( via / via )

"I don’t want to jump ship and just say, ‘Texas is crazy’,” Javaid said. “I want to be a part of the people trying to make it better. Because if not us, who?."

"LOCH NESS

Upon the vernal equinox,
when all our fictions come to pass,

a shadow leans across the rocks.
Beneath the water, clouds amass:

a nebula absorbs the loch’s
illusions — hoaxes, dreams in glass,

the jostling haze of history’s whims —
until, at last, the creature swims."

--@Anthony_Etherin

VCR-SX.

"twinge"

our own disorders · like obol fare
drawing the drapes · drone crying
& cardboard · the common currency here

i gather up galleons · goldless sunken
a pdf prized · by a patient few
rooms still around · though reived of their poets

the fountain finishes · a few last drops
i drop my gazing · the drive gone
save silvery · mist drifting

"Meeting a group of reporters in a downtown restaurant in Seoul on November 19, Choi said, 'I’d like to thank you for your continued interest in me in spite of my insignificant achievements'."

( via / me )

Cheerful bat.

"restrictions apply"

abstract traces · of an old crime
two voids diverge · two alter-anthems
accounts curved · by the force of forming
through a harsh haze · of hazard lost now

"Suddenly the newly minted writer must make laborious efforts to describe what he or she has written...This struggle takes place, I think, because the sincere reaction to making meaningful art is often speechlessness. We make art about what we cannot understand through any other method."

"Subject, it seems to me,
can still be rendered the way a frog looks at a snake, both nearly
the same temperature."

--Gerald Burns, from "On Myth and Time", 25

mirror, variable 4.

( me / lanny quarles )

Before I Was a Gazan.

"Those secret nooks where thickest hang the nuts" --J Stanyan Bigg

Temptation of Saint Anthony.

"baby rabbit at dawn"

brown bun frozen · by my still car
i walk wispily · wide berth giving
long without latching · my look on these figments
eyespots aching · to own the world

"In 1534, after the French explorer Jacques Cartier sailed to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and claimed the 'New Land' for France, he encountered natives who knew Basque words and expressions." (via Mefi)

( via / me )

Secular Jewish Culture / Radical Poetic Practice.

"Tornado City"

scrub-typhus · scramble traipse
brightened the bruise · of brown night

the pool quiescent · pale turquoise
i organize early · agon's routine

shimmering shudders · shoot up the sky
what whommles · the whorled telescope

Mubo mobled · by a mogul churn
such symptoms · the Sampo flings

"Before long, he realized that what he had been doing in a part-time capacity could be his primary career."

"...As when some pair in lands
Of buried thunder, walk forth side by side,--
The unknown line of fate between--and earth
Yawns, and each, moonstruck, on a separate shore
Receding diverse, swift thro' sounding glooms,
Knows but a lengthening distance and a black
Abyss."

--Balder

~VERTICES 2~.

( via / me )

"...mean images are social dreams without sleep, processing society’s irrational functions to their logical conclusions. They are documentary expressions of society’s views of itself, seized through the chaotic capture and large-scale kidnapping of data."

"we talk of love many years before we know anything about it, and we think we know it because we talk of it, or because we repeat what other say, or what books tell us. so that there are ignorances of different degrees, and degrees of knowledge which are quite deceptive."

--amiel (via @infinita_fiori)

"And I understand how easily devotion can be exploited and weaponized."

"lousy with flowers"

oil slick rainbow infall
evil July diva
what falls, further seething
futhark trending ruthless

yet into form faintly
fix once if no foxhole
prayer's Bayesian priors
mangle the prinked Angstrom

Some clips from my work Mechanical Marvellous.

( via / via )

"This is just the tip of this nightmare."

"serial motets"

the sword-whisperer · whacks us with his absence
paints pictures · all titled Hellscape
the swamp swallows up · our swag our markings
only in memory · is the mincemeat iron

"After nearly four decades of scribbling away like this in semi-obscurity, Searcy, 69, has recently stepped out into the literary spotlight with Shame and Wonder, his first volume of essays, published in January by Random House."

