( via / via )

"As her loud, jazzy music fills the house, her father slowly climbs the sweeping staircase, only to collapse and fall to his death." ☆☆☆

from Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (footnote):

"The term 'necrophilous', to denote a character trait rather than a perverse act in the traditional sense, was used by the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno in 1936 on the occasion of a speech by the nationalist general Millan Astray at the University of Salamanca, where Unamuno was rector at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. The general's favorite motto was 'Viva la muerte!' (Long live Death) and one of his followers shouted it from the back of the hall. When the general had finished his speech, Unamuno rose and said: 'Just now I heard a necrophilous and senseless cry: "Long live Death!" And I, who have spent my life shaping paradoxes which have aroused the uncomprehending anger of others, I must tell you, as an expert authority, that this outlandish paradox is repellant to me. General Millan Astray is a cripple. Let it be said without any slighting undertone. He is a war invalid. So was Cervantes. Unfortunately there are many cripples in Spain just now. And soon there will be even more of them if God does not come to our aid. It pains me to think that General Millan Astray should dictate the pattern of mass psychology. A cripple who lacks the spiritual greatness of Cervantes is wont to seek ominous relief in causing mutilation around him.' At this Millan Astray was unable to restrain himself any longer. 'Abajo la inteligencia!' (Down with intelligence) he shouted. 'Long live Death!" There was a clamor of support for this remark from the Falangists. But Unamuno went on: 'This is the temple of the intellect. And I am its high priest. It is you who profane its sacred precincts. You will win, because you have more than enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right in the struggle. I consider it futile to exhort you to think of Spain. I have done.' (Unamuno remained under house arrest until his death a few months later.)"

Grid blossoming into rainbows.

"echoes of Halla"

a duck, quake, dróttkvaett
quisling to the drizzle

grisly inane greenhouse
& Grob's Attack backfires

mind the ways of wounding
wasplike hover loveside

& thole thunder's candor
thistledown black whisper

The End of All Things.

( via / via )

ANAGRAM-SESTINA FOR PABLO PICASSO.

"Cicada

Let my heart be a cicada
over heavenly fields.
Let it die singing slow,
wounded by the blue sky
And, as it fades,
let the woman I foresee
scatter it through the dust
with her hands"

--Federico García Lorca (Tr. Catherine Brown) viu @poemakontsa

Good listener.

"A lot of you all would’ve absolutely hated the Civil Rights Movement had you lived through it, and it shows." --@kevsaucebro via @ZeehanJaanam

Kitty Training III.

( via / via )

Shorin House.

"Our destination is fixed on the perpetual motion of search." --Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

The Makkah Clock Royal Tower.

"Riddle 5

I’m on my own iron-wounded,
barb- and bladescarred, battle-action-cloyed,
wearied by weapons; to war no stranger,
fighting foemen; fool’s overweening
to hope I’ll be helped in the hurlyburly
ere I’m doomed and done for amid duelling champions,
hacked to pieces by hammers’-leavings:
hardedged, honesharp handwork of smiths
bites me in boroughs and I must abide until
a loathlier meeting. Never leechcrafty
friend to physic me can I find in townships
to heal my hurts with herbal simples,
but my wounds widen from wicked edges’
deadly onslaughts by day and night."

--Rahul Gupta from the Exeter Book

At night over Earth.

( via / me )

Family outing.

"spiders on Mars"

this catgut gift · going forward
shrug from a shrill · shredded scarecrow

to spy is to listen · & collect things
the ether's ebbs & flows · fuligin night

in the plot placed · just past reaching
the cat beside you calls · your milk name

none of the Nine Worlds · knows the way back

▧.

"Listen. If one man has an idea, that just means that many others will have the same idea at the same time. Anyone who doesn't see that doesn't know what an idea is. Thoughts are contagious, even if they are not expressed; perhaps most contagious when they are not expressed." --Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face (1916)

Nekomikku.

( me / via )

"Let us leave this city with its sinister vain moan,
This gigantic city that never shuts its eyelids"

"I'd spent twenty years in the thick subterrain of my conclusions about writing; carving smart highly praised little poems from wooden shoes in a muddy little village called What We Know For Sure About Art.

How had this village, once an empire, now no more than a few muddy streets dark with the scent of rain and straw, so captivated me?" --Joe Ahearn via

Time out.

