"WHAT'S A HAIKU? (Anagrammed Lines)
Basically, the paced
heptadecasyllabic
blade; a patchy slice."
--@anthonyetherin.bsy.social
"Me as a kid reading Dune: I don’t get why their whole society is built around the eradication of A.I., seems like they’re wasting a lot of tech
Me as an adult: oh that’s why" --@notdred.bsky.social
The funeral industry turns to AI. "I glanced over at an advertisement for another high-tech service—one that could make lab-grown diamonds from my mother’s ashes or her hair. Having an AI write her obituary seemed pretty tame in comparison."
"One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise, she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.” --Thomas Paine via @gregggonsalves.bsky.social
The Devil Commands (1941)-#14. (Made from Wm Sloane's The Edge of Running Water). ☆☆
sent downstairs
in a season of tension
the pale dawn doesn't betray—
one pawn—but we are many
fingertip
sliced slowly heals—ripples bring
what ripples can in the wrong
springtime of a strong cantrip
redcoats rank
on the empty mall headless
& the deadline for dimpse crawls
also with our dread swelling
dread swelling
& two of us sent downstairs
miasma kickstand crunch
orchid perped ichor
keloid ort
oblong lurgy rides
oblong is my best box
derelict byssus
orchid perped ichor
veins of the verst miasma
“The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.”
~Thomas Henry Huxley, Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews, 1888 (via @pickover)
Do you know the way to Ziq-Zhafej?
"perfume. / shadow; / water; / sorrow / could not lessen / the night."
--A Humument
the rites small, but GROSS
my sweater starts to RAVEL
half-formed thing
intent when Mothra starts to OVATE
little souvenir of a terrible year
Briareus’ illimitable SETUP
vertical-ridged, tan water tower
since then i have SLEPT
only tea in the pantry
peach MANGO
Geiger counter holiday
Bikini ATOLL
low-rent rentier · spiritually speaking
a NOMAD
Raku the smoky progenitor
of this GLAZE
boulder on your shoulder (Sisyphus)
feel a bit OLDER
Hieronymous Bosch on tesseract acid
could have made these melting CARDS
apart together
& yet together APART
best music
never played commercial RADIO
oasis of the scribbling green pangolin
jonesing for a coffee DRINK
this is not the dining car
so shut up & STOKE
I Saw In Louisiana A Live Oak Growing.
"Appalled as darkness
Nothing so warlike as a
ray or a shot, bordering an
early French
I did not glance it. I did
not glance it at
all
No one ran violence
and water, where devils and
concerns and murmurs
caused anger
There was that English like the mist
helping the tins
It was its moving that misfunctioned,
the appalled attracting and attracting”
–Issue 1, 1040
"It doesn’t mean that art will stop; it’s just going to become much less visible."
"I was first working at a newspaper where I published separate stories on related topics. At that time, I changed jobs regularly as each media outlet was bought by local oligarchs." --Magdalena Sodomkova via
"THE RENEGADE (Palindrome)
Named a general,
war began.
Amid, I manage, brawl,
a renegade man."
--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
"German Backwards"
1.
skwiff-skwumpf · squint margent
grinds tank treads · trysting with Waterloo
all-channel coverage · chonk cahoots
of the Blitzkrieg fudge · furled creek
& pale cheek border
2.
lovelier than tanks
is the absence of a tank
on a June morning
3.
not Tankman
wisp crankshaft wan grotto
standing up in words stuttered
a glut of birds glimmering
the streets belong to the birds
"Clarifying Serum"
weathered fence edgefurther
fallow saffron scaffold
day without dank junkets
the downballot clownwhite
row of firs horizon
red number-encumbered
no-ting elevator
"What’s purple and goes buzz buzz?"
"Even the possible has its insoluble particle." --Emily Dickinson
"Aged two, she was on the set of Eraserhead, playing with the model of her creepy alter ego."
"Horace felt that an argument ended in his favour, when his opponent wept, and as he always pursued one to this point, had no experience of defeat in words." --@ivycomptonburnett
Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being.
