Creel Pone. (via feuilleton)
"Perelandra"
blunt charabanc · to the napalm miser
each book when i bought it
black cake · on a red paper plate
call from a marionette
the road trip sped · that's a flight for life
& more salubrious pastures
in the dim turquoise · rabbitsome dawn
in my black pen's fading line
"So huge is God’s despair
I heard Him weeping there"
--Malcolm Lowry
'Petrichor': the first word i ever invented, when i was in junior high, "jairce"--because this is a thing i knew but had no name for (it was years & years before i learned the other).
View from the surface of Comet 67P. (One of the best short bits of all time, full of awe & mystery. Murnau would be proud.)
"POWERS, DOMINIONS.
Behind them, in the bamboo:
barking leprosy, symphonic.
Vincent's posted
ear
has reached its destination."
--Hamburger's Celan
"who will fashion petrichor
from absent rain
tomorrow
or when taller mountains drown
in ice-melt
sorrow
who will suck from ancient stones
their non-existent
marrow
and when mother earth lies still
find all fields
fallow"
--@wodz.bsky.social
"If we reject the idea that phantoms are struck by 'ruinenlust', their association with the broken buildings needs explanation. Is it that our imaginations require half-standing structures to be ghosted? Is it because we are so gripped by our own ruin lust that we summon from stones?" – CJosiffe via @hookland.bsky.social
"In this regime, desire does not disappear—it metastasizes." (via Mefi)
The Beaver Pond. (via @maryanncorbett.bsky.social)
"...writing this book feels, to me, like indulging in, no, relishing a cream bun. All for me, but I let you take a bite." --Jen Calleja, Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode (2024)
poison sunbeam · bark scabbard
circuitous cubeb · scry choir
scry choir wiry
siren sentiments · the wall closed
i bank nada · dank Nabi
"Rather than the ornate wallpaper of the house, philosophy is its rumbling unglamorous heart."
1.
streets permute · marks flicker
i should know by now
rooftop shot · rough sniper
slouching t'ward dessert
books on shelves · berth stable
i could tell you where
same street names · nothing lasts
only pothole spawn
old authors · the eye delves
cobblestones again
2.
vorago · aver crypt
cataract becalmed
turquoise shark · stilbshatter
carillon for crabs
what streetnames · strait trammel
these potholes · & pared shrugs
nothing else besides
hours list'ning · the songs lost
in the combat roar
in days-sweep · & swarm dust
harm ferry
We know whose side cancer's on.
I called my (Republican) congressman's office about an issue & now i get junk phone calls every day i didn't before. They made me give my number & then turned around & sold it instantly.
The Death of Bowie Gizzardsbane.
"pink light glory"
1.
we know what we know
as we go
pink light glory glareflung
glissade-parded crescent
we know what we know
as we go
the oft-moving ivy
agonist treads hargside
we know what we know
as we go
in the antheap hunt-score
one harried now doorless
pink light glory glareflung
2.
pacifist
no mystic born of bypass
in the frass struggle-tempest
distillation of driftglass
heresy
sea under software pylon
high lawn bare of normalcy
sanguinary pacifist
3.
spiralling cerulean
rista wrung from needfire
brillig bright carillon
begged parallel bentspire
4.
hazy skyline skaz-airt
excuse the rude tideploy
sparks crowd out the croc's glide
across from snide corsned
"vogue razorcut"
nerf pistol
medical district windsurf
surface of world of Trappist
this sky of fistic godturf
Pitchblende
stormswept rendering half-ditch
or witchcraft sort of pretend
as you befriend each chaffinch
goblinesque
the rescue · vorpal the job
three- no problem -leggèd desk;
burlesque of the thing, rob
record store
where porous prophets beckon
cosecutive coral rings
chased me forward & breakneck
a book drops
back of stop sign its fishhook
it took me years of caltrops
& sex props better to look
black mirror
it's here your fettersome lack
nor slack inheres in squalor
nor spiritual chime with crack
a poem springs
'midst Insoc & against time
deployment in the scantlings
wrecked cars strings of gray bilm
tribe murmur
hurricanes like teeth inscribe
a bible for the furries
viaticum: urban vibe
this group chat
vying mischief's batshit soup
a stupid hero snaps at
a wiser garners rat poop
roof wristband
handicaps Lord Nerf Pistol
What's your favorie Goth movie?
