"a life
of running away
summer cicada"
--Issa via @bashosociety
Blade Runner, the Aquarel Edition.
world accrued · from the cawing of crows
a sere façade · seen head-on
scratched dishes · delve for the prize
in proprietary dark · you belong
to learn is to linger · by ways fragrant
the whole time hindered · by Thékk in hiding
or a cawing clear · across great fathoms
"And a black pupil in the green scum shows."
"The last artefact you need during a disaster is a disaster story that metaphorises it." --Wish I Was Here
夏②. (via @seppuku_doge)
won't begrudge · this groomed messenger
so much vetted · by not one poet
what could you whirl besides · your pinwheel gaily
when it's sealed already · the say- & unsayable
the meaning of the moment · will mostly show
scant months hence · whatever our hopes
your job to be joyous · as only the young can
entranced by a truth · i would not rob you
& the crooked word · crumbling away
about mass murder · that's not this monster
i leave to the left-out · my kin & colleagues
who'll have plenty to plead · complacent in the nosebleed seats
"For Betelgeuze was a ruby shining, and a diamond for Rigel, and pale topazes for the other stars."
derelict PLANO
shards of LURIA
bleat in ARLES
child of my step-NIECE
cherish OASES
"Edgelands: I'm beginning to hate that word, because even more than 'psychogeography' it's so attractive and easy to use but so obviously a gentrifying label, an attempt to plant a flag in the zone. Not only have liminal spaces become culturally mainstream, there's a mainstream of liminal-space thinking; a kitsch of liminal zones is now inevitable." --Wish I Was Here
"I understood that my kind would never inherit the earth even if we inherited it, and I often think about that." --Wish I Was Here
During the Battle of the Somme.
matutinal creel
treasures the mana fades from
no travellers here
sussuration from fountains
ev'ry other minute cars
plappergeist hail · only this Hallmark
mystery movie · amok plangent
narrative of the neighbor · who turns Maga
QAnon-pilled · in the pinkgold stillness
"got my brown paper bag · and my take home pay"
--ZZ Top
ANAGRAM-SONNET FOR JORGE LUIS BORGES.
"If I had a 'familiar' it would resemble less a nervous exotic animal than a chipped enamel sink. You would not find it on my shoulder but in its natural environment at the bottom of a derelict canal in the industrial Midlands. Our connection would be the source of my special powers, which would neither mimic nor metaphorise its qualities but be unmistakably sink-related. I would feel no emotion towards it even when events caused us to be separated and tortured. A sink can feel nothing. That is one of the baseline or default qualities of a sink. But wherever I went, I would know that out there, bedded in the mud beneath the slow black water, never more than a mile or two from my present location, its energies focussed, site-specific and calm, there my sink would be" --M John Harrison, Wish I Was Here (2023)
1.
thought-lethargic · in the threat landscape
fizz furnace · i affirm numbly
each mazeturn moment · a mere flourish
in Indra's plaintext · microplastics
the truth teller · at knifepoint
recants
2.
crag zenith
cool · watcher of elves
a cawing
from behind
the mystery of the starter
dusty car windows
3.
pinkgold wires cross black
soundless click of micro-steps
don't know buttoning
"I was writing this poem about a sustainable arts ecosystem..."
gray hills at dawn · dolg
burn in the wolf-loud glade
up periscope · pale cerulean
pierced by slurred spires
through the glass gleams · fires we cannot touch
Hermeto Pascoal performing in a lake.
"It is true I cannot say whether things are going to change for the better, but what I do say is that things will never be right unless they do change."
- Lichtenberg via @aliner
Poem.
"An audience is a crowd that gathers to listen. A vidience is a crowd that gathers to watch. A tangience is a crowd that gathers to touch. A gustience is a crowd that gathers to taste. An amorience is a crowd that gathers to love" --@ctrlcreep
feared shortfall
bemused blogging dream
car won't start
ink runs out
this morning's light no other
& the news repeats
fremd hump of the fractal
flickering-res presence
my care once & weary
a wintry murk circle
conundrum long landless
below brumous tombstone
softness like a sickle
sings in the bog kingdom
"Old English fact: gospel is originally short for gódspell, or 'good news.' The opposite was láthspell, ‘bad or loathsome news’." --@wylfcen
Loonie Tunes St James Infirmary.
Clarice Lispector: “I am every hellish piece of me—life in me is so demanding that if they hacked me up, like a lizard, the pieces would keep trembling and squirming. I am the silence engraved on a wall, and the oldest butterfly flutters and finds me: the same as always.” via @_motherslug
"BATTLE OF BOSWORTH FIELD (Palindrome)
Drowsy brawl.
A York royal.
War by sword."
--@Anthony_Etherin
"There’s much more plastic in our brains than I ever would have imagined or been comfortable with."
The Antarctic on 1st April 1911.
path retraced · almost airless
respite arraigned · among the rawdoggers
path of no shoulder · & shardborn entities
"Horror builds the mansion of ruined intuition..."
