Permutazione plastica nel campo.
"Toad ran back across the meadow. He waved the kite over his head. The kite went up in the air and then fell down with a thud." --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social
the hungry floor's fling
flustered despite rustsleep
shattered wine machine
one shiver tap delivered
"The ethical activity of poetry is to perceive and evoke the beauty of life..."
"No omen of Orion,
mid a dim noir
of one Moon."
--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
How to Survive This Mess. (podcast)
"Waste marigold and late unhappy leaves
And grass that fades ere any of it be mown..."
--Swinburne
"THE DRONE (Palindrome-by-Pairs)
A drone,
lost,
lay,
as by
a last,
lone
road."
--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
God.
"An Imaginary City
I entered it in one of my travels
A silent city
No trace of the living
Doors shut
The wind playing in its squares
But its window lights
Were on all night
Who switches them on?
I saw roses in the gardens
Their necks tilted
A children’s playground
In ruins
I knocked at doors
I called out
Have they all died?
Did they depart?
What magic spell turned them into invisible beings?
Suddenly I saw the shadow of a woman
on a marble platform
fidgeting slowly
trying to wake up
I said: 'Eve,
do you know who I am?
Adam'
But she didn’t understand the language"
--Mahmud al-Braykan via @rabihalameddine.bsky.social
"a poem for St Lucy's day"
realm of the boogaloo
& things that soon get broken
volcanoes on Io
the Check Tire light that won't quit
espresso maker loose
steam lost around the O-ring
prognostications
turn haywire like a rabid dog
track flizzoms in the swirl
gold leaf is rasquache
moveable farce
peals chaos in the ampersand
"More like a part of the world than a city, Berlin is a place where it is easier to choose a sociable solitude from the larger crowd, where you will find your quietest harbour in Germany.“
--Jean Paul (actually Johann Paul Friedrich Richter), GER 18th/19th-C writer. via @berlincompanion.bsky.social
"From the perspectives of its own architects, annihilation is inevitable"
pale turquoise saucer
intact across rough decades
Friday the Thirteenth
too many pieces to glue
as once for Fiesta Red
"parasinistral momentary ditty" (with apologies to Joni Mitchell)
i've grasped at life with both hands now
with Left & Right & still somehow
it's Left's misprisions i allow
i haven't grasped life whole
at all
A Nocturnal upon St Lucy's day.
"The Full Cold Moon"
Crambo-clinker to the cruellest timeline,
apricity i only can imagine.
Poems, however, gather in a vrimmel
& say: it matters not where steers the bumclock.
(via)
The Pyramid of Capitalist System.
"seems worth noting that a major subplot in A Christmas Carol involves Scrooge denying healthcare to his employees, and that Tiny Tim would have died had Scrooge not been shamed by ghosts into giving him coverage." --@sketchesbyboze.bsky.social
"Mengzi transformed not only my view on human nature, but also how I engage with philosophical texts."
"imagine a country so furious about drag performers that it voted for polio" --@jefftiedrich.bsky.social
"lost in arrowwood hedges
sunset
a far-off bonfire"
--@wanderstruck.blog
"jocund quant"
trails gone cold · eclipsed by the rattle
of machine gears jamming
would still stare at · such subjects
"I was always having those ideas, but I didn’t know what to do with them."
"a spider waiting
in his web of equations
woven between
the blue vertebrae
of the wind"
--@joypops.bsky.social
"Spiegelman told the sold-out audience in a Q&A session that his next comic will be about Gaza."
"Guest Speaker"
The Shrouded One, who sits there in the corner
& does not speak, that is the one who counts.
Never mind the outcome of our sports
as standing wights grow yellower & browner.
We had awhile our downfall in abeyance,
to stride the Earth seemed destined & unchallenged:
but since find wins less often plucked than scrounged,
with shrugs & snickers tossed back at surveillance.
It cannot be a fault in our chosen means;
it has to be the human stuff to blame,
which more & more abolished in our scheme
at last will cease to pester what remains...
The Shrouded One perks up at this, & grins.
"ownership"
gather baulk
stirious whirr
nestles crash
ebon lantern lurk
sludge skittles
When you really don't want to go to the hairdresser but still kind of have to.
