( via / miekal and on fb )

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)

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

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

( 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.

( via / via )

Envoy.

" 'I—I thank you, Governor,' he said with dignity, 'on behalf of the Great Science of Mathematics and Joe the Duck.' " --@harryskeeler.bsky.social

A compelling revision of the history of experimental writing from Pound and Stein to Language poetry, disclosing its uses and its limits.

will we be fleeing for our lives
across the coming battle-days
no longer customers to please
will we be fleeing for our lives

but what besides the tale we'd gloze
has changed in dodging maladies
will we be fleeing for our lives
across the coming battle-days

"...This war was never political at all..."

( via / via )

A Habitable Grief.

twisting branches braced
debridement's keen greensward
halcyon December else
semblance crag & ragged
sirens attend sunned
sittingstede sans witness
the book binds its nook
aboard a slow snowflake
& time waits in womb

stilbchuck · friction state
stereo blare wary

Life on a Killer Submarine.

"the night is long
guided by their mother
dark forest"

--@poemexe.com

"Carter told Dylan he never understood the experience of the workers on his family’s peanut farm until he heard' I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More'."

( via / via )

50 Contemporary Poets on the Best Poems they Read in 2024.

"smoke drifts
obscuring
the full moon
how many hearts now
know grief"

--Terrie Jacks via @evecastle.bsky.social

White Rabbit.

"Sxwaixwe"

weather alert lithe
league of tofu eagle
North is East announced
by a nice big iceberg
ghosts in the guest house
a gain for mansplaining
flicker among murk
mobled banks of strobe lights

Walking in Space.

( dan welch in asemic grp on fb / via via @elakdawalla.bsky.social )

"At the same time that Scribner published Hemingway and Fitzgerald, it was the leading purveyor of white-supremacist books in America."

upstairs alcove furl
ash cardinalitial
vain answer evince
inverse angel manger
epiphany swarf

"Using a simple animation technique that does not require special browser plug-ins, And has enlivened each character by continuously cycling it through a sequence of five to eight different typefaces."

"What made less intuitive sense to me, I said, was that such a cultural memory of colonisation – the knowledge that atrocities took place in your own country at the hands of a foreign occupying power – might be some kind of necessary condition for understanding that similar atrocities occurring today are also wrong." --Mark O'Connell via

"We have worked closely with the Government of lsrael and the UN to provide greater access to the North Governorate, and it is now apparent that the civilian population in that part of Gaza is in the range of 7,000-15,000, not 65,000-75,000 which is the basis of this report."

( via / me )

Tanka.

"back alley
a train's whistle
i had a kiss all ready
and yet"

--@poemexe.com

"No, do not speak soothingly to me of death, glorious Odysseus."

winter of our weave
wilderness from mildew
half a napkin heap
with harm-flinging army
leafmeal lie the reefs
that allow lurch purchase
orange cones acquire
the cold look of bookends
oven winds our weave
lit control panel
from the sea floor

Inch Abbey.