( via / via )

Presence of Mind.

   debacle—
the raucous trill of trouble
subject to flock flutterings
clock strikes thirteen mulligrubs
   spiralling
apart spigot
   bilge brigade
sans glibber blurt
   cicadas
in agony
fallout spire parch
debacle parch bring

Peppermint Frappé (1967). ☆☆

You don't think like a survivor, i said. You pile up all the things you can possibly think of to feel bad about, & then drop this treasure on your head, but that is not how a survivor thinks. A survivor only looks at the immediate problem to be solved, looks at it without reacting emotionally, & may have a vague notion of a wider view & goal, but never gets fixated on feelings of urgency & ultimate attainment. I know this sounds like a truism but it is still essential. It may not yet be so bad that only those who think like survivors will survive, but i'm certain that we will not be given warning or training should the moment itself arrive. You must start thinking like a survivor today.

"You know what's NOT normal US behavior? This is the first time there's been a mass movement to STOP a purge in real time."

( via / me )

"When I was at the beginning of my career, a job at the Times was the ultimate prize. For a lot of people, working there was their whole identity. Now, they are ashamed to have to work there."

"But to say what you want to say, you must create another language and nourish it for years and years with what you have loved, with what you have lost, with what you will never find again." --George Seferis

Oh say can you see.

Just watched The Night of the Iguana. This is the poem the old poet finally finishes after 20 years:

"How calmly does the olive branch
observe the sky begin to blanch,
without a cry, without a prayer,
with no betrayal of despair!

Sometime while night obscures the tree
the zenith of its life will be
gone, past, forever. And from thence
a second history will commence

a chronicle no longer gold
a bargaining with mist and mold
and finally the broken stem,
the plummeting to earth, and then

an intercourse not well designed
for beings of a golden kind,
whose native green must arch above
the earth's obscene corrupting love,

and still the ripe fruit and the branch
observe the sky begin to blanch
without a cry, without a prayer,
with no betrayal of despair.

Oh courage! could you not as well
select a second place to dwell,
not only in that golden tree
but in the frightened heart of me?"

An intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation.

( via / via )

That small dot moving left to right is 3I/ATLAS.

apricot dawn where ride gray legions
go in dread of the bitter rain

somewhere beyond this melee
love shall fall & pity rain

mangrove, mosquitos & the broken
skyscraper windows in the rain

yet poets shall learn to praise
the varieties of rain

i follow her through cloud labyrinths
by a trail like the smell of rain

though all its garments alter
this is still the same terrain

(2004)

The War in the Air.

"on the last day of the United States, when this country has finally descended into civil war, i will do a thread on how to dress for summer" --@dieworkwear.bsky.social via @karriehiggins.bsky.social

The Sweet Ride.

( via / via )

God is a Bullet.

"When in 1983 I moved to Syracuse, New York, the snowiest major city in the state, all my poems became about snow." --Geof Huth

Ruby Tuesday.

"Pinkville

   and atrocities
don't happen all that often
and only a few took part
and are nothing compared to what the other side does
and after all have always been part of war,
and we deplore war
and always have
and always will"

--Eve Merriam, The Nixon Poems (1970)

Although the wind.

( via / via )

To the Mother of a Dead Marine.

   brick cupcake
corruption of rank fiction
whip stripes & bludgeon-born stars
Tarzan trudge on a dragstrip

Mothra flying.

"...Grizzling/ In the wart-kinked,/ Gyring, pustulent light." --Kenneth Patchen

Assassin's Life is Worth.

( via/ me )

ICE is asking people to stop...

"We had no way to talk about any of this. We were at the same time terribly intimate and terribly aloof. We could work shoulder to shoulder for days on end, on what we knew for sure were battle lines; we knew the smell and taste of each other's breath and sweat, but we never stopped, we never paused long enough to look each other in the eye.    And we had no vocabulary for these things. No concepts, really, for what was happening. Another world was breaking through to ours, and we were awash in it. We had in fact invited it and here it was, and mostly we saw it as good. We set blind boundaries, changed them, made impromptu rules, forgot them, quarreled, worked together. While some of us drifted out of reach on hard drugs, or the pure chemistry of denial and need.
   But we had no words, not even the thought to look for words to speak what was happening. OR
before we identified the weather pattern, the storm had already broken.
   You could put it like that." --Diane DiPrima, Recollections of My Life as a Woman (2001)

Meanwhile in France.

