"A Minor Bird

I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;

Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.

The fault must partly have been in me;
The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song."

--Rob*rt Frost, in: Chi*f Mod*rn Po*ts of *ngland and Am*rica (1947)

Mostly Mosasaurs.

Anatomy of Art-Rock.

Hronir.

    Myrrhy Indigo Moko

1. No way of writing is natural, no way is unnatural.

2. To link to past things is good; implicitly is smart.

3. Hstory is in word history, not in who did what.

4. Try to mix as many opposing pairs as you can.

5. Irony has had its day, but that day still glows.

6. Guard dogs who prowl ‘twixt ground bombs and barb volts.

7. What you must say will not draw you to it.

8. A song aims for its mark without thought or adjusting.

9. Its way runs through chords of partially right fitting scraps.

10. A druid knows much but admits only to what shows.

"It's amazing how as things get worse, you begin to require less and less. We have a saying for that in Iraq, "Ili yishoof il mawt, yirdha bil iskhooneh." Which means, "If you see death, you settle for a fever." We've given up on democracy, security and even electricity. Just bring back the water." --Baghdad Burning

    "Not Real Windows

I lightly let go of my sanity,
that Antarctic gear
of monstrous precautions.
I say: things are not so bad
here and now
and how they do it...
Ten thousand years later I am dug
out of a glacier
with flesh on my bones."

--Ogd*n Pound, Ransom Not*s That Hav* Work*d (2006)

On my victrola: Boris Godunov.

"Two of my co-workers were talking about whether there were any contemporary art-movements. One,
an artist herself, said that what they do now is take something old apart and put it back
together in a new way. But, she added, that's really no different from DaDa, early in the 20c.
At first I wanted to butt in, then I decided: there's only one art movement left. INVISIBILITY."
--Cun*iform D R*am, S*v*n Habits of R*lativ*ly Succ*ssful P*opl* (1988)

Count this slovo kahuna in.

    Shadowy Crystal Moko

1. A word is built of stop-sounds and go-sounds.

2. A bit is a word-part with a go-sound.

3. Any string has an odd amount of bits.

4. A song has strings that vary in amount.

5. Trio to trio of trios plus two.

6. Amounts occur again most distantly.

7. Strings link by various kinds of joining.

8. Strong words call upon significant things.

9. A world of talk is known by its strong words.

10. Two words of talk inhabit a chirg song.

Manhunt.

Trust No On*.

"Jimmy was a great reader of yellowback novels. ...One day Mother papered our cabin with Jimmy's novels. When he got home, he made no protest, but he got busy and continued to read from the wall, with me helping to find the next page." --Mourning Dov*: A Salishan Autobiography (ed. Jay Mill*r, 1990)

A glimflash: "An Arkham Home Companion" by Brad Strickland, in: Th* Discipl*s of Cthulhu II (2003)


    ”Air-Burial”

Droll brackish bolt glitch
slipping abruptly dragon

fascinating action skulk fifth ash whammy
obtain tobacco

slack stalwart
ago slit bilk stump; act this asp glish pidgin
spurt apart
fibrillary anchor again pains

War is Harmony

Dull is Strong

Thrall stands Tall

    "THE HEIGHTS OF MACCHU PICCHU, III

The human soul was threshed out like maize in the endless
granary of defeated actions, of mean things that happened,
to the very edge of endurance, and beyond,
and not only death, but many deaths, came to each one:
each day a tiny death, dust, worm, a light
flicked off in the mud at the city?s edge, a tiny death with coarse wings
pierced into each man like a short lance
and the man was besieged by the bread or by the knife,
the cattle-dealer: the child of sea-harbors, or the dark captain of the plough,
or the rag-picker of snarled streets:

everybody lost heart, anxiously waiting for death, the short death of every day:
and the grinding bad luck of every day was
like a black cup that they drank,with their hands shaking."

--Pablo N*ruda (tr. Jam*s Wright)

"Cassini has discovered three new moons. Now Saturn has 34." --CBS N*ws.

Vardzia.

    ”Militia”

A sigil of Abraxas,
crimson and indigo vap.
Tajik day.-.. Torn rim as you:
abyss ago abolish

your wry apocalisp art,
brush a wrist acrss charcoal.
And what is not stubborn slag
to this? In a furry church

orbs unspool its staining light
as a humongous rain coil
craniosophic only...

In honor of losing this
story with atolls of iron
i dug up a railgun myth.

    ”Crock Pot”

Hussar dust, isthmus aspic matrix
or idiom dust as storm

bismuth Usk
string whinny, impact dust, asking Ragnarok

using optical
risk scrap smog bath story oral library

hard

to stay

angry and must



wash

across my

wars gray thalassa

se lalxu mu'e klama le
xecto lenku lunbra
.i .uocai nunpla .i .u'e
.io le satci minji
ba'o xunkadypagre
le la taityn. noi carmi
darno ku'o selyla'u
.i krefu cu'eku .uonai

(Lak*shor* arrival at th* hundr*d-cold gr*at-moon. Plan [gr*at-compl*tion!]. [R*sp*ctful-wond*r!] th* pr*cis* machin* has trav*rs*d th* r*d dimn*ss to far Titan's marg*. Will w* *v*r again?)

