( me / via )

Kaldron archived.

“give me a homeland
winter rain”

—@poem_exe

"Dallas in particular, is the city I can’t help but think about as I drive through Cyberpunk 2077."

i bind unto myself today
the primal force of expert music
the freedom of the arch zebub
& ev'ry shape of tholing this

i bind unto myself today
the mind’s sure grasp of things beyond
the thriftiness of cannibal
the volupté of the sage poet

i bind unto myself today
the myst'ry hid inside Samhain
the wolf’s high god, the dog’s old wolf
the wave that understands its term

i bind unto myself today
the magic of the first rebus
the tenderness of early light
the moment voice attains its iron

(2020)

Wilfried Sätty and the Cosmic Bicycle.

( via / via )

Ballad of the Hammonds.

season of jonestown koolaid
season of let them eat cake
still the wall to wall clown show
the audience is getting restless
i whisper some old ghosts down
watching new ones arise & leer
path thinner than a hair

leading to the stars

"When my lecture at USAFA was canceled because the admin had been surveilling my politics, some people said it was to be expected."

“The bone-cage speared by lilies of the veldt” —Geoffrey Hill

In the Time Between Sunspots.

( via / via )

The neon seas of Pluto.

“Every trade has a little charlatanism in it; ours has much.” –Anatole France

Phantasmalaise.

this way
not the broken way the whole way
caught in a light that remains

through giant wounds & tiny wounds
& only for this angle of seeing
a brief enough task

though you spend your life completing it

"Everything meant yes; nothing meant no; almost no one aided girls who wanted to avoid these guys; we were on our own and had to become escape artists."

( via / via )

Young Magpie Catches a Grub.

for another day the riddle
the riddle for another day
i have walked through smoke
through smoke i have walked
through stone i have walked

for another day the riddle
the riddle for another day

Pharaoschlange.

"A cultural history omitting the machinations of Eros lacks a natural strategy.”

Being a swell aphoristic remark made by Guy Davenport in the afterword to Elizabeth Hutton Turner’s _Americans in Paris (1921-1931): Man Ray, Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis, Alexander Calder_ (Counterpoint, 1996). via @lattaj.bsky.social

Firecrackers.

( me / via )

"The digital froth of the 2010s—BuzzFeed, Upworthy, the ceaseless click-baiting and SEO-hunting—could be understood as a Bronze Age, and we are now after the fall, in a new era we can’t quite name yet."

“…so much
ash to be blessed” –Hamburger’s Celan

Six Poets Who Have Asteroids Named for Them.

"pinkgold NPC"

grudgefueled grim binary
to grease crawlie ballroom
in the purblind blamefest
blustery calms dust this
pinnacle of passwords
the pulse divests jet stream
& queries quilt blackmail
acquired in the fire scam
remember mass girlcries
mellowed not by sell date
geriatric justice
adjourns till the urns fill

Nobody's Girl.

( gorky "diary of a seducer" / miekal and on fb )

Cat, Mouse and Me.

dismaying portion
in the shuttered citadel
foin of mower dust

a puppet has not enough
wood & too much emptiness

Leitkegel.

“Too bad dark languages rarely survive.” —House of Leaves

Ashes to Ashes.

( via/ @archillect )

A bad meme & a quote remembered.

“Many commentators have recognised that the essay on the unheimlich itself resembles a tale, with Freud in the role of the Jamesian unreliable narrator.” —The Weird and the Eerie

Evergreen.

"LEISURE

If I should make no poems any more
   There would be rest at least, so let it be;
Time to read books in other tongues and listen
   To the long mellow thunder of the sea.

The year will turn for me, I shall delight in
   All animals, and some of my own kind,
Sharing with no one but myself the frosty
   And half ironic musings of my mind."

--Sara Teasdale

An Ancient Chess KIng.

( "Deep in the land of Mordor, in the Fires of Mount Doom, the Dark Lord Sauron forged a master ring, and into this ring he poured his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life...."
Mount #Etna, February 21, 2021 ©️Photo Credit: Fernando Famiani vuia @Geology_History via auntbeast / lanny quarles on fb )

Please clap.

“END OF THE WORLD (Anagrammed Lines)

The world was ending:
Dawn light worsened.
Nights wandered low.
The long wind was red
with drowned angels….”

–@Anthony_Etherin

The Embrace.

“think of the storm
an empty snail shell
looking up at nothing”

–@poem_exe

Leitkegel.

( via / via )

"For the last *20 years* of his career, Einstein opposed US racism by only speaking publicly at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)."

“For I had pondered on a rune of roses,
Which to her votaries the moon discloses.”

–Dowson

Gumby ice cream vendor.

“Black rooks
like clouds
of burnt paper
flowing through
the skies”

—Back Roads to Far Places

50 years ago the owners manual of a car showed you how to adjust the valves. Today it warns you not to drink the contents of the battery.