Tβπ Hπ’ππππ (with Bauhaus performing in the crucial opening montage) but there's so many--1989 Bππ‘πππ, Cπππππ£ππ ππ Sππ’ππ , even 2021 Tβπ Tππππππ¦ ππ Mπππππ‘β--but nothing quite equals Dreyer's Vππππ¦π.
"...They move beneath deep arches back through time,
Recalling ecstasy in foxglove dells,
Homecoming cattle, or the silver chime,
Colder than salt-spring, of Bavarian bells."
--Charles Spear (1951)
tumbling in flight
yet ever onward
the last monarch rides
through gray skies & blue
over field & forest
the last monarch rides
in orange & black
it cannot see
the last monarch rides
the world's ruin glides
my horse of dreams stumbles
the last monarch rides
a veil across these city streets
that link the treated & the treats
i want to use my lights but don't
as i collate bizarre defeats
or i conflate disjunct sound bites
to feed chaotic appetites
--to be erased by those who watch
as Thug, the moving cursor, writes
fuel it should be for kindness, grace,
& love of the drama taking place
bu i cannot but long for more
than motorcycle bugs-on-face
i am a monarch, last of those
whose sky trail spanned the sunset rose
& made a legend out of wings
--only to reap the end we chose
i am a monarch, exiled far;
i am a king, forgotten deep;
i wield doors of Pellucidar;
i swing the eye that cannot sleep
traveller of wars
harbinger of worse
the last monarch rides
(2019)
Smile of the Beyond. (Is this the best album of the 70s?)
"Upper Sandusky"
urgent care
Corvair in virulent surge
murder bill passed at sunrise
wondrous gleam & bleak wordage
the beige tranche
& avalanche of cages
i drive like Jehu jousting
geomantic midden-hive
We always knew our gleaming machines brought death, just not so much, so unstoppably.
burnt-out house
a thousand miles thorntelling
some merely for showing up
shrouds appear where eyes aren't
dowse for bees in the quagmire
seasons in the burnt outhouse
Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.
"...hustle of rug vendors
comply with no one
the shadows
nor the dire air"
--MΓ΄ng-Lan, Song of the Cicadas (2001)
πΉ.
"So clack your tongue, unhallowed angelus! Start gibbering the profane vespers! Shriek back the godless antiphon! I will join in with you! For I am obscenely consecrated! I, Selda, am the immaculate bride of Hell!" --Harry Hervey, The Damned Don't Cry (1939)
"The Dead
The graves grow deeper.
The dead are more dead each night.
Under the elms and the rain of leaves,
The graves grow deeper.
The dark folds of the wind
Cover the ground. The night is cold.
The leaves are swept against the stones.
The dead are more dead each night.
A starless dark embraces them.
Their faces dim.
We cannot remember them
Clearly enough. We never will."
--Mark Strand, Reasons for Moving (1968)
"You hurtle..."
"I keep trying to be honest in this glittering wind."
"As Good as Anything
I don't see the point of
remembering you; you're too boring,
Iowa City, Iowa,
much duller topologically than
Needles, California. I'm here
in the Rebel Motel, with
my grape-colored sweater
and matΓ© tea, whose smoky odor's
bound up with first rooms and foods here
sex and snow. I
write about Needles
Herman and rocks, the story's called
'As Good as Anything,' and in it
daft Herman—true local
of Needles—says
'Rocks is as good as anything.'
