Saturday, December 13, 2025

( via / via )

Pluto is about to eclipse Sun, submerging most of Charon in darkness.

"Almost certainly the best thing I was ever told about owls was when I met an owl handler at an owl sanctuary and he told me that the wild owls who lived near the sanctuary worried about the tame show owls there and sometimes stopped by to leave them shrews and mice as presents."
—@dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social

Painting of an 1980[ ]s Henry Moore toaster.

greatcoat manhunt greenlight
Grinchseason to seize us
red, blue, green eyes bleary
the world blurred in the quarrel
desiccated darkness
drives wandering ferment
greatcoat with a target
vorago nave slaveship

A sebecid and a dyrosaurid squabble over a delicious turtle.

( via / via )

Sedna, frozen and lonely world drowned in darkness.

"conceptual gridlock"

spirit double spun off
sport damaging bridgework
rags worn in grim winter
worm suspended endgame

The moment demands clarity, not contortion.

"I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass." —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

Edinburgh montage.

( via / me )

Where the Tides Ebb and Flow.

"Take pictures of yourself, he had said, pictures every moment of the day." —Barefoot in the Head

Street sighting of a robot courier.

Ghislaine's pup
a slaver's prize
treasure banked
Damocles trap

sun frolic
as Rome freezes
Ghislaine's pup
answers to "Jeffrey"

Another Hlavaty quote.

Friday, December 12, 2025

( via / via )

Drag queen Grateful Dead tribute band because, sure.

"GIANT FRESHWATER STINGRAY

   Urogymnus polylepis

enormous, ominous, slippery sleeper;

gloomy illusion,
lonesome messenger,
in solemn, moonless pools"

—Luke Bradford

Peaked Too Soon.

"I'm kinda fascinated by why they chose to hit up Noam Chomsky. Were they just sitting around and one guy goes 'You know what this pedo sex party needs? Noam Chomsky' "

—@lowrhoufo.bsky.social

me: they thought Deep Structure was a porn film

Candlesnuff spaceship.

( via / via )

Build a digital clone of yourself.

“A good question is very hard to answer. The better the question the harder the answer. There is no answer at all to a very good question.”
- Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds via @jacobwren.bsky.social

Five Best Wilkie Collins.

timeslurry the slim thief
aslant winter rays

stern reluctance strikes

Bohemian Rhapsody. That was fun.

( via / via )

Calligraphy exercise.

"gold-framed fiasco"

as the barbed wire berries
brandish crimson hymn, zoo-cheer

Baron Samedi's modem
metrics-chirps & crown purples

red & white whiffed software
whelms the infirm grinchforce

prowl fields of stone stillness
stirious news, soon nearing

murk-making my name
among hungerthinned indigents

all the ermined numbers
ailerons drop from, hoplite

call me jaundiced

Even Gumby has to go to meetings.

"i bite into a persimmon
and a bell resounds—
Horyuji"

—Masaoka Shiki
(Sept 17, 1867 - Sept 19, 1902)

Tr. Janine Beichman

note: Horyuji is a temple known for its persimmon orchards (via @evecastle.bsky.social)

Low-Born Emperor.

( via / via )

Christmas songs for people who hate christmas playlist.

"Only a fadograph of a yestern scene." —Finnegans Wake

Sympathy for the Devil.

"tulpa"

storewarm wave
withers into lint trap
saffron morning sane
to suffer thistle kissing
the same putrid poem
sky pours on the floor show

trees fledged in flame
reflect waning brainwash
i start to keep track
contrails over grove-spikes

rows of headlights riled
roost seasonal bunkum
search drivethrough to save
selcouth once & welcome
java my sole jewel

jess & divine swinecare
only to dodge edge
ever moving lane's end
what gets built but war
worn in our hearts' ironwork

this furnished pad, flerd
affrodances sizzle—
i grapple finegrained—
grisly the sift whispers

stervebright storewarm wave

MacArthur Park.

Thursday, December 11, 2025

( via / via )

Once More, All Is Green.

bogpentacle pig iron
portcaligulate mortal
christmas tourists tussle
taking street space stressing
red, blue, green unblending
blooms on the dark starved velvet

The Lady of Shalott (2025).

"Making music isn’t about doing whatever you want or having fun. It’s about constructing an opaque sonic bureaucracy, which you then diligently work within as a stifled but honest functionary."
—@strategictaper.bsky.social

Golden Years.