"Mortality

This is the surest death
Of all the deaths I know.
The one that halts the breath,
The one that falls with snow
And nothing but a peace
Before the second zone,
For Aprils never cease
To resurrect their own,
And in my very veins
Flows blood as old as Eve.
The smallest cell contains
Its privileged reprieve,
But vultures recognize
This single mortal thing
And watch with hungry eyes
When hope starts staggering."

--Naomi Long Madgett, in The Poetry of Black America ed Arnold Adoff (1973)

Lament for the Chapbook Makers.

( me / via )

The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

"Of other care they little reck'ning make,
Then how to scramble at the shearers feast,
And shove away the worthy bidden guest.
Blind mouthes! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A Sheep-hook, or have learn'd ought els the least
That to the faithfull Herdmans art belongs!
What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel Pipes of wretched straw,
The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:
Besides what the grim Woolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing sed,
But that two-handed engine at the door,
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more."

--Milton

"The distended timelines of academic publishing, with its slow carousel of peer review, revision, and further review, give the printed record of these debates an inertial, afterimage effect; stale concepts and stillborn manifestos can pass as going concerns."

When will i be able to return to my customary omphaloskepsis, cranking out poems like Cracker Jack prizes, & mildly decrying the awarding of treats to my rivals? I cannot sleep for seeing the faces of the untimely perished; daily i discover further inroads upon freedoms i took for granted; threats make the mullions rattle.

(2004)

String Quartet No. 2.

( via / via )

By request.

“Those who believe in a God of punishment & repression, worship the Devil in the name of God.” –William Blake

According to the Bible.

“In the Forest of Estrangement”

our knowing of the rats
and that stark gnawing sound
at night
not to call it what it is

too long afraid
till all is scary and wrong
all but this phony flag
as if it could hold us

apart

as if it could
in storm or ruby flow

The ground turned green since the aurora was so bright.

( melanie pruit / via )

Haiku and haibun by Shelli Jankowski-Smith published in Haiku Pause Issue 2v.

“There are some birds in these valleys
Who flutter round the careless
With intimate appeal.
By seeming kindness turned to snaring,
They feel no falseness.

Under the spell completely
They circle can serenely,
And in the tricky light
The masked hill has a purer greennesss.
Their light looks fleeter.

But fowlers, O, like foxes,
Lie ambushed in the rushes.
Along the harmless tracks
The madman keeper crawls through brushwood,
Axe under oxter.

Alas, the signal given,
Fingers on trigger tighten.
The real unlucky dove
Must smarting fall away from brightness
Its love from living.”

–W H Auden, The Orators

"If America as we know it cannot be saved and we are truly in the abyss, what is the new America we can create when we emerge from this dark place?"

"GOP basically admitting it has no clue how to govern a complex society. Their only plan is to simplify it and rule it by force." --@mckenziewark.bsky.social

"We need to fight the false story with a true one: this country absolutely needs its immigrants and they are a blessing and an enrichment of what this country is and in many ways its heart and soul."

( via / via )

Jitterbug Waltz.

"Tried to read about the Jan 6 terrorist who now works for the Justice Department but it was behind a pay wall. Everything wrong with the USA in one sentence." --@thegodpodcast.com

Trial case decided by AI-hallucination.

"Jewels and After

On the precious verge of danger
Jewels spring up to show the way.
The bejewelled way of danger,
Beautied with inevitability.

After danger the look-back reveals
Jewels only, dangerlessness,
Logic serened, unharshed into
A jewelled and loving progress.

And after danger's goal, what jewels?
Then none except death's plainest,
The unprecious jewels of safety,
As of childhood."

--Laura (Riding) Jackson

Exeloume.

( me / via )

Poetry and the Confessional.

"Ever

Where, swift and wool in going?
Fell always wishing like this.

Tomorrow, want less and hunger bigger.
Fewer terror but stronger, staggered.

Taken heart outside to dry.
Rain surprise and ruined.

Silver cold and stops the swelling.
Why hurts from other body?

Why photo soothes with flat?
Salt soaks blood tender.

Brighten flesh in slap.
With word, not blood silent.

Not leave and take me
nowhere, swift and wool in going."

--Brenda Shaughnessy, Interior with Sudden Joy (1999)

Building a Mystery.

"Aelian writes of Trizus, the tyrant, that he commanded his subjects not to speak together, and when they used signs, instead of words, he also forbade those; whereupon the afflicted people met in the market-place to at least weep for their misfortunes, but neither was that permitted..." --Jeremy Taylor

If I Were King (1938).

