Boon.
"the distant mountains
shadows of night birds
even among the stars"
--@poemexe.com
driftstymie
tug, drizzlesift
enigma
no new shuffle
nothing to deal with
it's morning
bad miracle
level gray
gruesome if pressed
nothing to deal with
wrest
irreticence
out of shades
sharpened by grief
nothing to deal with
"The Mark"
and one by one the poets stop showing up
and the cold strengthens its grip
on the stone city
i imagine it's secret police
takes away
in darkness my friends
instead of lack of health care
i imagine instead of blind dumb brute indiff'rence
censorship
stops the mouths and ears of so many
this gives me the rage
to push on
through the increasingly sparse streets
of the appallingly hideous city
and write what no one will want to read
now or in the far future
(2010)
" 'It is tiresome of exceptions to prove rules,' said Miss Burtenshaw." --@ivycomptonburnett.bsky.social
"On Orwell’s birthday it’s time to reflect on how we’ve used 1984 and Animal Farm as state blueprints but have taken none of his advice on writing better prose" --@mic ahbateman.bsky.social
A bit of Ascension live. (via Mefi)
"alligator alcatraz"
cragblessing
lessons for a droll dragon
the bodies on spikes arrayed
cadence carried in exile
vagulate
gulag to gulag fated
carried in exile corsned
regicide coarsened by ruth
Police State Exhibit Closed Today Due to the Police State.
"the resuscitation
Through the fish netting / Through mummification
Through spore / Yeast kingdom / Body of black fruit
And resuscitation of the hunting trophy
By electric paddles / Fresh plumbing
The stew made new with bones warm out of the body / And paprika
The steam thick enough to get up / Walk out / Appear on okcupid
For Cupid’s six arms / And ten thousand eyes
Through the broadhead dunked in lye / Arsenic / Humectants
May the fletcher guide you down / Upon his mattress
May the mattress buckle and rise
Like the swollen lungs of a white dog
May the white dog rise / Like another moon"
--Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi in Calamity
"There are so many dead canaries, we’re now burning them as renewable energy." --@jgiraffekennedy.bsky.social
"But after today, that is where we are."
"It’s every parent’s nightmare, isn’t it? you check your child’s bulletproof backpack and find a picture book about gay penguins" --@lolennui.bsky.social
"Hereafter
Shall we not weary in the windless days
Hereafter, for the murmur of the sea,
The cool salt air across some grassy lea?
Shall we not go bewildered through a maze
Of stately streets with glittering gems ablaze,
Forlorn amid the pearl and ivory,
Straining our eyes beyond the bourne to see
Phantoms from out Life’s dear, forsaken ways?
Give us again the crazy clay-built nest,
Summer, and soft unseasonable spring,
Our flowers to pluck, our broken songs to sing,
Our fairy gold of evening in the West:
Still to the land we love our longings cling,
The sweet, vain world of turmoil and unrest.“
–Rosamund Marriott Watson, in: The Golden Book of English Sonnets (1924)
11.
a hundred years from now they'll have
their hands too full to blame us much
nor treasure with the little left
this wild profusion issuing hence
i trust that some of us survive
i know it won't be me or mine
with water writ or page of ghost
a puff upon the starry air
yet feels so real to sit beside
my love against apocalypse
as if the glaciers crowded close
& we had only this small fire
An imaginary place. A group of people who believe in this place & go about taking pictures that resemble what is known of the place. Their choice of pictures evolves over time: this is how the place changes. It is given life.
"The Altai folk say that no man is a shaman of his own accord." —Jack Lindsay, The Clashing Rocks (1965)
8.
always occupied · though the job's never finished
no ruins in sight
double down · on the dank denial
Locrian Hyridge
a large roach · with a purposeful stride
"Yet, where last light is lit, last pilgrims go,
Outlined in gliding shade by dying glow..."
--Richard Garnett
Waltz Poem of Those in Love and Inseparable Forever.
6.
shade seen · summer sky
opaque towers · table unfolds
city to city · a whole set of
somatic nostalgias · diff'rent from driving
kyaneai · cave indigo
sliding arches · anchored in bedrock
this veered voyage · & giraffe statue
at a time torn · by shredding claws
Mercury shoes · amongst shingles
trim grass tilted · with unknown tales
Laurel Land · allotted lozenge
of the world's turf · for a wicked price
& all the hapless · humans beneath
abrupt rubble · in raucous unison
bombs obey · some far fiend
who's never been here · nor these ripped streets
except maps · murder's whim
as the sky gods squander · a view from shade
The Golden Book of English Sonnets.