--Awhile back i proposed a book written with mismatched halves. It appears that such has already been written! "Michael Korda...was working as an editor at Simon & Schuster, and a few years ago he wrote a memoir of those days, entitled Another Life.
...Harold Robbins...started writing one book to get the advance, wrote half of it, and put it aside. When he needed the money,
he finished it, but he'd forgotten much of the first part, and so the second part had an inconsistent plot with mostly different
characters. Asked what to do about it, he said, 'Leave it.' (Korda is too professional to say which, but I believe it was The Pirate.)"
--Arthur Hlavaty in Derogatory Reference (now Nice Distinctions) 3 via Xvarenah 9-14-03
secret㊙️sauce - The Photoshoots.
"ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM (Anagrammed Lines)
Mythic Athenian makers
match a marine sky in the
Antikythera Mechanism.
In the sea, I mark my chant.
I chart the main sky; name
a heart’s kinematic hymn.
Antikythera Mechanism:
Animate, rhythmic snake.
Stray ankh. Time machine."
--@Anthony_Etherin
curate
the frail coral
here too hues lessening
the same typeface claims ev'ry trope
same pact
"The salt hag feels the turn of the tide before seeing the shore."
maze-lost maundering · militates
against gainsaying shades
sluice off the slovenly · dark with words
severe in vain lingering
rationales rife · in elegaic overshoot
enter the lit lodge
1999 translation of the poem online.
"There's a lot of things blamed on me that never happened. But then, there's a lot of things that I did that I never got caught at."
~ Johnny Cash via @OutlawsPoetic
Is Boudica the only person to have a statue in a city that she burned to the ground?
Bad Timing (1980). ☆☆☆
"Just thinking: If we were snakes or any other horizontal vertebrate, the concept of 'portrait' framing in photos they take of each other might be one and the same as 'landscape'." --@neiltyson
"Throughout Antiterra lurks the abnormal belief in the existence of a twin world, ‘Terra’."
"PANGRAM-HAIKU
My pangram-haiku:
Letters squeezed inside a box.
A refractive jewel."
--@Anthony_Etherin
the thought that it might be there
long outwears the witness
therblig wanting
like apples in an oven
not ripe at the same rate
"Telling my students that referring to the speaker of the poem using the author's name is doxxing" --@john_attridge
"Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often what we need?"
- Ludwig Wittgenstein via @EverySongIveEve
counting schwas
exacting bazooka
accidental custodian
of the world's treasure
When the new form swallows the older form.
"So I just now learned that Teslas see dead people 🧐." (via @ladyliminal1)
learn all the coughs · Cornell
carven notes in larva
eclipse feast-day cloistered
claim this malign diner
in dark letters dithered
adept to shlep candles
through the dread cathedral
thistlecorsage dodging
Samurai Song. (via @amitmajmudar)
"TIDES (Aelindrome in π)
31415926535
Desire stowed ships on seas,
while air, a fragrant eddy, ran....
A fragile air whips on.
Seas wed shores, tides."
--@Anthony_Etherin
"They had their hands on a strong thing. I think I may have been the only one who fully realized how strong this thing was." (via Mefi)
"Hind Rajab's death has already been forgotten..." (via @jorie_graham)
"The hidden moon shed thievish light
In the misty air."
--Bridges
there might have been a time i'd rue
a scrolling hour's fruitless churn
as all the half-thoughts fluttered free
that could not stay me in my quest
there might have been a time i'd seek
more than the lifting of the hold
that boredom, dread, & hopeless rage
impose upon each passing mote
but that was long ago, before
i learned what scant regard is due
to each rogue leaf from season's shift
& how much pain that shred still knows
A considerable collection of Grobiana.
"ANOTHER COLD WAR POEM
So what if you lived only
One second longer
Than we
Did: to us
You will always be known as the Survivor"
--Bill Knott
"Has this great clattering workshop nought for me
But the prerogative of looking on?"
--J Stanyan Bigg
St Luke the Evangelist beginning to write his Gospel.
When reasonableness turns liminal it makes room for the goblinesque.
squandered in word thicket
my early lead · lissom
woofus lore
he lived among you more
as a spy than as Shakespeare
he molded spoons
this side of the saraband
clowns cutting up at a peace conference, detailed pencil drawing, remedios varo, james ensor.
"The heart feels for its own..."
1.
when talk could build things
things were built
salad days i among those
when talk could build things
talk & talk's pathos
on the same drunken boat
when talk could build things
things were built
2.
dance the near-total dark
drill where align the dice
savior is an addict
victim-wave & worse riddance
3.
moving spyhole spavined
amercement played tersely
what in this dawn whining
whacks me like a fax growl
shine into harsh shindigs
shudder for the bloodshed
speak-of-it-never knack forged
from nine blue frass castles
Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse.
cheetoh as a turd that's been floating in the bowl for day & days. why doesn't anyone flush it? is is that the toilet isn't working?
no, it would HURT THE FEELINGS of the people who enjoy the sight & the stink.
Humid air, desiccated grass underfoot.