"Spagyrite summer"
this apeshit gestapo
insures meathook detox
syllables
by flounder cleave
fall about
glistening berm
the gray clasp of grapnels
gruesome prize no nuisance
The entire month of May 2025 in the Sun’s atmosphere.
"BY THE UNDREAMT etched,
the sleeplessly wandered-through breadland
casts up the life mountain.
From its crumb
you knead anew our names,
which I, an eye
similar
to yours on each finger,
probe for
a place, through which I
can wake myself toward you,
the bright
hungercandle in mouth."
--Joris's Celan
"In my writing my instinct was to defy form, but I very much sought in defying it to affirm it, an irony that was difficult enough to articulate, much less defend."
- Percival Everett, Erasure via @jacobwren.bsky.social
"I myself bore a shield on my shoulder and sword at my side, but no one came to any hardship because I did so. When Pippin saw this, he laughed, marveled, and said: 'Lay down your arms, brother; it's better to stick to your writing.' " --Ermoldus Nigellus, "In Honor of Louis," in: Charlemagne and Louis the Pious (tr Thomas F X Noble, 2009), IV.
you are bitter, Pilgrim,
like one who unceasingly
bites down upon an unripe lemon;
whoever has wronged you?
—i am not bitter
not nearly
not nearly bitter enough
They say it's not your problem
you've got it pretty swell
so why are you bitter
out of all the jolly winning clowns?
—i am not bitter
not nearly
not nearly nearly
not nearly bitter enough
"Chronos as an It Girl
After Marianne Moore
It’s not Time as in Time’s-Up but it
is Time like
the magazine no one reads. 'It'
does not pretend to know whether it is man or woman,
or an accident, or a demon
from some older-ass, whiter-ass, time.
Ass! It’s a time of Callipygi-
-an women,
girls waking up from Jane Austen
genres of dreams. Ah Mr. Willoughby, do you know her,
Chronos, the It-girl? the many-eyed
and many-faced Titan of dimes square?
Titan or Titian, art’s temporal—
'And the coke
is mostly fentanyl these days.'
She’d rather be in Cabo, honestly, the people there
look like they want you to have their ba-
-bies. Because they have their own, is why.
In a cracked mirror, nabbed from a
tan package,
that read 'c/o Joan Didion,'
Chronos the It Girl makes her face, then primps water lilies,
which she places in the pool before
the guests show, demanding: 'Vodka, neat.'
Who has a pool in New York these days?
'I heard she
ate her son.' 'No, silly, she just
ate her placenta. Placidly.' Everybody is do-
-ing it, everybody wants to stay
young, until they suddenly want kids.
'But brush fires in California,' you
overhear
some boy say, a boy who claimed once
he was a poet, but when somebody challenged him to
read a verse, he recited the words
to 'Ms. Jackson' and everyone booed.
But now it’s time—Time’s Up! Times Square!
The New York
Times front page reads: 'You don’t have to
go home but you can’t stay here.' She’s tired, Chronos is,
she suddenly feels much older than
when the party had just begun. Go
home! You stupid Greeks, you dumb Romans,
stumble back
to whomever’s bed you left,
and let her sleep a beautiful It-Girl sleep, to the dul-
-cet sounds of New York architecture,
which tick like clocks: American Time."
--Maria Theresa via The Hinternet
Cart in the box of a Lego cat.
Only Wes Anderson could adapt Ivy Compton-Burnett.
"burdened with dark thoughts
shaking dust off my shoes
lockdown"
--@poemexe.com
Refrigerated morgue trucks outside Bellevue.
"twilight of the passive voice"
imagine
we receive that name no more
from morning till evening
no grievous wrong or rage-porn
"the right amount of alarm"
dread's kingdom
ringtailed interloper treads
god only knows the soapbox
Glock's prodigy of gloze-threads
faux Marley
Hotel California take
the revolution early
hummingbird & fiery lake
"Real world:
- Trump team trying to create a Reichstag moment.
- Trump telling military audience that LA is hellhole full of 'animals'
- Officials in Calif trying both to calm things down, and stand up
PUNDIT world:
- Is it smart politics?