Am*rican Aurora.

Landing.


   II.

Dawn, swift, indigo
pouring across highways;
all of us just quit
smoking and big box shops
mushroom blindly up,
turning to a clown boss
as if numinous
as if knowing a way
in this indigo
pouring in this lungfish
drowning cairns abolish.

   III.

pouring indigo
a blind mushroom numinous
in lungfish highways
cairns big box shops out turning
pouring big clown flowing boss

Using classic rock in tv car ads--was this how hip young Xtians would look at using old pagan holidays and myths, in Roman days?

A 19c. woman from Norway writing in T*xas...

"Twilight in Plano, I."

In this far suburb world of big box shops that mushroom blindly along highways, it is not so crazy that its pallid, plump inhabitants should turn to a Dubya as if numinous, as if worthy to follow. No history or natural world can chip at its blank horizons; location and causality both, its cairns abolish.

" 'It’s E, see? Three of ‘em in that p’ticelr name Keeler. Well, it means ‘at ev’ry t’ird line from the end of the story back for, twenty or thirty say, is culled out by strikin’ off the other two. And the e’s in each of them lines.’ Rudy stopped, perceiving that there might not be but one or two. 'The e’s,' he amended quickly, 'plus the typewriter spaces in each of them lines counted, see? And the count in each spells out a few words--by alp’bet’cal places, see? Like 1 for A, 2 for B--an’ so on, see?'
'Well, I’ll be damned!' commented Caldwell, almost admiringly." --Harry Stephen Keeler and Hazel Goodwin, The Case of the Transposed Legs (1948)

"Injustice is the binding force that makes our false world cohere. We can no more think of a world without injustice than a world without gravity. (Money is only the visible sign of this relation.)" --Jack Nastyface, Tsunami (1969)

"The number one killer in the world is dysentery, but you don't see anyone going around wearing brown ribbons, do you?" --Katherine Russell Rich, The Red Devil (1999)

Into song variants?

'Komitas is to Armenians what Chopin is to Poles: their musical genius. ...He wandered around villages collecting songs. He established tens, others say hundreds, of Armenian choirs. He was a wandering balladeer; he improvised epics; he sang. He created hundreds of compositions, magnificent, great, known to all the Philharmonic orchestras of the world. He wrote masses, sung to this day in Armenian churches.

In 1915 the massacre of Armenians began in Turkey. Until the time of Hitler, it was the greatest massacre in world history: 1.5 million Armenians perished. Turkish soldiers dragged Komitas up on a cliff from which they were going to push him. At the last minute his pupil, the Sultan of Istanbul’s daughter, saved him. But he had already seen the abyss, and this made him lose his mind.

...He lived on for twenty more years. He did not make a sound.' --Ryszard Kapuscinski, Imperium (1993)

"Fuzwp Oqwmg"

this wintry noonday
slowly drawing away
soaring why?
a rising icy mist
was pursuing nova of -
that horror which stalks

good-old labyrinth blood
in a storm within
...all.
was shadowy and lost
crimson amphibian all stumps soft
labyrinth cant why how but grow

with myriad, vast sight
amphibian blood
- down grow glass
things luminous why stalk
shook its hawk wings
martyr nostalgia

star for mark fungus carnivorous
booming in fitful gusts
pursuing stark living soaring shaft of nothing
bad pill, tomb
...now did cant. soaring coughing -
unwilling admiration of

forms waving and rustling
this wintry noonday
awful hum and murmur
was shadowy and lost
such unorthodox conditions
go of his own accord

Hurufit*s.

Floating citi*s.

TruckDogs.

For fans of Johnny Guitar only.

A dialog in history.


"One does not ask the social value of mountain climbing: and there is a kind of poetry corresponding to that--autotelic, intolerant of ease." --Krakatoa E. Simoleon, Azazel (1933)


"Prison Library"

This is the way i holy
normal work stalking shadowy word

noxious out
shadow star / did burning do drip Carcosa

infamous ghost that
wants to put burning in diamond

loud morrows
soft luminous blood zonda

"I Think I’m Going to Laugh"

-burning of fungus. nova math
-drip sinking. to triumphant lamp

of down transplant star - us nova nova
midnight grip gun

pursuing nova junk - spurting
skin loathing atomic - burning Ubar

/did burning do drip
. sinking - grip rain


"Diglossia"

how can i this stark stalk
in in do not. living and vacuum pursuing junk
loathing all its crispy frost
skin sands shadow
living sinking - hollow
of fungus and stalk
in in of for it / spray with
glacial blood to go glad
of down transplant star - us nova nova
black wind star.
do star? not. -

watch a bug across it crawl


"Just Not Into You"

. / of fungus vugg
of down transplant star - us nova nova wood

for with amphibian
. / do star. it. down flip moon

carnivorous star / can’t
can’t grip rat. lingo

transplant grip sinking / for last
amphibian vacuum ions

Start nixing this bunch.

Alas.

