( via / via )

Tanka.

"Trump is picking his cabinet like he’s in a fantasy league for the apocalypse" --@samlymatters.bsky.social via @amishsupermodel.bsky.social

"Lawless midnight forever composes..."

cruise as if · fateful crossing
   narrated richly
floor full of specks · constellations'
   animal starlore
these rinds wrixled · catenary chain
   winding to issue
not in the delveless dark · doing nothing
sequence set · to serve order
   entropy stymied
mere message · made & unmade
   tossed on the air tides

Cold.

( via / via )

Traffic Light.

the old anger · year's embers
   as blank of will as ever
knives flashing · flourishing decay
   book fires caught in eyegleams

"I read three mystery novels by Carr this year, each one stranger than the previous, and this—with its impossible murder, coven of witches, mechanical men, and a resolution you will not see coming—was the strangest of all."

Remembering again my favorite impossible hack that would solve most if not all of our problems: simply switch the military & the education budgets of the US...

The Smiles of the Bathers.

( via / via )

Because You Can't.

"Well there goes my resolution not to be hunted for sport" --@sofarrsogud.bsky.social

Ormulum.

"Rats all across:
end as sadness,
or call a star."

--@merlinaacevedo.bsky.social

The Angel of Death.

( me / via )

"Agreeing to a debate on this topic is like agreeing to a debate about whether the Earth is flat."

"the lustre
rumours
in the eyes of that caged bird
celestial music"

--@poemexe.com

I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies.

"Anxiety is just nature[']s ozempic" --@ilovepie84.bsky.social via @prufrockluvsong.bsky.social

The Mysterious Island.

( me / via )

Exeloume.

"sleepless all night
the cranes alight
stealing"

--@poemexe.com

"In 2023, I received an envelope with no return address. Inside was a flash drive containing tens of 1000s of secret files."

"A LINE"

how simple the desire
for love, or something that tastes like love

but how many ways there are
for two lines in space not to meet

(1989)

Water in the Desert. (vai @alinaetc.bsky.social)

( me / via )

She's a Rainbow.

"The End

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end."

--Mark Strand

Fylgija Ear / Futhorck.

"If I'm going to properly mourn something, I will cry about centuries of paper-based literature being disrupted and dis-intermediated. My subculture world I loved so well: xeroxed fanzines, science fiction monthly magazines, publishing houses, independent bookstores, newspapers, magazines, libraries, novels.

I wrote 'em. I really liked novels... As it happens, I recently wrote a new novel. Funniest novel I ever wrote. It's an ebook, you can go and look for it if you want. It doesn't make much difference if you do or you don't. We just don't live in a world where novels can be important in the way that novels used to be important.

Nobody reviews them. There are no paper periodicals that talk at great length about paper novels to people who spend their lives reading paper.

The bookstore chains have been disrupted. They are collapsing. I am a novelist. I myself don't go into bookstores very much now. They have become archaic, depressing places. They are stone cliff houses. They are half abandoned.

If I don't go in there, certainly my readers are not going to go in there. I know where the readers went. They’re all on the internet, or in social media, just like me."

--Bruce Sterling, closing remarks at SXSW, 2013

World of the Future, We Thirsted.

( via / via )

"You are the evening of the future-spongy-asserter day."

"Music of the future, of the inhuman future. Music from after the Anthropocene, of the thanatopocene." --Nietzsche and the Burbs

Brilliancy prizes.

"Catcher of words, watch
as they wing the day’s light
to hiding: the hidden
insect horde; the best word,
the wing rattle whining
west to the sun, the one
skeleton sound flying
skull caught in your word pot."

--David McKelvie in: Modern Poets on Viking Poetry

Perfect Day.

( via via Mefi / me )

"In the late medieval period, a group of Christian mystics began associating Denebola with Christ’s guidance and the promise of salvation."

Denebola feuillemort
frisk-snirtled anodyne
smaze this morning galore
glisk in forlorn ray’s-den

Sunset after Rain.

"In Japan, the Minamoto or Genji clan had chosen Rigel and its white color as its symbol, calling the star Genji-boshi (源氏星), while the Taira or Heike clan adopted Betelgeuse and its red color." --Wikipedia

The Three Stigmata of Donald Trump. (2015)

( via / me )

"One can ask this question forever and not once walk away with an answer."

"I'm here but I'm really good" --Alanis Morrissette

"The Academy is a different place today than it was then, and Lodge’s trilogy is now a period piece, but it remains excellent reading."

"One Stray Spark

Feuillemort feathers the fickle forest floor,
Sparked by a glisk on a brief winter tour.
Surrounded by smaze, the trees cough and choke
Snirtles are stifled, a forest fire is no joke."

