( via / via )

"Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, 'I wish I could read what Sharon would have written.'
Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit."

Jorie Graham namechecked on Elsbeth.

Happens to the Heart.

ratfollowers riled up
region of low-testo vestals
zeros to fill fire-cast
fanfare & pit bull sitcom

Palindrome-Haiku.

( via / via )

Monet's Water Lilies.

“Oral Wars”

slather the use
hence
through and rest
with ersatz vicissitude faction
like
profligate
languaged give
is curious word
ebb every time
expunge
trenchant to know scholarly amalgam
of languish observation
following upon
and though which festoons
tantamount opaque
you do let lapse from
would make a find abscond
the delve zeal
alleviate
did it rue so
herculean
then i gild
in taut fusillade
than soon after
will spurn as din
they could feel
or why gall roils
on arid beauty
domicile
of never lair

The Eagle still has landed.

In every encounter with my demons, 𝑠𝑙𝑖𝑝𝑝𝑎𝑔𝑒 has the upper hand.

A Sufi microtonal music thread.

( via / via )

You know, sometimes the absence of philosophical thinking just screams in an argument.
   C'mon—we don't know what "intelligence " is, but we already know enough to say it isn't one thing, nor can it be measured linearly.

Dumb, dumb unexamined metaphors.

What if what was special about humans was our ability to discover personhoods outside our measly selves. What if it was empathy?
We might start finding all sorts of other intelligences around us; & if robots furnish one more, unprecedented sort, that would be pretty cool. But it's hardly guaranteed to save us.

"...in 1955, the computer scientist John McCarthy and his colleagues applied for US government funding to create what they fatefully chose to call 'artificial intelligence'—a canny spin, given that computers at the time were the size of a room and as dumb as a thermostat." (via Mefi)

close, close your heart.
it's there all safety lies.
when all the choices hurt,
close close your heart.

some sorrow-stones inherit;
some inchmeal realize.
close, close: your heart—
it's there. all safety lies.

The Horse of the Invisible. ☆☆

( me / via )

Rovina's Choice.

"Colonel Mustard"

purpose silence soapbox
silvery crust, liftgilver
silica packets
one writes without threatflinch
those who rule by fear gulag
not their own limits
antelucan lintpluck
as lies smoulder t'ward goldbreak

My panic room.

Shards, shards; nothing that has 𝑔𝑟𝑜𝑤𝑛 from something else.

Toxic books.

( via / via )

Deconstructed Gnossienne.

"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."
—Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus via @rabihalameddine.bsky.social

Oldvillage.

"My feeling for the mask"

alpha baboon beefcake
bakers of slop cropdust;
in the twilight tailspin
intelligence-knellhush

"As part of Professor Higley's class, Magic Language in the Middle Ages, students were introduced to the world of constructed languages, and they even created their own."

( via / via )

The war on knowledge.

"Airship of Theseus"

thick, orc-like aesthetics
timbleful of dawn scrimmage
hunger in the hogan
ahead, only dread-onus
maybe future's merch-spiel
in the main runs dorp-sunset
antelucan echoes
orcs on my mind come blindfold

wipe the windshield Herschel

Snow on the torture channel.

Disgusted at how the spirit of gaming has infiltrated every sphere, from news that can only see politics as team sports, to a class system increasingly devolving into winners punishing losers; from art subcultures that conflate status with achievement, to entertainment based solely upon tricking you into falling for false promises; truth is not just bent in the interest of the game, it is not even factored into the equation. And a place has already been prepared for those who’ve given up or been forced out of the game: this is all that keeps me playing, sheer mulishness. (Instead, i imagine i have found my own way of playing. This is to want to be misunderstood. …Thus i count myself among the Seekers-of-Blame.)

Glass set on wood sounding.

( me / via )

Keeler's Theory of Plot.

The poor cannot be punished too many times for the crime of being poor. It’s the last vestige of Original Sin.

Time after Time.

"Such Insomnia and the Shape

it takes in the dark. Moon with a faint
dent. Clouds squishing like grubs. The minerals

awake in their sightless caves.
Indifferent. Loveless.

Wulfenite, azurite, hematite,
sulfur. What I must do

is breathe and think of breathing
things, orchids and insects, the soft

exhalations of cedars on the cliff’s
edge. Or Röntgen’s first images of X-rays

on photographic plates:
fragile skeletons of frog and fish,

the left hand of his wife,
her tapered bones within their cloud

of shadowy flesh. The beginning
of seeing past sight—

in which what’s interior becomes
visible architecture for the living self.

I love the thought of slipping
into a darkness which is actually

the beginning of a different kind of light.
But how to know which darkening

is just a dreaming spinning out
the cocoon it will soon sail away from?

