( via / via )

Not today (#NoKings).

"We are all here, drunkards and harlotts
And how joyless we are together!
On the walls, flowers and birds
Languish about clouds.

You smoke the black pipe,
So strange this smoke over it.
I dressed in a narrow skirt
To look more shapely.

Oh, how my heart is yearning!
Amn’t I waiting for my death hour?
And a woman who is dancing now
Certainly is going to hell."

—Anna Akhmatova via

"We live beneath glass here in the City, all the time, but we are reminded of this in practice only when we attempt to walk away from it, or when, as happens several times a day, we hear the sad thunk of an oblivious bird, and then look up to see it sliding down the invisible slope."

"After a nightmare move—a proper, unremitting nightmare of a move—tonight is my last night in the apartment. I am very sad and very excited. Surely the Germans have a word for this?" —@matthewclayfield

"Umzugswehfreude - the bittersweet pain-pleasure of moving house" —@josephsfurey

"Not because words have magic powers, though most of me believes they might, but because silence hasn’t done the job. Silence has only let it stalk about in the dark, bulking up, making threats.."

( via / via )

Sulfur digital archives.

"...poetry alone with the first throb of its metre, can tell us whether the depression is the kind of depression that drives a man to suicide, or the kind of depression that drives him to Trivoli." —G K Chesterton via

The Charles Ruas Archive comes to PennSound.

"highlight reel"

furioso errors
artifex dwarf warthog
slowly then flail sliding
asleep meeping glibber

Macbeth and the Witches.

( me / via )

"As the mimic population grows, the reference class for 'real research' or 'real illness' becomes increasingly contaminated."

"goblinmaxxing in the mud tumor"

tears of rage · subfusc rental
      the chill numbs
   choughs in drivethrough
bright spot · for a brumous day

"The reign of the algorithm is the reign of an ever-accelerating and more ruthless conformity; it is the triumph of 'the social,' in which both public and private disappear in the tide of slop."

"And ask not why, where reason never was." —George Meredith

The ship shall be nailed, the shield be bound.

( me / via )

"It’s not that these men were such Promethean geniuses that none can hope to follow in their footsteps (although they were, of course, Promethean geniuses), but rather that their footsteps are there now."

"Celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States with the dumbest, most corrupt president ever in power is a bit like celebrating a wedding anniversary after your spouse murdered all your children and drained your bank accounts." —@mrsbettybowers.bsky.social

Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime.

"orphic antonym"

sometimes the wish · comes winging
      to have done
   one thing diff'rent
& the day's gray · gravel dissolves
in a mist of marks · on a blank page
      fireflies veer
   in the dark dawn
& my wish breaks · & i put on gloves

First Afghanistan born female muralist and street artist.

( via / me )

Zinester's eve.

Cyberhejira weary
Pseudo-aged kavarna
Two-point-oh & tuppence
For a toff swart coated

Roads merge in the mirror:
I managed, built fanbase
A whirlwind whacked antlers
Off as the season fizzled

This game gnarly & gyre-fed
Goes to the hive-heaven
And paper like liquid
Eludes grasp of Buddha

Once roosted here writing
Some wrong turn carnival
And wedged doubtless the word-crumbs
You won’t find iron candled

Nautilus hide & sequent
Cells for the skull skiffle
Nor record wars slept here
Slatternly or fetlock

I know trick to fix this
Railroad track still rugged
Fufty yarons yearning
Yeggman’s degree segues

Another goblin sonnet.

Locate qualia in discourse, in intersubjectivity...

"Indeed, for many of these writers, their politics seem to have been a largely aesthetic stance."

( via / me )

The Last Thing I Have to Remember.

"The elm that whimpers at the top told the stone that moans when stricken." —Finnegans Wake

The true purpose of the Pyramids.

closer to their downfall
feels farther than Carthage
newsreels pound with paywalls
pirouette jet fathoms
& i scribe testy scrimshaw
scrape sparks from the shark's teeth
pensive in the shin-whack
closer to their downfall

Routine Dismay.

