( via / via )

New active regions.

"A Girl from Jerusalem

After trees hid me for a thousand centuries in their fruits' pits, I played on the domes near the heart, I leaped through city squares like a grasshopper free in deserted fields, hills shimmering in my eyes, crossing ages with the legendary joy of an ordinary child's madness, unpuzzled by time or strange armies.

I'm reincarnated in every girl who's drawn the world with the chalk of city stones, I was that girl playing mom on the walls, guarding her kids from cold, nothing clutched my little heart. This was before news was invented, and I learned that the holy is bitter or my huse is coveted by Earth's great civilizations. I was inhabited by souls of love, opened my arms to anyone who wanted to pray where the earth is closest to God. Ii wasn't naive, embracing them, declaring my city their city. They didn't fathom my metaphors. They surrounded me in a narrow corner of the old wall. And when they invented a weapon, they tried it out on my heart.

As if descending from windfields, they came, without features like mine, without fingerprints on walls and streets, they wounded the sand and mountains, wounded the springs, dried up places' memories, held the corpse of a boy who knew nothing of their catastrophe, and I stayed to tell of my Nakba. No one hears. Escaping through green fields, filled with tears, no one hears.

A happy girl, knowing nothing of history's nightmare, I said, I won't harm anyone, no one'll harm me. That's how happy children think. How did the pretty night turn into a horror story, a monster, the bulldozer's teeth ripping remnants of old dreams—what does the word enemies mean? I had no enemy but the sleep that stopped me embracing the expanse. But I still collect my grandma's tales in the heart bag, dry the reeds. Children most love the stories accompanied by flute.

I look on this city from the city, on this country from the country. I look on all those who died, whose souls rolled here, who knew, having been eaten by ends, that the night takes its time then passes, that the day takes its time then passes. Don't tell anyone but they locked themselves in my house. They left me out in the wind's insanity. I knocked on the door till my hands bled, and no one opened it. God, how did they get there, and me here?

They won't tell you I built these temples where they worship God, these walls guarding humanity from falling, these songs to balance the world, these dances to conjure rain and ripen fruits. With each summer that passes through my narrow neighborhood I come of age, I build my house within me, I carry it when they hit me in the guts, separating me from me. I will remind my children of the massacre and the vines that shamed the desert. I will loosen my colorful ribbons. I will fasten them about the city's waist forever."

—Khaled Juma in: You Must Live (tr & ed Tayseer Abu Odeh & Sherah Bloor, 2025)

Evening in Autumn.

"The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee."

—Christopher Hitchens via @sardonicus.eu

"This has also been going on without reprieve in Elgin, Aurora, and other Chicago suburbs."

( via / via )

ICE in Colorado.

“Therefore the Romans were not so great because they were religious, but because they were sacrilegious with impuny.” –Arnobius, Adversus Gentes, tr Bryce in The AnteNicene Fathers v.6

One need not be a chamber to be haunted.

A hungry sparrow sings the saddest song,
And marble flooring cracks beneath its weight.
It was a dream, and dreams do not prolong:
A hungry sparrow sings the saddest song.

And you who mince the litany of wrong
Come into lands where none prevaricate.
A hungry sparrow sings the saddest song,
And marble flooring cracks beneath its weight.

The ache for celebrity.

( me / via )

AR 4246, AR 4248, and whatever else is lurking.

"in the wash of stars
owl’s cry enters me-
I wake as smoke"

—@wolftwinthomas.bsky.social

Sunken Oboe.

Sometimes, i admit, i want cacophony.

AI for Friends (Halloween version).

( via / me )

Hoovered-up halftime.

“Whoever has no house now, will never have one.” —Rilke

Rumble.

"recusal"

1.
abandoned shore, bearing
bullet shells & rust helmets
slip of sawdust paper
sere dross near the hospital

2.
daily this one no diff'rent
in the plan death annals
too they'd talk our ears off
sworn in the torn silence

It's me, unnamed critter from bosch's triptych of the temptation of anthony!

( via / via )

Anagram-Triolet for Keats.