No one to turn the lights on,

to say this grotto’s simply full of dust
and brush away the shattered pollens."

—Katherine Larson

"Lowell protégée Kathleen Spivak observed, though, that Plath never cracked a smile, not even at Lowell’s jokes."

( via / via )

The Necessity of Poetics. (now published as a book)

“Pantoum: Clogs”

Heavy smoke drifting t'ward the road
trees flush with white blooms
when the goshawk strikes
light breaking through thick cloud
mild winter morning

heavy smoke drifting t'ward the road
silence in the sanctuary
when the goshawk strikes
wait for the greeny arrow
mild winter morning

no more resurrections
silence in the sanctuary
array of high goshawks
wait for the greeny arrow
no more quarter

no more resurrections
trees flush with white blooms
array of high goshawks
light breaking through thick cloud
no more quarter

"What if a schizophrenic municipal employee in provincial Germany attempted to write his own Bible?" (via aldaily

“I look upon the geological record as a history of the world, imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines…” –[Robert] Duncan quotes Charles Darwin in a 1955 letter, and goes on to say: “What if poetry were not some realm of personal accomplishment, open field day race for critics to judge, or animal breeding show–but a record of what we are, like the record of what the earth is is left in the rocks, left in the language? Then what do we know of poetry at all compared to this geology? and how silly we must look criticizing …as if geologists were to criticize rather than read their remains.”

"Brodernism is not a writerly movement but a critical tendency, not a tradition in the strict sense but a kind of post facto absorption..."

( via / via )

Guilty of a box of zines.

For Xmas our City of Magnificent Splendors has decided to commence far-ranging repairwork on virtually all of the major thoroughfares running north and south; consequently, such travel is now rendered vastly more complicated, time-consuming, and temper-provoking, as if to test our mettle as a civil society at a moment when its only glue is the prevalence of the civic illusion itself. Apart from this infrastructure, in fact, we are nothing but squatters in the ruins of the achievements of our unknown and unknowable forebears.

"Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions..."

“The Pope at Ground Zero”

Hammocks. Rings. Owls. The march
to wryneck, softer than a whisper;
and ev'rything proceeds from scratch
as modules in my brainpan fester.
Today the weather might be March
although November, light so mellow
falling across the plains of pitch,
and where i go there is no one can follow.

Hero of insufficient starch
and highwayman with finger blister,
my sense of irony’s no crutch
against the hurricane’s rough bluster.
Whatever brought me here won’t muster
reasons to stay, or songs to hallow
this perilous absence of high master,
and where i go there is no one can follow.

Hyenas nuzzle at the latch.
Tomorrow is a blasting gospel.
Only for now, the jewels i catch
linger, then perish faster and faster.
Whatever courage i can foster
must shore up my walls, as stern as jello;
i chase gray moths on a twilight porch
and where i go there is no one can follow.

This blue podcast, this slim fetch
dwindles in the winds of Hesper.
I cannot dream of goodlier hutch,
i cannot find a finer clyster.
Among the hooligans who cluster,
this one’s apogee lies fallow.
Once to lift a stratocaster—
and where i go there is no one can follow.

You who never knew the bunker buster
still find blood stains on your pillow.
Graywyvern shifts across Ygg’s twister
and where he goes there is no one can follow.

Ave Maria.

( me / via )

"Several of Milton’s examples of the genre survive, for example, but any man who’d been at school or university even briefly in seventeenth century England had written a Latin Gunpowder Plot poem."

"a Plato talpa"

watch for gooseshit
   to the shore
of the laptop
   linking world
   linking world

one may ask me
   if i know
words are tricky
   trawled that dark
dingle lie
   dingle lie

First match at the Library of Alexandria.

"Longing like a delayed freight ship boarding São Miguel; longing like fado and its slow dark lacerations in the flesh; longing like chocking and chocked waiting, like the white canvas of your skin against the ink and the promise of my body; longing like a Tanizaki obsession, like a feverish breath." —@poemakontsa.bsky.social

What is America but a murder house?

( via / via )

M7.4 flare peaking around 1115 UT today.

"THE CITY (Palindrome-Haiku)

Go flat, urbanised....
A cradle here held arcades
in a brutal fog."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

The First Law.

"a definition of enough"

sorrowwolf, sulfur
surd's alchemy talcbind
to brick nerves now broken
nine blue castles trining

empty like Horst's eyestalls
erstwhile crown of soundbites
boxcar full of failscabs
first enemy stumble

Five over is too slow.

( via / via )

Lynd Ward's Beowulf.

fierce events unfolding
ravenous fibs travel

down these dells returning
medley of dings peddle

the real squalor squares off
glint squamous tentacles

"He lives beside the slow accumulation of words, which fill his house like the stream of sand into an hourglass." (via Mefi)

“and my purse my purse full of clown-seized ankles” —Bill Knott

The Gestapo abducting a daycare worker from her job.