( via/ me )

The Sais and Taliesin.

falling tumbling tollbooth
intestate earth nestling
      counting coup
   on the sluggards
corner eyeslipt firefly
the blur that goes blooey
      taking note
   of the talkers
come away wambly
wetigo's chief chetnik
      likes my poem
   says it perkles

Squarish waves.

"Because you suffocated your beauty in fat.
Because you made of our adoration, mockery..."

—@joycecaroloates via

Mother dog.

( via / me )

"Critics too often read these motifs as expressions of personal psychopathology when they instead allegorize the intersections of individual and social unconscious."

Was it so very hard to be incorruptible?

Some Greenland Shark love.

"carbolic acid smell"

looth scarcity scathe-hap
no scandal, just dustbin

pale auroras peering
as punk jackals hunker

sparks photopsic, spyport
for a spruce puce skinflint

Like We've Never Done.

( via / via )

Maybe the best of all pop-up books.

      “THE WIND IS BLIND

Eyeless, in Gaza, at the mill, with slaves
   –Milton’s ‘Samson’

   The wind is blind.
The earth sees sun and moon; the height
   Is watch-tower to the dawn; the plain
Shines to the summer; visible light
   Is scattered in the drops of rain.

   The wind is blind.
The flashing billows are aware;
   With open eyes the cities see;
Light leaves the ether, everywhere
   Known to the homing bird and bee.

   The wind is blind,
Is blind alone. How has he hurled
   His ignorant lash, his aimless dart,
His eyeless rush, upon the world,
   Unseeing, to break his unknown heart!

   The wind is blind,
And the sail traps him, and the mill
   Captures him; and he cannot save
His swiftness and his desperate will
   From those blind uses of the slave.”

—Alice Meynell

Somali Rocket Docket.

"hachette isn’t canceling a book bc of the way it’s written, but bc they can’t copyright something generated by another corporation’s algorithm" —@patricknathan

Runes of Arecibo.

( via/ via )

Zoomorphic sculpture.

"Now, making a work is not thinking thoughts but accomplishing an actual journey." --David Jones, preface to 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐴𝑛𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚𝑎𝑡𝑎

Dr. Seuss’ dark side.

free paint stirrer
asymmetric peace
gray dawnlight of groansift
grist for the verb stillicide
Walnut St
Arapaho
new floaters to keep up with

Psyche in the Underworld.

( via / via )

Fiercest, truest love poem.

"problematic fav"

blearyeyed blame chiming
astrobleme tremendous
texture. despair spoon's end?
spiracle clog dogma
blow my nose nave-bound
anent bomb-winter
taperdimpse adept goes
dallying morn's floornail
hieroglyphic glucose
infirm glare sparingly
hostage to the sky scaffold

The set of The Addams Family was actually Pastel Goth.

"When I was a Stanford Prison Experiment guard I was always nice to everybody but no-one ever wants to hear about that." —@causticcovercritic.bsky.social

What Builds a Bridge.

( me / via )

Where foxes say goodnight.

"for all their ubiquity in the waking world, i barely ever see any electronic devices in my dreams" —@ulkharaghayeva

"We spent four years together, but that was thirteen years ago, and these thirteen years, like glaciers, have ground down everything they left behind."

"TRIAD

These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow…the hour
Before the dawn…the mouth of one
Just dead."

--Adelaide Crapsey

Sinogrime.

( via / me )

Peaceable Kingdom.

"A-sway,
On red rose,
A golden butterfly…
And on my heart a butterfly
Night-wing'd."

—Adelaide Crapsey (Shadow, 1911-1913) via @twicktwit

"At the same time, when I was in my ‘20s, we were not looking for old technologies to bring back to life."

"The current age is one of material abundance and spiritual poverty. It is odd for that reason by historical standards." —@syntheticsocrates

V. Revisited.

( via / via )

Night sky on Mars. (Not really.)