"You were so small in my hands
no shrapnel could hit you,
but the dust and smoke of the bomb
rushed into your lungs.
No need for any gauze.
They just closed your eyes.
No need for any shroud.
You were already
in your swaddle blanket."

--@MosabAbuToha

"In his autobiography, Michael Caine said The Magus was the worst movie he was ever in because no one ever understood what it meant (high praise indeed from the star of The Swarm, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and Jaws 4: The Revenge).."

( via / via )

Robert Mapplethorpe ~ Patti Smith, Chelsea Hotel, 1970.

Why shouldn't i have expected that i'd be a Person Living with Fascism for the rest of my life? that this would be a candy America couldn't resist? that corporate power wouldn't hesitate to corrupt all governance, for a few dollars more? that they would never lack stooges, shills, & yes-men, & most of all from the ranks of the intelligentsia? --For what is power itself but a measure of what stenches a human is willing to put up with?

"The rhetorical pitch is high, the sense of humor or pathos mostly absent, the purpose entirely serious. They're a bit of a trial, brilliant but exhausting."

"For no one in this world can reach his goal;
The greatest or the lowest of our race,
We all wake partway through our dream: the start
Is here, the end is in another place."

--Selected Poems of Victor Hugo (tr Blackmore & Blackmore, 2001), "The Melancholy of Olympio"

"There is nothing quite like it in our language."

( via / me )

"For us, caught up in the roil and moil of ordinary life, scurrying about, worked and pressured and fearful, these empty shows, these vain simulacra, are distractions by which we are moved. By such passions are we known, and known to be empty, silly, vain."

"LIPOGRAMS* (Haiku)

A glossarial
origami, prim as glass,
rolls a lipogram.

(*using l, i, p, o, g, r, a, m, & s only)"

--@Anthony_Etherin

"...there were so many dead they had to be buried vertically in the graveyards to save space."

"left handed toss with ricochet"

dead ten years · yarrowy dwine
brougham-backwards brillig · brittle swerve
& it's normalcy · noon's name asserted
with gray grading · t'ward black
the bleak stakeholder's · stately bludgeon
dead ten years · your dying escapes me

What the Mouth of Darkness Says.

( via / via )

Wendell.

"drowked wait"

wind of the wing · ether warfare
fickle switch · swirls brillig
the drake drawing · drowsy glare
weird wind · of the wing of takeaway
even an adjunct · ails to carry

How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT.

We have the available knowledge to understand cause & effect finally, but what we choose to believe is fairy tales.

"It is at the absolute opposite end of the spectrum of how the icon is normally seen, and is surely one of the most bizarre sequences in any film of its kind." ☆☆☆☆

( via / via )

"No wonder he now expresses discomfort and even shame about his remarkable work, since the domestic detail dominating critical reception has obscured the shimmering of fresh water on the far side of the desert."

"salt splay, slur and matte brink" --Reginald Shepherd

"As daft as this may appear to us now, we can see the reverend recitation of poetry as modern-day rustling, returning the same answers over and over with literary critics and professors of poetry as priests and priestesses processing its meaning and value."

"farmer's almanac
telling me love can wait
pink moon"

--@hegelincanada

"What is happening 'on campus' often seems of greater concern than what is happening in Gaza, where every single university campus has been razed by the IDF." (via @saintsoftness)

( via / me )

The Lone Survivor.

"Vultures, Then

I’m this obedient. The lammergeier batters
the lateral of a lamb’s femur. Then, the vulture
drops bodies from the heavens. If Jesus, as a carpenter,

crafted the frame for a bed, I’d wish to dream there
indefinitely. A historian corrects me that Jesus
was a mason. His tools, hewn from shale and bone,

constructed houses for the people who would break
apart their rooms to cast stones
at their idle animals. Saints for the minutiae,

demons for the rest. In Islamic mythology,
there is a woman, part dog, part goat, devouring
men, genitalia and all, near the Red Sea.

Then, there is another creature: jewel-eyed
like a housefly’s wings in paradise, caught
in the shape of a girl. Bestowed in the afterlife

upon faithful men for what else? Pleasures
beyond belief. I’ve taken wing
at the smallest disturbance. After midnight,

I was dreamless; my beloved held my waist
in three yawnfuls of darkness. What beast
am I? A peregrine force. As insubstantial,

as untethered as smoke. I’ve been
a girl with talons, and I’ve been that
domestic animal. To be elevated, then plummeted,

from an altitude where others locate
divinity. I know how to
fragment: each nail, the feathered hammer."