"Now even the noblest
need watching. Trust's breeders
embrace arch blasphemers;
even friends' oath turns evil.
Let them fear the slow-faring
fuse of your cautiously
stooped and lightly-stepping
stealth, while your beard's healthy."

—in Crimsoning the Eagle’s Claw: The Viking Poems of Rǫgnvaldr Kali Kolsson, trans. Ian Crockatt. @Arc_Poetry 2014 (via @RNOCOrkney & @scotlit)

Eternal Ride.

( via / me )

There are Trains Which will not be Missed.

"The writer should be more than a clerk, or to turn a line by Frost the one who does our writing for us. I work sometimes in bookshops. Young people come in and their eyes light up when they see writers they've heard recommended -- Brautigan, Bukowski, the generation after Salinger, mostly, and Hesse. Here, it's as if they're saying, is at last an author who will understand me. Why they want to be understood, or feel understood, is a question they've not been raised to ask. (Keats loved to test things on his pulses, but probably didn't test his pulses on his pulses.) It's enough to put me off sentiment, or make me ashamed of my own gratitude, and that is a pity. But how American of them, to like things that are like themselves, because they are like themselves. Perhaps it's hard to think you're anything, and these writers solidify a shape. I wouldn't know. I don't read them. Maybe it helps to see your shabbier feelings compassionately expressed by a writer you've heard of." --Gerald Burns via

Composition 198.

"Its pure fingernails on high (Mallarmé)

Its pure fingernails on high devoted to their onyx
Anxiety, at midnight, supporting a torchbearer
Many a dream of evensong burned by the Phoenix
That does not collect a cinerary amphora

On the consoles in the vacant lounge, no folded shell
Abolished trinket of sound insignificance
(Because the Master went to draw tears from the Styx
With this the only object of which Nothingness is proud)

But near to the window on the empty north, a dying
Gold, according, perhaps, to the décor
Of unicorns kicking out of the fire against a nymph

She, dead, naked in the looking-glass still
That in forgetfulness enclosed by a frame
In sparkles soon after the septet make themselves seen"

--Jim Hanson 04/05/08 (via)

Can't Find My Way Home.

( via / via )

"...The 27th stanza is an example of what has been called "the most complex and exquisite type of palindrome ever invented'..."

"the pyramid of the magician"

a cardboard box · full of sand
a stadium stocked with · steel balloons
morth muttered · in deep midnight
bright plains stretching · for one who plans to cross

"Congratulations to Mike Maguire (@MikeSpeaks) for winning the Grand Prize and Poetry categories in the 2024 SymmyS palindrome awards."

" 'anti-semitic' is the new 'woke,' the new 'crt,' the new 'cultural marxism.' in the right-wing lexicon, all words are empty signifiers and therefore fungible." --@upstaterica

Tomorrow.

( via / via )

Kevin Killian: Selected Amazon Reviews.

"It is true that after his death Thomson's Corolianus was spliced with Shakespeare's to become the version favored on the British stage for many years..." --Percy Adams, introduction to: The Plays of James Thomson (1979)

"Pipeline" on Lawrence Welk.

"my pronouns"

morphs the landscape scaffold
flickersome past flaunting
Funes skinflint

bards i knew are buried
their chapbooks char in the grate
beautifully chastened

& what remains whelming
by mere persistence sings
wheelless & sideways

hulks at the cruel curb

Madman Across the Water.

( via )

Hornet's Nest.

"A Gull Goes Up

Gulls when they fly move in a liquid arc,
Still head, and wings that bend above the breast,
Covering its glitter with a cloak of dark,
Gulls fly. So as at last toward balm and rest,
Remembering wings, the desperate leave their earth,
Bear from their earth what there was ruinous-crossed,
Peace from distress, and love from nothing-worth,
Fast at the heart, its jewels of dear cost.
Gulls go up hushed to that entrancing flight,
With never a feather of all the body stirred.
So in an air less rare than longing might
The dream of flying lift a marble bird.
Desire it is that flies; then wings are freight
That only bear the feathered heart no weight."