( via/ via )

Battle of the Bards.

in full awareness
through the stinking shades
already attracted to litter

thought trails
crawly-mawly
one doorway good as another

why bother with what glittered once
a long time ago

Aurgelmir.

“frilled with the rouse and hush of drowsing foam” —Mina Loy

Facing East.

( via / oil painting by me )

Voyage by rail.

"Frog walked into the house. It was dark. All the shutters were closed. 'Toad, where are you?' called Frog.

'Go away,' said the voice from a corner of the room." —@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Compund Interest.

"draze"

sugar glass for shew-stone
shade-penitent quitclaim
& the road draws ruts in
rapt applesauce Tulsa

remain lapse-malignant
lump polishing mishmash
till scorn scrolls its thunder
sky-emulous mural

For the Finders of Bodies in Murder Mysteries.

( via / via )

"We escape the trauma of the history we happen to be living through by entering the mythic time of the history we didn't."

“a year older
the sound of a rat
on the snowy plain”

–@poem_exe

The Greatest Cut in Film History.

“Not that anybody asked, but the Continental Plates that drift across Earth’s surface do so at about the same speed that your fingernails grow.” –@NeilTyson

The very authentic and not at all suspiciously unified response to Charlie Kirk's death.

( via/ me[?] )

The Birds of Ancient Battlefields Visit the Suburbs.

“I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift,
A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.”

—Leaves of Grass

Why I shouldn't be doing what i'm doing.

"There Will Come Soft Rains

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone."

—Sara Teasdale

So intriguing everyone wants to pick it up.

( via / me )

Scant Moments, Heavy Coats.

diff'rent silence
than others after this cough
striped sock musing

how silences can be weighed
like one book finished
versus another finished

thronged we are
& yet more empty

September 11.

“Our fathers to their graves have gone;
Their strife is past, their triumph won;
But sterner trials wait the race
Which rises in their honored place;
A moral warfare with the crime
And folly of an evil time.”

—Whittier

Anglo-Latin Macaronic Verse in Early Modern England. (pdf)

( me / via )

Tanka (Buddha-foot-stone).

Shootings are ultimately part of the harm caused by bullying. One side says the answer is more empathy. The other says the answer is more bullying.

All Such to Life.

"As He Is To Us

Wiry and worn, well-tanned from the task,
the gravedigger goes to his goodly works
with a practiced pace, pick and spade.
On a slope commanding a modest meadow,
he’s put in a potter’s field of his pets;
a flock with fates more fleeting than his,
ones at his mercy, his will and mood.

Rocks and roots must be cleared from the clay,
so he digs deeper, then dutifully fills
with the burden he buries, barrow he tamps.
What’s hard on the hands frees up the head;
prayers need replies, regrets must be purged
by he who decides when suffering stops.
Aloft or aground, God is alone."

—Ted Charnley at Alliterative.net

Now buried in hell with Dante.

( south pacific / me )

Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.

Horst Wessel time, vatniks
bigmouth venom triggers
something stupid not quite
targeted stab Margate

whelmed by the hate hailstorm
a bard hardly tracks this
except among matters
of deep mud to creep past

long shadows to shlep through
yet, & shreds of Edsel
no team jersey tells you
—nor bark—Tagboy's carkfreight

Chacony in G Minor.

Children, there was a time when hatemongering was not an honored & remunerative profession.

The worst response to violence.

( via )

Failed first attempt.

'The real end of the world is the destruction of the human spirit; the other kind depends on the insignificant attempt to see whether after such a destruction the world can go on." —Karl Kraus, Selected Aphorisms (tr Harry Zohn 1976)

Space Needle.

drones over Poland drawing
fire, this afternoon's otchkies
dreamily earn
rodent pale cerulean

orange barrels baffle
—rider bale
yet nothing that needs it gets fixed—
cardboard holding claimant

nary a coin for
horizon's hilching haze
peals drones over Poland
halberd papercut

Chili remixes.

( seppuku_doge on tw / via )

What it means when they call you an NPC.

“NEWS

Enter to me in the silence of the evening.
Nod to me in the pause of the gloom.

Whoever you are, supporting me now in person,
Above the cold pleats of the current …

Fall to me in the pause of the year.
Desire is not all: It is not meat nor milk.

Love is not all: It is not food nor body.
This is my news to the race.”

—ERATO (1971)

Request No. 1.

Despotic power of the judges of all these TV competitions. We grow to lose the natural indignation toward such power a person should feel.

"If the poems are seen to have the power to corrupt minds, and to potentially engage a wide enough readership to make this a concern to the authorities, they must operate more or less in the same way as poems written in sincerity."

( via zach whalen on tw / via )

Night and Sleep.

“If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.” —William Godwin via

A Signal from Mars March and Two-Step.

“AS I LAY WITH MY HEAD IN YOUR LAP CAMERADO.