"i am certain of finding"

otherworldly organist · ordalic dither
as the clock creeps · to some cracked tryst
sunny in bricktown · sort of dull
hard to rehearse · the heist of civilians

one-storey lives · lost to the annals
anonymous song · numinous sadly
all-souls' · edgelord rally
to think of those · by thwart chosen

talaria-shod · & shelter-hardy
gathered leaves · along calm lanes
wrote recipes · i failed to follow
saw this coming · called it pitiful

remains much · murksome finale
mechas bustle · in the bright cold air
musicians practice · for that prism'd hour
their note hangs · like a harbinger of peace

many poisons · went into perfecting
this wrenched respite · in a rude season
the bard battles · sore disbelief
himself as skeptic · in the scuttlebutt ranks

a day off from deigning · to rearrange realms
pure penitence · or pastime compromised
by wanting whispers · from the dead to flatter me
with hour urged · in the foxhole ardent

Alpha Centauri Ab.

“Along the pavement roll’d the muttering head.” –Pope’s Odyssey, XXII

The science world is ending.

( via / via )

Learning Mangement Systems.

So much of our time & energy goes into learning this special proprietary software that the students will never use again, & the teachers won't either because next year we'll have switched to something else that requires us all to start over again. It's what we engage with now instead of the subject matter. It's madness.

Troqueer Parish Church, Dumfries.

"Persephone's Rainbow"

centipede-cease classroom
suspect even god-grieving
riddled where road widens
ruinous now stress questioned
pentacle-held hauntbug
hardly ever bard-stubborn
two kinds of amerce mischief
milkshake the belong-here acres

Every mistake is better with anger.

( via / me )

A little bit of Murnau's Faust.

"we shall be unleaved"

smash & grab metagrabolized
can't watch can't turn away
fever in the phone booth
ferrying tyres down stairways
Gadsden neighbor goblins
on the gantry tree house call
harder & harder driving
this maze made of malware

superficial seicheslosh
sends me down lanes past bastions
of mummified folderol
fade into perse string theory
theory that throngs angstrom
throughways to blue sky ruin
smash & grab metagrabolized
gargoyle scree

White.

“In 1921 a poetry magazine Zangmi-czon or the Rose-Village was published, where Zong-hwa Bag (pen name, Wôltan or Moon and Shallow) and Yônghûi Bag (pen name, Hoewôl or Thinking of the Moon) wrote decadentic poetry. In the following year a literary magazine Bêgzo or The White Tide produced three poets, Sa-yong Hong (pen name, Nozag or The Dew Sparrow), Sang-hwa Yi (pen name, Sang-hwa or Thinking of Fire), and Gi-zin Gim (pen name, Palbong or the Eight Peaks), and they were rather humanistic. In the same year a poetry magazine Gûmsông or The Venus was published by a group of nationalistic lyrists, Zu-dong Yang (pen name, Mue or The Endless), Zanghûi Yi (pen name, Gowôl or The Old Moon), and others.” –In-Sôb Zông, A Pageant of Korean Poetry (1963)

The Museum of Fine Arts Boston returned two stoneware vessels made by enslaved potter/poet David Drake to his descendants.

( via / me )

"Texas school boards are increasingly turning to ChatGPT & other AI programs to comply with SB 13..."

"Few people, for instance, realize that a time may easily come when we shall see the great outburst of science in the nineteenth century as something quite as splendid, brief, unique, and ultimately abandoned, as the outburst of Art at the Renascence.” –G K Chesterton, Dickens

I've seen the Bacon & it rules.

“constridulation”

should you have done something
better with your time
vying ways to come
born into the nighttime

pictured for another
should you care at all
worse days will annul
what seemed urgent pother

we of course feel guilty
through the haze of cronk
to watch Atlantis sink
from plans as glad as faulty

O Caritas.

( via / via )

On to Bermuda.

"Black Rook in Rainy Weather

On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident

To set the sight on fire
In my eye, I seek
No more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
Without ceremony, or portent.

Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can’t honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Leap incandescent

Out of the kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then —
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent

By bestowing largesse, honor,
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); skeptical,
Yet politic; ignorant

Of whatever angel may choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again,
The long wait for the angel.
For that rare, random descent."

