( via / via )

Europa and Io.

"a fraternity hoodie that spells out ISIS in Greek letters, just picture it" --@dly.bsky.social via @francesmeh.reviews

"The fact that Quakers continued to use thee long after most of the rest of the English-speaking world abandoned it is somewhat remarkable, but ...even though Quakers retained thee, they eventually dropped thou (at least in colloquial style), using thee in its place."

a short car drive walked
in all temp'ratures essayed
the gray of old snow

"Since I am an actual dropout I always felt a degree of impostor syndrome about it, and I had no idea how my colleagues taught their classes. I was afraid to ask."

( via / via )

"The new people were something else before they were white-Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish-and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again."

ignoble spectacle
spastic the whirligig
out of the pentacle
enter devout floatpig

Modern Japanese Fiction in English Translation.

"Or spotted plush of panthers from the boughs
Of lush primeval forests..."

--J Stanyan Bigg

Regret rate.

( via / me )

nocturn.

"DiValo decided to let Wolf Gladish fry a little in his own money-hungry juices before telling him that where there was a legerdemainist in the picture, the war was never lost! So he held mutual post-mortem condolences with the other." --@harryskeeler.bsky.social

The Black Sun.

"Glacier

a gracile calcic acreage, regal, irreal, elegiac, clear—

eerie icicle cellarage,
glare carrier,
lilac relic:

all ice,
all age

all lag"

--Luke Bradford in Eunoia Review

thors helmet.

( via / me )

"In a time when assaults on higher ed are the most acute since the McCarthyite assaults of the 1950s, the University's leadership & trustees have abandoned any duty to protect the university's most precious resources: its faculty, students, & academic mission."

elfcap inference · fade into craft
svelte microclime · Svengali

bright sun on the · old snow
January resolutions · looted for sport

& it's elfcap inference · keeps us afloat
in the aftermath · of the munchkin cull

"...there are widespread videos of kids in Compton, where I once lived, helping their mother remove her belongings, and being labeled to the world as looters."

"The sexual tension between winter and depression" --@tomorrowx3.bsky.social via @4slars.bsky.social

Look at what was taken.

( via / via )

LA firenado.

" 'Yes,' said Frog, reaching for a cookie, 'we need will power.'

'What is will power?' asked Toad." --@toadandfrogbot.bsky.social

DuckTales took an unexpectedly dark turn..

"MERGING (Anagrammed Lines)

More winter seedlings —
more needless writing;
entire worlds seeming
to merge in wilderness...."

--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

You step outside and breathe in the ashes of your friends' homes while charred pages from someone's beloved books glide to your feet on poison winds.

( me / via )

"...how to become a hammered shield, and turn to dust, and grow from it."

online bills my bane
abet bruising newsreels
snow in the dim diamonds
& a still, small voice says
i want to live

how did this beast heist
bury our squall-knowledge
suddenly loot-brutal
& a still, small voice says
i want to live

Night Terrors.

"the cricket crawls in
seeking
cheep! cheep! cheep!
even unto death"

--@poemexe.com

A fake merman I bought to mark our anniversary. (via @clownf1st.bsky.social)

( via / via )

The Songbirds Online Waka Anthology.

"So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few of them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and form" --@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

"They had ridden the ‘hoot-owl trail’ and tasted the fruits of evil and now justice had caught up with them to demand payment." (via Mefi)

door to black dawnsorrow
dim blood-sugar droog
fylgja · for the roleplay
affordances dismal

out there feral afghan
ignorant of thigsters
whitens the suit sepulchre
celibate as feldspar

Don't let him get in your head, detailed oil painting, edward hopper.

( via / via )

Welcome.

morning cark sans carnage
recall wax wings falling
dust of the erst anchor
autumn's chundered thunder
snow crunch has a crisp loss
across gathered fathoms
& the black seed blindly
blesses thwart & parting

すきにやればいい. [Just do it as you like]

"Working on my resume….

Are fits of rage and outbursts of profanity listed under skills or hobbies?" --@etobicokeernie.bsky.social

Orpheus.

( anthony villarreal in asemic group on fb / via )

An Outer Space Memory.

" 'In a sense he will not die.'
'In a poor sense,' said Theresa, 'as he will not be alive.' " --@icomptonburnett.bsky.social

Dawnsorrow.

dawnsorrow prolonged
so much light through the bare blinds
& silent dribble

the snow refuses my poem
as death does, as that darkness--

The Path.

( via / via )

These are difficult times.

"NOVEMBER

On a pale sandhill
A bare tree stands;
The death-wind
Has snatched the last few leaves."

--Jun Fujita in Poetry (1921)

Paint It Black.

“The novel used to feed our search for meaning… It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don’t need the novel… We don’t even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings.” –Don DeLillo, Mao II (1991)

Unconditional discharge.

( via / via )

Season of the Witch.

Words for kinds of traffic, as the Eskimo (supposedly) have for kinds of snow...

