( via / via )

From Frankfurt to Fox.

"All parts of the body are erotogenic. Assholes can be trained with whips and kisses, that's elementary. Pricks and cunts have become monstrous! Down with genital imperialism! All flesh can come! Don't you see what we have lost? Why have we abdicated so much pleasure to that which lives in our underwear? Orgasms in the shoulder! Knees going off like firecrackers! Hair in motion! And not only caresses leading us into the nourishing anonymity of the climax, not only sucking and wet tubes, but wind and conversation and a beautiful pair of gloves, fingers blushing! Lost! Lost!" —Beautiful Losers

Hey Ya!

antique holepunch Alpine
enisled drawer to drawer filed as
rooms revolved rovedoors
& ridedonkeys' swerves conquered

you made marplot chapbooks
mistily cast where air goes
as a train tranche crunches
the truthless miles so violent

dots dropped in the snap bin

Gebrauchsgraphik, Jan 1968.

( via / via ☆☆ via )

Fake Book Titles Extravaganza 9.

"Aztec treasure"

smoky rooms · in the run down
warehouse district · words rang
& died dismally · the doors closed

the very streets · evaporated
only mirrors · hold like misers
their dark shapes · with the shabby jazz

in my pocket glass · in my heart the dead
   of this grim tontine

the floor's own smell

"This is the last entry in the blog called Click Opera."

"Yet environmental catastrophe features in late capitalist culture only as a kind of simulacra, its real implications for capitalism too traumatic to be assimiliated into the system." —Capitalist Realism

"...the only area where I could find decor shabby enough to satisfy my craving for patina, which is, finally, character, personality, history, texture."

( via / me )

AI-written articles outnumber human-written.

"looking at illustrated ads in magazines like wow u could have a job doing art at one point. they used to pay people to do illustrations thats crazy. bring that back" —@dirtcupart.bsky.social

"Purity can only be represented in impurity..."

"VOYNICH (Anagrammed Lines)

I encrypt much, to vanish
into such ivy parchment —
in the script many vouch
vaunts no mythic cipher:
The Voynich Manuscript."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Stronger than Dirt.

( me / via )

Burning sage.

"felching ferch in the Twisted Slippery Years"

before Xmas tourists
tamp the crepe
subfusc noon its stilbfare
stipples crisp
nothing going onward
ogles gap
till gaunt Xmas soldiers
swing their gear

" 'I didn’t have anything, so I stayed up all night scribbling and ended up onstage with Audre Lorde,' Burns recollected. 'I actually got paid $50. I’m the only poet I know who got into the field for money,' she joked."

"   —But you were trying to protect me, weren't you? Oh, F., do you think I can learn to perceive the diamonds of good amongst all the shit?
   —It is all diamond."

—Beautiful Losers

NE limb eruption, likely from the vicinity of region ex 4274.

( me / via )

"While digging through the debris, hoping to find a memory from the past, he discovered one of his musical sheets."

"Cutting out the middleman by inventing a ceiling lightbulb cover that already comes with the dead bugs inside" —@thehyyyype.bsky.social

1940s Arabic & Kurdish Recordings from Baghdad. (via @bruces.bsky.social)

I dream of the beauty of Alzheimer's
in a world that has lasted so long...

to forget how i got there,
to have lost these days.

06 03 91

Excavated Shellac.

( via / still from secret ceremony )

#neography on tumblr.

”Stonewalled (Shakespeare XIV)

The fall of Colossus calls for more than pluck.
Atop the ziggurat astronomy
finds one, two stars. (Three with luck.)
Why do I keep feeling 'quality
of life’ is more than wigs of polliwogs? Tell,
O cranium, where these walls lead, numbing as they wind:
nor do but echoes report from the stopped up well.
Each new day presents me with a find,
a book or a record, yet I hardly derive
sustenance therefrom. My wobbly art
rolls on. Rumorous, the baboons thrive
in spite of mystic blasting. Clouds convert
to muddier clouds, while toads prognosticate
inside thick cornerstones of uncertain date.“

—Zachary Appomattox, A Series of Unfortunate Presidents (2005)

"As I suspect with the Khazars, periods of resurgence in interest and participation are contrived and managed by GAE itself."

“We have passed the moments of crisis: we are now in the era of death and collapse; now we must preach and practice harm reduction, preserve our oral histories, feed and nourish each other, rest and recover, and imagine and build the foundations of new life as this world ends” –@ganjacum

The art of fooling robots (day 120).

