i ought to feel better
   than i do
a keeping-up debtor
i ought to feel better

weather growing wetter
   dems are winning too
i ought to feel better
   than i do



The Gallant Gallstone is now available as a book! " 'What's that?' 'It's the title of a novel. By Lois Cook.' 'What kind of novel?' 'Oh, just a load of drivel. It's supposed to be a sort of prose poem. It's all about a gallstone that thinks it's an independent entity...and then the man takes a big dose of castor oil. ...It's all supposed to prove that there's no such thing as free will.' " --The Fountainhead (1943)


Remembering the troops.

    "the doves on this block"

we sink into the swamp
with sovran appetites
from Abu Ghraib our nights
from war the pomp

as if in swinish dreams
we sink into the swamp
more splendidly to romp
the plush extremes

a landscape red like Mars
observes this fevered stomp
we sink into the swamp
as bulbous cars



Erkin Koray thread. (From Turkcerock.)


"At least he isn't another Mongolian!"

(via Centauri Dreams)


zombie ensemble

cardmember akimbo

ransack
stack of implements

what are these words for



He Do the Time Police in Different Voices. (Which led me to the Wikipedia article on the motif of harmful sensation--a genre The King in Yellow certainly belongs to)


The Devil to Pay.


Audio Duncan. (via Sharp Sand)

    "Hope I Die Before I Need Health Insurance"

vainglorious border collie
all we are is dust on the
windowsill silver
bullet ballet layaway wasteland
castaway waitjurk
sorrow embellished a song
poppy and lullaby



Spudstock.


Man or Astro Man?


"We may have horrible weather in Texas, but the fantastic scenery makes up for it," i said.


Why We're Here. (again?) (via MeFi)


In a 1972 TV performance of "Eighteen," Alice Cooper throws in a couple of lines from "American Pie."

(from, via Incoming Signals)

My Florilegium Anthropocene anthology is up to L.


   "A Dissertation on Post-Modern TV Shows with Unresolvable Plots"

Ninth hedge-magic
distill the perps
one with God's answer



Sayonara Michelangelo.


The Curse of Uluru.


Saviour siblings.


"The age of working class art is over." (via wood_s lot)

    "John Aspen"

it is years
fastened to this task

screever of the cloud-shadowed hours
my love for you is the sidewalk beneath

and such perfect days
if only they were without knowing

fifty dollars a week on gas
i read maybe one book a month

the backstreets, deserted,
i try to imagine our starting over in

one more self-published chapbook
one more offering to the void

her life my life and our life together
three stars at fixed distances

and maybe it will all work out
each of us finding our place in the emergent pattern

i dread the future like an avalanche
i stand watching poised and rustling above us


Everclear at Guantanamo. (via Cursor)


"Was it Earthquake or tobacco,
Day of Doom or Night of Drink?"

--Kipling

    "TO TOUCH AN ANGEL

A MAN wrote me not long ago and asked me what I thought of the theory of angels. I immediately told him that I am highly in favor of angels. As a matter of fact, I am scared to death of them.

Any adult human being with half sense, and some with more, knows that there are angels. If he has ever spent any period in loneliness, when the senses are forced in upon themselves, he has felt the wind from their beating wings and been overwhelmed with the sudden realization of the endless and gigantic dark that exists outside the little candle flame of human knowledge. He has prayed, not in the sense that he asked something, but that he yielded himself.

Angels live daily at our very elbows, and so do demons, and most men at one time or another in their lives have yielded themselves to both and have lived to rejoice and rue their impulses.

But the man who has once felt the beat of the angel's wing finds it easy to rejoice at the universe and at his fellow man.

THIS sense of cosmos, or angels, or the divine accommodation of a man with the universe, usually happens to a man suddenly. Angels do not take part in work for civic causes or help raise money for the United Fund. A single human heart has to long to touch an angel before it can sense one.

It does not happen to any man often, and too many of us dismiss it when it happens. I remember a time in my final days in college when the chinaberry trees were abloom and the air was sweet with spring blossoms and I stood still on the street, suddenly struck with the feeling of something that was an enormous promise and yet was no tangible promise at all.

And there was another night in a small boat when the moon was full and the distant headlands were dark but beautiful and we were lonely. The pull of a nameless emotion was so strong that it filled the atmosphere. The small boy within me cried.