"pale blue and dull yellow"
golden to the tired
pretenders drawn onward
leaves autumn's delight
allot whispered crispness
salvage what won't wolve
wasteland sealed unyielding
toss necessity
talonward with birdsong
"It’s impossible not to gaze at the horizon of the sea without thinking of the Chicxulub Crater."
"Pacer, a time civic, emit a recap.
P A C E R
A T I M E
C I V I C
E M I T A
R E C A P"
--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
"...Burroughs, brilliantly played by Daniel Craig."
我愛你. ('I love you')
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
– Frédéric Bastiat via @cynical.ltd
“this thing I made at Kinko’s”
Chapbook, made at Kinko’s, heartfelt missives, placed on consignment at the bookstore, doesn’t sell, is handled by two or three who go on to buy something by a poet they know, lies there seventeen years, is tossed into a landfill when the store closes, power grid fails, feral children dig through the landfill for recycle things, pulls my chapbook out, sees that its pages are mostly blank, paper is rare, takes it to an overseer who can read, sees a word he doesn’t know, is intrigued, book ends up in a Chinese archive, is studied, nobody knows what the word means. [100 words]
Embarcadero near Market, 1963.
"first night without oxygen"
we will have wandered · into a burning land
not for the first time · not forewarned
all for what? · for the mere whinny
of the almighty dollar
for protectors approaching · pure worthlessness?
for folly & fathomless · evil of a few
for the wine of ignorance
for a food craving · & for crazy pain
"when I walk around this city, it feels like the future is bearing down like a freight train and yet the past bleeds out of every pore" --@tomtomorrow.bsky.social
"ChatGPT is down so I have to write my manifesto myself 😫" --@billgerrard.bsky.social
"The Mouse Whose Name is Time
The Mouse whose name is Time
Is out of sound and sight.
He nibbles at the day
And nibbles at the night.
He nibbles at the summer
Till all of it is gone.
He nibbles at the seashore.
He nibbles at the moon.
Yet no man not a seer,
No woman not a sibyl
Can ever ever hear
Or see him nibble, nibble.
And whence or how he comes
And how or where he goes
Nobody dead remembers,
Nobody living knows."
--Robert Francis
"THE CITY (Palindrome-Haiku)
Go flat, urbanised....
A cradle here held arcades
in a brutal fog."
--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
Posters of health insurance CEOs.
"Principles and the inner life are alibis the moment they cease to animate external and everyday life."
- Merleau-Ponty in 1947 via @alinaetc.bsky.social
“During the Vietnam War… every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”—Kurt Vonnegut via
"It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time." (via @missrobin.bsky.social via @jordandavis.bsky.social)
"I've lost your voice
in this useless milieu
solitude
that seemed such a burden
I see now, was my torch"
--Eve Castle via
"hammering in the library"
sexy murder bard
philosopher frass
stay in your lane stan
the words herd us out
the words herd us out
sexy murder pnyx
hemlock is warlock
cider in the void
" 'Mongst such affairs I wounder thou hadst time
For to peruse those Idle jests of mine."
--1672 Ovid
"The federal government is basically an insurance company with an army."
"The passing winds sang vesper hymns to me"
--J Stanyan Bigg
"i will, i will, but not yet"
got to greet · each grunt pothole
can't be calculate · star crossings
ever war was · wherry you whirl in
shots shook the · shadow you raised
screen of no skelly · in the fluid forms
of cartoon animals
vendible glissade:
not in the heavy years since
have i had reason
or surcease from the watchful
eyes of the Furies, to dance
"END OF THE WORLD (Anagrammed Lines)
The world was ending:
Dawn light worsened.
Nights wandered low.
The long wind was red
with drowned angels...."
--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
The edgelord is implacably conceited, because his whole persona is based on denying the judgment of anyone who knows better than himself.
"the future's praise"
like the nautilus
but unwise
weaving shards of loss
like the nautilus
daylight growing less
naming the burdened ways
like the nautilus
but unwise
"Condor
How flawless and unvarying his candor
Over the wide, over the high Andes
The great condor
So infinitely far from all dissembling,
Is there a doubt? He dares, he dares the sun
To watch him
And the sun watches. Watches, watches the condor
Over the wide, over the high Andes
With equal candor."
--Robert Francis
"It seems to me that, if there is mercy in the lyric that’s not as achievable in prose, it’s that the lyric is not beholden to human time. " --Molly Spencer via
This Beast Went A-Catching Sparrows.
