"museum of my own shards"
dark turquoise · trill skirling
the actors old · in these sequels
the ink sketch · on the scarce wall
green neon · towers grown
trill skirling · dark turquoise
on the racecourse
"Dig, dig; and if I come to ledges, blast." —Edna St Vincent Millay
"They are running the government according to the logic of right-wing grievance media.... The point is to create content, and they don't see an actual difference between dunking on Sabrina Carpenter, passing legislation, and bombing other countries." —@goldwagnathan.bsky.social
“Pork Chow Mein”
grebes have no hist'ry,
personal or collective,
like the sands they stalk
a grebe is like: snow
the morning after it has
melted, unobserved
a grebe is like: fire
that can rage through a forest,
light an incense stick
a grebe is: clumsy,
graceful, ugly, beautiful,
as the light changes
grebes never speak their
hearts, no matter how heavy,
the sea can do that
i can only watch
a grebe so long: my mind snaps:
that is their defense
the first grebe stood at
the edge of the first sea and
then there were others
if something survives
the earth’s destruction, will be
a grebe’s thin shadow
(1983)
Two eruptive M-class flares from AR 4299 today.
"The two imprints seemed linked in my mind as heroic projects - both in their different ways manifestations of archive fever, the disinterment of buried futures..." (via feuilleton)
"cardboard posse"
absent presence pry-bar
that prowls sunny splint-winter
desuetude with tassels
tears into the brood carrel
red, blue, green this garden
grasp finitude nutmeg
in the shorn shades gliding
"The Voice comes out of the whirlwind, and long ago we hushed the whirlwind." —Beautiful Losers
The Mask Comes Off When I Write.
"Here is a plea based on my whole experience: do not be a magician, be magic." —Beautiful Losers
comet's tail of time-trace
touching vacuum blackness all
this dust distance suffers
dying & stone builds alone
dark glow on a pale glow
glass intricate sickness
i write through nil rainstorm
running with psalm-comet's tail
“Before Mug Unison” (response to "Of Being Numerous")
Pale cerulean rinse
Of road dappled shipwreck
Head full of harsh signs
Here where the cease-whisper
Guides drones of down-drawn
Deep hollowness swirling
Jagged concrete jess
Justice a pale hostage
I drive among mirth
Of moving savages
Not at this nexus
Nod skulls or pain winecups
With my wastrel gloves
Work out of thick darkness
Fishing boat rebuked
Abandon hope mindfog
Overpass echoes
Each perfect escapement
And the glass tors trail
Tiny ribbon-goblins
In my eyes inchmeal
Oligarch-love anklets
Pale cerulean prole
Preaching anxious felch
Come let us unleash
The law of skinned thunder
As terrible touch
Takes place amongst ices
Leaves ash heaps hallowed
By the hent burned contours
Achieving the five-year plan in four years.
"there's a whale in my mind. i
feed him arrogant prophets."
—Ishmael Reed
"wtf is a FIFA peace prize? that's like being an NFL laureate in physics" —@dieworkwear.bsky.social
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún played on Germanic Lyre.
"be enormous fungi"
fill mystique constructed
more as a jest, slestered chart
dark turquoise nest, Durkin's
diligent web though of vril
vacancy— the sickle
sky— crowded the embers— shroud
clinging towers clueless
eclipse of what scuttles off
& the thin poet (thawing
thesterness) ingests damage
masquerades as mood wisp
montage as a lodgement trope
the low buildings lewder
by light of noon, runic shards
—sienna mold mainlined—
messaging what? cesspilled orb
foam clinging to claimant
eclipse broken now & grips
the will to form warm-frames
wet redbrick district of hurt
virtual thumbscreen screaming
at scrollnoon, the whole undone
"spongebob squareback"
sandalwood song, hindered
by something like high cold moons
dusty cat— comment wasteland—
increase-gravity teahouse
the Hague's cardboard hurdle
rehearsed glare of parasangs
lorn sandalwood sunrise
suppurating cupcake moon
"Fashion this heap with gleaming snowshovel facets, for I meant to build an altar. I meant to light a curious little highway shrine, but I drown in the ancient snake cistern. I meant to harness plastic butterflies with rubber-band motors and whisper: 'Consider the plastic butterfly': but I shiver under the shadow of the diving archaeopteryx." —Beautiful Losers
"The fact is like a bright new coin, and you do not want to spend it until it has picked up scratches in your jewelry box, and it is always the final nostalgic gesture of bankruptcy. My fortune is gone." —Beautiful Losers
Explore live radio by rotating the globe.
