( via / via )

On the Marionette Theater.

   binary twilight
soft turquoise rabbitwatch
   eighteen light years

his whole life proving a planet
that could not exist

The House.

"And fierce reluctance of disastrous stars" —Swinburne

"Once the stone itself can be copied at will, the story is no longer part of the value. The story is the value."

( via )

A Song of the Petrel.

"carceral blessing"

angular realm sundering
honeyshine
upon a violet plate

fulsome praise for the narcissist
for anyone else an insult

"hough I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter."

"They had already made sure they all knew I was videotaping, pointing me out to each other as they prepared to leave. Then, as they drove their unmarked vehicles slowly through our street, windows tinted dark, every single one of them slowed down as they passed me. One agent put two fingers to his eyes and then pointed them directly at me. “I’m watching you.” Another leaned forward and made a heart with his hands as he drove past. Another blew kisses at me. These were armed federal agents who had just descended on a residential neighborhood in masks and tactical gear, taken people away, terrified families, and now they were driving away laughing and trying to taunt a woman who had dared to stand on the sidewalk and record them." —Heather Delaney Reese

Venus i never prayed to.

( via / via )

Here’s how many people have lost food assistance so far.

"Do we spend a seventh of our lives on each day of the week?" —Mark Scott via

No. Mondays are half.

Ristitamtsi.

   a cure too late—thugs
break into the lab, smashing—
   a hundred & four

with this picture perfect sky
ev'ryone in steel capsules

"...the only runic inscription from Anglo-Saxon England which declares itself to have been made by a woman."

( via / via )

First same-sex couple in recorded history.

"Show two-thirds of it dissolving into mist and you have given the viewer the rest of the mountain to build, larger and more alive, inside themselves." —Tōan via

The House Fire That Launched Robert Silverberg's Golden Age.

   the world of after
all the ingredients here
   colors that will rise

the garage door derelict
that addresses us daily

"Trump may be more porcine than equine—a Circe product. Even so, after all this time, we should have been able to spot a Trojan horse."

( via / via )

Take my Number.

"We must imagine Sisyphus. That is the problem." —Alexander Fayne via

Lego Klimt.

   all the rats
waiting for their turn
   to jump ship

their pockets bulging
their consciences clear

"The environment shaped more than conduct: it decided which beliefs could be spoken, and the beliefs it permitted were the ones that matched how the place already ran.."

( via / taneraic into blissymbolics via brendan )

Putin's Ashes. (via)

a low broken place in the concrete
black dirt accumulates
in a sort of shape

a sort of story
classical when i turn the car on

"The bulb, in Tanizaki’s argument, was not the villain. The villain was the assumption that 'what is seen is what is real'."

It’s interesting to me how scifi doesn’t much talk about Tiptree anymore. She’s a double scandal & reveals too much about scifidom in her success & her failure. Malzberg probably did it best. He had an unmatched feel for all the people that being a professional writer destroyed.

"Despair is paralysis, it robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the Earth… I choose joy over despair, not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the Earth gives me daily, and I must return the gift."

( via / via )

"This was the console where, for 40 years, hundreds of thousands of slips of paper had been inserted into cardboard cylinders then sent up or down in pneumatic copper tubes in the stacks, 17 floors at its peak."

   clearer the garble
pages whose reason has fled

   button on the wall
& a code to keep up with

the cough no named intruder

The church will be finished in 2034.

"In 1950s Tokyo, an imported jazz LP cost 3,000 yen at a time when the average monthly office salary was 20,000 yen. The jazz kissaten was the solution to that arithmetic.

Japan's jazz kissa trace back to a single establishment: Black Bird, which opened near Tokyo University in 1929, playing Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong on an Electrola phonograph for students who had no other way to hear American jazz. By the mid-1970s, roughly 200 kissaten operated in Tokyo alone and around 600 across Japan. The typical room is dim and compact, stacked with vintage American audio equipment: Altec speakers, McIntosh amplifiers, Thorens turntables. More than 90 percent of these establishments still play vinyl.

The defining practice was silence."

—Michael Daniels via

"...in a single moment, diffused, profuse, complete and distant..."

( via / via )

Quizzical Mothra.

   boomer media
lives tied to the dust playback
   all a million-fold

the forest night encounters
that would limn the real hist'ry

Salman Toor's greens.

"What nobody expected was that ineffability would become a methodological crisis for 21st-century neuroscience." —@inoculatetheworld via

Five good things.

( via )

Mimetic desire.

   unseen jet fading
not so, my suburban dread
   the car, shabby, waits

as if yesterday's world left
just this façade & none else

The Yellow Scale.

"...one thing that’s obvious when you’ve done a lot of this kind of work is that the poems you see most often — the ones people bothered to write down or pass on most frequently — are not necessarily the ones you find in anthologies today." —Victoria Moul via

A Schema for Artorius.

