( via / via )

"It is imperative to resist the disproportionate foregrounding of cishet male loneliness because the structurally oppressed manifest their benign loneliness symptoms differently from those who suffer from the malignant disease of thwarted entitlement." (via @mckenziewark)

“THE BUILDING OF THE SKYSCRAPER

The steel worker on the girder
Learned not to look down, and does his work
And there are words we have learned
Not to look at,
Not to look for substance
Below them. But we are on the verge
Of vertigo.

There are words that mean nothing
But there is something to mean.
Not a declaration which is truth
But a thing
Which is. It is the business of the poet
‘To suffer the things of the world
And to speak them and himself out.’

O, the tree, growing from the sidewalk–
It has a little life, sprouting
Little green buds
Into the culture of the streets.
We look back
Three hundred years and see bare land.
And suffer vertigo.”

–George Oppen

"And it’s not about a 'horse race,' either. That’s become the newest excuse for so many outlets sanewashing the fact that every time Trump opens his mouth what comes out is the elevator-blood from The Shining with some gobs of electrified shark and the fucking shards of Kristallnacht floating in it."

under the floorboards · of the bird arpeggio
circular skin-stir · of depths pellucid
& always, in the air · obscure motors

many moods · of turquoise mindful
what so whelming · in the wheels' turn
plans plaintive · to be pleased with & done

when the mechas marched · yesterday in Sarajevo
in the Congo where cobalt · is fetched for our phones
or today in Sudan · is your twitter mute

we demur in a mecha · credit cards & car wash
summer-cooled · salvific in fireworks
pick menu items · muttered in the last breath

by those held otherwise · than high-rent humans

"Instead of -ology, which comes from Greek, the Anglo-Saxons used the native noun cræft ('skill, power') to form words for sciences."

( me / me )

Center of Interpretation of the Desert.

reweave Penelope's record
gurgle from the pool gorge
rook-gainsayed
spiral road unsped

Delphi shuttered down
& sparse Art Deco
in the smouldering lurch-landscape
erst iced & obliviated

Grand Overlook Hotel.

"a wisp of snow
curls in from the door --
the bookstore cat
settles at last
in the poetry section"

--Michael Dylan Welch via @ericcoliu

"Clarity, legibility, insight, erudition—our capacities for discerning and theorizing the limits between good and bad behavior, man and beast—do not prevent us from craving the monstrous, the human."

( via / me )

Theory of Everything.

"not very humanist of me but I think certain people should be hunted for sport" --@mcmansionhell

"The destruction of Gaza is executed by tanks and fighter jets pouring out their projectiles over the land: the Merkavas and the F-16s sending their hellfire over the Palestinians, the rockets and bombs that turn everything into rubble — but only after the explosive force of fossil fuel combustion has put them on the right trajectory."

"[...]

Not everyone
is a physician

but sooner or later everyone
fails to heal.

In Gaza, a girl and her brother
rescued their fish
from the rubble of airstrikes. A miracle

its tiny bowl
didn't shatter."

--Fady Joudah via @TaraSkurtu via @ericcoliu

"The most intelligent thing I have done today is to have followed this pigeon for the duration of two blocks."

( via / me )

"All these versions tell the same core story, but no two of them seem able to agree on the details."

"Sonnet

The way the world is not
Astonished at you
It doesn't blink a leaf
When we step from the house
Leads me to think
That beauty is natural, unremarkable
And not to be spoken of
Except in the course of things
The course of singing and worksharing
The course of squeezes and neighbors
The course of you tying back your raving hair to go out
And the course of course of me
Astonished at you
The way the world is not."

--Bill Knott

These are the Plunderers. (via @chrislynnhedges)

"The more you write, the more you breathe life into another I, and little by little, the one who writes is no longer the one who has written—the text, once it becomes text-in-the-world, belongs to the other more than it belongs to you, though wholly to neither. A peculiar feeling." --@dreamsofbeing_

Another misty morning in Glastonbury.

( via / via )

The Fallacy of AI Functionality.

