( via / via )

Who would have thought.

"Signs and wonders, eh? Pity if there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in wonders!" —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

Libertad.

Praeger U

purer age
rape urge
ear purge
pure rage

"A peculiar aspect of the dawning of the digital age is that it has, in some respects, returned literary life to the 18th century."

( via / via )

Rafflesiastes. (after Tuesday)

vertigo vap · devout stagger
   out the darkened glass
dull pain furling · a forest of echoes
   fumarole's second best
the threat we would face · in that future time
   was not from the stars

I Started a Joke.

"A firefly is the antithesis of a waterfall." --@poutinesmoothie.bsky.social

Marrow Desire.

( via [i'm not sure how much of this page is made up, but it certainly proves that the planet has a fandom] / via )

Iconic Exoplanets: AEgir. It has its album too. (Darker & more abrasive than the Wolf 424 music--i like it.) (Oh wait, there's more.)

"Jonathan Caravello, a lecturer in philosophy at California State University Channel Islands, was reportedly 'piled on by multiple agents all at once' as 'he tried to help a man in a wheelchair'...After being tackled by agents, Dr. Caravello and others were arrested. According to a statement from the California Faculty Association (CFA), there are 'unconfirmed reports' that Caravello is being kept at Ventura Federal Detention Center." —Justin Weinberg for Daily Nous

An Expanded Symbology of the Night Sky (2015).

"Sure, if sword could venge
Such cruel wrong,
Evil times would wait
Ægir, ocean-god.
That wind-giant’s brother
Were I strong to slay,
‘Gainst him and his sea-brood
Battling would I go."

—stanza 8 of Egil's "Sonatorrek" (tr A C Green in Egil's Saga )

A whole collection of images of AEgir.

( via / me )

One Way or Another.

   Crashsound cairned
crickets grisly whistle
half the books seem whisked off
ahead of black jackboots
vicious vouchsafed Crashsound
i aver won't stonewall
pale cerulean rampage
or river deep reaping

To-do list.

"Every twenty years, all political parties should have to change their name, logo and colour. Force voters to actually pay attention to policies, not tribal habits." --@anonopin.bsky.social

The drawing room in Vilhelm Hammershøi's Copenhagen home.

( me / via )

"Anyone who’s looked at medieval manuscripts or binged 19th century crime novels knows that morbid fascination is about as old as humanity itself."

"It’s a full-frontal attack on the authority of the courts, out in the open now." --Joyce Vance via

Night traffic transfigured.

"throughfaith in tanglenet"

disfigured face
Epsilon Eridani
arsenal of Morse Code
spider-sparse celadon

Gun of Wishes.

( via / me )

There is music in my head.

"the fire a part of its story now"

   gargoyle scree
creatives in argyle
pergola of drastic
rabbit zigzag iceberg

mackerel sky mentor
amok cybersober
rabbit zigzag ragtime
& a rose named Heimdall

The Scribbler.

"spiderweb
snail?
a rainbow
in cicadas' cries"

--@poemexe.com

Monkey Riding a Four-Headed Beast.

( via / via )

"In colonial Kenya, British judges meted out detention to whole crowds with the wave of a hand."

"the epstein footage is missing a minute because jeffrey started singing hey jude in his cell. justice dept doesn’t want to pay for the licensing. somewhat understandable" --@johnfreiler.bsky.social

Plenty of funds to fly and bus migrants.

"in the valley of the trolley"

a lemon omela
omniprey & pretzel
writes in the bitter pall
of bombhush witch-Salem

rags of what had gloried
gloze if all-forgotten
hot cicada blackboard
fingernail-made tally

yet fragile too this freight
of magical nightmares
when the story's wrapped up
& captured in tintype

"The persona poem gives the author the opportunity to interrogate received beliefs, to try it another way, even to be the person they dared not be." (via @evecastle.bsky.social)

( Eye of the Devil 1:12:18 / via )

"The Red Tower": narration & analysis.

erasehead rustling
at my half-worn heels
raindance haste
& crumbling crinkled paper

no second draft singing
corrodes the surf
it goes with dull gurgle
i remember much

galvanized mark
rustling erasehead

"The story's darkness wasn’t just criminal but it was existential."

"I'm no political expert, but I think it's probably a bad idea to have a government run entirely by people who would drive into the side of a cliff with a tunnel painted on it" --@thehyyyype.bsky.social

"The only justice who noted their dissent was Ketanji Brown Jackson, who over the course of 15 pages came as close as a Supreme Court justice will ever get to characterizing their colleagues as breathtakingly full of shit."

( via / Eye of the Devil 0:17:09 )

Dueling dust dragons.

