ICE follies. More ICE follies.
we sent our weatherman out in the rain
to see which way is darkest
it's the future
"Toad walked along the path. A large, soft drop of chocolate ice cream slipped down his arm.
'This ice cream is melting in the sun,' said Toad."
--@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social
"We are but a moment's sunlight
fading in the grass"
--The Youngbloods, "Get Together"
My Flowers To Those Who Love Peace.
what spoiled chances tinchelled
chimp-questionnaire glairy
built as a halt boxcar
bonegate with a tone arm
defunct mall where mocked-at
messages are resting
too much of the turmoil
taps on eclipse rhapsodes
fangles a beast bargain
One voice that would be silenced.
Freedom Seeds. (via @diotimaellen.bsky.social)
enigmatic limericks
gem milk intricacies
desaparecido
cop-sided area
“The credulity with which we entertain the idea that software can become sentient, while finding any excuse to deny the sentience of our living animal relatives, is a deep, dissonant, incoherent psychosis.” –@Unpop_science
Hidden medieval courtyard in Angoulême.
"Glitch Art, which emerged in Chicago during the early aughts, attempted to mobilize the formal affordances of digital error to point toward the artifice of the interface." (--wait, "enigmatic limericks"??) --Hannah W. on Youtube.
"The inside of a man is a subway, there are levels and more levels—the lower down you go the more disgusted you get, but there are still vending machines at the lowest level, with chocolate, little treats, candies…"
--Céline, London via @avecsesdoigts.bsky.social
"Vita Nova
You saved me, you should remember me.
The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats.
Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.
When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling.
I remember sounds like that from my childhood,
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,
something like that.
Lugano. Tables under the apple trees.
Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags.
And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water;
perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him.
Crucial
sounds or gestures like
a track laid down before the larger themes
and then unused, buried.
Islands in the distance. My mother
holding out a plate of little cakes—
as far as I remember, changed
in no detail, the moment
vivid, intact, having never been
exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age
hungry for life, utterly confident—
By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green
pieced into the dark existing ground.
Surely spring has been returned to me, this time
not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet
it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly."
--Louise Glück via @rabihalameddine.bsky.social
Unauthorized remake of Georges Méliès's 1902 film.
"American children are about twice as likely as Danish children to die before the age of five." (via @timothysnyder.bsky.social)
“Heroics
Though here and there a man is left
Whose iron thread eludes the shears,
The martyr with bosom cleft
Is dead these seven heavy years.
Does he survive whose tongue was slit,
To slake some envy of a king’s?
Sportive silver cried from it
Before the savage cut the strings.
The rack has crumpled up the limb
Stretched immediate to fly;
Never ask the end of him
Stubborn to outstare the sky.
Assuming an heroic mask,
He stands a tall derisive tree,
While servile to the speckled task
We move devoted hand and knee.
It is no virtue, but a fault
Thus to breathe ignoble air,
Suffering unclean assault
And insult dubious to bear.”
–Elinor Wylie
First Word on Horror: Liz Hand.
“Skirr gloppened worriers thro’ the night;
Roar puteals that toads eschew”
–Betelguese: A Trip Through Hell
The Birds of Ancient Battlefields Visit the Suburbs.
“…I founder in desire for things unfound.
I stay amid the things that will not stay.”
–Geoffrey Hill, “Pavana Dolorosa”
Black Metallic. (Palate-cleanser?)
“Address to My Soul
My soul, be not disturbed
By planetary war;
Remain securely orbed
In this contracted star.
Fear not, pathetic flame;
Your sustenance is doubt:
Glassed in translucent dream
They cannot stuff you out.
Wear water, or a mask
Of unapparent cloud;
Be brave and never ask
A more defunctive shroud.
The universal points
Are shrunk into a flower;
Between its delicate joints
Chaos keeps no power.
The pure integral form,
Austere and silver-dark,
Is balanced on the storm
In its predestined arc.
Small as a sphere of rain
It slides along the groove
Whose path is furrowed plain
Among the suns that move.
The shapes of April buds
Outlive the phantom year:
Upon the void at odds
The dewdrop falls severe.
Five-petalled flame, be cold:
Be firm, dissolving star:
Accept the stricter mould
That makes you singular.”
–Elinor Wylie
"I don’t know if bringing you into this world was the right thing to do." (via @kameronhurley.com)
I die of thirst beside the fountain.
None of us has tried the fountain.
At night the fountain glows within;
dark bits of flotsam ride the fountain.
The desert-builders hedge their words
but drink, however wide the fountain.
The grotto seemed today run dry.
Just to be sure, we pried the fountain.
Let Graywyvern whisper deep
and you yourself provide the fountain.
Seneca (who i always thought had one of the most eventful lives for a philosopher).
One refuses self-improvement, one disdains the didactic, not because they're useless but because they're keeping score in a game that's no longer playable.
Normalcy as denial. Normalcy as resistance. Normalcy as the balance one can't quite remember the trick of.
manageable Fillmore
murders offstage, soft-pedal
the road riddled · with dark red radar
haze across land's end
hazard in dream-words
brillig in the Braille days
abrasive-muse newsreels
swerve ichneumon · in a Nakba rain
shattering cardboard
eyes on the welkin
Storming a Quaker Meeting House with weapons drawn.