“In Sappho’s poem, her addresses to gods are orderly, perfect poetic products, but the way—and this is the magic of fragments—the way that poem breaks off leads into a thought that can’t ever be apprehended. There is the space where a thought would be, but which you can’t get hold of. I love that space. It’s the reason I like to deal with fragments. Because no matter what the thought would be if it were fully worked out, it wouldn’t be as good as the suggestion of a thought that the space gives you. Nothing fully worked out could be so arresting, so spooky.”

– Anne Carson, “The Art of Poetry N° 88”, The Paris Review, Issue 171, Fall 2004 via @andrewgallix via @mjohnharrison

"Because of its realistic extrapolation and ironic undercutting, 334 is also sometimes described as dystopian, but its 2021 is blessedly decent compared to our own timeline."

“I held it so tight that I lost it
Said the Child of the Butterfly
Of many a vaster Capture
That is the Elegy -”

–@DickinsonMuseum (via @JoyceCarolOates)

Perfect Loops.

( lanny quarles on fb / via )

On the Line. (via Rob Mclennan substack)

projects
& shadowy
almost-projects lure me
down the checkerboard of the days
whirlwind

Short viddy of a stern sea queen.

"The unearthly bonds
Of the singular

Which is the bright light of shipwreck"

--Oppen, 9.

"I thought I'd never, ever see that again."

( via / via )

Who's That Girl.

"This scene hostaged to fog and heat mirages..."

--Reginald Shepherd

"In one of the first dreams, the iridescent, saintly figure hands Pau Cin Hau a book containing certain symbols and teaches him to make certain shapes... With these symbols, in 1902 Pau Cin Hau came up with a logographic script for the local Chin language – the first time the spoken language was rendered in writing, and a watershed moment in Chin history."

"7.
Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck
Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous."

--George Oppen

Fox.

( me / via )

Haiku by Tomas Tranströmer.

"New Fiery Moon"

hour's gemmate · jowl-forest
in car mirror · mildly white now
still this striving · studded with losses
like i'd find · final attainment
worth all this weary · warfare of signs
a made place · in the metroplex
journey they say · has to save its own
passenger pulsewise · perils crossed
on roads like this · rugged & tuned
  by a staticky radio

Stanzas in blankkvaett.

successfully censored · my sad thoughts
  for a passel of pretty minutes
this is Theseus · & his magic thread

Warrior.

( via / via )

"There is a permanent time that poetry lets us into. There are doors in all the centuries, feeding into this permanent time."

"Superfood Moon"

litharge grins · in the gray gloaming
pogrom & peers · proceed to flow
registers wail · for the box wolf
a cool climbing · collapse past
  & lost days retrievable

here where no mask · was made fitting
my stories stay · & my stars stored
roof-cerulean · cold corridors
wire fencing · & the fucked up street

Pleonexia.

"LORD OF THE RINGS (Palindrome)

Eyes,
till it’s won,
kill orcs.

A nine-men order.
Baser Gollum.

I mull ogre,
sabre, drone —
men in a scroll.

I know, still, its eye."

--@Anthony_Etherin

Tonight...on the Twilight Zone.

( via / via )

"In the museums of the moon..."

"smoothing the parched and fissured floodplain
to your fine skin, silt and a foam of flowers left"

--Reginald Shepherd

Cat suit.

"Cliché

Its back and forth, ad nauseum,
ought to make the sea a bore. But walks along the shore

cure me. Salt wind’s the best solution for
dissolving my ennui in,

along with these protean
sadnesses that sometimes swim

invisibly
as comb-jelly

a glass or two of wine below my surface.
Some regrets

won’t untangle. Others loosen as I watch the waves
spreading their torn nets

of foam along the sand
to dry. I walk and walk and walk and walk, letting their haul

absorb me. One seal’s hull
scuttled to bone staves

gulls scream
wheeling above. And here . . . small, diabolical,

a skate’s egg case,
its horned purse nested on pods of bladder-wort

that still squirt
brine by the eyeful. Some oily slabs of whale skin, or

—no, just an
edge of tire

flensed from a commoner leviathan.
Everywhere, plastic nurdles gleam

like pearls or caviar
for the avian gourmand

and bits of sponge dab the wounded wrack-line,
dried to froths of air

smelling of iodine.
Hours blow off down the beach like spindrift,

leaving me with an immense
less-solipsistic sense

of ruin, and, as if
it’s a gift,

assurance of ruin’s recurrence."