( via / via )

The Party of the Underdog.

"But most people who walk through campus have no idea that its buildings are just as decorative and fundamentally a work of fantasy as those in Disneyland." —Freddie DeBoer via

"I’ve been reading the poems of Borges, and it strikes me that he is a marvelously kindred spirit to that Cubano-French jewel of the Parnassians, José Maria de Heredia."

   spray thrown up glitters
in the early morning sun
   my jacket buttoned

new photos of the whole Earth
not even explosions show

Fashion in sci-fi settings.

( via / oil painting by me )

God.

   from the cosmic egg
that never had a chicken
   thirteen billion years

sufficed to produce a wight
who loudly proclaims, "time's not!"

The Gesture of a Fate.

"The fundamental
stuff of matter

is the Liar's
Paradox."

—Rae Armantrout

The Sponge of Apelles.

( via / via )

Song of the Rider.

"You know how in a library no one’s trying to sell you anything?

That’s how the internet was." —@butisitart.bsky.social

China and the Future of Science.

taking Kharg Island
like a little bitch
blood splashes

at night in the empty kitchen
low sussuration in my ears

"White collar work and even the halfway point of an email job prove elusive; the tedious application processes function as force fields repelling the narrator. There’s a sense of middle class decline, of an educated man whose education has proved largely worthless, working jobs that would seem “beneath” him, even as he tries and often fails to romanticize their working class elements."

( me / via )

Rock n Roll was born 111 years ago today in Arkansas.

      "query letter"

   putting the plant out
that knows neither hand nor war
   only this sunshine

nor i the new equinox
earth in its tilting squanders

Coqueluche.

"In 1913-14 Noguchi was invited to lecture at Oxford on Hokku (haiku) at the invitation of Robert Bridges, the poet laureate..." —Dr Jonathan E Wilson via

It’s That Bird (Again) .

( via / via )

4/26/24 in Lincoln, Nebraska.

   a Grendel without
Beowulf · our high hall fears
   advent of sunset

so many nighttime prayers so
few the acts of resistance

Epigraph from Malina.

"The bat has functioned, across fifty years of philosophy of mind, as a license to stop asking."
—@barnes7 via

"Thick as a Brick" live.

( via / via )

Cover up.

   yearning that there should
again be the silhouettes
   burned into brick walls

& slow dying for millions
after the first, vaporized...

"The island was the physical node, but the network itself was the point. It ramified and in so doing connected everything."

I'm not a critic, i'm a sad epicure.

Robert Crumb, 1985.

( via / via )

To bring about Armageddon and the return of Jesus.

"LOST (Palindrome by Pairs)

On most
loyal ash
lay a lost
moon."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Selected experts.

      "study war some more"

   three evil old men
in five, ten years will be gone
   but their bombs fall now

mackerel sky, later storms
i will take due precautions

"Once, when I was about twenty-five and not yet entirely aware of the extremity of my unclubbability, I did try to go to a writers conference."

( via / via )

Of this we can be certain.

   Atlas 31
on its cold passage elsewhere
   gives a nod to earth

where the apes in charge frolicked
by civilization's fire

I would totally check out a band called Ghost Galaxy.

"Kafka understood that an even greater indignity than being turned into a giant insect was still being required to go to work afterward." —@pogform.bsky.social

This image contains the Pleiades star cluster, Barnard's Loop, Orion Nebula, Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Witch Head Nebula, Eridanus Loop, and the California Nebula.

( via / via )

Founded by engineers in 2022, the company released about 9,000 titles in 2025 alone, covering subjects ranging from economics and humanities to fashion and food, all at a pace that would be unthinkable without extensive use of AI..

Every word's secret wish: to be a different word. (Finnegans Wake)

"The linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf never co-authored a paper, never jointly proposed a hypothesis, and would probably be surprised to find their names joined to describe an idea that neither of them ever proposed in the form we understand it today."

      "thirty foot banner of our fearless leader"

   all the fierce takings
in the hungry night, in the
   night that is called day

taking until the whole world
is empty as your dead heart

Nice AI-image-generating tool, but it will never be as great an artist as Onfim, a child who lived in the Novgorod Republic in the mid-1200s and who scribbled these drawings and schoolwork writings on birch bark at the age of 6 or 7.

( via / via )

Self Portrait As Philosopher.

It wasn't just rhetoric, it was slop-rhetoric.

Baciagaloop.

"a toccata at Baciagaloopi's"

   column of headlights
& the gold tissue awning
   of cold virulence

strength for another go at
the Piper Piper impasses

Artists and Models.

( via / via )

New Year.

"to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me"
—@mobydickartsea.bsky.social

Inside Alpha School.

   i will be here &
then i won't be here · honking
   of the geese unchanged

gray skies above manmade creek
modernist buildings reflect

Another great Toho poster.