—Sylvia Plath

Year of the Rat.

"Sorry meth pipe racoon, COVID herpes monkey is my new spirit animal" —@juiceticles.bsky.social

Has Anyone Seen The Antichrist?

( via / via )

"Denial shields fossil fuel allies whose profits depend on unrestricted carbon extraction."

"got me working nightshift on the sun" —@scomputer.fun

"Why should we pay the same amount for a third of a pound of beef?"

"black metal law"

rage gruntpowirpingin
pumpkin-headed champs hoists
battle it out bilgeflood
for the skint bystanders

"...social media posters made a kind of parlor game of cramming the Trump Administration’s actions into their favored explanatory paradigm."

( via / via )

Another Paranoiac Critical piece. Is there a revival?

"Tell Me Not Here, It Needs Not Saying

Tell me not here, it needs not saying,
   What tune the enchantress plays
In aftermaths of soft September
   Or under blanching mays,
For she and I were long acquainted
   And I knew all her ways.

On russet floors, by waters idle,
   The pine lets fall its cone;
The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing
   In leafy dells alone;
And traveller's joy beguiles in autumn
   Hearts that have lost their own.

On acres of the seeded grasses
   The changing burnish heaves;
Or marshalled under moons of harvest
   Stand still all night the sheaves;
Or beeches strip in storms for winter
   And stain the wind with leaves.

Possess, as I possessed a season,
   The countries I resign,
Where over elmy plains the highway
   Would mount the hills and shine,
And full of shade the pillared forest
   Would murmur and be mine.

For nature, heartless, witless nature,
   Will neither care nor know
What stranger's feet may find the meadow
   And trespass there and go,
Nor ask amid the dews of morning
   If they are mine or no."

—AE Housman

"Noise makes a difference."

“In times of peace, there’s no need for unofficial recorders.” —Yuan Haowen (1190-1257)

"...hillbilly guitars, trance-like rhythms x howling vocals."

( via / via )

Lynds Dark Nebula.

"Though all our iconography would have it otherwise, the problem of our time—the Twentieth Century and its infernal legacies—is not a problem of humans who are evil. It is the problem of ideologies that don't work, that can't work; and of the humans—literally innumerable—who keep refusing to admit this." --Eva Rasolnikov, Marooned Among Losers (2004)

Mary of Silence.

"August 1914

What in our lives is burnt
In the fire of this?
The heart's dear granary?
The much we shall miss?

Three lives hath one life—
Iron, honey, gold.
The gold, the honey gone—
Left is the hard and cold.

Iron are our lives
Molten right through our youth.
A burnt space through ripe fields,
A fair mouth's broken tooth."

—Isaac Rosenberg

"This is the total destruction of our country, but it is also a farce."

( via / me )

Circling the wagons. (via @adriennelaf.bsky.social)

"9 THE LAUREL AXE

Autumn resumes the land, ruffles the woods
with smoky wings, entangles them. Trees shine
out from their leaves, rocks mildew to moss-green;
the avenues are spread with brittle floods.

Platonic England, house of solitudes,
rests in its laurels and its injured stone,
replete with complex fortunes that are gone,
beset by dynasties of moods and clouds.

It stands, as though at ease with its own world,
the mannerly extortions, languid praise,
all that devotion long since bought and sold,

the rooms of cedar and soft-thudding baize,
tremulous boudoirs where the crystals kissed
in cabinets of amethyst and frost."

—Geoffrey Hill (via vamoul.substack)

It's never a good time for a mad king but fuck.

The Taxicab Number.

( via / via)

Death ball sponge.

“Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. And their guides, the writers of fantasy, should take their responsibilities seriously."

From Elfland to Poughkeepsie, Ursula K Le Guin via @angryrobotbooks.bsky.social

Definition of poetry.

"a fishing boat in the Caribbean"

a big haul
on this perfect day
sky buzzing

The Skeleton Navvy.

( via / venus from atatsuki via )

Sometime in the last two weeks.

“A STONE FENCE

From there
The vast zone stretches.

It began to ruin.
A cross-shaped sword is sticked in.
It was hard and small.

Whitish clothes are folded there.
The third one is vacated not covered.