--V. Penelope Pelizzon via @ae_stallings

When coal was the primary energy source.

( via/ me )

On Aram Saroyan.

"Photo After Pogrom

Arrangement by rage
of human rubble

the false-eternal statues of the slain
until they putrify.

Tossed on a pile of dead,
one woman,
her body hacked to utter beauty
oddly by murder,

attains the absolute smile
of dispossession:

the marble pause before the extinct haven
Death's drear
erasure of fear,

the unassumed
composure

the purposeless peace
sealing the faces
of corpses--

Corpses are virgin."

--Mina Loy

October is for visiting graveyards.

I don't think they should change the way software platforms work without leaving you the choice to make it go back to the way it was if you don't like it.

The Sun's sound.

( me / via )

Vacation memories.

"this caterpillar
still not a butterfly
deep into autumn"

--Basho via @bashosociety

"Though bad feelings between philosophers and trans people were mutual, the former could be mostly separated from the latter by a wall of class access." (via @mckenziewark)

"Winter

Among the brittled grasses,
Frosting in the moon glare,
Tombstones are
Whiter tonight. "

--Jun Fujita via

The Other Side of the Moon.

( via / via )

Rotating-morphing hexagonal maplike form.

"Génocidaire"

as has been amply shown
murder on a vast
& automated scale
can easily be contrived

using the building blocks
of ordinary men
& itemized techniques
given a faulty premise

& that most deadly curse
instilled in us from youth
retains its first cachet:
the will to follow orders

Porcupine position, now!

"Rilke, upon reading Trakl: 'I imagine that even the initiated experiences these views and insights as an outsider pressed against panes of glass: for Trakl’s experience occurs like mirror images and fills its entire space, which, like the space in the mirror, cannot be entered.' " --@dreamsofbeing_ via @mcmansionhell

An Incantation.

( me / via )

The price of empathy.

"wave after wave
on an incessant journey
another sunset
when I long to change the taste
of salt, the colour of the wind"

--Pravat Kumar Padhy via @ericcoliu

Machine.

monkeyshines · shapeshifter October
the blinding or blacked-out · winding backstreets
i remember through house-moves · & plague years
the words fade · if they ever weren't false
to shapeshifter October · taker of summers

I and Thou.

( via/ me )

The stupidest map.

Random # 222 = 435 in base-7; 4 + 3 + 5 = 12 lines

the wrung thread that raddles
rapt dyspeptic grep days
burning that boil-garnet
above our crunk functions
i take my place in the flow

plumb out of chrome plated
plot twists here where thought churns
dronefire mires tomorrow
maybe a shelf labile
i find in my higher hurl

dyspeptic orb parboil
i prove with my allotment

A bank in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

"There is no I taken in itself, but only the I of the primary word I-Thou and the I of the primary word I-It." --Martin Buber (tr R G Smith)

Big Moon.

( via / via )

Keep Me There.

“Through a partnership with Microsoft, Kroger plans to place cameras at its digital displays, which will use facial recognition tools to determine the gender and age of a customer captured on camera and present them with personalized offers and advertisements on the EDGE Shelf,” reads the letter. “EDGE will allow Kroger to use customer data to build personalized profiles of each customer, and then use those profiles ‘to determine how much price hiking each of us can tolerate,’ quickly updating and displaying the customer’s maximum willingness to pay on the digital price tag.” via via @adamjohnsonchi

Red train.

cosmic
defunctive reds
dissolve into savor
of what we were when we were the
bright ones

"While a bureaucratic 'fix' to the problem would be simple enough-- ~$250 million per year would be more than enough to expand a Housing First program to cover nearly every person experiencing homelessness in the city-- the political will is not there."