"Ialdabaoth"

nova what that black doing
van rain tyrant
quasar it dark

hollow star
junk what transplant mark night
vacuum luminous

a glass playground ghoul
black doing
spray it black


"Plutonian Nativity"

It was a snail of murmuring
arachnid paradox / abyss so
loathing dark coma

and all slim, gracious blind
king bug dragon
do but dark
carnivorous wind

transplant star?
last is sinking
find that tall child?
solar monday no

nothing doing good-old glacial who.
.poison god.
amphibian is sinking


"Kings"

dusting his wisdom
stalk was vacuum

grinning ghost
disastrous lungfish

glass continuum night crimson living
of spurting shadow

quark dark
.brain days that?

paradox transplant
black spray hard black

"How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you’re not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows." --Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (1977)


'To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our
advance toward a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.' --Lichtenberg


"Tsunami"

-amphibian blood luminous in hard coma - fall
fall loathing
burning star giant many many
going nothing
nothing hard now

was triumphant asylum sinking what star.
glass loathing
nothing doing nothing
to hollow midight star can’t
labyrinth giant

/junk in that.
nova junk
shadow star
to transplant in that.


"Praying Badly"

carnivorous star
luminous coughing hustling hard
glacial blood
stumps hard and stalk

for last is soaring
glacial star
black junk soft with
soaring glass

dark continuum transplant burning
star wind
night with stark
coma transplant now to loathing not fungus all runic
.hustling of soft.

"/irony"

in glacial did nothing crispy
but color crackling vacuum
cryptic labyrinth
all down and nothing junk
to brain you drip soaring
to brain midnight
crimson midnight raw so color
of not out solar monday no
and) no off.


"Four Yarons into a Tribulation"

? do asylum grow so.
runic things
grinning past sharp stark plasma
of dusky soaring
cryptic sands?
giant star runic. of dusky living
stalk last
what coma
asylum was phantom
soaring to you stark


"Narrow Laughs"

crispy atrocity lost
that nova shaft dark
coma in asylum?

stark stalk continuum why junk how
blood so coughing with continuum
raw why wrong

you burning for it

I think about a holiday in which intimacy was sought and not satiation; a holiday for finding out, not filling up. Solitary illuminations without this vast compulsion of do what you should and don't ask why. I walk on a cold road, and cars roar past as if in stark pursuit. I slow down, astray.

"In Kulchur (Spring 1962) Jonathan Williams has an imaginary movie cast to play the modern poets--Edward Everett Horton as T. S. Eliot, Lon Chaney, Jr, as Robert Frost, Adolph Menjou as Edward Dahlberg, Cary Grant as James Laughlin. As Louis Zukofsky he casts Fred Astaire." --Charles Tomlinson, Some Americans (1981)

"Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings

For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,
Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good,
To sound the constitution of just wars,
Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood.

Relieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust,
Their usage, pride, admitted within doors;
At home, under caved chantries, set in trust,
With well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs
They lie; they lie; secure in the decay
Of blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted,
Before the scouring fires of trial-day
Alight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head,
Budge through the clay and gravel, and the sea
Across daubed rock evacuates its dead."

--Geoffrey Hill, For the Unfallen

Most dark, but only for now. Faith, folks!

"ii.

Rivers bring down. The sea
Brings away;
Voids, sucks back, its pearls and auguries.
Eagles or vultures churn the fresh-made skies.

Over the statues, unchanging features
Of commerce and quaint love, soot lies.
Earth steams. The bull and the great mute swan
Strain into life with their notorious cries."

--Geoffrey Hill, "Of Commerce and Society, III." (1959)

"...Charles Mingus wrote about afternoons spent in his youth, watching Sam Rodia as he went about his patient, complex work of building, transforming, tearing down then rebuilding the bizarre spirals known today as the Watts Towers. ...Years later...it struck him () that Rodia’s Towers was much like the impulsive but meticulously structured music he had just been playing--that is, was a resourceful and vital work, an invention for freedom and transcendence." --Mikal Gilmore, in: The Watts Towers of Los Angeles, Leon Whiteson, 1989

'Mussolini spoke like a peasant from Romagna; he uttered the words: problem, Mediterranean Sea, Suez, Ethiopia--as if he were uttering the words: card game, Lambrusco wine, riot, Forli. Lord Perth had the accent of an Oxford undergraduate who is distantly related to someone in Scotland--the accent of Magdalen College of the Mitre Hotel, of the Mesopotamia Island and of Perthshire. He uttered the words: problem, Mediterranean Sea, Suez, Ethiopia--as if he were uttering the words: cricket, Serpentine, whisky, Edinburgh.' --Kaputt

'I would have liked to say to her: We shall talk about Italy. And besides who knew whether Italy really existed? Perhaps Italy was a fairy tale, a dream; who knew whether Italy still existed; who knew? Nothing existed any longer except gloomy, cruel, proud, despairing Germany. Nothing existed any longer. Italy, indeed!'
--Kaputt


"Shiny Windlass"

Follow a pillbug
through blurry dim Carcosa.

Choir of moons wassailing Ragnarok
with toom word,

spiralling argonauts who fall without joust.
Mournful in this frost

cars plumb our schloss osco sky
swart opal

as if railgun of Odun bound faith
solitary mound and storp and dying sky

"Thrift"

A squalid abyss of light
follows, wolf
to my planward thoughts; and Xanadu
flows frigid music.