--Léonie Adams

Forty Miles of Bad Road.

"Fear stalks the land. (As usual; so what else is new?)"

- Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (via @EverySongIverEve)

Ghost Riders in the Sky.

( via / hotel point op cit )

Black & white subtle busyness.

"The invocation of 'legality,' when what is being protested is a violation of the law of multiple orders of magnitude of more seriousness, is the exact sort of pettiness you'd expect from the morally bankrupt." --@_ryanruby_

"A writer continually struggles for clarity against the language he’s using or, more accurately, against the common usage of that language. He doesn’t see language with the readability and clarity of something printed out. He sees it, rather, as a terrain full of illegibilities, hidden paths, impasses, surprises, and obscurities. Its map is not a dictionary but the whole of literature and perhaps everything ever said."

"Death of a Palindromist (palindrome)

Now ill as mirror,
reset a torso golden.

Words sap, mock,
cut me open.

Old as a tide,
I edit a sad, lone poem,
tuck compass.

Drowned logos rotates.
Error rims all I won."

--@SpoonerRhythms

They've made a fur suit for those robot dogs.

( via / me )

If i ever walk onto a flat green plain with just 20 houses that look Exactly The Same i Will have a panic attack.

"Poliespo for Dummies"

spraintsquander · skyblue years
i learn belatedly · like us all

leafblower blither · blending with fresh sun
my damp sneakers · with difficulty climb

Self-knitting isometric gif.

"Genius is all haunt’d eyes and bad haircuts: see Wittgenstein, see Beckett, see Marguerite Young. You don’t think the dapperly-coiff’d Thomas Wolfe’s a genius, do ya stupor man? John Ashbery (whose haircuts’ve gone slightly better of late) wrote, back in the god-awful hair days: 'We have seen the city; it is the gibbous / Mirrored eye of an insect.' " --John Latta at Hotel Point blog 4-27-05

Two clowns taking turns thwacking each other on the head with a 2x4, detailed oil painting, james ensor, remedios varo.

( via / via )

Tricky stairs.

"A funny thing is that I tend to give all my novels the same title to begin with—Wrestling with God. Then while I’m writing, I realise, Oh, that’s not quite it . . ."

--Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2022) via @timesflow

Polka A Go-Go With Li'l Wally.

"ledger"

   faint sidewalk ripples
dull gray sky unbrightening
   an insistent trill

Remington's nocturnes at the
Amon Carter museum

Shape Study 43.

( via / via )

Faun's Midafternoon.

"sushi bistro"

triskaidektrance · trickle-whisper
in the dainty dark · carry on calmly
how the world works · one of those stymied of
to its sheer show · more surely attentive
& the rain runs · all around us heedless
past & present · prattle on equally
island of amber · otchkies for the main chance
filter out fathoms · of velvet fingers
in the no-longer night · announcing resumption
in plainer terms · of the putrid deal

Kyoto International Conference Centre.

"We’re all just saying this same thing to ourselves, people of conscience that I know. None of it is new or even surprising. But god, the way empire seeps into you, the way you see it in the new buds of trees and then the sun, shining off a riot sheet or SWAT helmet." --@saintsoftness

YAOSF.255.

( via / via )

░R░░a░░b░░b░░i░░t░ ░R░░a░░b░░b░░i░░t░ ░R░░a░░b░░b░░i░░t░.

"I am watching a toddler die on a table in a field hospital in Rafah with half her face blown apart while listening to college students fight tears reporting on a police assault on their campus for protesting that, and I feel like I am losing my fucking mind." --@marisapk (via @dreamsofbeing_)

"If neither Kristi Noem nor Greg Gianforte have the patience, responsibility or moral compass when it comes to basic decency to animals, they lack the fundamental decency needed to govern a state."