( via / via )

Woke up this morning.

i wasn't yet ten
when they threatened to expel me
for wearing a peace sign

all the wars since then

ladybug
on a tall, tall tree

In the Garden of Souls.

"John Berger, on Simone Weil’s window:

'You stand at the window, you open it, you lean against the railing of the balcony on which no more than four pigeons could land, and you fly in imagination over the roofs and history.

It’s the exact height for flights of the imagination: the height of birds flying to the far edge of the city, to the walls, where the present ends and another epoch begins. In no other city in the world are such flights so elegant.

She loved the view from the window, and she was deeply suspicious of its privilege.' " --@lightinkpaint

Cfern.

( via / via )

Because of Us.

Personally i think there should be a law that robots can't speak to a human without being spoken to.

Guardian of the Moon.

Random # 85 = 151 in base-7; 1 + 5 + 1 = 7 lines

IV-tied & burned alive
not the way i'd care to go

US-made the armaments
silence or excuses made

now we graithe for Halloween
how can i be part of this

how can i evade it though

Goddess of the rune-carved mead mug.

( via via facebook memories / via )

The Incomplete Lojban language.

"Ghost Music

Gloomy and bare the organ-loft,
Bent-backed and blind the organist.
From rafters looming shadowy,
From the pipes’ tuneful company,
Drifted together drowsily,
Innumerable, formless, dim,
The ghosts of long-dead melodies,
Of anthems, stately, thunderous,
Of Kyries shrill and tremulous:
In melancholy drowsy-sweet
They huddled there in harmony.
Like bats at noontide rafter-hung."

--Robert Graves (via @poochigian)

"I remember feeling euphoric as I walked with my family barefoot on the beach. As a Palestinian with a West Bank hawiyyeh, or ID card, there were a number of factors working against my ability to experience this simple act in my homeland." (via @aliner)

"For example, in one of Asimov’s stories, robots are made to follow the laws, but they are given a certain meaning of 'human.' Prefiguring what now goes on in real-world ethnic cleansing campaigns, the robots only recognize people of a certain group as 'human.' They follow the laws, but still carry out genocide." --Peter W Singer via

ᴀʀᴛɪғᴀᴄᴛ⁹⁵.

( via / via via @kbabcock )

"I want poolrooms to be real ." (Frutiger Aero-adjacent.)

"Till Echo, like an ancient oracle..." --J Stanyan Bigg

The Stream (Coming and Going).

"smoky rubble
a bullet-riddled helmet
marked PRESS"

--@ericcoliu

"I love a good dirge."

( via / me )

Finnegans Wake, illustrated.

spiral coil from spillth raised
aspire plains to choir on
nothing's own dark inning
erstwhile it's a burst hope
in your lane find fennel
phantoms among scantlings

spiral coil from spillth raised
aspire plains to choir on
let the wrong one linger
latticework & flat tire
home is a huge region
harrowed by pure fury

Finifugal.

Long ago i figured why the two parties have been running almost vote for vote the same. Just imagine you have to replace a roll of toilet paper, & there's two ways it can go, but you don't particularly care which. Then it turns out some of the time one way, & some of the time the other. Even though people are roused to assert their tribal identities vociferously on social media, when it comes to actively participating in democracy, what many people feel is a tedious obligation, to be gotten through with as quickly as possible (like homework or jury duty). There really are not that many voters who think about it any harder than that (because, as i say, they want to assert that most precious right: the right not to have to think). So it's a razor edge we walk.

But on the other hand, to play the devil's advocate, there could also be a huge plurality of people with at least enough sense not to step in cowflop, except that the media needs the excitement of a "close race" so they only pay attention to data that reinforces that notion....

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. (via @minxmarple)

( me / via )

"Love is not possession, but a continuous dispossession. It is the sweetness of pure shipwreck."