Horra.

"A Dollar’s Worth of Blood, Please

With the last memo checked: They will sign, success; with the phone put down upon the day’s last call; then with the door locked at last,
Wait; think;
What should the final memo be?

SAY THE LAST WORD,
SAY THE LAST WORD ADDING ALL WE’VE MADE AND LOST,
SAY THE LAST WORD THAT WEIGHS THE TRIUMPH SEALED IN INK AGAINST THE DEBT
PRESERVED IN STONE AND THE PROFIT LOCKED IN STEEL,

One final word that the doorman knows, too, and the lawyer, and the drunk,
That the clerk knows, too, sure of tomorrow’s pleasant surprise,
And the stranger, who knows there is nothing on earth more costly than hope
and nothing in all the world held one-half so cheap as life,

One final word that need never be changed,
One final word to prove there is a use for the hard-bought distrust and the hard-won skill,
One final word that stands above and beyond the never-ending weakness and the never-failing strength,

SAY THE LAST WORD, YOU LONG STRAIGHT STREETS,
SAY THE LAST WORD, YOU WISE GUY, DUMB GUY, SOFT GUY, RIGHT GUY, FALL GUY, TOUGH GUY,
SAY THE LAST WORD, YOU BLACK SKY ABOVE.”

–Kenneth Fearing

Finger.

( via / via )

"It floods the imagination, leaving you to wander a city on the edge of collapse, its streets filled with mercenaries and rituals, its skies heavy with the smoke of sacrifice."

"Poems

Poems are born when life is dead,
Or else so much alive
No ribs can give it residence,
No heart can give it hive.

There is no soul of transient thew,
No mind of common grey
That can subsist on such an air--
But poems come that way."

--Lindley Williams Hubbell, Dark Pavilion (1927)

Europa Clipper has begun a 2.9 billion kilometre voyage.

--What a wonderful story. I remember when Voyager 1 reached Jupiter. My parents drove me down to Houston where i bought a set of slides. I had a projector from Edmund Scientific & i tied a small fan on top with string. When i think about Jupiter, i can hear that fan & smell the hot air it gave off.

Slats and Slits of Light.

( me / via )

"...a third-party research has estimated that GPT-3, the AI model underpinning the popular ChatGPT, uses 500mL of water for every 10 to 50 queries... A cheeseburger takes about 660 gallons. That's about 50,000 queries per burger.."

"It's very rare but occasionally spam emails make me giggle, like this one from Thriftbooks which had the subject:

'Pre-Order the Latest From Fyodor Dostoevsky'

So happy to hear he's coming out with a brand-new novel!" --@stinsdemons.bsky.social

me: "it's called 'crime and impunity' "

7th Heaven.

"LOSS (Palindrome)

Warm in me,
loss is so laden.
I pined.
A loss is solemn.
I’m raw."

--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

An in-depth look at Julie Andrews in 1963/64 & so much more.

( via / me )

"In the eyes of autocrats and plutocrats, the future is not a right but a commodity."

"summer eve
abandoned
shadows speak
illuminated by a wildfire"

--@poemexe.com

Timelapse of BepiColombo’s fourth Mercury flyby.

"And though Propertius did like precepts give,
Yet his clear fame doth still unstainèd live."

--1672 Ovid

Last surviving copy of The Life of Margery Kempe.

( me / via )

House of Dark Shadows.

"it's kind of crazy how the US broke away from england only to end up with their own completely insane king george" --@elleisanisland.bsky.social via @prufrockluvsong.bsky.social

Wyoming Neuschwanstein.

secure rendition · from the place where it was
   over & over
   & that's not counting the things dropped
this shadowless glow · a diff'rent glow at night
   hardly the same thing
   as when we were trapped for a week
without internet · ignorant of deaths
   over on the next street
   not to mention globally
but for now we natter · on the dry stream
   ever away
   send pictures of the old snow

When your country is starting to feel like a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

( via/ me )

Runoff.

furious ripples · roof runoff
casts on the cold lanai · still sheeted
are the yards yet · & most of the roads
it is late afternoon · i long for a book
   that is not the books i have
old snow · this senseless profusion
not for us · or against us
while we're content · to topple our stones raised
   with so much effort

Exile.

"Need to institute congestion pricing on takes" --@ositanwanevu.bsky.social via @jcsalterego.bsky.social

"I have a contrarian’s compulsion to write about this in a way that tries to capture this terrifying sentiment without conceding to a kind of winsome, perhaps melancholy lyricism in service to how things are or were..."

( via / me )

New issue.

"The world is my oyster: slimy, disgusting, and I don’t want any part of it." --@joparkerbear.bsky.social

What the Peepers Say (in English & Ojibway).

"a snowflake
windblown in the grove
silent cathedral
in a bead of sweat"

--@poemexe.com

"Incidentally, this is the poem that occasioned the famous anecdote, according to which the poet Corinna, supposed to have been Pindar’s teacher, is said to have told him to 'sow with the hand, not from the full sack'."