19c: grade school Classical Greek

20c: high school calculus

21c: two lanes taking turns to merge into one IS ROCKET SCIENCE

Triolet.

the mad king shuffles ballroom plans at an empty desk
      screaming comes across the sky
cool bright morning where i try to fadge some slack
      windshield crusted with false-spring pollen

Shelter.

( via / me )

"He came to literature in an unlikely way."

"APOLLO 11

*

ARMSTRONG (Palindrome)

Neil A., NASA peer.
Craft far,
creep as an alien.

*

ALDRIN (Palindrome-by-Pairs)

Char sea.
Run, ally Aldrin!
Skies, kind, rally a lunar search.

*

COLLINS (Palindrome-by-Triples)

Oil, kit,
daring wander.
Collins: Outer soul.
In colder, waning dark,
I toil."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Iran War - The Movie.

" 'Trump visits Graceland during the war' sounds like second-rate DeLillo but here we are"
—@rhhaines

My first sound release made from sonifying my analogue film reels.

( via [Not a real sculpture.] / via )

I take the philosophy quiz.

"Pandora’s box unboxing vid" —@oozeletter

"Their words left an archaising tinge on their faces, a thin but noticeable surface of rusty green and bronzed tarnish, (patiently, or not so patiently) waiting to be reanimated and reproduced with every ensuing epoch and its clamour for the vox antiqua reborn."

"world consumed at the speed of chewing"

old wrongs, like genocide
in another century

still going on

Stopping for a moonlit drink.

( via via / via )

Dreiländereck.

"Village Explainer Tells All"

soft dirgewrixle dockside
dazzle razzle clown lung
in the truck-trawled desert
plumes retrace my lost plumb

lammermeier misprint
      flayed digging
   antelucan
Mt Olympus · on Ozempic
silicon chip · harsh chassis
       break breadsticks
   my brain on kedge
turquoise cup · cold order
burnt orange

Life was pretty good.

I write only for Thomas Merton & his electrician.

(Riding).

( via / via )

"I’d say jazz drumming taught me how to write."

"It is cowardly to describe as illusion what we know is merely farce." — E M Cioran (tr P Traylen) via

The Real Zeno's Paradox.

      "Sojourner

   Shepherd's Law, Northumberland

The fettered hill.
The skull.
Old stone, among nettles fallen, near.
Her light brown hair.
The brief bales.
The bared hills, the load-bearing hills, the hills of Lammermuir.
Her coming headlong here."

—Gillian Allnutt

Nowhere Man.

( via / screenshot from google street view )

"For us, the contemporary poetry that matters tries make sense of the history of the recent past, a past that’s been propagandized, memory-holed, and co-opted to the point it can be difficult to remember, much less reconstruct a historical narrative about these times and their psychic darkness." (via)

   "this first fog, enough
to paint grass turquoise-grey, plus
   a few extra wisps"

—Jenkins Rising via

The kind of debate that makes me want to turn off my laptop & go outside, where the predators can be recognized coming at me.

Let’s keep snobbery in jazz where it belongs.

"The darkness in a Caravaggio is not, therefore, theatrical; it is residential. It: 'smells of candles, over-ripe melons, damp washing waiting to be hung out the next day: it is the darkness of stairwells, gambling corners, cheap lodgings, sudden encounters'."

( via / via )

Palate cleanser.

Central Market just upped the ante on highfalutin' coffee culture with a roast-it-yourself option in its own dedicated room.

What stocks should I buy right now?

"anchor in effigies"

questionnaire honk droppings
library halftime rhyming
your cloak on a coat hanger
catch the sun if shining
deputize a wise finger
Dilbeck's fallout darb

In Prison.

( me / via )

"Yet still the unresting castles thresh."

dragons, dragon holdings
a dreich name for framing
touch Gestapo gingerly
to a tune accelerando

God is a comedian.