Roiling coiling marrow-road of magnolia
without a thirst in this world
or door to carol:

what song thrusts past shadowy my way
full of frith
and swift, tumultuously craggy argot?


“At a towering concrete crucifix, planted between the church and the street, women with upraised arms pray indiscriminately to ‘Jezy’ (Jesus) or to ‘Bawon’ (Baron Samedi), the Vodou god of death and sexuality. For many Haitians, Jesus and the Baron are the same divine person sharing the same cross.” --Donald J Cons*ntino, Vodou Things (1998)

Th* Unconscious Civilization.

Almost a R*volution.

*dgar G. Ulm*r.

I want to watch Top Chimp try this, if God is so big on him. (via M*tafilt*r)

As my significant half points out, the Carpenters' song "Goodbye to Love" is a kind of zoomar: its composer Richard Carpenter has admitted being inspired by the title of a fictitious song in the 1940 film Rhythm on the River, in which Bing Crosby plays a composer who has a hit song referred to, though never heard, within the film.

"Abtar Ibtida"

Putrid pathways sang a glitch
rollchair stock is up. Faring dragon

if Dubyabacks go to Norad arroyo
now, iron rook

at acornfall star.
Support our insanity, O lungfish droog.

My soul is my own
raghdirst. Crystal tobacco

and orthography kills and acid
storp pidgin.

"The Wind Suffers

The wind suffers of blowing,
The sea suffers of water,
And fire suffers of burning,
And I of a living name.

As stone suffers of stoniness,
As light of its shiningness,
As birds of their wingedness,
So I of my whoness.

And what the cure of all this?
What the not and not suffering?
What the better and later of this?
What the more me of me?

How for the pain-world to be
More world and no pain?
How for the old rain to fall
More wet and more dry?

How for the willful blood to run
More salt-red and sweet-white?
And how for me in my actualness
To more shriek and more smile?

By no other miracles,
By the same knowing poison,
By an improved anguish,
By my further dying."

--Laura Riding

Download a pdf of my IPOMO*A at this location.

Whit* Mughals.

On my victrola- *ast Asia Trav*logu*.

A horror-w*st*rn-romanc* nov*l: Th* Cowboy and th* Vampir* by Hays & McFall.

"But the longevity of modernism does show what happens when the prophesied resolution of drastic social and psychological anxiety is postponed--what unsuspected capacities for ingenuity and agony, and the domestication of agony, may flourish in the interim." --Susan Sontag, Und*r th* Sign of Saturn (1980)

‘Dream of Evil

A gong’s brown-golden tones no longer loud--
A lover wakes in chambers growing dimmer,
His cheek near flames that in the window glimmer
Upon the stream flash rigging, mast and shroud.

A monk, a pregnant woman in the crowd;
Guitars are strumming, scarlet dresses shimmer.
In golden gleam the chestnuts shrink and simmer;
The churches’ mournful pomp looms black and proud.

The evil spirit peers from masks of white.
A square grows gloomy, hideous and stark;
Whispers arise on islands in the dark.

Lepers, who rot away perhaps at night,
Read convoluted omens of birdflight.
Siblings eye each other, trembling in the park.’

--G*org Trakl, Song of th* W*st (tr R Firmag*1988)

“Mirrabooks Crosshairs” (for Ashb*ry)

Of good conduct. Visit snap
snarl, and pry
primly at its principal focus,
as if curlylocks.

Snarl and pry
painstaking indignification flicflac
as if curlylocks,
waving croons.

Painstaking indignification, flicflac
of good conduct. Visit snap
waving croons--
primly at its principal focus.

Yay!

A cool flick for our gnarly days. And this. And (o boy!) this.

"Moral Thoughts"

I.

Ashblack promising Moloch
in Arcadia
wit mimics.
up to can't toOf/- tubular muon bulb
twilight trail, Xibalba calx
this bright sand
twilight trial mockingbird carn Karnak
ival sand bright this
my infamous visitors to talk

II.

Virgin light
blackbody was this institution of faith,
Fallujah from Abraxas
gunman sunfall up;
origin Taproban. Abolish
this spasmodic dust in a spin of blood goo
in my mind
counting by four fours air color is Maya,
sky is pallid cannibal.

III.

Thalassa pours within Agharta
gray wizard karma
gray radix
blackbody was this institution of faith.
Through morning's corona myth
i ply aloha
my kiln and lorn gift for all mankind:
Aradia diary bot
Pallid Mountain pain

IV.

Mask, maskful thunk, contrapuntal lair
is my will
and clarion of arbitrary sigil
swallows it up with a rank
fathom of abort.
Blackbody was this institution of faith
folly, wry
at its buzzardly agon
shard of protocol rough mask only.

V.

Mystic buck
organisms sows which can grow within us
laggard soul as food
clan of a tap, scarf Mount Qoph
cannot look outward. No wolf
lost sorrows, which want to always turn opal
and hobbit,
blackbody, was this institution. Of faith
allot to it dark mask a lunar.

VI.

Fanciful awl's nub,
a portrait of a woman
riding in a shiny black hot rod
through this kiln.
Follow ruby toad,
follow iron
into Iran shit
and Arbathiao slips a scarab
burning with wry Algorab.