There is already a beginning of Gpt-authored & part-authored books flooding the market. You could say humans tinkering with the output has been a regular feature of cynernetic literature at least since the days of Racter. A podcaster Melanie is fond of "Wings of Pegasus" on Youtube) says almost all the commercial music coming out these days has been autotuned--even when the singer has a perfectly good voice. It's just the varnish they glop over everything to make it "finished". So this was easy for foresee. Will non-cyber-aided art become, like wood carvings or handmade quilts, a specialty with its own specialty audience? I like AI art for its weirdness when it's weird in a way no human would've thought of--when it too perfectly imitates mediocre human art, it just bores me. I think this is also an effect that will happen. Maybe there will be jobs for humans to add human-kind of imperfections, "texture", to those perfect AI-artworks.

Autumn Evening.

Random # 41 = 56 in base-7; 5 + 6 = 11 lines

the cries of the crows · too long unheeded
this burning born · in the eldritch cathedral
done with the dawn · done with ev'rything
  they runed Plutolight
portioned-out pills · plinked ragtime
on the fluttering floor where · discount flanges
(the rest is missing) · plenty of marks
to yammer at yet · before i've finished
my coffee the cairn · of skulls rises
to stifle the sun · it's a cold world
  with a lot of ices

"You have entered the tunnel."

( via / via )

Doppelgänger.

"The impossible in which I believe

Borges is in; this library
is more alive. When he arrives,
the possible becomes more so.

I offer him his cup of tea,
but it is seldom tea-time where
Borges is. In this library

the volumes ripple on the shelves
and yet keep rising like the fire
the possible becomes. More so

than you might think, these books extend
through time or space once it is clear
Borges is in. This library

is never ghostless as it glows
through dreams of visitors who know
the possible becomes more, so

much more than those who graced these aisles,
than dust that dances over files.
Borges is in this library;
the possible becomes more so."

--@amjuster

"I personally would not challenge Vance to a past-life poor-off, though I usually get knocked out in the quarterfinals anyway because there’s no drug addiction in my immediate family."

"a fork in the trail
the wind
takes our old map"

--@ericcoliu

Untitled--2020.

( via / via )

Konzuming.

"...I'm reminded of a recent conversation I had with a colleague who teaches our poetry classes; he said he writes his business correspondence in villanelles when he has to be especially pleading with the recipient." --@anonscone

The Push and Pull of It All.

(rhime rondeau)

the last stage of art
dispense with the angel
melancholia
the delicate yearning
of the short candle

shadows walk in amber
& tentative slag
progeny of Cthulhu
the last stage

a tightening coil
a rigorous ebbing
in games of closure
played with a paperclip
tipped high for the vap
the last stage

All Souls' Night.

( me / via )

Jumbled careening cars & houses.

"Prologue of the Earthly Paradise

Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing,
I cannot ease the burden of your fears,
Or make quick-coming death a little thing,
Or bring again the pleasure of past years,
Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears,
Or hope again for aught that I can say,
The idle singer of an empty day.

But rather, when aweary of your mirth,
From full hearts still unsatisfied ye sigh,
And, feeling kindly unto all the earth,
Grudge every minute as it passes by,
Made the more mindful that the sweet days die—
—Remember me a little then I pray,
The idle singer of an empty day.

The heavy trouble, the bewildering care
That weighs us down who live and earn our bread,
These idle verses have no power to bear;
So let me sing of names remembered,
Because they, living not, can ne’er be dead,
Or long time take their memory quite away
From us poor singers of an empty day.

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.

Folk say, a wizard to a northern king
At Christmas-tide such wondrous things did show,
That through one window men beheld the spring,
And through another saw the summer glow,
And through a third the fruited vines a-row,
While still, unheard, but in its wonted way,
Piped the drear wind of that December day.

So with this Earthly Paradise it is,
If ye will read aright, and pardon me,
Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea,
Where tossed about all hearts of men must be;
Whose ravening monsters mighty men shall slay,
Not the poor singer of an empty day."

--William Morris

Fields of force.

Poems about being scared, poems about being tired, & for variety poems about being scared & tired.

"Oo[h], Those Awful Orcs!"