"jigsaw puzzle
our fingers linger
on the same blue sky"

--Cherese Cobb via @frogpondjournal

And I survived a couple of assassination attempts as well over this.

( via / via )

Beacon from Mars.

"Venus does not rotate, but keeps the same face always toward the Sun, just as the Moon does toward the earth. One face is forever daylight, and the other forever night, and only along the twilight zone, a strip five hundred miles wide, is human habitation possible, a thin ring of territory circling the planet.

Toward the sunlit side it verges into the blasting heat of a desert where only a few Venusian creatures live, and on the night edge the strip ends abruptly in the colossal ice barrier produced by the condensation of the upper winds that sweep endlessly from the rising air of the hot hemisphere to cool and sink and rush back again from the cold one.

The chilling of warm air always produces rain, and at the edge of the darkness the rain freezes to form these great ramparts. What lies beyond, what fantastic forms of life may live in the starless darkness of the frozen face, or whether that region is as dead as the airless Moon—those are mysteries.

But the slow libration, a ponderous wobbling of the planet from side to side, does produce the effect of seasons. On the lands of the twilight zone, first in one hemisphere and then the other, the cloud-hidden Sun seems to rise gradually for fifteen days, then sink for the same period. It never ascends far, and only near the ice barrier does it seem to touch the horizon; for the libration is only seven degrees, but it is sufficient to produce noticeable fifteen-day seasons." --Stanley Weinbaum, "Parasite Planet", Astounding Stories, 1935 via

Pop.

"The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say." --Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things (1987)

A Planetary System Around a Binary Star, Including a Mini-Neptune in the Habitable Zone.

( via / via )

Kristen Wiig as Ann-Marget on SNL.

"one of those days when the voice cannot utter and the hand cannot write nevertheless there are words everywhere and all you can do is lay your silence amidst them?" --@dreamsofbeing_

"Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, or William Carlos Williams—all spoke other languages as children, as did Jack Kerouac..."

"depauperate seiche"

we climb the ugly road to the ambuscade
to find out of what stuff this country is made

Buzz Saw.

( via / via )

"This means that there is a renunciation of the common life based on culture, which is subject to standards, and a return to the common life of barbarism."

"the burning of a minor library"

tiring treefrog chorus
tugs at my blink shrinking
floor-spread sweater flatiron
flunking i yet function

brick district by breast stroke
brandish protest notecards
demand mist divestment
or make your black acre

I Saw the Light Decay.

I crave bookcases & a place to put them.

Window.

( via / via )

Earlier version of the above.

"To speak of the future is to use a language that is forever ahead of itself, consigning things that have not yet happened to the past, to an 'already' that is forever behind itself, and in this space between utterance and act, word after word, a chasm begins to open, and for one to contemplate such emptiness for any length of time is to grow dizzy, to feel oneself falling into the abyss." --Paul Auster , writing on Royston's Lycophron in: "The Invention of Solitude," Collected Prose (pp 107-110)

How Line Breaks.

"private lake"

Pax "Exodus" Piaf
appears smack at year's end
skull askew on Fillmore
skillfully fadged magic

& Surt who escorted
by cinders naught taught me
in the ill eye's wellspring
no answer save vise icing

The Meaning of Locality.

( via / via )

Under the bridge 2.

"Lollard's share"

grayblue corridor growing
thrusts away wispiness
grip this word

this drive through dreary suburbs
this coverage of cataclysmic
droog contention

is there a picture paired
to my formal cark-flurry
pass me flying

pass the Lady of the Lake
as she waits her shipwreck,
a Lollard his share

"All with the intention to sort of mentor a bespoke poetic alter ego."

"The eyes are mine shafts, and dripping they lead down to the mind
whose diamonds tip our heaven-drills."

--Amit Majmudar

The Dallas Cricket Apocalypse.

( via / via )

"Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate..."

"SHAKESPEARE (Palindrome)

Burst elm.
A hymnist.

