Wiles & the alliterisen.
"castles"
art ever perfected
on the weakest practiced
if teams turn from murder
in time, they still mime it
wake & know no warning
will work · blood-mist lurking
cars out like bright castles
“It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.” –G K Chesterton, Browning (1903)
“The fatal Sisters three,
which spun my slender twine,
Knew well how rotten was the yarne,
from whence they drew their line.”
—Gascoigne
Fall issue of Forgotten Grounds Regained.
"accord de fromage"
Zubenelg-lift zimme
zillows Clearview keelyard
the world's missing witness
wones in van's brisk shadow
On the Diminishment of Seafarers' Laments.
"the Rooibos Lopez"
all the ways of magic
i learned
first & last subject
all the ways of magic
& pinchbeck margents,
trophies made of lead—
all the ways of magic
i learned
The Fall of the House of Usher.
πβπ π€ππππ βππ πππ π πππ£ππ & left nothing but iconography behind: that, & suffering.
“on rune-height by the garbaged rill
the scree-fall answers the cawed madrigals”
—The Anathemata
"Beethoven's Sixth Extinction"
pert Overton porthole
pours flammable dubstep
relate life of reading
ruse: silicon duckspeak
this drive dreary miles-trudged
draws cellophane bruffshade
chase as if a charmed ring
cheat-warriors see through
fiery while Rome fiddles
font negligence widgets
pyramid-heft hilches
harsh penalties pelted
a warm wind of taking
warps terrible cribbage—
ahead raging raindance
roves Overton porthole
ultramarine anchor
flurry of orb turmoil
lanes disappear piecemeal
a third part of heartache
a third part of thespians
as dawn threats unfetter
gas dwindles & guile cakes
the Mars gantry slanting
ultramarine anchor
flurry of orb turmoil
"OK, there are a lot of things form the recent past that we need to bring back and one of them is the experience of going to the record store with friends and buying a record and then going to to your friend's house and laying on the floor and listening to each other's new records." —@mrtylercrook.bsky.social
"If our present suffering ever leads to a revival..."
“…I failed to realize that everything is mysterious, that we live only in mystery, that if chance existed, chance would be yet more mysterious than Providence.” –J K Huysmans, 1903 preface to π΄̀ π
ππππ’ππ , 1884
thunderation rondo
a rat's nest of bleak questions
as usual in Ozspecs
elegy prowls Grinch tinchel
Actually "robot army" is the one thing i did have on my apocalypse bingo card.
"chilly rain
stalks the edge of his dream
my Gazan friend
still waiting for the phone call
I know won't come"
—Chen-ou Liu via
That's 68 cents apiece. I want him to knock on my door & hold out his hand. We will have words first.
“I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion…” –Coleridge, π΅ππππππβπππ πΏππ‘π‘ππππππ ch. II
I've been shouting "mazel tov!" but this is better.
"No angel that has six wings ever changes."
“Hypocrisy is quite as inseparable from being a man as sliminess is from being a fish.”
—Kierkegaard
“Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed
Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound
In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat
On the silent sea we have heard the sound
That came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.
Under the mile off moon we trembled listening
To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound
And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing
The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.
Open a pathway through the slow sad sail,
Throw wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boat
For my voyage to begin to the end of my wound,
We heard the sea sound sing, we saw the salt sheet tell.
Lie still, sleep becalmed, hide the mouth in the throat,
Or we shall obey, and ride with you through the drowned.”
—Dylan Thomas
“Job Misquoted”
I know a myst'ry worth a few of those:
clog stronger than the pipe.
And what after all is this thing of having hope
or losing it, as if hope were the only prize?
Is it for hope i’ve made the Maze my bourn;
hope, that i devise small hours to graithe?
Then once—its spreading rings,–shall gravity smoothe
& not a molecule abide as cairn.
There must be reason in the mere parabola:
sometimes i say it’s joy, sometimes beyond,
a building, where i cannot understand
except as limned by glyph & scribble-qabbalah.
Myst'ry, not that i bear nothing’s burden—
but myst'ry ineffable:–claiming nothing’s guerdon.
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.
"fucking president is bulldozing the white house and it's like number 43 on the list of breaking scandals" —@tomtomorrow.bsky.social
"MIDNIGHT (Anagrammed Lines)
Lawless midnight forever composes
verse from compelling shadows. I set
scenes from the improvised gallows,
the slow, simple coverings of dreams."
—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
"The novel used to feed our search for meaning..."
"lemmingrede"
tulip craze or witchcraft
describes Cheetoh era,
ergot—outrage raining,
ev'ryone keeps smiling
myth of American freedom
or elites lacked conscience
then led final ransack
given go-ahead by
grifter who got lucky
myth of American knowhow
i think they won't bother
theorizing downfall
Chicxulub's scar chiseled,
a changed landscape crawling
the myth of America
“It seems to me that the modern public prefers its poetry sung.
That doesn’t surprise me, anymore than that they also prefer movies in color with sound, to silent ones in black and white.
I myself like silent movies on their own merits, but I have no illusions that there are going to be great artists practicing this medium ever again.
In the light of this argument (to which I can find no answer) the squabbles over verse or free verse seem rather petty.” –Ernst Kipling in Eratosphere
"The majority of American poets have acquiesced in the judgment of the predatory society. They do not exist as far as it is concerned. They make their living in a land of make-believe, as servants of a hoax for children. They are employees of the fog factories — the universities. They help make the fog." —Kenneth Rexroth, 1959
"When we are exiled from the orders and unities of culture..."