"heat auction"
cold moon climbing · our claim baulked
all the black pathways · blandishingly
press on proud glass · cold cuckold moon
a packet of razors · a rune too far
smile tilted · to taunt without words
"There blooms no bud in May
There blooms no bud in May
Can for its white compare
With snow at break of day,
On fields forlorn and bare.
For shadow it hath rose,
Azure, and amethyst;
And every air that blows
Dies out in beauteous mist.
It hangs the frozen bough
With flowers on which the night
Wheeling her darkness through
Scatters a starry light.
Fearful of its pale glare
In flocks the starlings rise;
Slide through the frosty air,
And perch with plaintive cries.
Only the inky rook,
Hunched cold in ruffled wings,
Its snowy nest forsook,
Caws of unnumbered Springs."
—Walter de la Mare
Sumerian short film. (via Mefi)
"Cook never replied to questions; she merely looked at a questioner with a smile, which the latter could never be sure was not some other expression, as it took place so far behind the rest of her face." —@ivycomptonburnett.bsky.social
"And I can feel a telescope pointed at me like a revolver" —Vicente Huidobro (tr Weinberger)
"a sick hand on the thermostat"
grasp at something cesspilled
sucker without doubt upshot
boxcar into bad riddles
obey crueler death weather
your children sent chanting
church stories besmirch darkness
next to me knave driver
nerves like mine, as whine-fervent
The earliest visual language of Iran.
"one thing a spork can't do"
santomnation seashore
sent ansible dubstep
red, green, blue on black night
blaze solitude's pitbull
as we crawl past crisp swarms
creed-pantaloon'd sculling
"... it is perhaps less surprising that language appears to be non-calculable than it is that anyone ever thought it could be otherwise." —Elizabeth Sandifer via
"I feel like the saddest part of the drunk racoon passing out in a liquor store bathroom story is how just like 4 months ago he was a GS-15 in Elon Musk's DOGE team." —@steveolson.bsky.social
Accordion-book of the Rhine Valley.
"cenobite"
shrill flashlight of shipwreck
i hold, shallow mouldwarp
snooze to the quern cam'ras
buzzing close like snow-sift
A mini eruption of filament plasma.
worm's-eye-view devour-mouth
no vista too high, trying;
ahead, riddles hustle
their huge solid forms roaring
so we choose the sizes
seem to allow more power
Charon in the crow's nest
crazed, solving all dense crawlspace
"Literature – even though people usually study it author by author – is always a dialog amongst many voices which intersect and reply to each other within literature and outside it."
– Italo Calvino via @jacobwren.bsky.social
"Tacitus is a sort of waterfall over which Classical Latin literature takes a last gloomy and splendid plunge." --J A K Thomson, Irony (1927)
"shadows long and dark
on the yard below the guard-tower
red and orange sky
a solitary buzzard
flying home before twilight"
—Antonio Laravie in Lynx XXIV:1 (2009)
Water and Stone. (The rest [20pp] can be found here.)
"The Darkling Thrush
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervorless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware."
—Thomas Hardy via
"everyone in this administration was the kind of kid who pulled wings off flies" —@tomtomorrow.bsky.social
Mood.
“Our heart is a defective instrument, a lyre with several chords missing, which forces us to express our joyful moods in notes meant for lamentation.”
— Chateaubriand, René (tr. Irving Putter) via @yoonkim.bsky.social
Julie Harris reading Emily Dickinson.
"Red Alphabet"
The dragon slays itself with lots of help.
Never were heroes. Only the heroes know.
Of definitions, in definition-hell
it was a war; in words the trapdoors ope.
I have seen walls fall down, & footprints left
on regolith. In time the bad guys fold
almost like stories say. Unparallelled
only if hist'ry-class the reader loafed.