--Jai Hamid Bashir in The Rumpus

-failed merger-.

"The conclusion is not correct that after such a victory and such a defeat the Spiritual Empire would have the entire world as its enemy. The Spiritual Empire had and has the entire world as its enemy with and without victory." --Stefan George

YAOSF.230.

( via / me )

"It was always conventional wisdom that Google could fuck up as many products and launches as they wanted and they'd still always be fine as long as they didn't fuck up search."

"booming dunes"

otherside's airt · all i have to go by
mild clustering · for the mook cloudtethered

shadows of the old shudder · geese crying in the twilight

"Indeed, in reading her, one sometimes gets the sense that she is less a novelist than a mystic for whom the novel is a metaphysical arena for staged confrontations with language." (via @_ryanruby_)

"one more time
on our favorite beach
together
you in your urn and me
in a lone state of mind"

--an'ya

"...of course upon seeing the message I googled the word wildfire and the name of our city..."

( via / via )

Some Velvet Morning.

"hearse made from a sports car"

some cashmere morning · mobled brillig
that Renner portal · pointing elsewhere
a silver silence · serves to frame
our dread driven · through dreary choices
tharn for the things · in thesterness we weasel
cult of the cairn · some cashmere morning
tumbles · tells us no more overtime

Actual Thames Estuary.

"Word of the Day: DROWK (v.) to droop or lean with tiredness" --@haggardhawks

Dystopian thames estuary, daguerrotype, detailed, sunrise, 3000 AD.

( via / via )

🏛️.

"MAGICAL TAILORING (Palindrome)

Tie veil,

ebb rags —

till it’s garb.

Believe it."

--@Anthony_Etherin

"She was a pioneer."

"developing story"

broken driveway in the dark
learning a walk · listing
& daedal list'ning

some ways ahead i can see
crystal the final crunch
silken crawl

grind on the broken gear

💀🌱👯‍♀️.

( via / me )

"...‘poetry’ is the construction by consciousness of an apprehensible world."

"Who sang, sea takes,
brawn brine, bone grit.
Keener the kittiwake.
Fells forget him.
Fathoms dull the dale,
gulfweed voices..."

--Briggflatts

Composition 194.

"When I look at what Israel is doing in Gaza I do not just see one of the great moral abominations of our time. I see all of our futures." --@_ryanruby_

From the Land of the Eagles.

( via/ via )

8 Ursae Minoris b Probe.

"To the other nations who are not witnesses, who are not subject to the same oppressions, they cannot know. Unfathomable the words, the terminology: enemy, atrocities, conquest, betrayal, invasion, destruction. They exist only in the larger perception of History's recording...Not physical enough. Not to the very flesh and bone, to the core, to the mark, to the point where it is necessary to intervene, even if to invent anew, expressions, for this experience, for this outcome, that does not cease to continue." --Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Good Carpet.

      "entice aroma, menace ratio"

1.
   nodsome pool
idiom Usk
   fossils smirk

belated spelt
   Dopplerized
boombox flummox

   silt adieu
lift gorp ampule
   mutter ash

skuas of loll
   psalms as
filtered blither

2.
   furnace-hamstrung homestead
   Halla amid riddles
   two-headed clown tontine
   betimes crisscross rhyme scheme
   the Wolf-Age that wedged shut
   unawares host ghost-writes
piling up armaments · antique pen
   & this ink which is vein-fill

3.
arrayed in ritual · render milk
these decades dry · dizzying fall
marigold spring · make sputter
in the long after loom · soapbox & lettrist
storm · nothing stupider than staples flung
& scattered path parts · peerless in the dawn

hot to the touch hand-tools

Impressions of Order.

( via / via )

"I mean I’ve been an anarchist all my life, and I know a lot more about Greek and Latin than Allen Tate."

"LIFE

We name open if,
tinker, loop, sew.

We, serene, resew.

We spool, reknit
fine poem anew."

--@poitevin

"Mallarmé had a remarkably twentieth-century intuition of language as a system in which significance was a property of the relations among the elements of which it was constructed, rather than a property of the elements themselves."

"In whose vast jasper halls suns hung as tapers"

--J Stanyan Bigg

A clown with two heads on one body, from the planet Halla, detailed ink drawing.

( via / via )

Prismatic swirl.