"...we are seeing the emergence of actual, meaningful rebellion in western counterculture for the first time arguably since the Vietnam War." --Caitlin A Johnstone via @blckdgrd.bsky.social

"This seems to unlock something in the protagonist… the words uncovered on pieces of rotting paper seem to change his perception of things, to allow him to understand what it was that people were trying to achieve in that tower, what they evidently did achieve."

"Zero built a nest
In my navel. Incurable
Longing. Blood too –

From violent actions
It’s a nest belonging to one
But zero uses it
And its pleasure is its own"

--Fanny Howe via

Eye of the Devil. (1966). ☆☆

( via / via )

"...though the war with the aliens continued, people could never agree on what kind of a war it was, or what its boundaries were."

relict pale cerulean
ringing as this jazz wanes
a soaked shirt consorts with
sear-wielding concealments
on the gray hard griddle
grubs undertake traiking

Trek Egyptian.

“The only thing I have in common with God is that I don’t exist.”

- Fanny Howe (via @_AustinAdams)

A little list for you.

( via / pic from ИНСАН, ЗАМАН, ИЗЛЗР by Ј. ШАМИЛОВУН [1974] )

ICE in Camarillo.

" 'I cannot remember any of the things that were on my list of things to do. I will just have to sit here and do nothing,' said Toad." --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Pastor says ChatGPT can interpret speaking in tongues, including ancient Sumerian.

"chilly wind
they hold up one hand
silence
chilly wind"

--@poemexe.com

"Wolf 424 is the primary star of the world Ember." The album. (Very sub-Vangelis, but pleasant enough.)

( via/ via )

Krasnov in polka dots, surrounded by his cabinet, detailed oil painting, richard lindner.

no promises · in the flash off chrome
stabbing the eye · with eerie prescience

"These extraterrestrials come from an atmospheric planet about 10 light years from Earth, a planet which they call Iarga." (Maybe Epsilon Eridani on my list. And there's also Susann's Yargo.)

"He had found the thing which modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe." --The Man Who was Thursday

Ummo.

( via/ via )

Safe thrill.

"It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy." --The Man Who Was Thursday

Curse the high clouds.

"marrow desire"

parallel lines · laggard gaze
passing eclipse · clockwork wage
    the one unbroken
    pane blacken
    shuriken
    & light cone
focus the face · nearest world
nevermind fib · absent land
    whose noon unbroken
    shades sicken
    mannikin
    & chrome cairn
border anneal· bardic gnome
ammonite elk · parallel

Kream Kastle.

( me / via )

Sixteen Tons.

   fine thistles
in the flown light
   era crazed
a crew of thieves
periscope broken off

   wrapped circuit
of rogue habits
   turn to screens
to scrape shavings
periscope broken off

   by the blades
that hurl sideways
   nicked this once
or halfway nailed
periscope broken off

   shapes that teem
in gloom sharpened
   therapy
to unstring them
periscope broken off

   is more real
each plate relish
   knowing scrape
of iron scaffolds
periscope broken off

   time's poising
with a grid tag
   the road churned
thick chariots
periscope broken off

Stairway to Heaven.

" 'I really have no experience,' he began.

'No one has any experience,' said the other, 'of the Battle of Armageddon.' "

—The Man Who was Thursday

The stars are yesterday, detailed oil painting, remedios varo, james ensor.

( via/ me )

Tanka.

"We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet." --The Man Who Was Thursday

"It is the stuff of dystopian nightmares."

here awaiting · what follows
   the morning grows clear
my thoughts thole · the thirstless tide
as if legions · languidly jostled
or plots concocted · their cast loops
here that is rounded · in a rude book
holding all · in an armature of words
i witness & surmise · more than one myst'ry
   curling with the smoke-shreds
like the grim grains · of my own past

Decimation of NASA.

( via / via )

They have travelled a very long way.

"CECOT where the fun never stops"

And now they'll pull the plug on NASA too,
seeing no glory for their Fearless Leader.

How i despise this irksome ape intruder
come to destroy my last felicity...

The world as we all know was spoiled & rotten,
& brought forth from itself its crowning garland.

As once a haunted portrait i spied in Holland
told me a secret cast out from the garden.

Thunder into the night that holds no warning

Klamath River Hymn.

“Occurs to me that Nabokov probably witnessed the burning of Montreux Casino during a 1971 performance by The Mothers of Invention, the incident recorded by Deep Purple in ‘Smoke on the Water’.” –@_ryanruby_

End-Song.

( via / me )

ICE in San Francisco.

I love: poets who don't make sense, paintings that scare me, music i can live with, friends who aren't needy, houses full of books, governments i don't have to think about all the time, & weather that doesn't try to kill me.