VII.

Blackbody. Was this institution of faith
in Latin
lit? Swirling Isis
and our dying tarry as cargo
pyramid's torpid daimon
blackbody was this, institution of faith.

“Ahriman”

Prior-to-dawn fog (java
occultation) so

“Maintain Carnival” gandom runfight
crismon idnigo puslation (it’s basic)

Parlacy
of faltisanship--group a wants to stand (dark)

Crofit for ponstraint without, but that
; ad (Aradia)

Onslaught; fol-
(unkind light in dold cays) lows cold

Rocklop*dia Fak*bandica.

“Akpuon”

Turbom*ssianist gulls irk
abort solid imgrat, d*ath
as is; will
rat snood fib us stomp.
Agaric mull Iliad flop, Oscar rip
gray ikon. Bad obol go.


“Ialdabaoth”

High comma plains drift Dallas
Christmas in Fallujah black coral

Thishful winking or-
chid ambit bad control rush angst and no way

Loot lost back
it is tribal sign

"There is no next big thing." (Yo, bards!)

I long for old days past.

Still making dough as worms gnaw on you.

Trail*r trash Christmas.

"The downside of using humiliation against a man whose life revolves around his honor is that he is thereafter bound to hate you, and to someday take his revenge."

"Night Thoughts"

A civil crystal war orgasm
ink stomp of cold sound

Stomp from stop
i cast my shadow on hill and swift calcspar--

Flying lurch sharawadji
partisanship to stomp turn


"Shoon"

Affirm tulsing popaz click thick dirt
nothing from it wash

Start climb shah
gymnasium contrapuntal phobia

Also hymn His mutiny
and at lurch of first stars pun

Find did nothing wrong
down cold drug

Authority upon crystal invasion
raucous orphans and fun mountain gray

Dawn cold hit
who told truth didst thou ink acid Mars

Bush is Lord. (thanx Mich*ll* H.!)

It's
the end of the age... (via Vicki Rosenzweig)

“Gain”

storm utmost for troth
small runs starkly among moons astray
its afflatus rosily
frost strung crows
moon at this isthmus smurry, far flung slogan

"I am a king of that most mighty empire,
That's built o'er all the earth, upon kings' crowns;
And poverty's its name; whose every hut
Stands on a coronet, or star, or mitre,
The glorious corner-stones."

--B*ddo*s

Cars against songs.

Didn't catch it. (But look at all his forms!)

You can look up stuff in this Moby Dick. (via R*adyst*adybook dot com)

"The US is so hard up for troops that the Pentagon is deploying soldiers who have lost arms and legs in combat."

Flarf crit. Not from Pluto, but it could do.

"A robot, unable to walk, moves slowly around in a wheel chair. It seeks out humans to ask for money in exchange for a ‘machine’ poem. Its arm holds a moneybox, which it thrusts to the ‘client’ demanding a response. When a coin is deposited a poem is read out. A hardcopy is then made from a printer on its chest to complete and reinforce the economic transaction." --from Beyond the Beyond

Mushaira. (via Dumbfoundry)

"There have been societies whose bureaucrats were fine poets. There have been societies whose poets were fine bureaucrats." --Flow*rs That Glid*

Conclusion on Flarf.

"b()rth

this is a crivenning gutslep
how he scrivinns the dadchild myld
from

her. Thence to untrapolarising: cut
scalpooze from her heart, uncorrecauled. How

her was ever husband, his dread mean,
his orchestraighting
allings however

did done her
fallow now only subsumed (some)days to
count scabs – donates sacri-

ficials my daughter mantra fuckyou! dad go
control else some(body) else
how

from her any God cherved, scruntised
to a babbled
I don't say grace

Come, girl
let's counter-parry gypsy curls
chant fuckyou!s and from

him
take days, seed, reputation, growth,
it's okay to condemn, tomorrow'll
birth comparison. I

shall receive my looks
in you Fine Child Of My Hips his

was only a piddled tadpole smaller
thanna pinhead, loathe

now,
hush; blenkering a dusk prets
and gentics sivasilk, my eggs loti

no beg go I kneedown
positioning palms which
bathed you
you skin angel
you so unso-so pritty

pray
drusher hope's undeceptivity"

--AnnMarie Eldon

Ringol*vio.

A hit in Japan.

All of you still doubt?

A cool cartoon. (via Cahi*rs d* Cor*y) --Alas, avant is a flavor, not a faction or a program. (And not an algorithm, too.) Avant was what you did as an old sky was falling around you. What you do now, with skyfall and all flavors as sour, must grow of its own roots and lights; tomorrow, what is said about it might sound surprisingly wrong: as if you only had in mind to fail.

Davinci against a gang of baboons with crimson butts. Davinci says, “I will build a contraption that can carry us all to a ballot-counting land, I will paint a portrait of what this insanity has cost, I will think up a way to stand our unkind days, but I will not call it victory.”

On my victrola: Th* Cowsills In Conc*rt.

"Giddy Ingot"

Star cold languor, fictional music
and with contagious fang unfurl aurora

Fathoms turn to blood
thy ingot

No shock.