( via / via )

Started wondering if you can still buy trilobites. (They used to be unbelievably cheap. [p. 26])

--Awhile back i proposed a book written with mismatched halves. It appears that such has already been written! "Michael Korda...was working as an editor at Simon & Schuster, and a few years ago he wrote a memoir of those days, entitled Another Life. ...Harold Robbins...started writing one book to get the advance, wrote half of it, and put it aside. When he needed the money, he finished it, but he'd forgotten much of the first part, and so the second part had an inconsistent plot with mostly different characters. Asked what to do about it, he said, 'Leave it.' (Korda is too professional to say which, but I believe it was The Pirate.)" —Arthur Hlavaty in Derogatory Reference (now Nice Distinctions) 3 via Xvarenah 9-14-03

Snowstorm.

      "AYE-AYE

   Daubentonia madagascariensis

an eerie messenger dressed in obsidian,
its orange irises near-incandescent, as radiant as gemstones,
it meanders, murmuring, in a dim arbor:

a somber, taciturn demigod,
unseen, near-insane,
as enigmatic as a secret code;

disturbed dreamer,
strange astronomer,
grim insomniac;

a sinister, misunderstood simian,
damned ambassador to an ancient underground nation,
it digs at grubs, one digit as enormous as an antenna;

it rises at moonrise,
as a red moon rises,
and murders us in our dreams"

—Luke Bradford

This is me when the orange one kicks it.

( via / via )

A different view from Machu Picchu.

   elevator fixed
& this building refurbished
   yet it's still too cold

nor has lifted the burden
of the helpless who can see

Holly.

Reclaim the J-man. Reclaim the em-dash. Our work is cut out for us.

Tanka (for Voyager 1).

( via / me )

5 Mind-Bending Modern Black-Metal Bands You Need to Know.

"Creatures in the void love to tell you how nothingness feels like a warm embrace" —@weedlejuice.bsky.social

Dead Languages, Divided Fans, Divinity Inverted: Inside Batushka's Polarizing Vision.

   water pouring woke
me in the cold torn up tent
   —one more night burden
on the long way since we left
our contested place of birth

Can't say I ever expected to see a "That Font was No Angel" headline.

( via / via )

Vice signalling.

"MIRRORS (Anagrammed Lines)

The Hall of Mirrors:
A horror fills them —
this roar from hell."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Fossil Trilobite.

"Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid."

—Tennyson

Tanka.

Wednesday, December 10, 2025

( via / via )

Change.

“That a pansy is transitive, is its only pang.” —Emily Dickinson via

December.

"atmospheric river"

cold names becrimson
the crime scene of Venus
cold garage & ruledoom
rista spanning slan-doorway
becrimson'd moon, meaning
merger with twilight lutesong
wrongly named cold, raddles
Orion's mark, sparkling

Ohilen. More on Mรถng & Izalien. " 'Le but de cette langue c'est d'arrรชter d'intellectualiser la musique et de parler avec les tripes. Chaque son รฉvoque une รฉmotion et chacun peut y mettre son propre ressenti', explique Isao."

( via / via)

Dickinson manuscripts.

"I AND OTHER POEMS

Goodbye clear views for stars and sun.
Removed from the Lagoon:
   gradual loss of hair,
      teeth,
         consonants,
nouns, verbs, sentences, prefixes
and suffixes.

The immense struggle waged on withering and receding
gums.

The worm will be the inheritor of excesses and torpidities,
   expectations and apathies.
The work will be the equalizer of optimisms
and pessimisms,
   illuminisms and darknesses,
   illustrations and parodies.

Scrawny bones and strength undone
So that a clone hatches from Pascal’s thinking
reed.

Having fallen created Lucifer, who no longer dreams
of light."

—Waly Salomรฃo via (via @poemakontsa.bsky.social)

How you know we're trapped inside a Pynchon novel.

"Raven, seer of
disaster at dusk - first stars..."

—Unica Zรผrn via

Godzilla is my friend.

( via / via )

Every legal story now.

If you hear him snoring you have to start singing over it.

Minerva Bowl.

"lone star topaz"

lone star topaz leapfrog
liquid courage thurible
pass a van whose paneblurb
poses to change floes of ice
giant gem this harmfield
jerryrigged for losers wears

Minnehaha Falls.

( me / via )

As if water is a safe place to shelter if a Strandbeest stops obeying orders.

touch's kitchen kingdom
counters the white mountain
of entrenched troll knowledge

in its shadow shine
all the knifesharp carpets

2020 tornado.

After awhile mask-off fascism is just, "Oh, that again?"

Death Row Apricity.

Tuesday, December 09, 2025

( via / me )

ร‰tude in Black.

"The acknowledgments for this novel is going to be just a list of brands and kinds of chocolate"
—@charliejane.bsky.social

Black Beast.

Fiesta Red fado
festering test tube nightshade
earshrill silence
many vigils venom'd
revert to don't-know dirt road
earshrill valor
bed sliding a slabtilt
slackening—high moon's crackle—
earshrill name tag

:).