Psychiatrists will say that the angel in all this was really within me, not outside, but it makes no difference.

There are angels inside us and angels outside, and the one inside is usually the quickest choked.

FRANCIS Thompson said it better. He was a late nineteenth-century English poet who would put the current crop of hippies to shame. He was on pot all his life. His pad was always mean and was sometimes a park bench. He was a mental case and a tubercular besides. He carried a fishing creel into which he dropped the poetry that was later to become immortal.

'The angels keep their ancient places,' wrote Francis Thompson in protest. 'Turn but a stone, and start a wing!'

He was lonely enough to be the constant associate of angels.

There is an angel close to you this day. Merry Christmas, and I wish you well."

--Paul Crume, in the Dallas Morning News 12/25/67 (& many Xmases thereafter...).


"Imagine that all of these elements were the same, but she’d left us the work of Amy Clampitt."


Electric veena thread.


Ramos da Silva.


"I often find myself defending as new forms of honour things that others dismiss as fads."

(thanx, Jill!)

    "The Five People You Meet in Waco"

dulgiskula fulcrum flarf
against night

Iskander skitoma juche slurp
sanguine afterburn

sundown clabber across crystalline murrain
amphibian effigy



New Leaf Paper.


The Pusher.

    "What Does Music Want?"

aysirosi lyre
is lingering frore doorbell

is literal slag wyvern trigger bequest
filter psalm

slash zigzag indigo Ogpu dealth
crystallized silt ink aggry afterimage



Outwitting History.


Another perfume blog.

    "Encyclopedia of Food Riots"

static in my head
is money in my pocket
smoothe the love-rank bed
with only ghosts to rock it
gray horizons speak
movie of the week
gerdanlouk is sped
limn the empty socket

cities of the dead
wheel a forsaken sprocket
bradykinin bred
and poison in the locket
now the poet rises
with plate-sized irises
ready to have said
his say at the quisling docket

where we are is clear
our fates, our loves stand naked
only the atmosphere
veils with fulsome orchid
shrouds in doublespeak
movie of the week
chronicles of fear
and a ferret in my pocket



"How hard it is to sing when I must sing of horror."


(Years ago i posted this in the Tanka yahoogroup; i am reposting it here so as to have it all in one convenient place:)

a year or so ago i undertook to translate some of my favorite tanka into the artificial language Lojban. at the time i did this i noticed that the old Rexroth translations i used were not only not in form, but often not even five-lined; & so i thought when i posted them to the Lojban list, i would modify them into the same strictness as my translations. here is the result of that exercise, along with a few i added just the other day. i know on one level this sort of thing is as barbaric as when Dryden turned "Paradise Lost" into rhyming couplets. but, i'm not claiming it's an improvement. anyway...

1.

'As I watch the moon
shining on pain's myriad paths,
I know I am not
alone involved in Autumn.'

--Oe no Chisato (Rexroth)

As I see the moon
tracing all the manifold
highways & footpaths
of pain, i know i am not
alone involved in Autumn.

(the literal Lojban runs: I observe the lunar illuminer of many harming roads, & intuit an autumn pattern of me & not-me.)

2.

'I go out of the darkness
onto a road of darkness
lit only by the far off
moon on the edge of the mountains.'

--Lady Izumi Shikibu (Rexroth)

[this is my all-time favorite tanka.]

Out of the darkness
onto a road of darkness
i go, illumined
only by the far-off moon
on the edge of the mountains.

(My going from the dark via dark ways, is illumined only by a small moon on the mountain slope.)

3.

'In the Autumn mountains
the colored leaves are falling.
If I could hold them back
I could still see her.'

--Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (Rexroth)

Here in the mountains
of Autumn the rufous leaves
have started to fall.
If i could only hold them
back--i could see her again.

(Autumn mountains. Falling are the leaves that have color. If i prevent it, i now see her.)

4.

'This is not the moon,
nor is this the spring,
of other springs,
and I alone
am still the same.'

--Ariwara no Narihira (Rexroth)

[this tanka has haunted me for twenty years, & i made many versions. after a while, the "moon" became a "song"; & my latest version owes as much to Earl Miner as to Rexroth:

'This is not that moon
And it cannot be this is the spring
Such as the spring I knew;
I am myself the single thing
Remaining as it ever was.' ]

This is not that spring,
nor even the selfsame song
so broken-hearted.
I myself am the one thing
staying as it ever was.