( via / via )

One of the greatest noirs, joan is phenomenal especially in the final segment.

“Poems should echo and reecho against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can.” —Spicer

Notation.

“What exactly is poetry and what makes a good poem?”

unlike the other silly question that was asked hereabouts recently (“what is the greatest lyric poem in English?”) i don’t think this one is worth answering. formerly, there was an answer for every age & every culture but now there are 500 & the prevailing sense is that each poet decides for himself which criteria to use. the odd thing is, though, that when poets do argue they seem to think they are taking one of two (or, occasionally, three) possible positions. after an hour, if they are smart & somewhat lucky, they will then discover that they don’t even have definitions in common for the words they’ve been using to describe their positions… such is the state of intellectual discourse at the end of the 20c.

1-31-2002 on Eratosphere forum

Auctioning Blake's Tyger.

( via / via )

"The novel’s major theme, a world disenchanted of God (Delillo in Mao II: ‘when the Old God goes, they pray to flies and bottle tops’) is handled in such a heavy-handed manner it’s impossible to imagine how its hand could be heavier, short of restaging the whole novel on the surface of a white dwarf star."

“Farrago

The housings fall so low they graze the ground
And hide our human legs. False legs hang down
Outside. Dance in a horse’s hide for a punctured god.

We killed and roasted one. And now he haunts the air,
Invisible, creates the world again, lights the bright star
And hurls the thunderbolt. His body and his blood

Hurries the harvest. Through the tall grain,
Toward nightfall, these cold tears of his come down like rain,
Spotting and darkening.— I sit in a bar

On Tenth Street writing down these lies
In the worst winter of my life. A damp snow
Falls against the pane. When everything dies

The days all end alike. The sound
Of breaking goes on faintly all around
Outside and inside. Where I go,

The housings fall so low they graze the ground
And hide our human legs. False legs hang down
Outside. Dance in a horse’s hide. Dance in the snow."

—Weldon Kees

Demogorgan Theme (Upside Down).

"a lot of imaginative fiction is actually assuming that incidental and contingent traits of 20th century america are properties of the universe" —@segyges.bsky.social

"Rooney said the ban on Palestine Action under terrorism laws also had far reaching consequences for her as an author and her right to free expression." (via @hyoyoonkang.bsky.social)

( via / me )

We, the Musk Chasers.

"I've been watching a marathon of Murder, She Wrote the last couple days, and now I'm ready to move to Maine." —@kameronhurley.bsky.social

"There is no way of talking about the book without ruining the plot, essentially, unless you don’t talk about the novel at all."

"ROCK HAS NOT LEARNED

Valleys are not aware
Heather and bog-cotton fit themselves
Into their snugness, vision sealed

And faces of people that appear
Moist-eyed, confronting the whole work

With cries that wince out
Just as they shape and tear clear

The whispery husk bones of faces

Are ground into fineness of light
By a weight
And shadowy violence
Of blind skylines revolving dumbly

Ignorant in ignorant air"

—Ted Hughes

Triolet.

( via / via )

Crying like a fire in the sun.

"TV show cookie tie-in"

turdictionary readout
reapply duduk-dark tidings
vibecession vaxx curbside
vor cellophane loafers,
lumpy mustard deerstalker

stamp each verbal cupcake

"The role-playing game is to our century what the novel was to the eighteenth: the social art form epitomizing and evangelizing a new mode of self-creation"

“Let me chop apart
With my bare hands
This blurred forest.”

—Spicer

Stramonium thyglocalate.

( via / via )

Embankment.

“The edges of a mirror have their own song to sing.” —Jack Spicer

"A huge amount of the viral content about American politics and American news on social media is from sock puppet and bot accounts monetized by people in other countries."

"black friday"

bloodletting psalm sidles
silica pouch will parry
in dreamlaced inside-voice
answer fathoms made laden
almost-black mocha mogul
militates trek pill-wandering
hands empty as they happened
to halve the smudge bloodletting lie

American Tune.

( via / via )

Fear of Dreaming.

"smol plague run"

to the sconce skald arson
scoriac absurd verdict
faint hieroglyph haunting
in the hargcube-math target
stilb's albatross circuit
seashore full of cruel edicts

Nice look at the chromatophores.

There’s the timeline in which AI art develops to the point where it rivals that of humans & humans start being influenced by it; & then there’s the timeline where industrial development results in runaway climate disaster & the end of business as usual for the human race–but i would advise any scifi author not to try combining these two different scenarios into one book. It’s too much. Audiences will be confused.