--@thedevilstuna.bsky.social via

Savage Hump-Shaker.

( me / via via )

Kekius.

iceberg edifice
ailing raffle sapphire

bright streets & bare trees
entrust nothing busted

cyber wagon walg
awarded burn lordship

auburn ragged orb
this isle without doubtshrift

Potsherd.

"my starter pack is three dogs in a trench coat" --@kimmysunshine.bsky.social

Wreck.

( via / me )

On Dirk Bogarde in I Could Go On Singing.

"In a variety of ways literature incapacitates a man for the exigencies of existence." --Charles M Snyder, The Flaw in the Sapphire (1909)

"Long after the book was published, Vonnegut met a chemical engineering professor at a party and asked him if Ice-9 was theoretically possible."

"cycle"

necessary pond

out of all those formed
by the passage of water
over depressions

lone batrachian dwelling

master of all grays
& browns & blacks around him
still as the cold air

then suddenly not

the pond will wither
& its mud grow black cracklings
but the plop remains

"I’m looking for a place to stand, or a way to go, where the behavior of those I oppose will not control my behavior."

( via / me )

The White Whale.

gas burner galvanized · by one gaunt lucifer
   frying these mushrooms
their aroma rising · roams mem'ry
   ice winters prior
power deprived · sickness in tow
   promises broken
the aluminum kettle · with its loud shriek
   ready for tea-time
the sidewalk smooth · to the still mailbox
   pale & untravelled

8192 pxl.

It actually doesn't help me to keep being reminded these people are not only wrong but pathetic excuses for human beings, too.

"...you intend to borrow a book on usury and walk out with a book on barcodes as well, thanks to the happenstance of a shared name and the catalogue’s caprice."

( via/ via )

Second Nature.

"...lots of people remember the sort of funny story about a man explaining my own book to me and not the much grimmer business of people talking over/ disbelieving women trying to say things like 'he's trying to kill me,' which is also in the essay." --@rebeccasolnit.bsky.social

"...to question the meaning of one’s existence implies that one’s existence is secure enough to add meaning to, a thing that is hard to do when you’re trying to stay alive in the first place."

'"the logic of extermination"

Galilean moon lacewing
pearl pilgrimage dawn
leaning spiral
asbestos bilm falling

at last clouds clattering
bent thickly
gave us a good answer

but not the one we needed

Truest thing ever said about writing.

( via / me )

Modern Poets on Viking Poetry.

"dinosaur highway"

voidvotive · shell shock crystal
listicle lungfuls · apart from plainsong
pavane impervious · to the pyre we walk through
   bleeze-leam all the livelong day

Pavane for the Children of Palestine.

"THE ART (Aelindrome in the Decimal Expansion of √2: 14142135623730950488)

The art,
a losing sun,
as she emerges,
only a swan
to her suffering,
may be dark
as turns of sky.

Do seas turn
so dark, maybe,
suffering her
as wantonly?

So, emerge as she —
sung in a lost heart."

--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Galilean.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"bleeze-leam" (Scots): 'blaze-light'

( via / me )

"...today’s GOP sees college graduates as the enemy."

"MORNING (Anagrammed Lines)

Nature painted this morning
as a thorn in untried pigment,
a mad night in turpentines, or
the turning points in a dream...."

--‪@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Nothing But Guns.

I'm trying to wrap my mind around what i just read (i work as a writing tutor). I think the harried teacher told a chatbot to come up with an assignment involving the use of AI & on the subject of using AI in a given field. (I can almost picture them gibbering to Siri around 3 AM this morning.) So the student fed the assignment into their own chatbox, & sent it to me for revisions. I guess the only sane thing to do would have been to give it to another chatbot to complete the merry-go-round. Instead, because i am paid $25 an hour to do so, i had to react to it as though it had been submitted by a human for human purposes... My head hurts.

A mass slaying followed by other mass slayings, detailed oil painting, salvador dali.

( me / via )

"Les jeux sont faits."

"got into a huge fight with the wife but she apologized by buying me a cybertruck and a brand new life insurance policy" --@ndrew.bsky.social via @kimmysunshine

The Survivor.

"spiderwebbed lover —
you left me like the old year
mouth full of endings
with your glass shard hands you keep
cutting all the clocks in two"

--@saintghost.bsky.social

After many a moon.

( via / me )

Tanka.

"The three closing lines of Dylan Thomas’ Fern Hill can be arranged into a perfect tanka.