AS I lay with my head in your lap camerado,
The confession I made I resume, what I said to you and the open air I resume,
I know I am restless and make others so,
I know my words are weapons full of danger, full of death,
For I confront peace, security, and all the settled laws, to unsettle them,
I am more resolute because all have denied me than I could ever have been had all accepted me,
I heed not and have never heeded either experience, cautions, majorities, nor ridicule,
And the threat of what is call’d hell is little or nothing to me,
And the lure of what is call’d heaven is little or nothing to me;
Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still urge you, without the least idea what is our destination,
Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d and defeated.”

—Leaves of Grass

Jenkem.

( Leonora Carrington - The Ancestor - 1968 / me )

1-Day Perspective.

   through a churn of smoke
myst'ry entered our hovels
   lobbed there to remain

(despite the stories we told)
—& now it is as crystal

Why I Write.

“I will not be outfaced by irrational things,
I will penetrate what it is in them that is sarcastic upon me”

—Leaves of Grass

Monkey Riding a Four-Headed Beast.

( via/ suzanne dyson via ruth reifeis on fb )

Runway Mothra.

   "Then you will begin
to burn the deserts.“ –Bill Knott

The Dream of the Rood.

tor of dearths
at the one war no one wants to enlist
word salad parses

the Praha clock delights a sober deist
car delivery caters
all our fierce inlets

the hardest
is adding idleness to our fun diets
frayed records in dust-caked crates

outside the walkers pass & repass
we drive without spares
to go back sev'ral edits

another mass shooting & how one reacts
depends upon the choice of hatreds
none listen

dug in but badly sited
you try to leave minimal traces
oracles silent

& i realize my final record is sparse
these frayed threads
say the biopic should be recast

feathered spears
on the wall hung · i let that contact be trashed
& cherished tinsel

at my feet ravenous tides

Song for Judee.

( me / @beeple )

Trail lifted bodily.

the Ever Given eludes our GRIPS
at the all-clown RODEO

IDEAL
soldiers sue for PEACE

wearing out all the parts of my shoes but SOLES
my shade, my terrible FETCH

moiré of the sky fidget EERIE
die this way is TRITE

something Einstein never said but gets CITED
victim HEEDS

wind rising · nothing on the RADAR
dead poet live one ADORES

cheer new DOLES
wear a mask & shudder at the ones who ARENT

cadge seventh-day RESTS

Dust on the Wind.

"To bore not one man, name not one robot." —@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Sound of Harris.

( via / @archillect )

Rusty Cage.

“how I thought of my well-worn books,–and our boxes of laughing bricks” —A Humument

Tanka.

"forensic analysis of the loopy D"

hollow glitz of glee-slog
détour glower meeting
the street has its stray zap
dodged strifeward codger
soundtrack & retreat call
breeze betraying season

Changing light across the walls.

( via/ painted by an elephant named khankluay )

Rionnard.

non-Euclidean DARTS
yet bulls’-eyes AWAIT
on the weather RADAR

thorny TIARA
sunglasses on a STRAP
salvagable FAUST

elegy’s AORTA
swerves with strange URGES
butterfly eats a STEAK

the magical TASKS
of a non-face BARER
pangolins ATONE

candelabra ROMAN
new edicts ENACT
thugs who collect the RENTS

Concerto de Arañjuez.

” ‘I came to Seattlehama to think about existence, contemplate the flow of time, and to learn how to play the steam koto.’ “ –Jon Armstrong, Yarn (2010)

Greatest crime.

( via / via )

"It’s the kind of Netflix special Terrence Malick would have filmed."

“Bedecker of imminences, bedecker
of the parenthesis.”

—David Smith’s Trilce

After Masking.

i have taken much too long
to round the Cape
& be headed home

the parrots
are in an uproar

i have taken much too long
to round the Cape
& be headed home

(2021)

My Halloween Gambit game.

( via / me )

Flintlocks.

"We: faded light, a path;
gilded all in art lumina.
Madness went —I say—
away, all lit.

Solemn, ill, I was sent.
I was a bird,
a sad rib;
as a witness:
a will in me lost.

I’ll lay away as it.
News, send a man.
I’m ultra nil, laded light.
A path gilded a few.”

—Merlina Acevedo

The Triumphant Chariot of Antominy.

"Those who are vulnerable move among mysteries." --Roethke

"Often, two subsequent feelings arrive to shore up our initial repulsion: first, a sense of righteous protectiveness over the hallowed tradition being milled into schlock, and second, resentment that someone else is enjoying a readership." (via aldaily)

( canyonlands national park, gustavo travaglini on fb / me )

No more "homework".

“Maybe the ocean is the bardo and everywhere you land is karma.” –The Great Offshore Grounds

A blogger's story.

indeed i dree cerecloth
dead reckoning buncombe
with a shardborn relish

shown empathy's mothwings
delivered to tatters

"The true story of the hunt will not be told until the lion learns to write."