( via / via )

To a Friend in Recovery.

"...I assumed,
among nasal lemurs."

--Satire: Veritas

I'll Plant My Own Tree.

   Vundesh cranch
winding the perilous winch
whispered from wharfside floatpig:
"Shake it like an Illig grinch"

cliff walk · & edge crumble

   Vundesh choose
music under a merle sun
whakapapa stern & still
furnace untouched feral stock

this little corner · where calm lingers

Giraffe statue.

( via / via )

Aubade with Burning City.

"dark tool"

   whelmed wasp nest
honey cerulean hospice
in the cool long living room
under a mingled auspice

   plaid giraffe
on wet wings of a tariff,
seraphim can't dance so slow;
rogaine on the race sheriff

   fragile realm
courage for a whelmed wasp nest

Joe Coleman pic.

"In a cold, lone, mossy bastille
Cell. It's a bare, venal room--"

--Satire: Veritas

Lion annual 1955.

( via / via )

Winter Court.

"...a namer of ebony, allied opals..." --Satire: Veritas

Closer than you think.

flowers & dogs in my feed
can't hold back the camps

fresh carrion
on the ever-ailing streets

dull danger at noontide
ascian's dogma

i wanted to be hypnotized, & i was

"I think probably in my mind, certainly what we’re seeing isn’t anything I’ve ever experienced in my lifetime."

( via / via )

My Grandfather Was a Terrorist.

"ache of pale cerulean"

ev'rything bitter · blends in the limbec
dark gray Accord · Gruenfeld
   shine momently like stars
already warm · winter lost
   as if it'd never been
golden arches · armies in polar
   ice & olive drab

"Big Daddy" Roth.

"...O so time
Edits a pastime so real!"

--Satire: Veritas

Basil Wolverton.

( via / me )

More neighbourly stump burning.

"O daft fados!"

--Satire: Veritas

Alcove at Bushmead Priory.

"La Vita Nuova

Last summer, in the blue heat,
Over the beach, in the burning air,
A legless beggar lurched on calloused fists
To where I waited with the sun-dazed birds.
He said, 'The summer boils away. My life
Joins to another life; this parched skin
Dries and dies and flakes away,
Becomes your costume when the torn leaves blow.'

--Thus in the losing autumn,
Over the streets, I now lurch
Legless to your side and speak your name
Under a gray sky ripped apart
By thunder and the changing wind."

--Weldon Kees

Gwyneth Jones on the Future of Gender.

( via / via )

Satire: Veritas.

"The Nevermore-To-Be

Lady, be the chatelaine
Of my vagrant dreams and vain:
Knowing naught is true and fair
Save the love that is despair,
In thy heart's withholden visne
Share with me the might-have-been,
Weave with me the sorcery
Of the nevermore-to-be.

Lady, let us pluck delight
Only from a forfeit night,
From the bedded myrtles strewn
'Neath a never-risen moon.
From the coil of years made free
In the climes of reverie,
Flee we to the phantom Troy
Of a time-forbidden joy.

Lady, be the chatelaine
Of my vagrant dreams and vain:
Be thou true and be thou kind
To the love we shall not find—
Sweet as aught the sirens sang:
Tome shall bring no dearer pang
Nor a mightier sorcery
Than the nevermore-to-be."

--Clark Ashton Smith

"The journal folds in and out of itself, like a middle school folding game."

"Part raptor,
Rapt parrot,
Part rapture..."

--Satire: Veritas

In the Renaissance Rooms of the National Gallery.

( via/ via )

"It comes as a surprise to new readers that, apart from the action of the three monster fights, large swaths of the poem consist of stories within stories, referring to characters and events in what I call the Germanic Expanded Universe." (via @rhunedhel.bsky.social

“All sin ever is evil,
As is Sargasso
Forever on Ossa…”

–Satire: Veritas

"I watch, God forgive me not, I keep watch
When I should be running towards the blaze."

“Astronomy

Taste and touch brighten spring snow
Weeds brought the refusal
Unbearably

Weeds loitered western stars
The earth catwalks the east rim
Less vivid

To rest the earth
To have fog-breath
The little western stars fought”

–Don Shea & an IBM 360 computer in: Avant Garde (9/68)

"Burgess’s article ends by proposing, only half-seriously, the establishment of a new pan-European lingua franca to be called ‘Marcommunish."