( me / via via @adapalmer.bsky.social )

"Apparently the New York Times doesn’t understand how diaspora works." (thread)

"From one point of view, magical progress actually consists in deciphering one's own record." --Magick in Theory and Practice

Premium gas, toronto, ontario, 1977.

"to a stranger passing through" (A11pl3Z)

   passing through
our yard you scarce touch the grass

relic of another time
you climb stairs out of this hell

"Based on preliminary orbit calculations, A11pl3Z will traverse the inner Solar System, passing between Earth’s and Mars’ orbits in October 2025." More.

(via / via )

Haiku Pause's Climate Change issue.

poison drizzle drainpipe
adroit conscience stauncher
Anne Frank tshirt franchise

a frabjous dunce hunts us

Tanka.

"a genre now, verse about consciousness of war as a kind of weather..."
--Gerald Burns

Fortuitous Darth Vader.

( me / via )

A Slow Enlightenment.

" 'A sad spectacle!' exclaimed Thomas Carlyle, contemplating the possibility that millions of planets circle other suns. 'If they be inhabited, what a scope for pain and folly; and if they be not inhabited, what a waste of space!' " --from Martin Gardner's Order and Surprise (1983)

No Man's Land.

"The Face

See me with all the terrors on my roads,
The crusted shipwrecks rotting in my seas,
And the untroubled oval of my face
That alters idly with the moonlike modes
And is unfathomably framed to please
And deck the angular bone with passing grace.

I should have worn a terror-mask, should be
A sight to frighten hope and faith away.
Half charnel field, half battle and rutting ground.
Instead I am a smiling summer sea
That sleeps while underneath from bound to bound
The sun- and star-shaped killers gorge and play."

--Edwin Muir

Interesting thread on competitive vs. cooperative games.

( via / me )

Skylab.

"Night Soul

My soul is sad at the end my soul
is sad to be tired at the end is sad
and tired to be in vain my soul is sad
and tired and at the end in vain
I long for your hands on my face

I long for your fingers on my face
like angels of ice your fingers on my face
I long for the ring to be brought to me
I long for their cold touch on my face
like a golden horde deep within the sea

And I long at last for their remedies
in order not to die exposed to the sun
to die in despair exposed to the sun
I long for them to bathe my eyes
where those in despair lie sleeping

Where so many swans are at sea
swans making their way over the sea
stretching in vain their sullen necks
while down in the winter gardens
there sick men are gathering roses

I long for your fingers on my face
touching my face like angels of ice
I long for them to moisten my eyes
the dead grass of my glances the fields
where so many lambs lie scattered"

—Maurice Maeterlinck, Hothouses (1889; tr Richard Howard 2003)

Crepúsculo/Noche.

"Also to be clear, ICE is going to kidnap workers off farms to put in the concentration camp, where they’ll then sell those same workers BACK to the farms as prisoners? Do I have that right??" --@erinvachon.bsky.social

#A11pl3Z.

( me / via )

Immigrant Song.

"...indeed, to combine pleasant discourse and a mind distressed is a sort of moral barbarism." —letters of Sidonius Apollinaris (Loeb translation--W B Anderson) I.iii, to Faustus

East Hastings.

"Sigmoidoscope"

Empires at the first
   amerce.
Empires while they last,
   amass.
Empires when they fall,
   appall.

Empires in the end
   pretend.

01 01 86

A word from Heart Mountain.

( via / via )

Pieces of Cosette.

      “Calamiterror” (--George Barker)

Brittle bones in lands of seiche
   Prowl the omnishambles
Walking shipwreck makes a wish
   In adamantine marbles
Where there is no other course
   Frenzied visions hand us
Intergeneration curse
   Whose riddle is tremendous

Black is white and white is black
   Only in the telling
Cameras on the shuffling cup
   Never catch its stealing
Still this nightmare grows apace
   Waking eyes turn bleary
Will not climb the long abyss
   To morning and its glory

Lightning strike we hope for most
   Out of mere confusion

"Tell me brother, where do we go?" (AI song)

"Frog and Toad jumped away. Toad was shaking.

'I am not afraid!' he cried."

--@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Ushering in the post-search era.

( via /via )

iconoclast.

“All cities are founded on the abyss.”

—Maria Zambrano via @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social

While This Beast Drinks Poison, a Snake Sucks His Blood.

"Orison of the Salamanders

Albino wolves drowse
tonight, albino wolves.
Succeeding waves
on a beach of black glass
whose pauses extend
from the start of my life
to its end.
Albino wolves drowse;
rabbits dig.
Madness is the promised land
sometimes & when it digs
all the way through
to here,
I sit & cannot say a thing
amidst thousands
of blind hands,

albino wolves."