(It is not so, that here is the spring or the moon of me. Nevertheless, in it i myself am constant in pastness.)

5.

'The white chrysanthemum
is disguised by the first frost.
If I wanted to pick one
I could find it only by chance.'

--Oshikochi no Mitsune

White chrysanthemums,
lost amidst the handiwork
of this first snowfall:
if i tried to pick one i
could find it only by chance.

(The new-ice-weather hides the white ones from me. If i wanted to take, i only by luck could find one of the flowers.)

[unfortunately, Lojban lacks a precise word for "chrysanthemum"...]


"Right now, we're just about where we were back in 1932 when FDR set up the WPA and set off thirty years of government planning and investment."

    "72 Views of the Tower of Babel"

sedevacantist reacharound
rooibos sear I ching
injury accident working

shades on a cloudy day



Quirkyalone.


"The library in Tashkent has a copy of Amir Khusrau's Kamsa in Hafez's hand, dated February 9, 1355." --Robert Bly, The Winged Energy of Delight (2005)


Interview with Kaz Maslanka. (via fait accompli)


"The fellowship includes a cash prize of $44,000, which he will use to pay his accumulating pile of medical bills."

    "The Thing That Eats The Heart

The thing that eats the heart comes wild with years.
It died last night, or was it wounds before,
But somehow crawls around, inflamed with need,
Jingling its medals at the fang-scratched door.

We were not unprepared: with lamp and book
We sought the wisdom of another age
Until we heard the action of the bolt.
A little wind investigates the page.

No use pretending to the pitch of sleep;
By turnings we are known, our times and dates
Examined in the courts of either/or
While armless griefs mount lewd and headless doubts.

It pounces in the dark, all pity-ripe,
An enemy as soft as tears or cancer,
In whose embrace we fall, as to a sickness
Whose toxins in our cells cry sin and danger.

Hero of crossroads, how shall we defend
This creature-lump whoe charity is art
When its own self turns Christian-cannibal?
The thing that eats the heart is mostly heart."

--Stanley Kunitz (via wood_s lot)


One Day the Soldiers Came.


"If there is a shame to be shared that is for all of us."

    "Gerdanlouk Thunder"

for those who still hear the guns
things i have no recollection of

powerful dark morning, the river in spate
tantalum vapors hanging over the river



Chakobsa.


"Art is for people who aren't worried about zombies." --Kelly Link

    "Song of the Son

POUR O pour that parting soul in song,
O pour it in the sawdust glow of night,
Into the velvet pine-smoke air to-night,
And let the valley carry it along.
And let the valley carry it along.

O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree,
So scant of grass, so profligate of pines,
Now just before an epoch's sun declines
Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee,
Thy son, I have in time returned to thee.

In time, for though the sun is setting on
A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set;
Though late, O soil, it is not too late yet
To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone,
Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone.

O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums,
Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air,
Passing, before they stripped the old tree bare
One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes

An everlasting song, a singing tree,
Caroling softly souls of slavery,
What they were, and what they are to me,
Caroling softly souls of slavery."

--Jean Toomer

(Sadly, a version of this with 3 glaring typos is all over the internet. Sheesh!)


Isidore of Seville site. (via Metafilter)

    "Quebrith Lost, Quebrith Regained"

hareiously sane
crusting yegg

with dollop lug tsunami
fly as fail into meagry sculsh travelogue

mustard ask stigma find indigo
igneous lyre berth


"If we were dog food, they would take us off the shelf."


Olga: Revolutionary and Martyr.

"We can only imagine the confusion and concern when the informed elite of the United States Government discovered that an alien spacecraft piloted by insectlike beings from a totally incomprehensible culture had crashed in the desert of New Mexico." --Milton William Cooper, Behold a Pale Horse (1991)


    "You Too, Not Just Me

Never just me.
However you need,

however, I'll be.
Like smoke slid

in like previous whiskey,
fire wisps,

fire drowns.
And follows itself

into new form,
first

afraid it's too alike.
A fraud must

believe, too.
Then, forgetting

how unlikely.
A centaur's first street

fair, alone.
Then so lucky,

only a dream is so lucky.
Sometimes laughing

with others
who must sense

us, condensed,
frontbodied, pushing

soft walking
circles onto a ledge.