( via / me )

The Hunt for Vampire Sunshine.

"My son, the wind is rising,
carry your wounds. Carry your will."

—Maher al-Maqousi in You Must Live

"The bourgeoisie ascending on both sides of the Atlantic was a class made of ink and newsprint." (via @joriegraham.bsky.social)

      "the prize"

kneeling nabob
   nags the curb
bright labyrinth
   bristles with
still tornado
   cast in stone
hands held begging
   for scant hope

should stop there
   but stuttered
olive eelfare
   to the eye
routine unreels
   a rough lurch
words wintering
   in this walg

how many more
   to mutter
to the torn blue
   & the trek
lassos collect
   as sloops lured
by promised prize
   prog bomb-hush

Mamdani quoting Debs.

( via / via )

"Not even Trump has gotten his own friend to apologize after shooting him in the face."

“Vorpal Provost”

This tunnel does not jibe with all the maps.
Lostness i imbibe with all the maps.

Eclipse-time, and the boys will no more jeer
the oddball in the tribe with all the maps.

Pursuing you, alas, is one that’s through,
O tutelary vibe, with all the maps.

There must be a german word for the feeling of thinking a girl’s music sucks but still wanting to fuck her.

If Charles Manson killed the people he killed in one night, & repeated it every night for 304 years, he would have killed as many people as Dick Cheney.

A highest level flare.

( me / via )

Why i can't get a straight answer out of CVS anymore.

They won't even know what an answer 𝑖𝑠. It'll be just one more thing they can only get from robots.

Annie Finch on Léonie Adams.

      "low gibbous moon"

   clear sailing
for a brief stint
   read a page
not yet burnt up

   going on
to the next game

The Agonizing Resurrection of Thomas Ligotti Online.

( me / via )

"Unfortunately, this feature of poetry does not sit comfortably alongside some of the more rigid precepts governing the artform, principle among which is the role of sensibility – the expectation that a poem, however mysterious, is primarily an emotional or perceptive response to the author’s first-hand experiences."

"all winter
Venus shone brilliantly
only now
do I see her note
on the pinboard"

—Farah Ali

Joyelle on Jeopardy. More. And...

“…after a hundred years of rubbing up against explorers, traders, missionaries, and colonial administrators, the tribe members had ceased to be reliable authorities on their own traditions.” –Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau (1999) [Critics and artists]

Moderate (M-class) solar flare.

( via / via )

Input.

Every one of us can survive. Just what persuaded you that we can’t? The resolve—in advance—to act as if it weren’t so.

"The Romans recognised the spiritual weight of ancient places and often sought to harness it."

“Hastur and the Loaned People”

today is only yesterday’s tomorrow
a ricochet of sorts within the kiln

a scrimmage in the coruscating polka
a mist that parts and closes as we wedeln

a paycheck ever late for harsh podelka
a marsh at midnight for infirm palaver

a treeless plain to thurify a druid
a plan to reassemble some cadaver

a pluviaminatory sky’s strange fluid
a bloody fingerprint on the polished banister

a tinkling in the dark, once-shaken bulb
a sorrow in the heart, that useless canister

a fissure in your reason’s isopleth

The Mall In Every 80s Movie.

( via / via )

"None of them knew what it was."

"natural death of a monster"

   geese faintly
branches flashing
   gray carpet
woodsmoke recall
   flashing branch
across bruised years
   at my knee
backpack nudging
Darth Cheney dead

   spin the globe
take a spanner
   maim people
you never met
   all about
bully's power
   & a world
grown cruelly worse
Darth Cheney dead

   geese faintly
at Abu Ghraib
   a million
—flash branch—murdered
   to my school
trudge & scatter
   some future
shred like feathers
Darth Cheney dead

First woman known to have professionally carved totem poles.

"Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water" —@mobydickatrsea.bsky.social

A little touch of Mothra in the night.

( via / me )

Lipogram Ozymandias.

“The pain of life is much more powerful than the interest in life. That’s why religion will always conquer philosophy.” –V V Rozanov, 𝑆𝑜𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑎 (tr E Gollerbach, 1927)

Thelyphthora.

"Slendertroll"

crow & wood smoke, werewolf
welter, lullaby riot;
here again gyre ransom
or regret made cloud crater
blue tea in the turnstile
tier-relative flutter

Walking to day-care in the genocide.

( me / via )

A trio of monster active regions.

“Who Shapes the Carven Word

Who shapes the carven word, the lean, true line,
And builds with syllable and chiselled phrase,
To rear a sheltering temple and a shrine
To house a dream through brief and meagre days

Must know that time wears words away like stone
And blurs the sharpness of the clean, straight thought;
A ghost will wander out and leave alone
And tenantless the temple that he wrought.