5.
spidermilk biscuits · aspects of surdweb
white ladder · on a white wall
wheeled nimbus · renews vows
& clown cloister · on its bed rolls
spidermilk biscuits · on a white wall
"In Nineveh ales are olive." --π·π π΄π€ππ€πππ & πππ ππ ππ ππ ππ
"Romanticism produces no architecture, not even revivals, but it does use the ruins of other styles to dream in." --Donald Sutherland, πΊπππ‘ππ’ππ ππ‘πππ: π π΅ππππππβπ¦ ππ π»ππ ππππ (1951)
"The Sublime
To stand upon a windy pinnacle,
Beneath the infinite blue of the blue noon,
And underfoot a valley terrible
As that dim gulf, where sense and being swoon
When the soul parts; a giant valley strewn
With giant rocks; asleep, and vast, and still,
And far away. The torrent, which has hewn
His pathway through the entrails of the hill,
Now crawls along the bottom and anon
Lifts up his voice, a muffled tremulous roar,
Borne on the wind an instant, and then gone
Back to the caverns of the middle air;
A voice as of a nation overthrown
With beat of drums, when hosts have marched to war."
--W S Blunt
It's not a difference of opinion or a political debate.
4.
tasteplethora tethered
attain rune
hijab stocker's hedgefund
high alloy
sky of tiny drones
watch someone satchelled
a sick sec
keep on calmy filming
your cairn turn
karen of all time
the owlfeathered gray-'suage
tasteplethora tethered
There was a man who only braked for equals-or-superiors. He was convinced that this could be calculated in a brief instant of inspection. His days could be sorted into days it rained & days the sun shone, but so many of them were equivocal he was forced to declare his days "sunny enough".
Ultimately the only philosophy that is able to hold my attention is the philosophy of tea. It already has heard of the word "extinction,"--and prepared an answer.
"Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno."
"Symplegades"
1.
snailpath unglided
the light put back
the caravan of jade wends
into mountain fastness
words that launched
in a brave season
mean something worse
or not even that much
the cataract
asks for rainbows
2.
gleams snailpath unglided
the glue that
holds this hearth together
"sharia leather"
firn venomramfeezled
fare not leaving carveprints
roll with the raunch punches
rainless brooding snood
radar wrought of beadwinks
a farce worth no gather
infectious rush
drizzle of ashen cark
our walg full of dull gods
gondola for blunders
fare not seeking frith
grumblethrum
umgang the reaper grimbright
hymn with benefit steep
housed in a pitstop shimmer
Time to harvest the golden wheat.
"What is called progress has consumed the fabric of our towns like fire, where war has not acted the mad dentist." --Debatable Land
"Over oceans the gossip travels in bounteous sneezes, chatter reaching islands at dawn, multiplying with the lifting sun and moving off to infect and settle the next atoll before the abrupt darkness." --Candia McWilliam, Debatable Land
Weirdest Books--my own list. (No doubt to be augmented in the future.)
"Proprioception for Dummies"
the standing dead · and all the lights they bear
out there · beyond the dark glass
the standing dead · what parley have i more
who stare · through the dark silent glass
i stand as dead · and do not yet require
such star · in the night of dark glass
(2009)
Late stage nymph (4th instar).
"Thirteen Poems from My Southern Garden
6
Seeking a style, culling my phrases,
Grown old carving grubs!
At dawn the moon hangs in my blinds,
A bow of jade.
Can't you see what is going on, year after year,
By the sea of Liao-dong?
Whatever can a writer do
But weep in the autumn wind?"
--Goddesses, Ghosts, and Demons: The Collected Poems of Li He (tr J D Frodsham, 1988)
The difficulties in using a form like the ghazal in English. With my afterthoughts at greater length.
" 'Things are bad, but they are not so bad!'
I don’t know, we’re in the middle of the sixth mass extinction and we’re watching it live, casually sipping on mojitos."
--@jgiraffekennedy.bsky.social
"This is what happens when belonging is treated like a privilege instead of a right."