"Wracking Havoc"

Looking for and not finding my stuff
in shadowy magnolia

Clod fusion
running on lucid ash, a waft of Tokay

Chalkydri, a hand
grasps shard and shard and at last a world

Girl on girl action from Mrs Halliburton.


Show your colors. (via M*tafilt*r)

' "The modern state," said Constantinidu, "deludes itself into thinking that it can protect God's life simply with police measures." ' --Kaputt


"Our window man has become a virtual millionaire with an average of about 20 windows to replace daily. " --Baghdad Burning


“Duration of an Instant”

A narrow walk, and down is up, now;
disastrous skald, and down is up, now.

Woods full of scorpions. Ruby trail
for ailing Whig; and down is up, now.

Trial upon trial: crimson companion
clips bright Algol, and down is up, now.

Narrow a shadow falls, through such mists
as scalp a rock, and down is up, now.

“Arbathiao”

with sickly actors and Cibola
crawls this rain

a brick indoors, and thus my own attrition
gray morn of a war

still Mongolians, still iron
ungodly hour, lipogrammaton, gun

disastrous lungfish
has no lamp

Pallid Mountain to ruin
and clouds coil across sky of Ubar

So long, Mr. P.

“Agathodaimon”

To sing is to arraign against wind’s sough
A bluff with as fantastical a fury.

I harrow fathoms in my turbid story,
with stony light and stars of civic Lilith.

Who can slog through lucid swamps for long
And not turn mystic? Sling a mystic’s wrath.

In rain as light as silk i walk and sing,
Against no solid balk, only bald shadow.

Ruin of what our nation had, and slag
Of all tomorrow’s tors, this worst of drugs.

Big Christ, who always knows a trick to win
As pinball wizards rip down Fand’s mimosa.

I sing and lurk in lands without a flag:
By walking it is road’s own bricks i honor.


'A frozen mountain stream, crystal fringes hanging from the rocks, chains of cold lace--this made me aware of what poetry really is: living emotion, rendered in a form allied to ice; flowing, elusive, imprisoned in something hard but transparent, colorless but reflecting all the colors in the rainbow.' --Thr*shold of Fir*

“Raucous Profound”

Touch my art, in raining dark;
thirst as Vlad in raining dark.

Chapbook kingdom, disastrous,
winds thrall vap in raining dark,

patchwork songs. What yawning void
strains this coil in raining dark?

Autumn martyrdom whips out
spoils of slag in raining dark.


'I shrugged. "Peace on earth through reason and order no
longer has any appeal to the imagination. That possibility has been rejected." ' --Hella Haass*, Thr*shold of Fir* (1964; tr Mill*r, Blinstrub 1993)

A Salam Pax sighting. (I got his book now.)

Orion.

"About a ton of Mars falls on the Earth every couple of years, so if Mars bugs pose a threat to Earth life, it is too late. They are already here." --David Grinspoon, Lonely Planets (2003)

Golf mysticism.

“ANSWERING A QUESTION IN THE MOUNTAINS

I

I went into the mountains to interest myself
In the fabulous dinners of hosts distant and demure.

The foxes followed with endless lights.

Some day I am to build the wall
Of the box in which all angles are shown.
I shall bounce like a ball.
The towers of justice are waving
To describe the angles we describe.
Oh we have been so far
To instruct the birds in our cold ways.

Near me I hear a sound,
The line of a match struck in care.

It is late to be late.

II

Let us ascend the hearts in our hearts.
Let us ascend trees in our heads,
The dull heads of trees.
It is pain in the hand of the ungodly
To witness all the sentries,
The perfumed toque of dawn,
The hysteric evening with empty hands.
The snow creeps by; many light years pass.

We see for the first time.
We shall see for the first time.
We have seen for the first time.

The snow creeps by; many light years pass.

III

I cannot agree or seek
Since I departed in the laugh of diamonds
The hosts of my young days.”

--Some Trees

“Bhopalimony”

And rapturous strain wodwo
gallant woods and swamps hibakusha

And faithful avid of gold warm nook vocal
through orchards now sylph

Wanton path
a happy man tamarind

A talk with Ligotti. (via M*tafilt*r)

Byrd says. (via Truthout)

“Wasa Wasa”

As this multitasking wasabi yoga
Brings down, aroma

Of myrrh blurs, an indigo goblin
Follows up with goblin’s blood.

"The way a lot of liberals respond to suggestions that devoting some energy to revitalizing the Democratic party's rural roots, you'd think that doing so required repudiating some of their most deeply cherished values -- rather than, in fact, simply living up to them." --Orcinus

“Tblasdayck”

In a rooky wood
i found my ray swam this vugg

food to divs
and disarray, for many a moon

holy city in ruin holy flatiron
lungfish down this clang lingo

Aradia instill my pumpkin
till cym and bal and om Gucumatz ions


“A gallant lineage, long in fields of war
And faithful chronicler’s enduring page
Blazon’d; but most by him illustrated,
Avid of gold, yet greedier of renown,
Whom not the spoils of Atabalipa
Could satisfy insatiate, nor the fame
Of that wide empire overthrown appease;
But he to Florida’s disastrous shores
In evil hour his gallant comrades led,
Through savage woods and swamps, and hostile tribes,
The Apalachian arrows, and the snares
Of wilier foes, hunger, and thirst, and toil;
Till from ambition’s feverish dream the touch
Of Death awoke him; and when he had seen
The fruit of all his treasures, all his toil,
Foresight, and long endurance, fade away,
Earth to the restless one refusing rest,
In the great river’s midland bed he left
His honour’d bones.”