When The U.S. Government Tried To Replace Migrant Farmworkers With High Schoolers.

“Watch long enough, and you will see the leaf
Fall from the bough. Without a sound it falls:
And soundless meets the grass… And so you have
A bare bough, and a dead leaf in dead grass.
Something has come and gone. And that is all.

But what were all the tumults in this action?
What wars of atoms in the twig, what ruins,
Fiery and disastrous, in the leaf?
Timeless the tumult was, but gave no sign.
Only, the leaf fell, and the bough is bare.

This is the world: there is no more than this.
The unseen and disastrous prelude, shaking
The trivial act from the terrific action.
Speak: and the ghosts of change, past and to come,
Throng the brief word. The maelstrom has us all.”

—Conrad Aiken

Ablanthanalba ambigram.

( via / via )

SMOC for dummies.

"MY FRIENDS

My friends without shields walk on the target

It is late the windows are breaking

My friends without shoes leave
What they love
Grief moves among them as a fire among
Its bells
My friends without clocks turn
On the dial they turn
They part

My friends with names like gloves set out
Bare handed as they have lived
And nobody knows them
It is they that lay the wreaths at the milestones it is their
Cups that are found at the wells
And are then chained up

My friends without feet sit by the wall
Nodding to the lame orchestra
Brotherhood it says on the decorations
My friend without eyes sits in the rain smiling
With a nest of salt in his hand

My friends without fathers or houses hear
Doors opening in the darkness
Whose halls announce
Behold the smoke has come home

My friends and I have in common
The present a wax bell in a wax belfry
This message telling of
Metals this
Hunger for the sake of hunger this owl in the heart
And these hands one
For asking one for applause

My friends with nothing leave it behind
In a box
My friends without keys go out from the jails it is night
They take the same road they miss
Each other they invent the same banner in the dark
They ask their way only of sentries too proud to breathe

At dawn the stars on their flag will vanish

The water will turn up their footprints and the day will rise
Like a monument to my
Friends the forgotten"

--W S Merwin

"When the stars, one by one, tremble through æther..."

"Our broken empire, America, wasn't an empire for very long. But there isn't one part of its breaking that is not also replicated in each section of the culture. In cars, traffic, movies, buses, banks, schools, war, architecture, hospitals and labs, and in poetry." --Fanny Howe, The Winter Sun (2009)

The earth-killing asteroid isn't an asteroid, detailed oil painting, salvador dali.

( via / me )

"At times the book felt like a dark palantir, giving me glimpses of dreadful, haunted dimensions that my soft, gentle, animal being was never supposed to encounter."

"At least I know my tradition is among the contradictions" --Fanny Howe

The photo of Earth NASA doesn't want you to see.

"T@FFETARRED

new word: shralk
(n.) the sticky echo left in your mouth after confessing.

i’m taffeta tarred
shralking now
on your cheapmouth couch.
a shameful shimmer,
a libertine handshake.
delete this poem
in horror.
worship it later."

--@thedevilstuna.bsky.social

"The original title of the novel means ‘Maigret in a furnished [room]’, but meubler can also mean ‘break the silence’."

( me / via )

Diligence.

"written-on scraps reused"

   the barred border
obedient lintel
intel subfusc absinthe
ardent funest garden

   feral foreplay
filch pivots to shivwield
tough turning makes carnage
atoll where quirks circle

   bleeze-leam blazoned
blessing among fungoids
the cars ahead coldcocked
accuse these amusements

A Hymn.

"The collapse of the insect world is the most alarming thing I've ever read about. Silent forests, empty skies, crops without pollinators. Insects make life possible and yet pesticides, habitat loss and climate chaos are wiping them out." --@earthlyeducation.bsky.social

My Emily Dickinson.

Lithium on Mercury.

( me / via )

"stillness
winter grey
watching me"

--@poemexe.com

London Calling.

"micro-retirements"

rumorous turmoil · tawdry "Excalibur"
the vampede vernal · in daylight devourings

crinkum-cankum · carved in heat
floodwaters · flense the banks

old VHS fade · & new thunder
my lids drop · there is no way out of this poem

The barking of dogs.

( via / via )

"The first robot band that actually played their instruments."

"defunct hurricane tracker"

   aasvogel
on the mogul's shoulder floss
flimflam in the monkey cage
a gauge of murk glimmer
   word buzzard
or does the dirtiest bomb
in fields of Nephilimpeach
in creatures crazed by deftness

"But I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine requires selling the idea that doing things is worthless. Because if doing something has some value, then it must be somehow better than pushing a button and receiving Whatever for essentially no cost." (via Mefi)

"impatiently
gravestones
leading to nowhere"

--@poemexe.com

"More often than not, they just spoon feed us entertainment to fill the hole where our sense of history should be."