( via / me )

Flaming June.

"fake waspnest"

1.
the prey wearied prior
practice hiding tidefnast
too bright lampions limn
the long getting-fit
dire cherubim
or floaters hold heartsong
happily gap-captive
as the scar pale sky
scotfree pumps the stump
with alibi

2.
   new golden
culdesac fold-askew
continue the told tale
mouldering acumen

3.
   white shadow
wisps stagger dealt
   osprey churn

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of an Extinction Event.

“O lost solitary
Argonaut…”

–Satire: Veritas

"It used to be that AI stories were easy to cover: it was going to destroy us all and there was a picture of the Terminator to hammer home the point – a film that was released over 40 years ago and therefore about as relevant to Gen Z as a rotary dial phone."

( me / 1985 )

"Only the billowing overcoat endures."

"What makes LLMs work isn't deep neural networks or attention mechanisms or vector databases or anything like that.

What makes LLMs work is our tendency to see faces on toast." --@jasongorman@mastodon.cloud via @rgarner.bsky.social

Killyglen Standing Stone in the Antrim Hills.

"Uluru, 2007

Breathtaken at the foot of Uluru,
Wondering what to make of this strange land
Beyond a wild surmise, I thought of you,

Who would have found some way to understand
The speechless power of this vast red stone
And, as far as the eye can see, a flat red sand,

And might have heard in the dawn wind a tone
Of sorrow that will never fade away—
A sorrow it could scarcely call its own.

My disbelief has nothing more to say.
I have no heart for making light of you.
If I believed in prayer, I would pray

You make your way at last to Uluru,
And everything that you believe be true."

--Robert Mezey via

After a night in Crow Hotel.

( via / via )

Art Bateau.

       "The Vundesh"

   loadmanage
if not to banish dreadbode
the old story shattering
catnip for the cold portal

   liftgilver
sylvan waste & the dead gift
skunkface in the narrow screen
Venus high where the monk moults

   dark like silt
shivering ev'ry built spark
candle out of hooded lodge
the skald side of loadmanage

Corn flakes & ice cream.

"And, in fact, it's something that I truly can't describe to you. There just aren't words. It makes you different, though. It makes you experience the world differently than people without it. There's no special powers that come with it, no grand insights, but just a calm sense of well-being. All I can tell you is that you feel in your heart that you belong to the universe, that you know you have a purpose. That's it." --Jeffrey Ford, "The Scribble Mind," in: The Drowned Life (2008)

The hardware.

( via / via )

"Several of us at last job DID find that using AI extensively for writing (as told to do by management) was making us worse writers. So we stopped, only used it for outlines and ideation. 70% of the team was then fired, and those who remained were told to generate copy whole cloth via AI or be fired." (thread)

"Imagine German children, after the war,
Sold models of Auschwitz, gas chambers to make,
Einsatz commando model figures to place
Across the killing fields of central Europe."

--Peter Jukes.

turbulence made marble
amerced by song wrongness
blood on the keyboard
where the last mound landed

AngeLINK reprinted. (via this thread)

( via / via )

So long, Elmo.

   kenosis
curbed dose of the mannikin
dull green & concrete grindscrape
find your place amid shapefling

Tripartite Mahzor.

If you were wondering who the people were that would want robots to think for them, we have an answer now.

What can I do.

( me / via )

Tanka.

"It took a thousand years from the invention of writing at Uruk to its first recognizably literary uses. " --Jac Mullen in the Hinternet

Inside UBIK.

"crow & 2 rabbits"

quondam merlewing quokka
acquainted night smattering
out of order proper
angst swept in the gloaming

much like any other
instant quondam merlewing
as the shapes creep sharper
shadowy words fidget

A Cow Like That Gives 5,000 Liters a Day.