I figured that out summer after
first love affair in New York:
hung out, home, at a rock shop
inspecting geodes and thunder eggs
Arsenic samples and petrified
dinosaur dung.
What can I say about Iowa City
everyone's an academic poetry
groupie, I haven't yet written a poem,
there's a bar where for 25 cents a
meal of boiled egg and tiny beer.
Really I don't know what kind of poetry—
what's the name of the make they
use here—or what kinds of
poetry live people write in the world.
Is there a right and wrong poetry, one might
still ask as I patronize,
retrospectively, the Iowa style,
characterized, as I remember,
by the assumption of desperation
boredom behind two-story houses
divorce, incomes, fields, pigs,
getting into pants, well not really
in poems, well no 'well's and all
in the costive mode
of men who—and the suicidal women—
want to be culpable for something,
settle for being mean to their wives
and writing dour stanzas. God this is bitchy
I modeled for art classes
that's rather interesting
the hypocrisy: nobody needs
to paint nude women
they just like to. So here I am
naked for art, which is a lot of
dumb fucks I already know,
same with poetry.
Written and judged by. Those befoibled guys
who think—you know—
the poetic moment's a pocket in
pool; where can I publish it; what can
I do to my second or third wife now.
Nothing happens in Iowa, so
can I myself change here? Yes
I can start to become contemptuous
is that good or bad, probably bad.
In New York I'd developed a philosophy
of sympathy and spiritual equality:
out the window, easily, upon
my first meeting real assholes.
'A rock's as good as anything'
there are no rocks in Iowa
shit-black soil, a tree or two,
no mountain or tall edifice,
University drabs, peeping Toms, anti-war
riots, visiting poets
treated like royalty, especially if
they fuck the locals or have a record
of fighting colorfully with their wives.
You can go to the movies once a week,
like in Needles. You can fuck
a visiting poet; you can be paraded before
a visiting poet as fuckable but not fuck.
You can write your first poems
thinking you might as well
since the most stupid people in the universe
are writing their five hundredth here.
I'm doing that now. What
difference does it make.
I like my poems. They're
as good as rocks."
--Alice Notley via
"I shall myself dole out words of such honiedness that flies from a dozen miles afar will fiercely drum their wings against our window-panes to have each a single sip at my speech." --@harryskeeler.bsky.social
Even Jonathan Swift is not up to this moment.
"Junonia
Plucking a fossil from the pebbly shore
of Howth Beach, I dragged my thumb across
the shell’s creamy basecoat and ganache
specks circumnavigating its body whorl;
I twiddled the spire, heard the sea’s posh
accent as it spoke through the aperture.
It said nothing I didn’t already know.
I brought it home for no reason except
to display its mildly pleasant uselessness."
--Chloe Cook in The New Criterion
parajmos
hodgepurge in the penitent
paid-for-something-diff'rent throng
long daggers merely minted
If writing a poem is like juggling.
"Consider that in Israel you may say 'Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy. The enemy is not Hamas... We need to conquer Gaza and colonize it and not leave a single Gazan child there,' on tv w/ impunity. In the US you may be deported for writing an oped saying Palestinians deserve human rights" --@nkalamb.bsky.social
Twice as many years since i first collected my thoughts into a book, as it took to collect them, yet i would not have a fraction of those needed to provide a sequel: this is when a musician puts out an album of all song-covers.
"golden dome"
should the news scrapers scream
halcyon in whole places
scry the haze
kill the mist messengers
green & blue boulevard
morning's blarney
tire still trying to engage
my over-urged attention
tort argosy
2009 retrospect of Theatre Gallery from one who was there. "In May of '85, I walked into the Theatre Gallery space and introduced myself to Russell Hobbs. Without even listening to our demo tape, he said, 'Yeah, man... come down and play after one of our art openings. We're having one in three weeks.' " (I think that was my one-man show he's talking about.)