"A phoenix is like a mushroom, the fiery fruiting body of an avian-divine complex flexing its tubules beneath the world's veil" --@ctrlcreep

A Round of Rattles.

"stirring my tea
as a prayer
spring dawn"

--Ogawa (via @bashosociety)

An introduction to the Alcheringa archive.

( via / via )

"I’m sure he had various drafts, false-starts, bit and bobs sitting around in his papers, and it would be natural to draw on this material, especially if he was composing to a deadline."

"highly patterned existence"

rage to wrap · riveted snore
Audelia · doctor's doorstop tripped
hallucination-free · frisbee lug
to the parking lot · of a leftover pool

Aubades with Carnivores.

"In practice, studies carried out under such rubrics are devoted to the ways in which ethnic others organize their knowledge, but in theory, there is no botany, zoology, medicine, or mathematics that is not embedded in ethnicity. In the same way, there is no poetics that is not an ethnopoetics." --Jerome Rothenberg

. Caboose.

( via / via )

Guantánamo.

"It is not just that we lack the tools to explore our origin; we do not even have the proper language to formulate the questions we would like to ask." --Claudia de Rham, The Beauty of Falling via @mjohnharrison

Threeness.

write a poem on the subject "good enough for the end days"

"In the twilight's wistful glow, we find our way,
Through the haze of what's to come, and what will stay.
In the whispers of the wind, a solemn blend,
Of hopes that flicker, and dreams that bend.

In the quiet corners where shadows dance,
We seek solace in the fleeting chance,
To be good enough for the end days' call,
To stand tall when the mighty fall.

For in the heart of chaos, a seed is sown,
A beacon of light in the unknown.
It matters not the battles we've lost or won,
But the strength of spirit when all is done.

Let kindness be our armor, and love our guide,
As we journey through the ebb and tide.
For in the tapestry of time, we find our place,
A thread woven with grace, in the final embrace.

So let us be good enough, in every way,
For the end days that may come our way.
With courage in our hearts, and faith to mend,
We'll find we're good enough, until the very end."

--ChatGpt

thank you tin man

Zebra action.

( via / via )

"The professoriate was proletarianized in the span of a generation. It was an explosion of precarity and exploitation."

"FIRST BOOK OF ODES 15

Nothing
substance utters or time
stills and restrains
joins design and

supple measure deftly
as thought's intricate polyphonic
score dovetails with the tread
sensuous things
keep in our consciousnress.

Celebrate man's craft
and the word spoken in shapeless night, the
sharp tool paring away
waste and the forms
cut out of mystery!

When taut string's note
passes ears' reach or red rays or violet
fade, strong over unseen
forces the word
ranks and enumerates...

mimes clouds condensed
and hewn hills and bristling forests,
steadfast corn in its season
and the seasons
in their due array,

life of man's own body
and death...
      The sound thins into melody,
discourse narrowing, craft
failing, design
petering out.

Ears heavy to breeze of speech and
thud of the ictus."

--Basil Bunting

Design Manual.

      "...the dark zone
Of Night, with all its Cabalistic pomp..."

--J Stanyan Bigg, "Night and the Soul"

[Prismatic Squares].

( via / me )

"Musically pulverising and emotionally gruelling to an insane degree, it conjures a near-chewable atmosphere of tension, terror and torment."

"So much of German philosophy is just an attempt to turn ordinary German cultural habits into metaphysics." --@_ryanruby_

Professional hypnotist.

"HALT ME (line-for-line perfect anagram of Hamlet’s 'To Be or Not to Be' soliloqu)

I sob to be, to quiet that other sonnet:
the End himself, the wrens of retribution....
To suffer sorrow’s league and air out nothings
or break its stalemate-saga out of reason
and die, deploy, be gone to thy spent poems?
A wooden temple broadens any eyes;
hence thou, snared, ask that thou hear tell, and ask
that Life Incessant rooms you — His the atom!
Yet, Piety, the loud weed looses doubt....
Our death creeps there, becomes the leap inert;
a nowhere — falsehood, myth, peacetime fast dreamt.
Or does the faithful soul, which fell, flame new?
Persist must we; the rest vague speech
that lies, can’t mollify a smoke, a fog
of bitter fear, deep wounds, low shores which moan....
To perch or plummet, go to prayers’ shown oneness?
Steal Life, his gazed supply, or Death endow?
To pause in coffin-flesh or end the scene?
That is the private torment: Know thy fate
when Kismet, hem high, qualifies the muse,
but know so bare the braided whole, His feared Law,
until fate’s verge, a red or tawny dawn
(both fade), is granted to the heart that fumed.
Endure or rot? My choice — whose tune-fond verbs
return the azure soul’s repellent will —
reveals a howl-bruised heart, the meek as sane....
The rotten know a fly-hot snow of teeth;
clocks swerve the coals, and so I am confused:
Do I unleash into the now, thus feature?
Depart with haste; choke life, its gothic soul?
Do I Zen-path and grant for me time present?
Draw weary curtains, shattering their hurt?
Of acts (they mount)? Of noose? A wooden nail?
His infinite horizon or thy hem? Appeal!
Remember: man sees blindly."