--Rob*rt South*y, “Th* Last of Th* Goths” (1814)

“Tan of Applack”

Upon touching’s summit no words
could satisfy frost

spoils of Atabalipa
but most by pillbug

on twinkling pinions hid from wind and mountain
liaison

lark who from
and now by thymy banks paradox

snows through all origin and
and now through shadowy paths touch nirvana

“The tide of darkness now is at its height.
Yon lily-woven cradle of the hours
Hath floated half her shining voyage, nor yet
Is by the current of the morn opposed.”

--Thomas Lov*ll Beddo*s, fragm*nt from “Th* Last Man”

“When William Butler Yeats and his wife visited California, his wife, a medium, had a series of occult experiences in Los Angeles...from which his extraordinary volume, A Vision (1925), was woven.” --C McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946)

“Win Cash!”

Our Swan King, off duty at his ranch, vacuum
Awash in poppy, finds dust sinful.

Prying at a florid scab
Without irony.

Wondrously
Toot addict of Big Christ grout.

Bright spot.

In thankful days.

No armor for our troops, but a yacht for Top Chimp. (via Atrios)

Inat.

Spanish translation of McCourt’s ‘Tis: Lo *s.

On my victrola- Mingus: Mingus Ah um.

Recoil from what natty pumpkins say. Go back into study of colors, old songs, truthful books. Past days had such wars, tyrants, and bad art. Try not to run into cars. Strong thoughts. It is gray but not cold. Icy gnashing far; dying in Iraq. Put that in your small songs. Nobody knows your faction.

“Choking Hazard”

Phan fu tom ry cant
in this round room fools inhabit walls of sand

my glass grows dim with rain, ritual
cannibalism with gold

Ophir chill.
my occupation is long taiga

phan ey tom rie morth;
dango road

Not only is "Abraham, Martin, and John" on that album, Dion also sings "Purpl* Haz*"...

Tri*bflug*ljag*r.

"But where is the Captain of this doubloon isle
Without a turnstile?" --Hart Crane (via The Nacr*ous Oughts)

SMART-1. [R NOT US.]

“Paint You Hands With Maroon”

Fall in Carcosa:
Mists drift across a diamond.

Cars void of occupants roll and growl
Forth gray’s word;

Diwn scorch, collaboration fills our crystal
Barroom with zonda

Fronds. Carcosa aliquot
Blows holy.


“0% APR”

Coil rosg, druidicals bijoux firm
Phantom fury slack.

Inform our cosmic civil war, Gray.
Much logic

Much smoking mirror. Gibbous
Chalkydri hazaj

Bling hazaj amid tumulus rock
And Rolaids a maskful cairn

Taqiya
Would bring us topaz portal out of chaos.

Amanda Ros again. (via M*tafilter)

Tomb found.

“CANZONE

Until the first chill
No door sat on the clay.
When Billy brought on the chill
He began to chill.
No hand can
Point to the chill
It brought. Where a chill
Was, the grass grows.
See how it grows.
Acts punish the chill
Showing summer in the grass.
The acts are grass.

Acts of our grass
Transporting chill
Over brazen grass
That retorts as grass
Leave the clay,
The grass,
And that which is grass.
The far formal forest can,
Used doubts can
Sit on the grass.
Hark! The sadness grows
In pain. The shadow grows.
All that grows
In deep shadow or grass
Is lifted to what grows.
Walking, a space grows.
Beyond, weeds chill
Toward night which grows.
Looking about, nothing grows.
Now a whiff of clay
Respecting clay
Or that which grows
Brings on what can.
And no one can.

The sprinkling can
Slumbered on the dock. Clay
Leaked from a can.
Normal heads can
Touch barbed-wire grass
If they can
Sing the old song of can
Waiting for a chill
In the chill
That without a can
Is painting less clay
Therapeutic colors of clay.
We got out into the clay
As a boy can.
Yet there’s another kind of clay
Not arguing clay,
As time grows
Not getting larger, but mad clay
Looked for for clay,
And grass
Begun seeming, grass
Struggling up out of clay
Into the first chill
To be quiet and raucous in the chill.

The chill
Flows over burning grass.
Not time grows.
So odd lights can
Fall on sinking clay.”

--John Ashb*ry, Som* Tr**s (1956)

“Frisk Not”

A stark fist of approval nails you
Snail acid crystal in mansions of charcoal.

Hamtaro garmonbosia
Through night to thing frith.

And it’s hard
Mutiny has its argot:

I want to down cold grow crystal scorch
If a moon say aught, Altair,

In its cold pallor;
In its astroturf and solitary church.

A union of sorts.

“Sky Land Ransom”

Slimy main laps at Karnak,
Rightful mood with dimming light.

Long ago, words had carats,
And a bard could ply Latin.

I carry my own asphault
Through an orchard of abort.