“What we don’t want to look at, we think we don’t have to deal with, and then it owns us completely.” – Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor" —@jacobwren.bsky.social

Do not mess with this owl.

( via / oil painting by me )

Everything is great! Everything is fine!

" Like Tennyson, Larkin is half in love with his own melancholy. He is also warning us against it." —Jem via

"This is why the traffic between storytelling and metaphysics is continuous."

"The plum’s snow blooms are past,
Again I hear birds cry.
I fear this springtime grass
Will climb our polished steps too high."

—Wang Wei via

"My family and I (husband, son, dog and gecko) live in Montana, less than an hour from Yellowstone National Park, where wooly mammoths and giant camels and sloths once roved among the glaciers that carved the landscape into what it is today." (via @varaxes)

( via / via )

"Voronezh, the first part of which is voron, meaning raven, sinister bird, and the second part is ezh, hedgehog, whose sharp spines are like a killer's knife."

"manic noun"

maze full of reasons
moving through to sieve
here before to find
dust that's my sustenance
rich market of merch
many lost things winnowed
on the book dream path
dim days without music
gravel tracked in
animorphic shadows
share stage with reagents
& news its own game
avoiding what has happened
& in truth little sense said
would account for this war

"His wife barely seems to notice when he disappears for days or weeks to drive around the desert loitering in cheap motels. Perhaps this is because she’s just written a novel about the same thing called Play It as It Lays."

"There was a line of perfect boards, ready to be made into something. There was a door, warped and fallen into the street. There was a boardroom, where meetings went on so long that no one knew what decision had been made. In my apartment, the tulips have reached the stage of paper. When they hear music, they will turn from purple to yellow. They will become a tent in which I have always remembered sheltering. It is cold, and yet I shelter. The panorama is of the river, and on the river there is sailing, and the sails fill the river, and the sails are gone."
—@salrandolph

"He later sent money to place flowers on Crone’s grave every Memorial Day until his own death."

( via / me )

Sequence.

"Things that are inevitable: aging, growing less attractive, infirmity, disease and disorder, death, not getting what we want, the disappointment and boredom that are core to adult life

Things that are not inevitable: poverty, war, homelessness, disenfranchisement, cruelty, bigotry, exploitation

Our culture acts like it’s the exact opposite, and so naturally many people are miserable."
—@freddiedeboer

I’m glad to know about this i suppose but it is one of the most depressing things i’ve ever read.

"Echoes of Love

The house is creaking like a rocking chair.
I’m small again,
comforted by the sway of matter in a shift of air,
cosseted by wind.

Undulate earth, how do you slip your hum
around our roar
of concrete, needles, neon, wadded gum,
demented hungers, war,

discarded children? Your lap is full of us
and of our wrong.
How can you simplify the noise
to cradle our first song?"

—Isabel Chenot

"Cain needed somewhere he could lick his wounds. So he invented the city —."

( via / me )

"...Powys wrote a novel that he was sure would garner him the Nobel Prize: A Glastonbury Romance, published in 1932. It is his best novel, but instead of the Prize he received only a lawsuit, from a man in Glastonbury who claimed to have been identifiably and unfairly portrayed in the novel. The ensuing settlement devoured all of Powys’s royalties from the novel..."

"to paint anything other than the witches' sabbat at the witches' sabbat"

violet's shroud shrinking
shirked ghost trio
burning through ten of my nines
shadow boxing blindfold

"...the music said that a thrilling time when anything seemed possible was about to turn to stone and open into a future of dread and terror, into a realm where to speak falsely, or even carelessly, could be fatal to body and soul."

"Then the sitcom – and Bernard Black in particular – became a cult favourite; I picked up my first proper writing jobs in Mexico, to which I’d decamped as soon as I’d raised enough cash; and my memories of that winter above the shop – the utilities cut off, jacket potatoes as bed-warmers, my breath making tortuous sculptures in the air – took on a certain garret glamour." —Joseph S Furey via

"Today we live in the future she warned us about."