Peevish when i would gather my narrowing realm
into a semblance of coherent spite,
i want to see, before the polecaps melt,
with Nuremberg this sordid chronicle rhyme.
Enough if two or three of the monsters hang,
or drink AI, or some other equal thing.
Walnut turn
cerulean walg
injury
lawfirm advert
along here
i see huddled
apartments
& cardboard plaints
We aren't always in a mood to burn libraries.
"We don't desire a president, do we?"
#PalindromeByPairs —@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
Christmas reading for SillyPeter.
ev'ry fork made murksome
among carnal-cruel hungers
tires caught in the choir grooves
kill-Callisto fade distance
& poets wanting painted
pink sunsets devise funsearch
others honk whose anchor
is elsewhere—wind-tossed vend husks—
Eruption from the active region.
bezoar stone
stray resembles
the wrong word
willowy ray
willowy
& bezoar plain
Hurdy-Gurdy at the Kozlov Club.
"Syllable-
mole, sea-
coloured, far out
into the unnavigated."
—Paul Celan
(tr. Michael Hamburger) via @kimdorman.bsky.social
"Toad looked at the ground. The seeds still did not want to grow. 'What shall I do?' cried Toad. 'These must be the most frightened seeds in the whole world!' "
—@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social
"digital golem"
earshrill dark its ache lost
anytime i change climate
pancakes left & perfect
passel of lame airts fnasting
flecks in the sky flicker
flagrant ions as ears vying
"sea of shrines"
blurred indigo ordnance
eerie arroyo plaintext
bricks unimproved— praxis—
the price of rune-carved dice toss
wrapping paper rustles
through rain hallway-lost dollops
snarlwings
"A drone, lost, lay, as by a last, lone road." —@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
Ascenseur pour l'échafaud soundtrack.
"Emit a tale woven one vowel at a time." —@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
jailbreak verse ingested
Jericho wall stump trumpet
iron eerie arroyo
icebergdodo-goaf profile
jerry-rigged smaragd jailbreak
a just world would hold golden
a free world would waylay
whether or not cost fostered
Bodê's illustrations for Space Chantey.
"Journey to Nomen Tuum"
break ground hog wild fire
break down wind up side car jack
strap on ramp up town
house proud flesh pot latch key word
play pen name plate glass pack ice
(2008)
"Shijo poetry makes wide use of the conventional symbols of the Chinese tradition. ...the Korean poets took them and shaped them to their own purposes, often using them in an ironical way. ...This sort of irony is at the heart of the shijo tradition, and it goes a long way toward defining the Korean sensibility." —Kevin O'Rourke, The Book of Korean Shijo (2002)
"MFAs are a scam. The only writers I trust are autodidacts who worked in a boot-blacking factory because their fathers were sent to debtors' prison" —@johnattridge.bsky.social
"November Night
Listen …
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall"
—Adelaide Crapsey (via @21rosa.bsky.social)
“The Passion of Squirkle Rebus”
my flicker is the only light
my copy is the real thing
this flurry of unmatched events
reveals a subtle hidden plan
we crave to take our looming place
among the waste and level sands
we dream to fend away the stars
how small we are when Pharaoh sings
(2007)
Too bad about "jailbreak poetry".
“On the dry Laetoli plain of northern Tanzania, Mary Leakey found a trail of hominid footprints. The three barefoot people–likely a short man and woman and child Australopithecus–walked closely together. They walked on moist volcanic tuff and ash. We have a record of those few seconds from a day about 3.6 million years ago–before hominids even chipped stone tools. More ash covered the footprints and hardened like plaster. Ash also preserved the pockmarks of the raindrops that fell beside the three who walked; it was a rainy day. We have almost ninety feet of the three’s steady footprints intact. We do not know where they were going or why. We do not know why the woman paused and turned left, briefly, before continuing. ‘A remote ancestor,’ Leakey said, 'experienced a moment of doubt.’ Possibly they watched the Sadiman volcano erupting, or they took a last look back before they left. We do know we cannot make anything so lasting as these three barefoot ones did.” —Annie Dillard, For the Time Being
"When we have found all the mysteries..."