- Is Gavin running?
- Doesn't Trump look strong! --@jfallows.bsky.social
"Art that hasn’t been taken through the long slow process of developmental demonstration — art that has shied from resistance and pursued “the smooth things” — will suffer, will settle for the predictable and palatable, will be boring." (via @adamroberts.bsky.social)
" 'Well, Nance,' said Mrs Bode, 'I remember you the heroine of a like occasion, as if it were yesterday.'
'People who remember things, always remember them as if they were yesterday,' said Cassie. 'I remember it as if it were twenty-six years ago.' " --@ivycomptonburnett.bsky.social
"Wayfinder"
thundergap
rhapsody of surrender
the endless gather goblet
slobberdust & slant paycheck
thundermeal
lie to a peacock's pander
write it down in freaky-dealt
runes among flashing Rorschach
"fingers sticking out of trash bag"
more names for it murmur
maul my night with dollops
unhoused conscience henchman
has to go on rowing
go on rowing
lay my head on highways
hurt with the news oozings
this isn't choice chasing
charred discovered fardels
discovered fardels
more names for it
The Hero Misunderstood: Defending Del Rey Books.
"And my laugh faded, as I thought of my long and fruitless search for that devil who, as a boy, had literally drowned me--except that, thanks to one of the very earliest pulmotors, I had come back to a world where people wore Recherché shirts--or at least were ultimately destined to wear them!" --@harryskeeler.bsky.social
"We finished our pudding (I had a savoury, my unassuageable Dead Sea thirst for salt made raw with love and black beer), I gave Hal my card, and I walked to the hospital singing like those inflamed men you see falling off the pavement in University towns, once Horus Professors of Arcana and now spinning drunks, the tuned brains awash. I am sure if I had been run down that day as I danced to my work, my blood would have run gold." —A Case of Knives
fremd litany · lurking lostness
the eyes witness · wary of investment
dark & bright clouds swirl · swarming the ghosts
i asked my robot · this rancid tussle
what did it signify · who would win
my robot answered · in an eerie whisper
rushing past me · on a road without exits
"First, Seuss wrote in anapestic tetrameter, not iambic pentameter."
“The Passion of the Joker”
The morning’s clear despair presents no challenge
to rabbits eating orchid after orchid.
It is holiday in Bedlam;
ev'ry thought begets its future comrade.
Black expiry: not knowing is a cadence
from which to view the distant growing tumult.
I wander with the grilse.
I carry no bodkin.
Today my ailment eases here, or almost,
sitting in line at a sunny backed-up Chevron.
Vampires don the alb
albeit fanged with comfort.
Don’t come to me with questions of the wounded.
"SOME PRAYED TO MOTHRA FOR GOOD FORTUNE."
"With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost."
--William Lloyd Garrison via @sharonk.bsky.social
"If Pessoa promoted Sebastianism, it's not because he believed in it but because he didn't." --Richard Zenith, intro to Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems
"Call it unrest, maybe riots, but insurrection?"
"LICHTENBERG'S TWELVE with the tablecloth
inherited napkins—a
planet-greeting to
the language-towers everywhere
in the to-be-silenced-to-death sign-
zone.
Being
—no heaven is, no
earth, and the
memory of both extinguished
but for the one
ashtree-believing nuthatch—,
his
from the city-ramparts gathered
white comet.
A voice-rift, to
preserve him, in
the universe.
The redlorn of a
thought-
thread. The bur-
geoned laments
about it, the lament
below it—whose
sound?
With it—don't ask
where—
I nearly—
don't say where, when, again."
--Joris's Celan
"Pretty soon it’ll just be AI bots feeding AI slop to an audience of more AI bots."
"rose of vastatin"
shelfkhaki, a shark fist
sherpa caught with whirlpool
isles · pale turquoise washcloth
origin unknown
shakuhachi sound
to this new replacement microwave
beige captivity
erupt shelfkhaki
"I've chosen to fill my life with looking at them, with knowing things like that if St Joseph on the right really is making mousetraps, mousetraps are metaphors for the cross of the crucifixion." --AV Marraccini via
“Forgetting takes a lot of work. You have to constantly remember that you are supposed to forget something. Surely, that’s how every ideology functions.”
― Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter via @jacobwren.bsky.social
"very big force"
empty hands · plowing the aether
messed up my QuickMark for this
not even on the sidelines · sorted
not according to courage
thunder not here · through hareious walls
Valley of the Dolls: Why We Love This Awful Movie. (thx Melanie!)
strawberry moon
brawny restroom
Troy's worn amber
storm bane worry
mow barren story
my sorrow banter
“Exactly at that moment when we have begun to suspect that law is congealed injustice, that existing order hides an everyday violence against body and spirit, that our political structure is fossilized... a cry rises for ‘law and order’.” —Howard Zinn via @haymarketbooks.org
" 'I fell in love with the idea that the mysterious thing you look for your whole life will eventually eat you alive.'
- Laurie Anderson explaining her attraction to Moby-Dick" --@jacobwren.bsky.social
(Otherwise known as poetry.)
"We'll build the wall and pay for it."
"A Musician's Wife
Between the visits to the shock ward
The doctors used to let you play
On the old upright Baldwin
Donated by a former patient
Who is said to be quite stable now.
And all day long you played Chopin,
Badly and hauntingly, when you weren't
Screaming on the porch that looked
Like an enormous birdcage. Or sat
In your room and stared out at the sky.
You never looked at me at all.
I used to walk down to where the bus stopped
Over the hill where the eucalyptus trees
Moved in the fog, and stared down
At the lights coming on, in the white rooms.
And always, when I came back to my sister's
I used to get out the records you made
The year before all your terrible trouble,
The records the critics praised and nobody bought
That are almost worn out now.
Now, sometimes I wake in the night
And hear the sound of dead leaves
against the shutters. And then a distant
Music starts, a music out of an abyss,
And it is dawn before I sleep again."
--Weldon Kees
Walking in LA. (via @kimmysunshine.bsky.social)
"night traffic
unhinged
winter rain
leftover rice plants"
--@poemexe.com
Y'know, poets could help each other out more. Like leaving good lines for someone else, if you can't seem to make a poem out of them...Naah. 𝑊𝑒 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑓𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑜𝑤𝑛 𝑏𝑎𝑑 𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑠.
Bye Sly. (via @harryskeeler.bsky.social)
"She sat down in a chair across from me and asked, 'Do you like Hemingway?'
She looked me in the eyes for the first time. I drank some of my tepid tap water. I knew the question was important. But I did not know anything about Pat or her life history. I did not know her tastes, or her relationship with other twentieth-century North American writers. I did not even know she had lived in New York and Paris. I had read only that one book by her, just before on the train. I set my glass on the table, knowing I was running out of time, like in a game show, and I decided it was a heads-or-tails choice. I could not guess the right answer, I reasoned, so I might as well tell the truth. 'No,' I answered, as if putting my last chip down on the roulette table.
'I HATE Hemingway!' she screamed.
She stood up and walked to the door to show me out. Is that the entire interview? I wondered, following her."
--Elena Gosalvez Blanco via @adamroberts.bsky.social
Stilbfester Matchstick Murmuration.
"pink Spitfire"
Black Swanwatch · Waymo smoulder
pale cerulean drive
I am the Eggman · I am the Eggman
I am the Walrus
step gets steeper · stereo lawfare
take away the words
in these shadows · shaped by driftglass
I am the Walrus
denounce each next · annihilation
laughing stock of the globe
my brake lights reflected · shiny white fender
I am the Walrus
sing a new song · said the Entity
They say they'll come to your house.
"Fulking Escarpment"
shark Khurbn
collect shizzle
overlay
of the loon's cry
in rubble
library rooms
force driven
the fierce judgment
flatcar tanks
deployed floatpig
bearable
all these bad words
"Polish is a difficult language; if it is your first tongue, you lament in all others; all sentences, said Polishly, sound sad." --A Case of Knives