"Frog and Toad waited a long time." --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social
"I think they were Fennecs, the smallest species of fox, but they might have been Rüppell's, which are more closely related to our Red Fox.." (via @davebonta.bsky.social)
"a curse from which there is no escape"
crystal night agnostic
knits up the snared care-sleeve
pellucid thorned lacework
alloted fraught queueberth
quebrith stench so stubborn
i steer better veering
remain major adjunct
among the deft bunglers
Andrew Tate having all his cars taken away.
"the wine of superiority"
cold winds · cruise the paved lot
social security · assigned in Hawk Tuah coin
the hottest year hurtles · to a rude reckoning
"There is an even stranger synchronicity lurking in [Jack] Spicer’s California mysterium. In 1948, back in Berkeley, he and [Robert] Duncan roomed briefly with a peculiar young man named Philip K. Dick, who once supplied an LP-recording device for their parlor games of poetic performance. As Killian and Lewis Ellingham point out in their definitive Spicer biography, Poet Be Like God, the books of Dick and of Spicer later became mirror images of each other, in theme as well as in imagery—grasshoppers, Martians, radios, salesmen, cities. Like Dick, Spicer was an impoverished and alienated artist for whom writing was, as Darko Suvin famously described the genre of science fiction, a motor of 'cognitive estrangement.' Both are cult artists who wrote, it can seem, as much for our time as for theirs." --Erik Davis via
"I find it vaguely comforting they found Xanax in al-Assad’s palace. Like oh good even the homicidal maniacs are on the edge" --@coolhand.bsky.social
"Pitcher
His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,
His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.
The others throw to be comprehended. He
Throws to be a moment misunderstood.
Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.
Not to, yet still, still to communicate
Making the batter understand too late."
--Robert Francis
"Fruit
If poems ever dropped into my hand,
If there was ever any time
In any land
When I had but to shake the bough
For the ripe fruit to fall,
It is not so now.
Today the fruit I want is fruit I pick,
I have to climb,
I have to reach,
I have to be both slow and quick
For each particular blue plum
Or golden peach."
--Robert Francis
"That’s not hardball capitalism. That’s polluting our culture for your own minor profit."
"IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (Anagrammed Lines)
It came from outer space —
a comet of imp creatures;
a curse of meteor impact —
to permute a cosmic fear,
to cap our mesmeric fate..."
--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”. -JFK via @misteres.bsky.social
"lightning
on the horizon . . .
the years
before me
stretch thin"
--Chen-ou Liu via @evecastle.bsky.social
"Beor's Lament
Among the mead-cups, misery I suffered --
Sloshed with gesiðas, smashed at the feast,
as hamstrung as Weland ‧ wandering back
to bed and breakfast ‧ in back of beyond --
consumed sufficient ‧ to stupefy legs --
winter-cold exile -- waking in ditch.
That drunkenness passed, so may this.
And like Geat’s wife, woeful Mæþhild,
sad at symbels, a sorrow-love --
On wine I whine, wibble sleep-reft,
A miserable man, maudlin-bladdered.
That drunkenness passed, so may this.
Like Theodric’s rule ‧ for thirty years
in the stronghold ‧ of the hotel toilet,
I seem to spend life ‧ spewing in cubicles.
That drunkenness passed, so may this.
Whetted on whiskey, wolfish I became.
Like Eormanric, I ruled the meadbench --
sixty gesithas ‧ by sorrow bound,
grim while I regaled them ‧ with god-awful jokes --
companions praying ‧ the punch line would come.
That drunkenness passed, so may this.
Of my present plight ‧ I plead to speak.
I once was a wordsmith, a weaver of verse
Remembered by many -- Martin my name --
but cider and spirits ‧ I’ve supped with ale,
and mixing mead ‧ with mulled wine
has tied my tongue, ‧ taken my eloquence.
Beor has broken ‧ my bardic spell.
That drunkenness passed, so may this."
--Martin Vine via
A Dove Has Spread Her Wings and Asks for Peace.
“We are in a prison of our own minds holding our own chains around us. We create our oligarchs and fight for their right to oppress us.”
― Heather Marsh, Binding Chaos via @kanenas-kaneis.bsky.social