Imperceptible
where your face

turns into breath
and vanishes

in the home.
Can't matter

in the home.
Some fire

makes form
only folly,

however all three
follow us to take

your shape
down with mine."

--Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar (2008)

Find out where to recycle near you.


"
href="http://garysullivan.blogspot.com/2008/05/mohammad-vs-mesmer-by-lights-of-many-in.html">The question "Mohammad or Mesmer?" is a common icebreaker, and a self-revealing test, among poetry students far beyond the United States."

    "1982 Junoon"

passage from that mood, years ago
to this mood

and the space i am in
doubles

but there is no going

* * * *

gusnylijda jelq
no talc
stamps going up
cry sandalwood

if its in the words
really in
some of the words
then it must be in
all of them

* * * *

the mirror that exploded
took us all along
oh yeah
took us all along
cold, bright
problems i cannot solve
listen to

the cries of the birds


When Butterflies Kiss.


350 dot org. More.


I don't think that i can take it.


The Republican Dictatorship. (via Antiwar dot com)

    "Ylang Ylang Yclad"

Don't want to lose this sleepiness
should occasion recur · to use it

you get used
to a certain size of exoskeleton

i donned shades for a moment of sun
when it left i kept them on

cherish these shards
that sound like part of the real future


Sigur Ros's album "( )", while reading the first chapters of The Wandering Scholars (again): is this not the music for a melancholy survival, on remote islands of order?

"It was low tide [for culture] on the Continent of Europe, except for one deep pool at Toulouse where the grammarian Virgilius Maro agitated strangely on the secret tongues of Latin, and told his story of the two scholars who argued for fifteen days and nights without sleeping or eating on the frequentative of the verb to be, till it almost came to knives, rather like the monsters one expects to find stranded in an ebb." --Waddell


The Chinese Enya.


Telephone Sheep. (via Rebecca Blood)

"The novelist and critic Masamune Hakuchô (1879-1962) said that it was only when he read [The Tale of Genji] in English translation that he realized how truly fascinating it was." --Ikeda, On the Japanese Classics (1974; tr B Watson 1979)


   Yves Bonnefoy: Threats of the Witness (my tr.)

In this garden you've stopped coming,
The trails of aching and loneliness erase,
The weeds stand for your dead face.

You don't care anymore that there may be hidden
In the rock the dark church, in the trees
The blinded face of a reddened sun;

You suffice
To perish lengthily as into sleep,
You love no more even the shades you wed.


" 'Nobody ever really knows what they want,' Charley said. 'Why should that change after you die?' " --Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners (2005)


Alliance of Enemies.


"When will the chicks of the same mother hen remove the colors from their faces and recognize each other as brothers and sisters?"

   "The Mystery"

I WAS not; now I am--a few days hence
I shall not be; I fain would look before
And after, but can neither do; some Power
Or lack of power says "no" to all I would.
I stand upon a wide and sunless plain,
Nor chart nor steel to guide my steps aright.
Whene'er, o'ercoming fear, I dare to move,
I grope without direction and by chance.
Some feign to hear a voice and feel a hand
That draws them ever upward thro' the gloom.
But I--I hear no voice and touch no hand,
Tho' oft thro' silence infinite I list,

And strain my hearing to supernal sounds;
Tho' oft thro' fateful darkness do I reach,
And stretch my hand to find that other hand.
I question of th' eternal bending skies
That seem to neighbor with the novice earth;
But they roll on, and daily shut their eyes
On me, as I one day shall do on them,
And tell me not the secret that I ask.

--Dunbar


Rough Crossings.


Taser parties. (via Dangerous Meta) So taser is the new tupperware...?

"Time drags like a sluggish wave, it is a sphere of molten glass on whose surface myriad glints catch one's eye and engage one's attention, while inside glows the crimson, disquieting core." --Saramago


    "Infamous Informers"

shatteringly orange plastic turtle
counterintelligence elbow
is decidedly orientalism's unperson

nor coventrize of
a rumor of one's own
Darth Vader M&M statuette


    "Hell is for Hobbits"

1.
sent to Coventry
sageness
drink vandalroot
peckish
lambently eradicate
corf adazzle
pullulating
the Septentrioni

2.
vandalroot
drink coventrize
Durkin

lowering corf

and this sky of angels peckish
your vain arroyos
intussuscept
grimly


The Shame of the Nation.