( via / via )

"The truth is that we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age. (via @evecastle.bsky.social)

"When we are exiled from the order and unities of culture, language, ethnicity that make up the great smooth national narratives of history, we are cast out into a multicultural, multi-lingual, multiethnic 'non-nation', an empire that frustrates our need to narrate a descent from origins and forces us to confront the lyrical unevenness of our lives. This is a confrontation that from time to time, for good or for ill, we try hard to avoid. ...the medieval [is not] a moment of past time since transcended but [] a metaphor for a kind of [artistic] practice that defies the national culture paradigm." --Walter G Andrews. introductory essay to Ottoman Lyric Poetry (1997)

"He doesn't say the Renaissance is a golden age. He says, we must try to make a golden age in contrast with this bad age we are in now by trying to imitate the arts and methods of the ancients and their golden age."

“AN ISLAND IN THE HARBOR

My own country my countrymen the exchanges
Yes this is the place

The flag of the blank wall the birds of money

Prisoners in the watch towers
And the motto
The hopes of others our
Guardians

Even here
Spring passes looking for the cradles

The beating on the bars of the cages
Is caught and parceled out to the bells

It is twelve the prisoners’ own hour

The mouse bones in the plaster
Prepare for the resurrection”

—WS Merwin, The Moving Target (1963)

It's great that we even have a name for the whale.

( via / me )

"Many of us are learning that the stories we inherited are not only suspect but in large part responsible for the threats we now face and will visit upon our heirs: the story of infinite growth, of survival of the fittest; the story of human supremacy, and, incongruously, an innate human selfishness and propensity to destroy."

“GHOST-CRABS

At nightfall, as the sea darkens,
A depth darkness thickens, mustering from the gulfs and the submarine badlands,
To the sea’s edge. To begin with
It looks like rocks uncovering, mangling their pallor.
Gradually the laboring of the tide
Falls back from its productions,
Its power slips back from glistening nacelles, and they are crabs.
Giant crabs, under flat skulls, staring inland
Like a packed trench of helmets.
Ghosts, they are ghost-crabs.
They emerge
An invisible disgorging of the sea’s cold
Over the man who strolls along the sands.
They spill inland, into the smoking purple
Of our woods and towns--a bristling surge
Of tall and staggering specters
Gliding like shocks through water.
Our walls, our bodies, are no problem to them.
Their hungers are homing elsewhere.
We cannot see them or turn our minds from them.
Their bubbling mouths, their eyes
In a slow mineral fury
Press through our nothingness where we sprawl on beds,
Or sit in rooms. Our dreams are ruffled maybe.
Or we jerk awake to the world of possessions
With a gasp, in sweat burst, brains jamming blind
Into the bulb-light. Sometimes, for minutes, a sliding
Staring
Thickness of silence
Presses between us. These crabs own this world.
All night, around us or through us,
They stalk each other, they fasten onto each other,
They mount each other, they tear each other to pieces,
They utterly exhaust each other.
They are the powers of this world.
We are their bacteria,
Dying their lives and living their deaths.
At dawn, they sidle back under the sea’s edge.
They are the moil of history, the convulsion
In the roots of blood, in the cycles of concurrence.
To them, our cluttered countries are empty battleground.
All day they recuperate under the sea.
Their singing is like a thin seawind flexing in the rocks of a headland,
Where only crabs listen.

They are God’s only toys.”

--Ted Hughes, from Wodwo (1967)

Never change, Blue Sky.

"Toad looked at the ground. The seeds still did not want to grow. 'What shall I do?' cried Toad. 'These must be the most frightened seeds in the whole world!' " --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Why are the Pyramids in Egypt?

( me / via )

Strange dreams these days.

"Period of bouncing around among so many books—by Vila-Matas, Piglia, Lisa Robertson, Calasso, Daša Drndić, Ronald Johnson—reading is no longer reading, but a compass for one’s own incapacities, a pointer for possibilities: way of jump-starting a kind of writing. An untenanted demesne for the taking." --@lattaj.bsky.social

"The black-tarred rook/ sells thunder..."

"Columbo villain"

drogulus hunt, drain-torn
drastic vale of railing
from the poop deck dipped
adornment-blaze morning
quisle the drizzle
in the gloomth glean glimthirls
—agley-turned the learning—
windowview flames, fled thieves
flummox-fissures umgang
quisle the drizzle
lizardly sizzle
fallen, lodged

on a thin ledge

Gaze at the marvels of Constantinople.