"Building a bridge is still labour, even if the bridge falls down."
what dies
does not come back
drive in subfusc days
what dies
sends strange Eumenides
into the waxwork limbec
what dies
does not come back
(2016)
"Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens." --@mobydickatsea.bsky.social
“I, too, have my Elizabethan, my Caroline moments.” –Max Beerbohm
"fanmo jimte"
Omelas
sovran the serene remedies
dying in the bitter dust
stark mustered extremities
Every ship that touches the land of Gapha, from its kick, brings it to the land of Gapha.
fear & frothing in Reno
i see no next unearthing
nothing but gargling Drano
our slain fog house of sleuthing
Cathy Gould at Uncle Calvin's.
“Bedecker of imminences, bedecker
of the parenthesis.”
–David Smith’s Trilce
In the Hangar the space opens up.
"...wart-sallowbrown, the swan of wounds,
hazy-plumaged; the horn-nebbed one.
Scream of scavengers. Scolding jargons
chide, rame and chirm as they choose morsels;
the squabbling skua, the skirl of whaup,
grey herring-gulls’ gabble and yammer:
mews’ glee at meat."
--Rahul Gupta
Loren Eiseley's poetry online.
"The Goddess Who Created This Passing World
The Goddess who created this passing world
Said Let there be lightbulbs & liquefaction
Life spilled out onto the street, colors whirled
Cars & the variously shod feet were born
And the past & future & I born too
Light as airmail paper away she flew
To Annapurna or Mt. McKinley
Or both but instantly
Clarified, composed, forever was I
Meant by her to recognize a painting
As beautiful or a movie stunning
And to adore the finitude of words
And understand as surfaces my dreams
Know the eye the organ of affection
And depths to be inflections
Of her voice & wrist & smile"
--Alice Notley
Fear and loathing in reno, detailed oil painting, remedios varo, james ensor.
"dwindle"
the day's spurious sparkle
would work bodycount shutdown
sneak & go traffic snorkels
i cackle an early countdown
can't heed the hurtful tire-light
tourbillon entity past
forage esters by firelight
slow hours iced by fast days
“Every great literature has always been allegorical, allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, the Odyssey because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle.” –GK Chesterton
"the hawk
accompanying the lonely moon
of silence"
--@poemexe.com
"Children of Light
Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones
And fenced their gardens with the Redmen's bones;
Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland,
Pilgrims unhouseled by Geneva's night,
They planted here the Serpent's seeds of light;
And here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock
The riotous glass houses built on rock,
And candles gutter by an empty altar,
And light is where the landless blood of Cain
Is burning, burning the unburied grain."
--Robert Lowell via Divas of Poetry
“We: faded light, a path;
gilded all in art lumina.
Madness went —I say—
away, all lit.
Solemn, ill, I was sent.
I was a bird,
a sad rib;
as a witness:
a will in me lost.
I’ll lay away as it.
News, send a man.
I’m ultra nil, laded light.
A path gilded a few.”
–Merlina Acevedo
Zoomorphic Vessel in the Shape of a Potato-Bird.
“If Hegel had written the whole of his Logic and then said… it was merely an experiment in thought…then he would have certainly been the greatest thinker who ever lived. As it is, he is merely comic. - Kierkegaard” –@nologos_
Skateboarding Corgi.( I want to believe this is real.)
Rannaighheacht and Its Variations.
"Fickle Fall
Falling for blue eyes is fake
if two make terrified too
you and talismans you take
for sake of whistle or woo.
Physical feelings shall fade
like shade on a weathered wall
making all things never made
or forbade for fickle fall."
--Robert Lee Brewer via
a lemon omela mourns
earnest but oft rug-erased
targe what it says on the tins
friends to be quick-sacrificed
"Upper Sandusky"
unreal city integral
to our exile hauntedhome
finding but folly a Grail
& gruesomest Grendel-hymn
Hike at Dog Canyon, New Mexico.
Fritz Leiber in The Silver Eggheads (1961) invented a name for computer-generated writing. He called it "word-wooze".