This will be ruins for another day,
Of lichen-bitten stone and empty tower,
A tumbled shrine whose god has moved away…
Yet later-comers, in some moon-hushed hour,
May find a strange light haunting still the shade,
And footprints that no mortal feet had made.”

—David Morton, Anthology of Magazine Verse 1925

Steal the Bacon.

“It is written that Iblis’s muezzin will be music.” —Lyda Morehouse, Messiah Node (2003)

Desire for Light Things.

( via / via )

Witness.

"THE MECHANICAL OWL (Palindrome)

Too held in its tide,
tan, a meek owl woke,
emanated its tin, idle hoot."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

"Authoritarians have always understood that spectacle is power."

"Optics Lab

This is not a sestina, it’s a hologram.
When I was eight, or about eight, my father
took me to the darkened optics lab
in the science tower basement, and showed me
a single floating dot, a disappointing dot
he helped six students make with a laser.

That’s how you make sestinas—with a laser.
I mean that’s how you make holograms.
You point two or six or ninety-two beams at an object
and bounce light off it, and show it to my father.
He detects an image in the waves, and tells me
it is formed by interference; in the lab

he described his work in other labs
amplifying light by stimulated emission of radiation—
honestly: he helped invent the laser: he tells me;
but how does this dot become a sticker with a prancing silver unicorn?
how do I describe my father?
who is ninety two today, a floating candle flame

on a cake; who is singular;
who explained about the two-slit experiment
when I was eight. He is still himself,
mostly. While his lab was fine-tuning that first laser,
he might have guessed about holograms,
but 'I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me'

about supermarket scanners, CDs, cat toys. Time
tells. Time passes, and that disappointing dot
is rainbow, landscape, animal. To make a hologram
you record perspectives on a light field
and illuminate the tracks left by your laser
until in parallax you create my father.

I visited today and said to my father,
'I’m writing a sestina. Explain light for me.'
We looked at each other.
His explanation dwindled to a dot.
He gestured at the moving, silent world.
'Rachel, I can’t.' He is a hologram,

an image, an incomplete experiment,
a pattern that can almost write the whole."

—Rachel Trousdale at Psaltery and Lyre

"This is a historic moment; the future is yet unwritten."

( via / me )

Orange Sugar Cookie.

cry of the scarabs · catch by the plashless pool
   espresso in a china cup
blaze to meet it · char unaccountable
   lemming march & onus
for all whose blood · is blasted with the red tape
   of mortgage or student dolg
narrow veer · vifgage at stun
   crossing crisp shadows
named October · named November
   named madness we cannot stem

"Yet, between past and present, there is not much of a difference in terms of human suffering. (pdf)

"Is it bad to have a cartoonishly venal, simple-minded toad as president? The experts we spoke to disagree" —@ianboudreau.com

"The interview was like sitting down with a person accused of a crime who agreed to answer your questions, and then failing to ask if the person committed the crime that was the subject of the interview."

( via / me )

Columbo.

Overlap of Marais: "Bells of St Genevieve" with this & this.from 𝐿𝑖𝑞𝑢𝑖𝑑 𝑆𝑘𝑦 soundtrack.

The cat's bowl.

"a hundred points of order"

adorning tree, dino
dervish, fervid street preacher

Epstein ballroom burps its
beautiful waste, blame haystack
and the wind and the sun and the rain

order of operations
dino adorning tree

Working Stirling engine.

( via / via )

Thaw.

“Sgt Ghost Pepper”

Plunge golden a gauge short
Goes to weather black feathers
That muffle mirth scofflaw
‘Midst falling of all statutes
Elsewhere still no alehouse
Doors, counters with smooth glozing
Season of witch satchel
Sends perilous fixed-fenders
Fall into flerd golden
Aflame with deathbright nightmares

"He moved from atheism to Zen Buddhism, through animism and Wicca, before settling into a Romanian branch of Eastern Orthodox Christianity."

Ornamental truth is acceptable because it can always be read as only ornament. This is why the great truth-tellers have been interested in ornament. But the history that matters is not the history of ornament. Unfortunately that is all the history that can be written; after a new truth is accepted, it becomes invisible. New truth is syntactical.

Poetry & ice cream.

( via / me )

Only surviving work.

“Like fever also is the great Nostalgia.” —The Book of Mirdad

Living creek.

gurgling pool of prophets
purge apogee Lojban
sprinkled umber, spraint-talk
sprocket made of boxcars
the wide riddle reams you
roughshod with the huffed dreams
inventory tintypes
like a tortoise hoarder

annual wound, undead
ink-vanishing mission

Colonial inn sign, Bossier City.