The stone fence is broken.
It was built again, being built again.

It was built.
The stone fence was built.
And the wind stole in and lodges.
Then the frozen evening squeezed in.”

—Zong-sam Gim

Gruntpowirpingin.

“Indeed if the worst conceivable situations which our humanity may have to confront lie beyond the scope of poetry, then poetry itself is a mere diversion.” —Kathleen Raine, The Inner Journey of the Poet

Dreamscape.

( via / via )

A Stack of LPs from the '60s.

"Beginning to think that the real product being peddled is not the novel but the edification that the novel will definitely provide and yuck." —@highway62.bsky.social

"This stuff is too much to process it directly..."

“Investigation of the Royal Massacre”

The desert’s share of elves
Alluringly recedes, a highway night
Disclosed in orbs that flicker, hover, melt
And leaving, jab with knives:
The desert’s share of elves.

The thievish dealer says
One day you too shall vanquish with the moth;
Anything to lose this daily death.
You hazard it, because
The thievish dealer says.

The desert’s share of elves,
The thievish dealer says,
Is more yours with the fading felth.

06 09 01

Words from JFK.

( me / via )

Like a Stone.

"bloodlust in the leadership"

moon tears with the teeth matched
strange merch where the perch bleeds
shirt of British Racing Green
vans cruising the cruel streets
the last craisin till fasting
glare of autumn afternoons
pale cerulean rendered down

infirm portal irksome
angst militates spitball
light through a gap gougeweb
gone foraging edgegrief

Long Shot.

"The adders herd death." (palindrome by pairs) —@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Death of a Bee.

( via / via )

"I do think that there are parallels that you could make to the moments right before and right after the First World War."

The idea of time is our consolation for losing the moments we fail to pay attention to. We say: it’s got to go 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒.

A great dinosaur painter.

“faithful to music”

having only been
faithful to music
too chary of other boon

having only been
as the forests burn
caught in the carolling murk

having only been
faithful to music

Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.

( via / via )

Tanka.

      “Ode to Eris, Goddess of Discord”

Now that you’ve been given a mini-planet
Fin'lly, of your own, will you go from Terra?
      Your laws are here carved out of granite;
   All of our wishes wear your tiara.

Maybe if us Earthlings could quit this scrimmage
Long enough to tell if another manner
      Of play might suit us more, we’d salvage
   Prizes to render the least a winner.

Leave us if you must with the golden apple:
Surely in our poverty something glitters
      Of dreams that don’t require iron’s grapnel,
   Smoky removal, and marching orders.

Witch Hare.

“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.”

—John Greenleaf Whittier

Mood.

( me / via )

Haiku.

"The author of the Journal of a Pupil describes a meeting between Gurdjieff and Crowley, but it is clear that they had nothing to say to one another. He says, 'Crowley had magnetism, and the kind of charm that many charlatans have; he also had a dead weight that was somehow impressive'-- that is, Crowley was a 'man of power'. 'His attitude was fatherly and benign, and a few years earlier I might have fallen for it. Now I saw and sensed that I could have nothing to do with him.' He does not describe the tea, except to say that Gurdjieff kept a sharp watch on Crowley, and says, 'I got a strong impression of two magicians, the white and the black--the one strong, powerful, full of light; the other also powerful, but heavy, dull, ignorant.'" —Colin Wilson, The Occult (1971)

Absences.

“GREEN LIGHT

Bought at the drug store, very cheap; and later pawned.
After a while, heard on the street; seen in the park.
Familiar, but not quite recognized.
Followed and taken home and slept with.
Traded or sold. Or lost.

Bought again at the corner drug store,
At the green light, at the patient’s demand, at nine o'clock.
Re-read and memorized and re-wound.
Found unsuitable.
Smashed, put together, and pawned.

Heard on the street, seen in a dream, heard in the park, seen by the light of day;
Carefully observed one night by a secret agent of the Greek Hydraulic Mining Commission, in plain clothes, off duty.
The agent, in broken English, took copious notes. Which he lost.
Strange, and yet not extraordinary.
Sad, but true.