"At Cadiz he saw a (polychrome 😉)..."
“From a Book of Hours
Bearing white myrrh and incense, autumn melts
Through flower and fruit and combed blonde straw;
Thunder looms on the mountain forest-belt;
The winter firewood purrs beneath the saw.
Our garden scents upbillow like the veils
Of Solomon’s Temple, shimmer in the rain,
And all is peace. Slowly the daylight falls,
And voice and lute bring back the stars again.”
–-Charles Spear
They've never met a problem yet that "more surveillance" wasn't the answer to.
Two Parrots Took a Walk Together in Spring.
Grok.
We are bombing ourselves back to the Stone Age.
"This is not an Age to hope for any encouragement to Learning of any kind." (via Mefi)
emissary Ishmael · before they closed the zoos
one thing more · that can be taken
"quisling quota"
this mummery · march into bare fields
singing jingles · snap thin fingers
want more same · the rows wiped smooth
what this skittles-sky · can't schedule
nor plumb plagueloss · not now nameable
shapes loom shambling · our share of New Spain
disappeared poets · in mid-accusation
unmet eyes · by the iron ringstand
Prayer to the God of Ketamine.
Our story for it is many things, but it all amounts to Habitat Loss.
“The second phase really began when they could no longer think except in terms of the plague.” –Albert Camus, Notebooks 1942-1951
"...icons have taken on new significance among youths."
“The Watchers
Beneath the rampart, when the bending palm
Draws languid fingers through the opening bars
Of wind-borne ocean music, with pale stars
On lips and eyes, sit in a holy calm
The watchers of the dooms, and far away,
With orange fires and marbled stain of blood,
Sinks through the wrathful slanting of the flood
That citadel devoted by the birds of prey.
See! Towers alone remain, like jewels ablaze,
Points of a sinking crown. The watchers now
Draw back in haste, save one with troubled brow
Who seeks those coming through the rain and haze.”
--Charles Spear
“The Prisoner
I walked along the winding road;
It was high summer; on one side
Behind pale foliage sinuously flowed
The hand-sown wheat in rustling pride.
Grey sprawling stone, before me towered the school;
I touched the chapel-corner through the hedge,
Traced dimly in the window’s painted pool
Three mitres and the shield with rope and wedge.
Deep peace! Yet there was panic terror shut inside;
The bronze bells rolled and reeled in flowing tide.
Against that shock time buckled to resist,
And no sound pierced the loneliness, no voices cried;
Only the great towers trembled in the pouring mist.”
–Charles Spear
"they circle
accompanying the lonely moon
in a crow's cry"
--@poemexe.com
"On Toad’s birthday Frog gave him a hat. Toad was delighted.
'Happy birthday,' said Frog. Toad put on the hat. It fell down over his eyes."
--@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social
1974 Exorcist comic book adaptation by Kazuo Umezu.
"Hakenkreuzer Sonata"
subfusc sky assails · the low brick buildings
awhile back hail · hurled down
hurting for the ones · caught in crossfire
which is most of us
das Genicht · glacial skates
for deliquescent stakes
"In 1862, a Union soldier found cigars wrapped in a piece of paper in a field of clover."
Snake Vine (Ngalyipi) Dreaming.
victory is near
inactive sorry
ivory canister
rainy vortices
starry invoice
or scantier ivy
viscera in Troy
it carves irony
voracity resin
"Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow." --Milton Meyer via
"The sun feels different to every vampire. Sometimes like burning, sometimes like needle rain; or the pressure of a heavy weight, or a dentist's fingers, or a spreading stain" --@ctrlcreep.bsky.social
cream-colored car soiled
against pale cerulean
morning growing late
the trafficjam that clogged all
an hour ago has vanished
Houthi PC small group
hurl a pompous glitch
a gulch triumph pools
a lumpish grouch plot
mull a phosphoric tug
a pitch gloom sulphur
a Pluto plough smirch
a Gothic hump rolls up
SPACE\TIME w/ colour + rotation.
"Please remember to keep diaries, use ink & paper, they will not believe the 2020's unless we unite in poems, letters, written testimony corroborating it was what it was & we saw what we saw. The past won't believe we repeat it. The future won’t believe we endured. The present hardly believes us now." --@salenagodden.bsky.social.bsky.social
It's 𝑎𝑙𝑙 explaining, but the explanation isn't the words.
Joshua's orb · hardback
Fanthorpe with its mantle
levelled the building
sudden dark at midday
then a dowsing shower
robot directed
white columns for motley
Galaxy Six-Sixteen
levelled the building
a breeze lilts through oozeheat
a word shed by dredge-teeth
robot directed
"Homage
All I am acquainted with, absolute solitary. Arrival: pinpricks of stars. Alpha Centauri
. Alien. Asellus Secundus
. Until my glasses came. After that counting: avert face.
Bent backs lean together whispering. Sound carries bees. Automatic breath. Betelgeuse
. A blueprint for old idioms.