"i am simply asking the press to cover the government sending masked thugs to rip people from their crying children and shipping them to a foreign concentration camp with the same ferocity they cover a trans kid playing jv tennis in sheboygan" --@ndrew.bsky.social
Generational Curse Comfort Zone.
scries scrolloping bleeze-leam
in the screwfly tufa
clench cicalatide
rural whiff or rough patch
array thick of playdough
fields where blackbirds bleed so
the bliss heroes whisper
clench cicalatide
pale cerulean pearlmelt
Deep dive into the 1985 Best Actress Oscar race.
Miralax scrolloping
scree bubbles, bug summer
sugar on a shoestring
Ingsoc meets Hvergelmir
scrolloping
wagtail through cicada dusk
Toki Pona Tacoma
coma with hokey rayhusk
"The inside of the vampire's coffin is sky blue, painted with clouds, and suns as numerous as stars. Remembered daylight, more intense than ours" --@ctrlcreep.bsky.social
"I think the greatness of Beckett, really, is that deep and lifelong profound disgust with art."
- Philip Guston in conversation with Clark Coolidge via @alinaetc.bsky.social
bad maze · vict'ry over the dirt
bad maze · vict'ry over the dirt
cerulean runnelled · with rare thwarts
Synergy Park · i parried a book or two
forget all that · thugwork prouding now
say masked Gestapo · as i mull a green signal
say masked Gestapo · story that breaks the teller
cerulean rulebook · wrought iron railing
on a twig carved · cold news of a twist
light in the underpass · ailerons up
the whales' tools · in the whales' house
tornado statue
Scrolloping. (link to pdf)
"LANDSCAPE with urnbeings.
Conversations
from smokemouth to smokemouth.
They eat:
the bedlamite's truffle, a piece
unburied poetry,
found tongue and tooth.
A tear rolls back into its eye.
The left, orphaned
half of the pilgrim-
mussel—they gave it to you,
then they bound you—
listening it illuminates the space:
the clinkergame against death
can begin."
--Joris's Celan
Glossy Footprints, Oxford Road.
"VENUS (Palindrome-Haiku)
Pure Venus, asleep,
slid off a daffodil’s peels,
a sun ever up."
--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
A guide to long narrative poems in modern English alliterative verse .
"... when there is a war the years are longer that is to say the days are longer the months are longer the years are much longer but the weeks are shorter that is what makes a war."
—Gertrude Stein via @zeeshanpathan.bsky.social
Signs the Frog has been Boiled.
'"path of attainment, path of remorse"
whist stakes tilt
the strict fiction
toaster scrape
telling morning
gate left loose
red sky scowling
sung the trout
or the troutlet
whist stakes tilt
Vania Has Brided a Serpent by the Beard and Rides Through Town.
"SOLSTICE (Aelindrome in Pi to 13 digits)
3141592653589
Solstice:
new, it evokes
old needs
and raw senses.
Sun rids us:
what binds us
bids us.
What sunrise saw
sends and reevokes.
Old, new…
it entices Sol."
--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
"She used turpentine to completely erase eleven versions of this painting."
"A sense of the self has never been my strongest suit: I deemed it no dishonour that I was being dismantled." --A Little Stranger
"Yazd is one of the oldest cities in the world, with some of the oldest buildings in the world."
As if Pluto's moon was named after Cioran.
A thing that scurries away when the lights come on.
"B1BL3_B@SH
gristle-whisperered guru,
huffs cope dust
from copper-plated relics.
eyes: captcha scars,
tongue: brandmark babble.
pitches salvation
in torn sachets,
preaches vape-flare psalms
on fake influencer reels.
collects disciples
like money-off coupons
then
holy-ghosts them."
--@thedevilstune.bsky.social
word sherpa waystation
assailed by snapshot infall
waxwing sift
a plethora of plantforms
the old car still carries
i ply catalysts
that lurk at arm's length
like amenable monsters
loom massacres
in any august mirror
the world no less nagged by
our own negligence
one more weaponized waystation
"having a tumble
winter grey
in the eyes of that caged bird
for a while"
--@poemexe.com
"The book was intended to be bought rather than read; it was a category book of gossip, easier to write than a bird book or a tree book and less resistible. People have no certain profile in flight and no certain season of falling sap, so research need not be exhaustive." —Candia McWilliam, A Little Stranger
"conjunction of portents"
lonesome echo answered
illness betimes kilnward
the trash over-travelled
betrayed by slate lightning
the gaunt god of winter
again churns in turnstiles
the sole bleeze-leam limbec
collects cracks of knackswelt