“Skunkworks”
There are no atoms
indivisible at last to be broken to.
If i was once
the site and source of such resplendent fire
or, oak, stood riven
lit from a forking lode, then more i shall be.
Atoms into atom-shards
and into shards of shards, there is no ending,
no last dust
but may be made to walk and weep again.
2 24 84
"I think we've done a 6,000 year experiment into what the highest level of communications technology is that the human brain can tolerate, and the answer turns out to be the wired kitchen telephone" —@zachrabiroff.com
"fistula whisperer"
funest vaudeville cistern
evanishment mere pancake
tsalal oblast eyeballed
airt of the sprung gate lungfish
"zersetzung"
notes trained to nudge me
feature in a fun song
nugatory fathoms
all the same sinking in
two moons are marching
silhouette-mythic
the uncontrollable turmoil
below scarce scopes out
tale scars
of fossil water wept
return to an abattoir
& worn tarmac
"The years crawl by like scorpions."
My job now is stalking the em-dash.
"My current theory is poems cause crime."
brave days in the divmix
dialing up long strong shadows
harp gestapo hoods gaily
halftime strange derangements
& bird chatter made bitter
"You couldn't tell wreckage from victim in the fast-turning shade-shapes of obliquity." —Barefoot in the Head
Interminable coffee thread but i read it to the end.
"The heart always so laden, the gulls always so malignant." —Barefoot in the Head
Remembering Japanese Words Deleted from the Dictionary.
low-effort pinwheels
flutter on a soft corpse-wind
walls of the East Wing
crumple at the wrecking ball
but you cannot take pictures
The most ridiculous book in the world.
Watched the new tubi goosebumps movie and liked the end credits song.
“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)
If we can take back the frog, we can take back the J-man.
When i rob the louvre im going straight for this painting.
"Here’s the way to think about climate change that I learned from @drkatemarvel.bsky.social:
We’re creating an increasingly chaotic and dangerous world, sending our children and grandchildren there, and they’re never coming back." —@davidho.bsky.social
“DATES
i.
Fish.
Bequeath fish.
Able to state papers.
Fish.
Bequeath fish.
ii.
Worry.
Wordly
Pies and pies.
Piles.
Weapons.
Weapons and weapons.
World renown.
World renown world renown.
iii.
Nitches.
Nitches pencil.
Nitches pencil plate.
Nitches vulgar.
Nitches vulgar pencils.
Nitches plate.
iv.
Hopping.
Hopping a thunder.
Credit.
Creditable.
v.
Spaniard.
Soiled pin.
Soda soda.
Soda soda.
vi.
Wednesday.
Not a particle worker.
Aider.
Add send dishes.
vii.
Poison oak poison oak.
Stumble.
Poison steer.
Poison steer humble.
Prayer.
Irene.
Between.
Conundrum.
Come.
viii.
Wet yes wet yes wet yes sprinkle. Wet yes wet yes wet yes sprinkle.
ix
Thicker than some.
x.
College extension.
xi.
Pass over.
Pass over.
Pass.
Pass.
Pass.
Pass.
Pass pass.
xii.
Not a night sight.
Pay sombrely.
Are and n and no and pail. Are and n and no and pail. Are and n and no and pail.”
—from The Yale Gertrude Stein (1980)
"mouth is older than eyes"
autumn is a task miser
ev'rywhere the gloves feral
dreams not killed by void druid
drastic groves—the tove window—
stop & go stark lit folly
astir veins that feel a crisp eelfare
turn on Greenville mid-grimace
agroof bloodlace fends huddle
yellowing glare halts hailstorm—
hist'ry with its rinds finds us
I bought myrrh in quantity.
"In much of the South Pacific, these creatures are seen as deities, ancestors, and relatives."
The first rule of Big Inflatable Frog is no one can say "Big Inflatable Frog".
"a tree you shall not cut down"
devouring glim, glyphless
gang agley Ingsoc
dust-left chances · chittering waves
blank sentinel · balloon untethered
devouring glim · vestibule
of the long night coming
only on ruins,
my future meditations;
though we may rebuild
as after each eruption
this was the loss that was home
"Better to grapple with the murkiness of this moment..."
But does not poetry begin precisely at the place that has no remedy?
Tire scrap in the road ornithomancy.
"chatgpt will bullshit you and i may bullshit you as well but my bullshit is *artisanal*" —@lauropea.bsky.social
"dead parrot society"
geometric · mirth welling
the lorn arch · allows no luster
pale cerulean · poltergeist icing
blast unfelt · the more fiercely
stint each weakness · staggering pure
the wasteland imaged · for our orc walls
From the early days of ballooning.
"phobic aerobics"
golden antheap word elder
eidolon wrenck grot autumn
word grot grue wit
the war as waged through gadgets
bewilders flesh road voters
through road rain thread
train delay & flame truant
"Agenbite of Auschwitz." —Barefoot in the Head
Frogs Together Strong (watercolor).
"To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order." —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social
attenuated
merely: this cloud of mischance
men know as covid
so memory-holed, masks seen
precipitate vast unease
I didn't get a picture of the best sign I saw today, but I remember what it said.