( via / via )

"The phrase 'Tupuna Fed, Mokopuna Led' (to be nurtured by the ancestors and shepherded by the next generation) shines in neon orange..." (via @kellylink.bsky.social)

biters of plague rats · dance the rubric
   i rise from my sad screen
lawns surround · & little kingdoms
   with a jester in the box
where would i walk to · or warpspeed
   when more, more of the same
between whose ears · arglebargle
   crowds out even rescue
let's throw a parade · gunwielders
   marching bands & flowers
trample those who drop · clowns
   make balloon animals
in the shape of the leader · & the fake first lady
   laughs

"She often invoked sacred geography in her art. Works such as Dance of the Nine Maidens (1940) and Dance of the Nine Opals (1942) depict local rock formations as sentient, mythic figures."

"Seriously starting to think the Great Filter is just patriarchy" --@charliejane.bsky.social

Amado Mio.

( via / via )

Indian Reservation.

“Why isn’t there philosophy creepypasta” –@Andilaama

My favorite blue record.

little enough AMISS
mild the clouds’ MIGHT
the all-window IGLOO

of vistas SHORN
awaits the first hurled STONE
aspirants CLASH

in the vanishment LOTTO
corrects the ATLAS
await orders to START

Rubicon HOSTS
a treaty miles too WORDY
Basenji OPERA

occasion before to REFER
suburban DREAD
in the snugly-mown YARDS

The myth of Klaatu.

( via / me )

Vegetative electron microscopy. I let Nightcafe have a stab at it.

one rock
atop another rock

reaches to the moon

but my next act of stacking
is to put the second back

"Optimus, he suggests, is a $10 trillion business for Tesla in the coming years, eventually arriving at '100 million being manufactured per year' at a pace wherein the robots will eventually outnumber human beings, which I assume he thinks is desirable."

"here is a perfect hyperdimensional jewel made of every word a human being has ever written, and all the correspondences between those words. people mostly use it to get insane household repair tips or jerk off. i guess it basically runs the government now" --@theophite.bsky.social (via @supercomposite.bsky.social)

The BL Lacerta album.

( via / me )

"Bowie’s Low—devoid of s.f. lyrics—feels more science fiction thanks to its innovative production and brittle, neurotic rhythms than Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs, whose songs about alien messiahs and Orwellian dystopias come clad in relatively conventional rock settings."

“The demons in their prismatic malice betray the agreement between us and them, and we are again in the chaos of chance.” –Pale Fire via

"Someone - I think it was Rem Koolhaas - said Expo 70 was the peak of the 20th Century and that's it been downhill all the way since..."

"the moon is cool
yet moonlight caught
a flute"

--@poemexe.com

Licht.

( via/ via )

White Rabbit.

"Speech for the Repeal of the McCarran Act

As Wulfstan said on another occasion,
The strong net bellies in the wind and the spider rides it out;
But history, that sure blunderer.
Ruins the unkempt web, however silver.
I am not speaking of rose windows
Shattered by bomb-shock; the leads touselled; the glass-grains broadcast;
If the rose be living at all
A gay gravel shall be pollen of churches.
Nor do I mean railway networks.
Torn-up tracks are no great trouble. As Wulfstan said.
It is oathbreach, faithbreach, lovebreach
Bring the invaders into the estuaries.
Shall one man drive before him ten
Unstrung from sea to sea? Let thought be free. I speak
Of the spirit's weaving, the neural
Web, the self-true mind, the trusty reflex."

--Richard Wilbur

Anastatic Printing.

"sleep on a journey
then you will understand my poem
autumn winds"

--#haiku poems of Matsuo Basho between 1684-1688
translator: Jane Reichhold (via @evecastle.bsky.social)

Bush Flowers.

( via / via )

"I see you. Pounding Monster energy at 2 A.M., telling yourself you’re 'building the future' while you slap together some Frankenstein CRUD app with a bot spoon-feeding you syntax it scraped from 2016 GitHub."

"passing Texas Street"

1.
   low needle
of the lewd now
   melody
& dire molar
   at Frankford
fremd affordance
   the red light
of loud writing
   Omelas
in iron merlewings

2.
   blink topaz
subfusc jazz is sinking
& you drink dazzlement
from the mazard of mink

   azure trees
gray season of fascist
driving through deserts
the dumb crumbs of empire
plunging through blink topaz

3.
   closed Comet
blizzard night of blightcreep
crabbed lakeside rivulet
shivers to be daynabbed

nothing festers faster than surveillance
except to smash encampments built by vagrants

   comet rain
flicker brain in the shawm
sheeted squads in a row
grids narc the low needle

"I think that the age of there being just internet phenomena is largely over. These phenomena are now blended into the real world."