( via / via )

First "Hycean" exoplanet.

"Sparrow

I am:
a little thing, tawny of hue
work wanting done. My city sings
as the sun sets. Sometimes I come
lief into light, but do not linger."

--Fiona Richardson in FGR

"It’s great that there are so many trans books coming out, but to nobody’s surprise its trans women who came from money and/or had a formal education who mostly get to write them."

"Elon Musk: Why isn’t there enough water in California?

Grok (burning through an entire lake to generate an answer): Wokeness"

--@illumi.meme.bsky.social

" 'I cannot rely on police to go after the red mob if they have to worry about facing disciplinary action when they are simply doing their job, Göring explained." (via @joriegraham.bsky.social)

( via / via )

East St. Louis Noir #58.

"Here was fine, there was a disaster. But here was just a different kind of disaster." --Hummingbird Salamander

The Plum Pudding in Danger.

"Fox

Down the draw toward the water
where the duck have flocked,
the stones stink with riots
of fox sign. The tortured mesquite
urge us to the wigeon, pintail,
blue-winged teal tuning their whistles.
At our rising from the last rock
they leap like rain returning. We shoulder
guns, begin to brush them from
the egg shell dusk: cave dwellers
whitewashing the walls of our hides.
A teal’s crescent cheek shines
in the game bag’s shadow. Back up
the brittle course four lengths of shot
, we settle at the scrub oak’s feet.
Dimpled walnut strokes the cracked
tip of my thumb. The dead rabbit’s record
screams into a cedar copse
beyond stones like steps into the night,
and that hideous, carnal bark comes
to say how far from home we are."

--Danny Fitzpatrick in Forgotten Ground Regained #5

Winter.

( via / via )

One of the scariest short videos i've ever seen.

"insomnia
through the paper window's hole
first rain
on the moon"

--@poemexe.com

Another one.

"Don't understand why Disney is trying so hard to turn Tron into a franchise when The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes is right there." --@charliejane.bsky.social

"Greenland is not just a big chunk of territory. It is a nation, a story, a homeland." (via @joriegraham.bsky.social)

( reunion cam / via )

Robert Duncan tribute on Ginsberg site. (via de villo sloan)

"DAYS (Lipograms*)

Monday may doom my mood.
Tuesday’s steady duty tests us..
Wednesday dawns and sends a yawn..
Thursday's truth thus hurts..
Friday air a far affair,.
Saturday’s as stray as dust — as rusty..
Sunday’s sad.

(*each line uses only the letters of its day of the week)"

--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

TOOT, WHISTLE, PLUNK & BOOM.

"Maybe the dinosaurs voted for the asteroids." --@samuelhlowe.bsky.social via @amishsupermodel.bsky.social

nothing / whatſoever.

( via / via )

The John Waters list of the ten best movies of the year, for the past 24 years.

"I have journeyed here
without bringing strips of cloth.
Let the gods decide
whether to accept brocades
of red leaves on Offering Hill."

--Sugawara Michizane in Brocade by Night

say what you will but this truck is producing some of the most on the nose images for how stupid this year is already.

horse-consul a curse flung
cadre of fumble-pumpkins
shirtless rider’s showdown
in the sheer gears-spanner

rather these clowns running
a roundup, rights’ nightfall
still i am sore star-reft
stepping among dung loads

500 Miles.

( via / via; more )

carbonbot cark
arid cerulean dome

colder road
ev'rything ice-clear

you will see me sometimes
anchored in soot

train tracks arrowing

The Mind (1964).

"light the fire
an empty snail shell
another door"

--@poemexe.com

Public Domain Image Archive.

( via / me )

Nantucket Sleighride.

"ANAGRAMMED LINES (Anagrammed Lines)

Anagrammed lines
mangle and rise. (Am
I glad namers name
enigma — and realms?)
Dream-names align
anagrammed lines."

--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

It's All over Now Baby Blue.

to the fiery furies · a funereal drogue
bright January · we adjourn our conclaves
   crow pecking in the dead grass
highway i could run my hand · on the harsh edge of
delayed little · alongside closings
   new album by the Cure
reap pretending's talion · in bright January late

Do It Again.

( via / jason cohen on fb )

Vortex.

"Greater American Empire Death Fugue

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are flashing he whistles his pack out
he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave
he commands us strike up for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink in the morning at noon we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined.

He calls out jab deeper into the earth you lot you others sing now and play
he grabs at the iron in his belt he waves it his eyes are blue
jab deeper you lot with your spades you others play on for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown
we drink you and we drink you
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents

He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise into air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith"

(Translated by Michael Hamburger) via

Disgraced.

"Toad walked on the high wire.

'Frog,' cried Toad, 'can you do tricks like this?'

'No,' peeped Frog, who looked very, very small."

--@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

White Bird.