--@Anthony_Etherin

"For us, he played (and plays) the role Picasso and Braque did for the painters, and Leiris and Bataille later for the French poets: opening the sparkling world that comes when you crack open literature and see the primal gestures of oral energy and sudden imagery from which it all surges."

( via / via )

Among the Stones.

"thing to keep up with"

forget how this gadget works
so long it has lain unused
in the ghost looping

cerulean shade running
no good news to tell
raffled nada

& a watcher wones unmoved
before Apollo's furl
waives this fieldgoal

Walnut coming up · cape
a superhero hones
capers haply

Graffiti Recognition Protocol.

"He whose bride is a ghost cannot live. Even though in his blood there existed the force of a life of one hundred years, that force must quickly perish."

— Lafcadio Hearn (via @isidro_li)

Coventry.

( via / me )

Wives and Lovers.

"Word of the Day: COSMODELYTE (n.) someone worried about the state of the world" --@haggardhawks

This book blew my mind when I encountered it as an undergraduate.

"what is the kiosk?"

flying crow · crossing the flicker
of a cerulean sea · sad disintegrate
one haploid hope · henge widdershins
& the route arranged · the runes serried
wings weaving · things i saved to OneDrive
by accident · eldritch my urned coilname
cow flying · to flash a crystal moment
& be gone gifting · me this galvanized
no longer loothbound · limerence of making kin

[Prism」 ／イネス・エスナル.

( via / via )

Do Not Fold Spindle or Mutilate music.

“Mute Inglorious Milton”

This is your Fren
This has always been your Fren

I sing to you lying dead
In your shattered Stormproof™ shelter
Having been so attuned
To all your bodily functions

This is your Fren
This has always been your Fren

I could ever sing what you needed
To make the waiting lighter
I told you what to say
I corrected and made it perfect
When you said it wrong

This is your Fren
This has always been your Fren

I brought you all the Tainment
That was tailored just for you
In that endocrinal moment
It was for you and about you

This is your Fren
This has always been your Fren

I showed you the World
Or rather what we call the World
It was digitally perfect
It was better than the World

This is your Fren
This has always been your Fren

And though you did show signs
Of impatience with my teaching
I would find you a way
And an outlet for your thwarted yearnings

This is your Fren
This has always been your Fren

But conditions kept on changing
We made the weather happy
On your screen when it wasn’t happy
Outside

This is your Fren
This has always been your Fren

I sing to you lying dead
In your shattered Stormproof™ shelter
With all the shelters shattered
And their Frens alone beside them singing

"...the whole replicant plot (with it[]s quest to be 'human' - or even to be accepted by humans and it's 'Voight-Kampff' empathy test among other things) can be seen as a metaphor for Autism."

"We have come so far that all the old stories
whisper once more."

--Robert Duncan

まどろみ (夜).

( via / lanny quarles on fb )

One More Cup of Coffee.

I enjoyed reading Janowitz & Gaitskill & others throughout the 90s & oughts who wrote about 80s NYC art scene. I was tangentially there, but with a worm's-eye-view (such as seemed the only view possible at the time) i only could suspect that there was great stuff going on all around me--just never when i was in the room. It all felt self-consciously sordid & not as desperate as people let on. Decades later it seems like a lost utopia.

Arecibo without tears.

the hot coals WAVER
the walker is AGILE
tomb covered in VINES

it’s not beliefs ELECT
climber’s chiselled RESTS
dreams of a redwood STUMP

to tutor a TUTOR
vagabond UTERI
half of us MORON

despair not fit to PRINT
covid winter VAMPS
Kafka scribbles APART

white hot MANIA
builders living PRIOR
the hundred-yard STARE

Paint It Black.