Modest proposal: for every book you publish, review 2 others.

No Easy Way Down.

( me / via )

"For weeks I’ve been working through botched copy-edits of my monograph, outsourced by the publisher to a company I’d never heard of, until it finally dawned on me the terrible job might be AI."

"On the one hand, form is the technology of the poem: it regulates the language and the lineation to extend the thinking that the poem generates. On the other, form has its own mode of intelligence: it performs critical knowledge work with the questions that the poem asks." --Orchid Tierney via

Endtimes schooling.

"the weird escarpment"

tears of Carthage course down
because of clang kingdom
wide & level loudness
smack dab in the smokescreen

a smidgen-off safe word
red sky where the hulk looms
days of no derne frazzle
teethclenched nights

bright star in the strict wind
after pogroms & pranks
birthing tears of Carthage
on my car's dawn windshield

AI Barron Trump singing AI gospel music.

( via / via via @colsonwhitehead.com )

The first Memorial Day.

"AI & the em-dash"

dense mackerel sky
drive past the house that burned down
forcing your detour

Ucalegon, no story
there must have been a story

Maybe read it as if it were a poem. (via vianegativa.us)

"I've had a few people ask me what piece of fiction best processes the times we are living in (especially Americans are living in) and I'll say again here, mile for mile your best choice is @jwomack.bsky.social's Random Acts of Senseless Violence." --@robertmackenzie.bsky.social (via @greatdismal.bsky.social)

"So that now makes Lena McDonald, KC Crowne and Rania Faris leaving ChatGPT prompts in their ‘books’." (via @colsonwhitehead.com)

( via / via )

Order fulfillment bots already in use.

"A guy is helping us bear proof our chicken coop and today he was explaining how we’ll put a carabiner clip through the extra-heavy deadbolt to keep bears from opening it and this wave of sadness that bears don’t understand carabiner clips just rolled over me." --@kellylink.bsky.social via (for the raccoon carabiner link)

Waitin' For The Bus/ Jesus Just Left Chicago.

"new guidelines"

tank parade · pitched at squee
   red hats in a row
i think thorned · thesterness
   maybe Roman dusk
little man · not for long
   on your golden stool
roll the tanks · paint your face
   corpse-pale underneath

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

( me / via )

Peak technology.

"living in harmony
watching the snow…
in a crow's cry"

--@poemexe.com

Soof.

" 'I am feeling much better now. Toad,' said Frog. 'I do not think I need a story anymore.'

'Then you get out of bed and let me get into it,' said Toad, 'because now I feel terrible.' " --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Another Beast Has Run Into Flowers.

( me / me )

E Coli Outbreak.

"The 11-year-old was Gaza’s youngest influencer, whose bright smile reached tens of thousands, including other children, while she offered practical survival tips for daily life under bombardment, such as advice on how to cook with improvised methods when there was no gas." --via

Pickpocket, Naples.

   land dying
Orion's belt of candles

the gray haze of hazard
harrows street & meet-cute

   taillight glow
you know all the ailerons

the gray fuse of fizgigs
muscles into bus stops

   azure trees
trope leisure at Alcatraz

Mad Magazine, 1992.

( via / via )

"All the Vedas, scriptures and sacred lore, canons and codes, are but grist and husk ground in the mill."

have more died now · than in Vietnam
marble blank · some of the names blurred
wall after wall · to be filled with names

wall after wall · wall after wall

rush out into ash
iron carnage
leave all the books lax
align moon
some people do it to be scruffy
some people do it for the whuffies

"war" like the war
of the Nazis with the Jews

i left enough time

some people do it for the easement
some people do it for appeasement
some people do it for the hatred
some people do it to feel sacred

"For those with heightened sensory awareness, however—and Thoreau’s writings reveal him to be just such a person—the world is a storm."

"Men are, in fact, quite unable to control their own inventions; they at best develop adaptability to the new conditions these inventions create." --John Galsworthy

"My mother was born in the camp and had no idea what a home should look or feel like."