    "Typhoon Sunrise"

In storms of rage against a newer world
myself knew not the tumult nor the prize,
but found a delight my budding dreams empearled
in storms of rage, against a newer world.

What of this land whose levins are all hurled?
Already i abscond, i coventrize
myself, knew not the tumult nor the prize
in storms of rage against a newer world.


"Cold gliding horrors thrill'd each hero's breast" --Mickle's Lusiad

"What I do not wish to know does not exist, the only real problem is how to play the queen's knight."
--Saramago


    "Longing."

IF you could sit with me beside the sea to-day,
And whisper with me sweetest dreamings o'er and o'er;
I think I should not find the clouds so dim and gray,
And not so loud the waves complaining at the shore.

If you could sit with me upon the shore to-day,
And hold my hand in yours as in the days of old,

I think I should not mind the chill baptismal spray,
Nor fine my hand and heart and all the world so cold.

If you could walk with me upon the strand to-day,
And tell me that my longing love had won your own,
I think all my sad thoughts would then be put away,
And I could give back laughter for the Ocean's moan!

--Paul Laurence Dunbar


When the Velvet Underground went on Lawrence Welk. (You mean they didn't?)


Called "TG's Finest Moment". (I used to have this on VHS, then in a weak moment--sold it.)

    "Behind The Arras"

As in some dim baronial hall restrained,
A prisoner sits, engirt by secret doors
And waving tapestries that argue forth
Strange passages into the outer air;
So in this dimmer room which we call life,
Thus sits the soul and marks with eye intent
That mystic curtain o’er the portal death;
Still deeming that behind the arras lies
The lambent way that leads to lasting light.
Poor fooled and foolish soul! Know now that death
Is but a blind, false door that nowhere leads,
And gives no hope of exit final, free.

--Paul Laurence Dunbar

NOW AVAILABLE. Get yours now--while supplies last!


    "Poem ending with a line by Davidson"

The lowering welkin has to teach
office of sudden shelter found;
a dream of rescue by snowy moonlight,
the meltingness of such.

Nor shall missiles wing us hence:
we plant among those skyey fields
words of despair, whispered long
for still night's starry scroll unfurled.


What Shamu taught me.


The Etched City.


I was doing a counter shift when i recognized one of the albums a kid was buying as The Magician's Birthday. (I used to have this on an 8-track!) Later, searching YouTube, i found out that they're still together. A group that had its moments of semi-sublimity, i would say now, without ceasing to be Bad Prog Rock in all the familiar ways. Still, gotta love that mythology... The emotions of adolescence were never so gaudy, as when hung on objective correlatives of Tolkienesque kinkiness. And some Moog.




"The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century's frontier."


A Million Penguins. (I miss out on everything.)

    "A Northern Suburb"

Nature selects the longest way.
And winds about in tortuous grooves;
A thousand years the oaks decay;
The wrinkled glacier hardly moves.

But here the whetted fangs of change
Daily devour the old demesne--
The busy farm, the quiet grange,
The wayside inn, the village green.

In gaudy yellow brick and red,
With rooting pipes, like creepers rank,
The shoddy terraces o'erspread
Meadow, and garth, and daisied bank.

With shelves for rooms the houses crowd,
Like draughty cupboards in a row--
Ice-chests when wintry winds are loud,
Ovens when summer breezes blow.

Roused by the fee'd policemans knock,
And sad that day should come again,
Under the stars the workmen flock
In haste to reach the workmen's train.

For here dwell those who must fulfil
Dull tasks in uncongenial spheres,
Who toil through dread of coming ill,
And not with hope of happier years--

The lowly folk who scarcely dare
Conceive themselves perhaps misplaced,
Whose prize for unremitting care
Is only not to be disgraced.

--John Davidson


They won the propaganda war, but lost the reality war; guess which one is the one that counts.


The Deep State, here & around the world.

The Ephemera.


