my eyes, throws my breath, tackles my heart,
And rain hacks my head to the bone, the hawk hangs
The diamond point of will that polestars
The sea drowner’s endurance: and I,
Bloodily grabbed dazed last-moment-counting
Morsel in the earth’s mouth, strain towards the master-
Fulcrum of violence where the hawk hangs still,
That maybe in his own time meets the weather
Coming from the wrong way, suffers the air, hurled upside down,
Fall from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him,
The horizon traps him; the round angelic eye
Smashed, mix his heart’s blood with the mire of the land."
--Ted Hughes
"Have you ever wondered what the Anglo-Saxons would say if they were Muslims?
" 'Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.'
I keep thinking about that line from Dune (the book) lately" --@funkentechno
"The actuality is stranger..."
"Verse, slow, moves lovers." --@Anthony_Etherin
mutterings that seem
unrelated to the fine
waft of a drizzle
"We eat the smile/ And spit out the teeth."
"corsair & argonaut"
mere moments remember · cascade
of icicled entities · early on
you learn to let · lost things lie
while actively aborting · bothersome thoughts
as well as wielding · new shopworn notions
the shock of a shift · into blazing oblivion
sends your senses · the vivid assertion
of names you never · knew, that will anneal
themselves as songs · swift keys to your coded swarm
“ 'The Babylonian cities were each modeled on a constellation: Niniveh on Ursa Major, Sippar on Cancer, Assur on Arcturus, Babylon on Cetus-Aries. The Han capital of Ch’ang-an was laid out in the pattern of the Big and Little Dippers combined…'
I dream of constellated cities." --@schweben_weben
Today I learned poker players weren’t the first gamblers to wear sunglasses.
"I bet octopuses think bones are horrific.
I bet all their cosmic horror stories involve rigid-limbs and hinged joints." --@CryptoNature
"the paperclip factory"
it fell along the way
as things to gravity's sway
along the way it fell
& nothing since goes well
the way it fell along
like voices in a song
along it fell the way
lost, lost in the fray
the way along it fell
the light like a ringing bell
it fell the way along
with what did not belong
& this is just to say
it fell, along the way
"Sleipnir's playlist"
bosk of orange · barricades delved
Wagner a vine · this venture drapes
gray granite · to grind my knuckles on
no next chamber · achieved in the move
i lift books lessened · by the lore therein
& wonder what words · on the wind scattered bring
"dunes of the Solar System"
no-deal Ramadan
sands run that are lives
sackcloth denizen
observe on the moon's mazard
can barely discern bodies
nor bothered more
than ichneumons that natter
in the doorway wasteful
of nog's witness
World Minority Script Writing Contest.
"jonoj"
nightcavalry overture
chastened lives collect
run with thieves' candles
Over almost 4 years as a licensed Thames mudlark, I have assembled a large collection of buttons.
reading a blank book
by the light of elapsed suns
senses alerted
staircase for shallow steps
these blurs meant something before
Fall of the House of Usher 1928. ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Time-Lapse Of Four Large Exoplanets.
"bad car photo"
vanished elects
a shelved insect
svelte echidnas
evident clashes
chastened veils
Caligari 1962. ☆ ☆ ☆
"The Cerberus four times
a day rattles his padlock, opening
and shutting our sternums, in winks
we understand perfectly."
--Smith's Trilce
"Everything looks sturdy, thick, armored and unbreakable, even the sweaters."
"the/ monkish specialist/ a red-hot// the first/ theologian" --A Humument
"deformed pill"
stringent regime strumming
stormfront in a shindig
the hedge maze a smidgen
much as i stand touching
bright lychgate allotted
alone to whist phonecalls
& this is the price · a proof asks
where the sun remains unrisen
"No middle way out of the waste land?"
"presentation"
lychgate opened leaping
along sheer high mirrors
poll-parrotting steelyard
in the poured sponge dungeon
torrential sparse ransom
no ruse but gray oozing
moonglade loan has led me
lychgate-through & twitching
"Obsessions are the most durable form of intellectual capital."
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (via @EverySongIveEve via @mckenziewark)
"woofus at bay"
sojouner descend · the song corridor
undertunnel teem
after an ailing · absence back
in this strange structure · i construe mildly
fanged ferry & shore
"Doctors used to prescribe bandages soaked in human fat to heal wounds. Rubbing fat onto the skin was also believed to treat gout. Burning candles made of human fat, called 'thieves' candles', were believed to protect thieves from detection." --@SaCha1689
"When Burgess met Borges they chatted in Anglo-Saxon." --Martin Amis
Good article on "EdTech griftopia".
"ylem moly"
ichneumon twilight twinges
the weight of honey on warped
toast wobbles it
thinnest crescent
birdtweet
biting cold
doors & gates & duckfences
the long shadows linger
in the last days
"FOR THE OLDER POEMS (Aelindrome in the Square Root of 2 to 20 digits)
14142135623730950488
The art,
a losing sun,
as she emerges,
only a swan
to her suffering,
may be dark
as turns of sky.
Do seas turn
so dark, maybe,
suffering her
as wantonly?
So, emerge as she —
sung in a lost heart."
--@Anthony_Etherin
"Some kind of impermanence, some kind of insolvability."
"why are you pondering glass, you should be pondering tungsten" --@allgebrah
"Another wonderfully specific Old English word: ȳðlāf, the stretch of shore left bare by a wave when it recedes, before another wave comes and reclaims it for the sea. From ȳþ ‘wave’ + lāf ‘relic’." --@wylfcen
"spectrocosm"
nature fakers filched this
filigreed sand needle
bright overcast airt where
otchkies dive conniving
"Within the place unmanifest
Where central truth is immanent,
Lies there a vast, entire content
Of sound and movement one in rest.
I know not this. Yet in my heart,
I feel that where all truths concur,
The shrine is peaceless with the stir
Of winds that enter and depart."
--Clark Ashton Smith (via @Isidro_Li)
Song of a Man Who Has Come Through.
"The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of it's ugly side." - James Baldwin (via @unemployedneg)
"...He'd begun
the well-greased progress of the hypocrite.
Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it."
--Byrne
"THE PLAINS (Aelindrome in the Square Root of 3 to 18 digits)
173205080756887729
Hazy heat wallowed.
Beasts had owed the plains
time’s pantomime:
crows begging the moon;
sins adoring sins.
A moon singing,
the crows began to mime.
Time’s plains
wed the past,
shadowed
below
a lazy heath."
--@Anthony_Etherin
"Adamant nights in which our wisest apes
Met on a cracked mud terrace not yet Ur
And with presumption more than amateur
Stared the random starlight into shapes."
--James Merrill
"No call of the harp
shall waken warriors · after their battles;
but the black raven · shall boast to the eagle,
crowing how finely · he fed on the fated
when, with the wolf, · he went rending the slain."
--Sullivan & Murphy's Beowulf