Call a Romeo play
or a royal poem —

or all acts
in my Hamlet's rub."

--@Anthony_Etherin

"'AI' will not replace you."

"Voluspá"

silver
balmy morning
after the storms have flown
Walpurgisnacht · pins the nightmare
with song

"New Goose returns again and again to homes: to owning or losing houses, to living in inadequate dwellings, and to shelters that shield people from violence and the violence that secures such shelters." (via Metafilter)

( via / via )

Under.

"The survivors

We settled here, scarcely believing our fortune
no more to scull the seas. The island was safe but
there were many deaths: driven by the darkness
men killed their kin; others drowned in shallow water

before they could reach the sea. The island was safe but
there was no earth to cultivate, nowhere to bury those men
killed by their kin. Bodies float in shallow water.
Corpses were left to rot, covered in rocks to hinder beasts:

there was no earth to hold them. Where could we hide the dead
when our sons were buried alive on the barren rock?
They were left to die, smothered in stones to keep them still;
the winter was their warder. Snow blew over the bones

of the firstborn buried alive on the highest rock.
The ice on those cairns was as good as a key in a lock:
the winter, their warder. Wind blew between the stones
and if sometimes it sounded like a child crying to be free

the ice on each cairn was as good as a key in a lock.
And so we settled, scarcely believing our fortune,
although it might sound as if we were crying to be free,
crying for a death to deliver us from darkness."

--Nancy Campbell

[Pixel Viens] .

"You do not see her yet. For the moment, you see only her traces." --Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Milton's Eve. (via @kukukadoo)

( via / via )

Pandemic Ghazal.

"Andromeda is penning dark grimoires" --@Anthony_Etherin

Cossak Walk.

"gryllisfoetor"

comets portents cartels
killing clowns in Fillmore
painted cow skulls pointing
at the Pink Moon's cincture
& Raven flaps flivver
wings in a whelk welkin
harrowing hewn onus
hatches brinks in Matchtown

Depression.

( via / via )

"If we struggle to understand the direction we are headed in, if we take our task so seriously as to render it inert, we miss the very thing we are attempting to analyse."

"Yule Log Drottkvaett (June 2009)

Heaving horses strive to
Hearth's home, trotting path through
Forest fog and boar-land:
Furnace burns their burden;
Pretty purge shall gorge on
People's crimes as grime of
Yesteryear is lost and
Youngling tongues a-banter."

--Daniel Stride/ “Mielikko Karvulakki” (via)

Words of Thanks for Thor of Scrolls.

"The greatest solitudes are quickly strewn with rubbish." --Lyn Hejinian

Gargoyle poems. (At least one alliterative & one drottkvaett.)

( me / via )

Boots of Spanish Leather.

"Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world."

--Rebecca Solnit - The Faraway Nearby (via @timesflow)

"In short, I was captivated, and when Lew closed his email by mentioning that no-one had ever, to his knowledge, actually used the stanza in English before, the deal was sealed."

"MURDER OF CROWS (Triolet)

A murder, from a garden, rose
and left us in the dying light.
The sky is red now — no one knows
a murder from a garden rose.
It’s rare to see so many crows,
and now they’ve gone to gather night.
A murder from a garden rose
and left us in the dying light."

--@Anthony_Etherin

"To me, this lightbearing move, in which total refusal becomes paradoxically foundational, is Notley’s signature gesture, what she herself characterizes as Disobedience."

( via / via )

Desert Rose.

"Windsor Moon"

scrannel throng the scrimmage
ascribed to bad vibedom
mobled rearview mirror
      cobwebs bedewed
      in the gray-candied
morninglight adornment

yellowbus gold yielding
yonder where i pawned it
tombstone eyes find teaser
      at the fremd portal
      one magnolia petal
tilts the whole frost goalpost

The Muse of Impossibility.

"Satoyama (里山), a Japanese term applied to the border zone or area between mountain foothills and arable flat land" --@fedeitaliano

A Rose Shoulders Up.