True, or exaggerated, or true;
As it is true that the people laugh and the sparrows fly;
As it is exaggerated that the people change, and the sea stays;
As it is that the people go;
As the lights go on and it is night and it is serious, and just the same;
As some one dies and it is serious, and true;
As the corner hardware clerk might know and it is true, and pointless;
As an old man knows and it is grotesque, but true;
As the people laugh, as the people think, as the people change,
It is serious and the same, exaggerated or true.

Bought at the drug store down the street
Where the wind blows and the motors go by and it is always night, or day;
Bought to use as a last resort,
Bought to impress the statuary in the park.
Bought at a cut rate, at the green light, at nine o'clock.
Borrowed or bought. To look well. To ennoble. To prevent disease. To entertain. To have.
Broken or sold. Or given away. Or used and forgotten. Or lost.”

—Kenneth Fearing

Wasistseingesicht.

( me / via )

The Crystal Ship.

"widening gyre productions"

barbed-wire whimsy · rewards fingers
neon the name · of a knack stymied
crystal increase · carves effigy
the plain replentished · buzzard-style
barbed-wire walg · inward hurtle

Stuttering Hand Grenade.

Nor ziptied children on my bingo card...

Long Black Veil.

( via / whatever )

The Great Silence.

“The old hunger, left in the old darkness,
Turned like a hanged knife.”

—WS Merwin

Demon Pond. ☆☆ (via @harryskeeler.bsky.social)

gunmetal gray welkin
guzzles the last beastlight
afar there is thrashing
thought cannot quite grasp it

our toys rascal-scattered
escape often hopeless
Godzilla's path picked out
apart from laid gridwork

machine so vast in vying
venture or cub habit
cloudily called Wind-Rose
kept in tiptoe hollows

The Eyes Have It: Dorothy McGuire in The Spiral Staircase.

( via / via )

The official revival of the Commodore brand.

"BUILD A SUN (Anagrammed Lines)

I build a sun. Feted, it rises.
Inside its beautiful reds,
in its dust, a blue fire dies."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Venezuela.

“The phrase was still in vogue that ‘only 3 people understood Relativity’ at a time when Eddington was complaining that the trouble about Relativity as an examination subject in 'Part III’ [the hardest, last test for the Mathematical Tripos] was that it was such a soft option.” —Littlewood’s Miscellany

Sure hope this ione s just a conspiracy theory.

( via / via )

Photosphere in ultraviolet.

“If there is veneration, even a dog’s tooth emits light.”
—Tibetan saying, quoted in A. David-Neel’s 𝑀𝑎𝑔𝑖𝑐 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑀𝑦𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑦 𝑖𝑛 𝑇𝑖𝑏𝑒𝑡 (1929)

Zines from Gaza.

“Poem

I first loved you
second to
your gentleness

like the blind who
divide their lives into
dark and dark I
have you and your gentleness

as a detail in a painting frames that painting
in the often
memory, your face
is surrounded by your eyes
unafraid
of the grays of gentleness

but better than your gentleness
I love your harshness

the harshness
when you talk about that prison capitalism
when you vow never to stop fighting

never

until each woman and man is free
until each woman and man is in the custody

of their gentleness”

—Bill Knott

The Paranoiac-Critical Method lives.

( via / via )

"The bitter irony is inescapable: an operation justified by anti-narcotics rhetoric would create ideal conditions for drug-trafficking organizations to expand their power."

“Hills of Home

Name me no name for my disease,
With uninforming breath;
I tell you I am none of these,
But homesick unto death—

Homesick for hills that I had known,
For brooks that I had crossed,
Before I met this flesh and bone
And followed and was lost…

And though they break my heart at last,
Yet name no name of ills.
Say only, ‘Here is where he passed,
Seeking again those hills.’ ”

—Witter Bynner, Oxford Book of American Verse (1927)

Last year's total eclipse.

" 'I invited [T S] Eliot here,' [Oppenheimer] told Freeman Dyson, 'in the hope that he would produce another masterpiece, and all he did here [at the Institute for Advanced Study] was to work on The Cocktail Party, the worst thing he ever wrote.' " —𝐴𝑚𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑢𝑠

Anticipation of Love.