"...no one can claim to be truly Portuguese unless he speaks another language better than his own."
--Saramago

    "Jewelled Spider in my Zipdrive" (Son of Godzilla)

Body-slam the glow-eyed gimantis
orphan with a cast iron alibi

in our paper houses lovers star-crossed
drink the red water eyes downcast

rare disease TV segment ablative
absolute bollix the lunar castaway

not these instrument readings
not this pet holocaust

godzilla breath pirate broadcast
a dry cough among styrofoam boulders

perish to whimsical music
Grinchus that the stars accost


"When one starts to believe in miracles, there is no longer hope."

--Saramago


Audio Dunbar.


"Liberals love America like grownups."

    "Hotel Penetralia"

the casket, protected
shade
the moving
at an end for now
reflect
khaki forms
busy
with their immutable
business

(thanx Xian!)

1. "Etymon Edamame"

Blog this saracen bowling
in the rancid jungle.
Its contrails, *plagal-boring,
disrupt the raptors' juggle
and our seas boiling.

What fates we *lease of this, charm
like astrolabia parting.
Some will come to harm;
some, content with just hurting
on the bladed barm.

2. "Barsoom Wedding"

A silurian gray dream
softens, realm of breccia,
rain-*obnoxious; failure is
the only option
considered in this wonky biz.

Ice-*fiduciary, creep
you *haggard turncoat.
Chemystery you tried to treat
with icky chromecoat
and now a fyrd's sweep.

3. "The Gun in the First Act"

Weird catenary footstep,
suggilation by furphy.
Flarf burns in my *fee
roll, eke my geason catnip;
it's Barsoom wedding.

One is futilous Ixtab,
the other pancake
with explicating Duck Stab;
futurist tinplate
gruntles the Barsoom wedding.

I do the insects' bidding.


(Note: i have marked "etymonarchical" usage with an asterisk.)


"On his worldwide money-raising tours, he would often thrill young would-be jihadists with miracle tales of angels seen riding into battle on horseback, bombs intercepted by birds that formed canopies to protect Muslim warriors and individual soldiers who with divine assistance defeated entire Soviet battalions." (via ALDaily)


"The poems, which will be sold as one lot and include 15 originals not held by the National Library of Scotland, have been given a guide price of £4,500-£6,500, similar to a collection of Harry Potter first editions signed by J.K. Rowling and considerably more than rare early editions of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, which are also being auctioned." (via Poetry Hut)


A practical response.

"Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide." --Plath

    "Supermodel Holocaust"

i can't wait
for that peaceful time
for that milder clime
to write

what will chime
on the shiny plate
i can't wait
for that perfect time


SOA Watch.


A crater named Neruda.

    "Canzone: Elegy for Hussain"

Given up under torture
names of friends, the frenzied virtue waltz

a commodity
in the beginning, borne on smoky zephyrs

hidden road
through the lachrymose garden of Pulumchva

fading, no fixture, irrational
mixture of star and angel

the arc from candle
to stilbtrap

Cornish asphodel
panhandler olympics in Xipetotec

remember
the vanquished desires

offers of sciamachy
by in-cahoots officers shadowed

even our dreams might throb with finitude's frost
paean Gjeld

in the fists of each peon hajji
warrior from Tau Ceti

blindfold march, opium worrier aion
rains opinion vap

craft ebbing
in overcast nirvana

sound of walking on wet gravel, against Vlad
this dark albedo

i find, a limber climber, wolfchurch
rat's amber

and following home the oblong ox
tuned to an oolong rainbow

wrecks the lexicon
my soft slag

here, wretched and robed in phosphorescent fire
here, rigid in death

change of tide
depth charge of boiling sibilant art

over the muezzin's taiga
scatter Carcosa filaments scatter gold

the wrathful ouzel
its shadow glides upon the ocean

digs the sand
of a sunk theocracy's

least common fnord and liripoop hobbitfrith
glean transparent deuce

a thousand bright chrome meanings
and mazy folds of nascent Armageddon

perfect myrrh
implicit as citadel in my

aasvogel
crossings tzigane

zigzag bright the tarmac cwm
adamant jade mayfly convex basilisk

Shaggai taikonaut tuatara
dusting now our liaison

hurls pillbug
after pillbug quest

what fulvous cuneiform communion
pontiff to this andiron glow of vermilion

snavvles the quaint manticores
with pillbug limits

if you can't
thristnidinghent profound attains your sand coil

acres of diamonds


"Now do you see how being vertically integrated puts Amazon in a terrific place?"