And it is a
#goodbye
of sorts.

oh as i was young
and easy in the mercy
of his means time held
me green and dying though i
sang in my chains like the sea"

--@dylan.kussman.bsky.social

"Our thoughts cannot be expected to stand at attention indefinitely any more than soldiers on parade in summer; standing too long, they will simply fall down in a faint." (Although i'm a bit dubious about the venue.)

"winter solstice
silent
armadillo"

--@poemexe.com

Anagram-Sonnet on Youtube.

( via / me )

Tribute to the Bad Tornado.

"a day of haze
despite your tweeting
no one replaces you"

--@poemexe.com.bsky.social

U Plavu Zoru.

"MATHEMATICS OF A FROZEN LAKE
(Palindrome-Haiku)

Slam ice, dynamic.
A bad loch: Cold abaci —
Many decimals."

--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Sounds fair to me.

( via / via )

One of the most popular Piero Umiliani records.

“lakeside”

amidst one mooting · maze or labyrinth
clear shapes cluster · seem clues haply
angled arrow · occupying my thoughts
shine of the shabby · paved passage
a labyrinth leads · through long detours
a maze mocks · with meaningless choices
saffron into suffering · sensibly drawn
nor can i tell what tokens · i should take for found

The Skeleton Dance.

" 'This house is a mess. I have so much work to do,' said Toad.

Frog looked through the window. 'Toad, you are right,' said Frog. 'It is a mess.'

Toad pulled the covers over his head." --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

"The Covid-19 pandemic worsened isolation, but tech had already made redundant many of the ways we used to congregate and mingle, while often portraying those ventures into the world as dangerous, unpleasant, inefficient and inconvenient."

( via / via )

House of the Rising Sun.

"snail
picking
more darkness
from far away"

--@poemexe.com.bsky.social

Vegas cybertruck burning.

"new year’s day
i am trapped here in this tent
sandstorm of regrets"

--@oyoguhito.bsky.social via @evecastle.bsky.social

Awesomeness.

( via / miekal and on fb )

"If it seems strange to mourn a love up late looking at cubes, ours was a strange love, one in which we became each other’s formal constructs, made structures for knowing together."

these three kings are targeted now
three bad kings the world will not mourn
ruthless killers
& graveyard fillers
no subject of theirs will mourn

(refrain:) no dry death finds tyrant on Earth
though this fate procrastinates sore
while the torture
prisons burgeon
& millions finch at his name

Netanyahu sought to evade
prosecution when he'd invade
Gaza's ghetto
giving no quarter
bombs drones & sharpshooters plied

(refrain)

the KGB saw Putin's rise
above all gangsters festering there
offed his enemies
bribed his rivals
at last attained Czardom ripe

(refrain)

Rapist Cheetoh's scramble-lurch
with much help returned him to rule
chaos spreading
all are dreading
next jumble-edict's spew

(refrain)

the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy.

"It is easier to accept who you've become than to recollect who you were." --Senlin Ascends

Entropy.

( via / me )

Thirty years or three.

"Why does our innovation never extend to our conscience?" --Joshua Bancroft, Senlin Ascends (2013)

"What day is it?"

outcomes
taunting flicker
not like lights in the dark
but like playful swipes of a cat's
mouse-claw

Beocat. (via @rhunedhel.bsky.social)

( via / me )

"Since the election, how many of us have felt ourselves to be suffering a similar punishment perpetrated by our own nation’s eagle, albeit a little less dramatically than the fate suffered by Prometheus?"

sharp leafshadow dorp
our share of pox tocsin
recrudescent frass
Rorschach made of horse shit

the leafshadow load
my long fasting masters
is only air pinwheeled
by oil guzzling buzzards

"Which of the values that formerly served a society well can continue to be maintained under new changed circumstances?"

"At a certain point my novels set. They set just as hard as that jam jar. And then I know they are finished."

—Ivy Compton-Burnett via @dunn4authors.bsky.social via @icomptonburnett.bsky.social

"It’s scary to admit that what we have been doing is not working, and that we may not know what to do next."

( via / via )

Ferry V.

"chipped nail polish
santa's blank stare"

--@poemexe.com

"Wear hats. Wear long sleeves. Never let the sun..."

"The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,

And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware."

--Thomas Hardy via @aestalling.bsky.social

Statement to the Heavens.

( via / me )

The Seafarer.

"honorarium"

grasp on the fragile cup
not so firm of late
reminder-glut
from which presents but slight escape

carillon of woes
& eye for news
the Usher-crack that grows
& creak claiming Soon

"During Assad's reign, Sednaya instilled such fear among Syrians that its name was often whispered in hushed tones to avoid attracting unwanted attention."

"And all these only like your name,
And your name full of all of these."

--Swinburne

There is a grassy hill.