--Camille Meesh, Axis Cookbook (2004)

Total Pixel Space.

( me / via )

War Pigs.

tightrope irruption
funmarole firing line
raven's feather
on the suspect sidewalk

it is no quest quarry
sand to acquire
the burst bibelots hang

in cold constellations

Welcome to the Age of Disappearance.

You get used to being cold, you get used to being tired, you get used to being hungry, you even get used to being in pain, but you never get used to being disrespected.

Eldritch Horror Final Form.

( via / via )

"Elon Musk is directly responsible for 14 million coming deaths. 4.5 million will be children."

Most poetry chapbooks are like one course of tapas. At the time you think, "This is really sort of interesting," but afterwards you wish you'd gotten more for your money. (2004)

"What if your reality, lived at the edges of accepted norms, can’t be translated into plot without distortion?"

knack vanitiously · connived to swerve
or drawn through · thrashing rocks
basket escape · a scant freedom

Trip Thru Hell.

( via / via )

"And then your country, for no discernible single reason but a host of creeping ones, decides to tear itself apart at excruciating length and horrifying cost, and you are in the middle of it all, just a flake of shale in a great juddering upheaval of the earth."

"Judgment at Westchester"

Two crows clyted in the burnt-out hulk of a house.
They shook the rain from their feathers, then one said,
"Those who made this landscape must be proud."
The other: "Havoc is power, nonetheless."

06 12 04

Alligator Auschwitz.

Predation the only logic that still obtains.

The whole process in a few words.

( via / via )

South Uist.

"summer
you have survived to feed
the chimney smoke
a seagull's cry"

--@poemexe.com

Because nothing says “Land of the Free” like hiding from your own government.

Today, free day at the [Seattle] art museum, i watched an hour long video on Francis Bacon. I was appalled to hear how he uses the unprimed side of the canvas--technically unsound--but it suits his brooding sense of mortality (as does his gambling). I still admire his work tremendously. Almost alone it seems to capture our late twencen reality (rather than its myths about itself): & afterwards, as i stood before the one painting of his they have, i reflected that my own paintings would be no real loss to the world, since one of his contains everything i've tried to say in all of mine. ...it occurred to me that Bacon's point of view (if something so visceral & nonintellectual can be so designated) is Jacobean, without the moralistic tone. Whereas most contemporary painters begin frivolously, from theory & career considerations, or from ego's frolics. Bacon identifies with his subjects so completely that it becomes impersonal...--but not in our usual hackneyed sense of "objectivity"; rather, feeling suffering & decay & degradation as the essence of life itself, or what (i would say) life has become for us, in the absence of myth & creative meaning. And the only transcendence, apart from sex, is the fact of the painting itself... My one criticism of Bacon, then, is that he depicts a world in which his paintings are impossible. Or (as he does show them!) a world without art's power. --a mistake all too common since humanism has lost its moral authority-- But after all, that's the world most people do live in!

...one night here they had on TV some show that was like real life cop stories--straight documentary footage--for the entertainment value of its morbid disorder. I can easily imagine, in front of every TV set, a whole tribe of Bacon grotesques, fixated like lampreys on their own imminent ruin.

(1992)

Sharing this for no special reason.

( via / me )

"Just imagine — your brother, your nephew, your niece, your uncle, just being mindlessly shot in the head and the spine."

not enough · protest songs
   & stations that'll play them
pale cerulean rigor · restless habit
   i stopped after scrolling
no nearer · to any answer
   nor the face of my neighbor

Tanka.

"They came to the top of a mountain. The shadow of a hawk fell over them." --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Little Weaver Bird.

( via / via )

The vintage.

"night traffic
the hum of insects
shadows of night birds
crocodile tears"

--@poemexe.com

If you sit next to me on a train and put your litter on my table.

"near enemy"

kevlar ramikin · roughshod bilge
   all is as foretold
Godzilla vermin · vertigo assails
   parable
bulimic tank barrier
in this year of disunion
oppugn bleeze-leam mirrorblack

"One thing you have probably noticed is that the people prophesying defeat almost never come back to admit they were wrong; usually they're off prophesying some new defeat instead.."

( via / me at abbieanna )

Muddled Mind.

"contrapposto"

i heard ft sumter
i didn't look up
a click like a shutter
i heard ft sumter

only scimitar
is the killer app
i heard ft sumter

i didn't look up

Holy Bomb.

"The gold long dim in Herculaneum..." --Clark Ashton Smith

The Chess Players.