( via / via )

"...as if the last decade hasn’t been about watching rich middle aged men nuke their brains on Twitter and then run the USA via shitpost."

"STAR-NOSED MOLE

   Condylura cristata

a dusty industrialist;

a curious occultist in rural dirt,
idiosyncratic landlady to starlit, stony soil;
tacit accountant, odd custodian"

—Luke Bradford

For a Friend Mourning a Teacher.

"Kat Abughazaleh just posted that if she's elected, she'll swear in on a copy of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower." —@blurry-line.bsky.social

Landscape near Kalaloch.

( via / me )

Keeler News 99.

“ 'It is natural for the years to pass,' said her cousin.
'Can it be?' said Terence. 'It seems so wasteful and wicked, when we only have a certain number of them.' "

—@ivycomptonburnett.bsky.social

As devout as a branch.

glimskewer · scrawl fathoms
of pale cerulean · rumblings bound
for no heft bouquin · can't get past
the gatekeepers · of the horn portal
their orange cones · & glimskewer thwart

Guy who's basically a practising wizard but gets super annoyed if you point that out and loudly insists he's a Man of Science.

( via / via )

How Might Current and Emerging Technologies Best Be Mobilized to Secure Perpetual Peace?

   red, green, blue shining
like we never had colors
   nor knew darkness

only the level gray of
unsatisfied desiring

Peace Perpetrated.

"SCOTUS is deciding if the Constitution violates the Constitution.๐Ÿ™„" —@askmetomorrow.bsky.social

Poster of "Colourscape".

Monday, December 08, 2025

( Yvonne de Carlo in Criss Cross ☆☆☆☆ / via )

"If that is true, then the world is not approaching a red line, it is living on the other side of it."

"The gray mists and the grayer houses were full of the menace of memory: they were like traitorous tombs from which the cadavers of dead hours poured forth to assail me with envenomed fangs and talons." —@klarkasht.bsky.social

From my store.

   regular sadness
not desperate rending grief
   dawn beached hard to tell
exactly what it had been
only you know that it's dead

Tanka.

( via / via )

๐ŸŽฏ.

this rumble-jolt joustchore
jewelbeast of the elbow
eclipse, cloister boxcar
clad in zany riddles
glowing orange antler
deactivate clocktime
saffron soaks the helmets
—sad radio Hamlet:
get there or not get there
ghastly surface wharfside
the grim boatsman beckons

Hitler Song (Mr Hitler).

"After her hearing ended, three-year-old Lucy cuddled her teddy bear as she walked back from the lawyer’s table and took a seat.

Moments later, the next child was called up to face the judge..." —Rachel Maddow via

"At this moment in time, the ballroom is really the president's main priority."

Sunday, December 07, 2025

( via / via )

"It is unclear as to whether Alban Berg enjoyed his superstitions, but it is certain that he had them." (Me.)

"And now I must make an end, and enclose this writing in the sealed cylinder of orichalchum, and fling it forth to drift upon the wave. For the space between my shadow and the shadow of the horror is straitened momently. . . . and the space is no wider than the thickness of a wizard's pen." —@klarkasht.bsky.social

Film Noir, She Wrote. A deep dive into one of television's cleverer gambits.

"a threadsun named Desire"

chrome parts to fall off
coral palaces rising
leafsnap the quick snuffwork
snasteflicker corral albums
snooze halogen hasbeen
hasp of simmerdim gaspipe
chrome leprosy crapshoot
accretes bits of Lebensraum

Useless for right.

( via / via )

Redemption Song.

the moon in twain, meted
meeting on screech beachhead;
sign in the sky, saying
assay of vault halted
stooge wandered in stern ways
astern plenty intentions
doubled moon & morbid:
more backtracking floor show

Life of the Dead.

"Our clothes were for the most part unadventurous like our conversation...'One should be quite unnoticeable,' [Lionel] Johnson explained to me." --W B Yeats, ๐‘‡โ„Ž๐‘’ ๐‘‡๐‘Ÿ๐‘’๐‘š๐‘๐‘™๐‘–๐‘›๐‘” ๐‘œ๐‘“ ๐‘กโ„Ž๐‘’ ๐‘‰๐‘’๐‘–๐‘™

Program.

( via / via )

Wichita Lineman.

"My rosary is broken
my beads have all slipped through"

—B Taupin

"Beautiful Losers was written outside, on a table set among the rocks, weeds and daisies, behind my house on Hydra, an island in the Aegean Sea. I lived there many years ago. It was a blazing hot summer. I never covered my head. What you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book."

urn ragged indigo
ink-begrudged effigy

longer pig pentagram
pawned above-universe

unhoused green happiness
harg duly cerulean

sparse my veer venturesome
invites brick characters

God is Alive (lineated as poetry).