"We’re not only losing trees, we’re losing tree poems that aren’t elegies for trees."

( via / me )

"Now dead, he continues his migration..."

"Cordova's son, Theo, invented a language for the family. ...I remember Astrid explaining it to me like it was yesterday. 'The Russians have sixteen words for love. Our language has twenty.' " —Night Film

"Vanity of Human Wishes" with commentary.

old bookmarks · ribbons to branches tied
not enough trails · did i tear apart
full afternoon · in the elsedim
   two or three words i learned

One of the best sonnets not by shakespeare or millay.

( me / via )

Some Moderan stuff.

poor trencherman patchcord
appalling moth clash pother
the worm turns
the masked rogue needs rescue

rancid to watch fray dancing
the storm warns
bitter shards & botflies
burn praise where the maze wanders

Gilgmesh Sumerian because why not.

"The truth about what happens to us in this world keeps changing. Always. It never stops." —Night Film

"A language without umlauts sounds monotonous..."

( collin creek mall by laura ostteen on fb / via )

"So we stand gazing not at a sequence of events, but a wreckage hurled at our timeline by one algorithmically curated catastrophe after another."

“He picked up the slaughtered, keg-robed earshot.” —Hell of the Cyr

El Topo.

tomorrow's burning wind
   strafes me today
running ever t'ward
tomorrow's burning wind

   midway dark wood
   & gnat cloud dree
tomorrow's burning wind
   strafes me today

Back issues of the Vachron Sentinel Zi-Fi Kolektin.

( via / via )

After the Kill, the Feathers that are Left.

“My only poem is one of broken words. It eats your heart and leaves a hole for bleeding. It steals a breath from every breath you take.

My only poem is open strands of meaning. It leaves a ringing in your ears you might believe is music. It rises out of muck to cry a call to chase.

My only poem is wanting over having. It is a grasp—as firm as steel—of air. It aches for aching and hates to ache for hate.

My only poem is all you’re ever losing. It opens like a yawning sinkhole’s sinking. It reaches for your slender wrists and plummets.

My only poem is what I’ll never haven’t. It takes away whatever hope you need. It slits the throat of thoughts of pretty flowers.” —geof huth, 2016

"We move in and out of states of chronic longing." (via @joycecaroloates.bsky.social)

"I bought the Knausgaard, because I'll read anything even remotely touching on The School of Night."
—@mjohnharrison.bsky.social

"They didn’t know they were advancing such a project – they would have to have read a book to know that – but that’s exactly what they were doing."

( @liminal_places / via )

Flames on either side.

“Based on theories that link the wrinkling of the brain to intelligence, I have concluded that waffles are more sentient than pancakes” —@ctrlcreep

Krasnov scotches his own plan.

where no cyborg DARED
evil amid, dim, ALIVE

i wander on the nitrogen ices plain,
plans RIPEN

i can’t explain how i know this but
with it our odds’ share EVENS

the death of the ball-turret gunner
like this, DENSE

computer-generated weather maps scream
all is up for GRABS

you could flourish in the fire
ask for a REMAP

where among the located planets
can be found a signal for our AMINO?

perigee
for my sad BANJO

the only one besides Graywyvern
who mastered it was a SPOOK

Cthulhu by ben shahn, pencil drawing.

( via / via )

Time after Time.

      "i think i can put it all right"

   whistsplinter
pale blue sprig from
   saying torn
return assayed
   bright morning
marred amulet
   tire rumble
nimble rat race
   news of dredge
amidst gray drudge
   pale blue sprig
narrowing blame

Too smart for social media.

“Against contempt, against the cementing of riverbanks, for all that fleshily meanders and overflows, and also for the hidden river whose shamed course is now subterranean, diverted, consigned to mingle with sewers, this is a report.”
—@anostrebor (Lisa Robertson)

The real Wolf 359.

( via / via )

Thirty quotations on failure.

“Alas for man! Alas for all thy dreams,
Thou great somnambulist, wherein, outlawed
From right and thought, thou workest out unawed
Thy grand fantastic fancies! Thro’ the flood,
The pestilence, the whirlwind, the dread plain
Of thunders—thro’ the earthquake and the storm,
The deluge and the snows, the whirling ice
Of the wild glacier, every ghastly form
Of earth’s most vexed vicissitudes of pain,—
Thro’ worlds of fire and seas of mingled bloods
Thou rushest, dreadful as a maniac god;
And only finding that thou wert not sane
When some great sorrow thunders at thy brain
And wakes thee trembling by a precipice.”