Hush hush, no sign in sight, no
Ghost survival hazards this.

Cloudburst of glad thwarts gawking
Cataract of ruin will.

Follow a smoking mirror,
Follow a child hungry wolf.

So much i would put away:
Draftworthy fandango iron.

Virginia Opossum, blink
And miss our rainbow sigil.

Holiday. (via Und*r th* Fir* Star)

Sad.

Still unknown?

"Amayxoya"

Torpid Sunday, aorta
Hardly glubs, polka

Of doom, ghost brinksmanship fails, a katydid
Squats as osmium in anagram

Gray raga
An aroma of Satan

Contagious Christians
Carry, crisply stars unfurl within basalt

Sorrowing;
And i find my only lackwit sky

A story without skuas
Flashing, and i look up in vain for a cloud.

“Vain are thy Hopes, to scape censorious Eyes;
Truth will appear, through all the thin Disguise:
Thou hast an Ulcer which no Leach can heal,
Though thy broad Shoulder-belt the Wound conceal.
Say thou art sound and hale in ev’ry part,
We know, we know thee rotten at thy heart.
We know thee sullen, impotent, and proud:
Nor canst thou cheat thy Nerve, who cheat’st the Croud.”

--Dryd*n’s P*rsius, Th* Fourth Satyr

Two Thoughts on Umbrism.

On my victrola- Rav*l: Gaspard d* la Nuit.

What to Look Out For (scroll down to end). (via wood_s lot)

“Luminous Toxin”

Gigantomachia did again
Tank and stark
To small tasks school this
Sinking bat. Odious wish, idiotic

Pain: ogham was jilt and it
Wasn’t only skua balk
In adorn
Is sticky part gray sky stoop lotus

Ask smash basalt ills
Slant at dark isthmus, skimpy as usual, scorn
Thickly robotic collar
Slick storm what ring aspic osmium
Binds snap skin

“The first professional kyoka [humorous tanka] poet, Nagata Teiryu (1654-1734)...gained fame with one especially apt verse; when a Chinese-ink merchant from Nara presented the court with an unusually large stick of ink, Teiryu wrote these lines;

‘Although not the moon,
It has risen so high it dwells
Above the clouds;
I wonder what reason
There can be for this?’

[romanji text omitted] The entire interest of this poem stems from the puns on sumi (‘to dwell’ and ‘Chinese ink’) and on yuen (‘reason’ and ‘lamp black’). This display of wit so enchanted the court, even the emperor, that Teiryu adoptedthe name Yuensai (from yuen, lamp black). He soon gave up his cake business to devote his energies exclusively to kyoka, publishing his own verses and correcting those of other people.”

--World Within Walls

'As soon as Stalin showed signs of consciousness, Beria threw himself on his knees, seized Stalin's hand and started kissing it. When Stalin lost consciousness and closed his eyes, Beria stood up and spat.' --Khrushch*v R*m*mb*rs

Abysmal Atlas.

Inquiring mind.

“A Lost Color”

To talk about dank mulligrubs, sad moods born of long brooding upon immortal wrongs. To talk about soulful old music, that allows anguish to go skipping away, though it should crawl back to us again tomorrow. To talk about a politically-out faction, possibly hit by a con job, still mad, still not giving up.


How to talk Ham-Ham.

“The purity and stability of language, too, on which you found your claims of perpetuity, have been the fallacious dependence of authors of every age...as if the language ever sprang from a well or fountain-head, and was not rather a mere confluence of various tongues perpetually subject to changes and intermixtures. It is this which has made English literature so extremely mutable, and the reputation built upon it so fleeting. Unless thought can be committed to something more permanent and unchangeable than such a medium, even thought must share the fate of everything else, and fall into decay. This should serve as a check upon the vanity and exultation of the most popular writer. He finds the language in which he has embarked his fame gradually altering, and subject to the dilapidations of time and the caprice of fashion. He looks back, and beholds the early authors of his country, once the favorites of their day, supplanted by modern writers; a few short ages have covered them with obscurity, and their merits can only be relished by the quaint taste of the bookworm. And such, he anticipates, will be the fate of his own work, which, however it may be admired in its day, and help as a model of purity, will, in the course of years, grow antiquated and obsolete, until it shall become almost as unintelligible in its native land as an Egyptian obelisk, or one of those Runic inscriptions, said to exist in the deserts of Tartary.” --Washington Irving, “The Mutability of Literature,” in: An Evening with Irving (1907)

"POEM FOR TYRANTS

sentient beings are numberless--
I vow to enlighten them all
--the First Vow of Buddhism

it seems I must love even you
easier loving the pretty things
the children the morning-glories
easier (as compassion grows)
to love the stranger

easy even to realize (with compassion)
the pain and terror implicit in those
who treat the world around them
with such brutality such hate

but oh I am no christ
blessing my executioners
I am no buddha no saint
nor have I that incandescent strength
of faith illuminated

yet even so
you are a sentient being
breathing this air
even as I am a sentient being
breathing this air
seeking my own enlightenment
I must seek yours

if i had love enough
if I had faith enough
perhaps I could transcend your path
and alter even that

forgive me, then--
I cannot love you yet"

--Leonore Kandel, Word Alchemy (1967)