Coracle of the divine child. Chara
. Carrion boat. My glasses come. Closer than we knew. Pick up and carry / crown our vastness. Circumference.
Double stars aplenty. Diadem
of stars. Stars smoky in the dust sky: a warm-day-in-early-spring smoky. Path of dirt. Decant.
Eyes so compressed the scant body falters. To arrange the central fjord, a frame of mind. Fum al Samakah
. Entrance the foreign. Flanks of the sullen creature.
Gianfar
. Glissade and glissando. Steps into the giddy: when all the stars came down for us. Gorgonea Secunda
. Glasses gaunt.
Haunt me with your heaven; hover me; cover me. Head of Hydrus
. Her hands held up. Theories of inversion. Izar
. Intimate meaning.
Jabber. Jabbah
. Ordinary journey through dark-hearted country. Worry the kith and kin to my adoption. Kaus Borealis
. Kangaroo mother awaiting young.
Linked to a twisted swallow. The shape of linger, leaven of organs. Lupus
. Lingua franca: devices of the soul. Leave me in the loud grass to pry.
Messier objects: midsummer, and the crickets rub their legs and sigh. Meteorites secure atmosphere. Mother me. Nonsense; necessary failure. Not this--not that. Owl Nebula
.
Oil slicking down skin. No oral memory. You grant one dark and thin wish. Orion
. History of one who dropped the orb into my outstretched palm.
Praesepe, the Beehive Cluster
. Pneuma. Places we haven't assumed. Putting my feet into the fire. Quasar
. The quarter hour: quarter notes risen through the feet.
Reception-transmission-expression. Rigel Kentaurus
. Rolling land, high grass reaching my chin. Raising hope. Release of the strange noise, heart bleating from the inside.
Show me your stars. Show you mine. Shout and heed. See how the body wants. Scant harvest. Stroked coat of the good dog. Sharp spruce needles driving my fingers along.
Tree out of ground, I grew slowly. Entertained trajectory. Teacher. Terebellum
. Until my glasses came. Interrupting. Undoing. Uncover the body's tender ledges. Ursas
great and small.
Vibration. Variations. My voice the loneliest sound you ever heard. Vulpecula
. To have made something divine. How I visualize your face: with hills.
Wild duck cluster
. Way out of the world without word. What green is: I think I know. A smell, a sharp while ago. Wires that mock space and outrun time.
X-ray stars
. What we give each. The lives we might have had. If I don't know you. Yildun
. Yield. Yes to the sudden break, yes to the thunder. Zosma. Zibal
. Zero made of nothing."
--from Prairie Schooner, Fall 2007
“History decays into images, not into stories.”
— Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project via @yoonkim.bsky.social
"And sometimes he understood nothing..."
"can’t believe we’re basically at pro-measles for kids level of evil" --@erinvachon.bsky.social
Fifty states redrawn to have the same population.
lavender
venal red
rend vale
and revel
raven led
How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing.
thristclench melted · mastiff-
mirth scaffold & laugh
we were here we heard the
hot thunder of naught
All the Spaces We were Meant to Hold.
"What do you get if you cross an anagram with a joke?
A kind of joyous, eager magic that wows at any hour."
--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
Meme.
"It’s like Watergate, only in this version Nixon directly mails the tapes to Woodward and Bernstein" --@atrupar.com
"hail stones roiling the pool"
trump
mad king trump
he's a chump
mad king trump
king trump
mad king trump
he's a speed bump
trump
mad king trump
clogged sump
mad mad king
king trump
"goatspider parachute"
brilligdawdle · bread line
for braised steel unreeling
the clown tripfest claps fins
clankingly wet hanky
brilligdawdle
or noosed festination
anent rain of chainsaws
agog as brig gimbals
gilded brilligdawdle
“…. it was impossible any longer to discuss what was happening to us in contemporary terms…. We were all going slightly crazy trying to be honest and trying to see straight and trying to be safe. Sometimes there are conflicts in these three urges.” Arthur Miller on why he wrote The Crucible (1953) via @gillywhite8.bsky.social
"Night is a moth in the night of lamps." --Jabès
"War Photographer
In his dark room he is finally alone
with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
The only light is red and softly glows,
as though this were a church and he
a priest preparing to intone a Mass.
Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.
He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays
beneath his hands, which did not tremble then
though seem to now. Rural England. Home again
to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,
to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet
of running children in a nightmare heat.
Something is happening. A stranger’s features
faintly start to twist before his eyes,
a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries
of this man’s wife, how he sought approval
without words to do what someone must
and how the blood stained into foreign dust.
A hundred agonies in black and white
from which his editor will pick out five or six
for Sunday’s supplement. The reader’s eyeballs prick
with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers.
From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where
he earns his living and they do not care."
--Carol Ann Duffy at Scottish Poetry Library
The Poet with His Face in His Hands.
"They fucking disappeared Hamdan Ballal."
landscape of thorns lines
the low road henceforward
tell them our fall furled
say few could win safety
to the ducks here hexed
i hail from thin window
the proud flesh that fled,
the flayed shadows madding
"Nightfall’s silver needles
Narrowing our marrow..."
--James Hart via
People in silent movies watching movies.
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