—Sydney Dobell

"A good way to think about the output of LLMs is not an instance. It’s not actually a concrete piece of writing. The sentences aren’t sentences."

no aboutness · newbie
nattering while clouds batter
each paradox patchwork
i perne upon urn's castle
herethunderhymn thronging
hedgegimp lesson crimp squandered
& little stars staring

The Library, November 2025.

( via / via )

Tanka.

   Sorrento
a named ripple
   a song lost
to the lorn years
   such teaching
as fire tenders
   how many
more would it take
   to rebuild
volcano brink

Tanka.

" '...it was a lady poet who read the cards for me. Name of Johanna Harzbelle. ...she wrote for herself, in a private language she'd devised.' " --Ian Watson, 𝐻𝑎𝑟𝑙𝑒𝑞𝑢𝑖𝑛 (1994)

Copperhead Road.

( via / via )

Antisemitism overt & otherwise.

" 'Should we like to live for ever?' said Hamish.
'Yes, if we did so,' said his brother. 'Our being would be adapted to it.' "
—@ivycomptonburnett.bsky.social

Oil painting of a still from Pulp Fiction.

neon flickers on rainpuddle
punctured now & then
& passing cars swipe

only for a second glimpsed
solider than years of grief

Sign language variants.

( via / via )

Favorite Stories of the 2000[ ]s.

“Song at Evenfall

I have no silver gifts for thee,
No scented words nor frankincense:
Only this love, that burns in me
Like a vain fire in valleys whence
The sun has flown beyond the sea.

Though moon and dawn alike delay,
Let love the mobled ways illume,
As once, on evening roads, the ray
Of Venus thrilled athwart the gloom
And led us home from far away.”

—Clark Ashton Smith

A ride on Little Mothra.

"Yes, I have a preferred parking spot at my supermarket. And yes I get annoyed when someone else parks there. Don’t they know?" —@redd5.bsky.social

I do so at all the places i revisit but what got my goat the most was when i didn't get my regular spot at the coffeehouse.

Of course, when i was in Prague i wanted to sit in a place at one of their ancient coffeehouses & they said i couldn't sit there because the spot was reserved for one of their famous Czech writers. Imagine.

Some parts of this timeline are just too gross but i remind myself there's bound to be a writer getting ready to make a hilarious novel out of these two monsters & i might even read it.

( via / via )

"People are trying to hammer culture down into a file that somebody owns or a particular teleology. Actually, culture is much more slippery and elusive than that. Culture is just an act of doing, where people are constantly reinterpreting things, training themselves on things and then making new stuff." (via @bruces.bsky.social)

Sometimes Takemitsu is all i can listen to.

Not 'Dark Ages'.

"White blossoms of the pear
and a woman in moonlight
reading a letter"

—Yosa Buson (1716-1783) via @evecastle.bsky.social

"Your conception of gender is like the Bohr model atom..."

( me / via )

Spix's macaw.

“Timepiece

To see in the punctured dust the sow bugs clocking.
These constellations of buds or beetles time us
More than the cocks do,
More than the winding tides.

And the ants sharpen their spheres,
And the stars, their spiders;
The sky’s spider turns:

Never you left your acorn place
For nightly signs and wanders,
For ants like meters,
For the repeating stars.”

—The Grasshopper’s Man

The Map Burns.

"Great word: mojibake 'the garbled or gibberish text from text being decoded by an unintended character encoding'." —@rudytheelder.bsky.social

"I’m going to die drinking a Diet Coke I didn’t even want."

( me / via )

Gaspard de la Nuit.

“Word of the day: sjushamillabakka — ‘between the sea & the shore’, i.e. in the shifting space between high & low tide, neither quite water nor quite land. Metaphorically, therefore, a threshold or border realm (Shetland, archaic).” —@RobGMacfarlane

The Terrible Various.

      “GHOSTS

The wind is full of ghosts tonight.
   Let them carry your body far.
Let them bury you out of sight
   Under a brooding star.

I can not weep for blood or bone.
   Flesh grown cold or eyes that stare.
Let them tuck you under a stone.
   Little, little I care.

For the wind is full of ghosts that talk,
   And I a rendezvous must keep
With something more than dust and chalk
   Before I sleep.”

—Marion Francis Brown, in: Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1925

( @frankhudson.bsky.social reminded me that the first line echoes Millay's Sonnet 43 & the last, Frost's "Stopping by Woods..." )

"They said yes because they didn’t think I’d find the money, and I did."