"...a nation that, at present, for all practical purposes, only produces Cheetos and killer drones..."

"The great difference between poets and madmen is the destiny of the madness that possesses them." --Saramago, op cit


    Bonnefoy: Une Pierre

          Porphyry's solar tome
    --see it as a mass of somber stones.
  Long have i perused Porphyry's tome;
now i've arrived where there is no more sun.

(my tr; 1985)


"All spectres now resume their dim domain" --Owen Meredith


Read the words. (via Matt Arnold)


"It is a measure of our own depravity that we do not hoot this man from the stage..."


"There are two kinds of poems."

(via)

    tr: Ghalib 35.

to sink is merely human · there is nothing you can say
depending on the enemy · there is nothing you can say

decease long wooed forbears · maybe on the ricochet
after so much carnage · there is nothing you can say

my case she asks degree of · only in the public way
knowing where this thing goes · there is nothing you can say

regardless of the question · we are lightly brushed away
in any jib of language · there is nothing you can say

Ghalib among the chatterers · his own silence must obey
except you call him crazy · there is nothing you can say


Haiku blog noticed by Silliman.


"...every city needs one young Japanese noise artist playing sheets of sheer distortion, it seems."


"They have also murdered my friends in fields teeming with hawks..."

    "The Reign of Galba"

Downpressed in Epigonia
for all the talk of winning

not a story
when the winners come to write it

dream of Nidhhoggr
and the altar thereto

a vivid understanding
in an old lingo


A nice thread on treasured poems.

   "Bob Phossy Jaw"

Nidhhoggr
in the Library of Babel

dead armadillo as
the route tempestuous

doorways
through my larynx scintillate

simoom wars

wharf plethora
gun-shy

the survivors on the way

* * * *

Rings of refraction
in black and white. The lit
fountain, holding memories.
Flicker among loose things
i'm having this one

panelling
walks
strange encounters
uncued by any music
solemn and binding

frolic
the sideways rain
good lusty yell
silhouettes
pass and repass

trace
the contradictions
shining


   tr. Ghalib 27.

From delectation, all our taste was lost;
The more our thirst took in, the less we had.

We never knew a chance: a snare so close
Awaited us upon the very threshold.

The amputation of our hand did not
Suspend the writing of that tale one bit.

So it was not apostasy to turn
Mendicant, for there too we were kidding.


"...it is always prudent to consult Persian dictionaries when reading Ghalib; he often uses words of Persian origin with their original Persian meaning rather than, or in addition to, the adapted Urdu meanings of the same words." --Aijaz Ahmad, Ghazals of Ghalib (1971)


"One of his [Milton's] strangest devices is to use existing English words, not in their current sense, but in the sense which their Latin root possesses." --Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition (1949). Highet goes on to cite "pontifical" used as 'bridge-building', "astonished" as 'thunder-struck', and "exploded" as 'hissed off'...

Mallarmé probably can be added to this list (& certainly Celan), which i think i will call etymonarchical mode, as well.

Ghoti.


''Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is. Once language has said all it has to say and falls silent, I wonder how we will go on living.' --José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984; tr G Pontiero 1992)


    "Guitar Solos that Changed the World"

Forge the athanor, blind tiger;
tiger despair to disembark
among elliptical plates of standing water
jingling hauberk.

Ichthyosaurian blockade
drain, a brindled standing quirk
pools Darjeeling-led ordalic slider
goaf and pitchfork.


'The book of resemblances remainms to be written.'
--Jabès

"It was a show of [Clyfford] Still's painting that led me to stay in San Francisco instead of going to Europe, and to search out the new painters where I found Jess. It was not to be until five years later that I ever saw a canvas of Still's as an instance of the beautiful (and these in painting are rare enuf), but what was clear then was that this was authentic, a command within the spiritual history of art that involved more than painting--as uncharming, as hideous in strength as revolt is; it had or I gave it authority. Not to be like it, but to take my place in a world where such painting must be a definition of the real." --Duncan to Levertov, 2-2-60


    "Touring the Polygamist Ranch"

Here · morning · rain
forever to leave the earth

Clear skies searched for rain
above the waterlogged earth

Jade Vacuity, rain
from ev'rywhere that is or isn't earth


"Even where his art is beautiful, Still's work is grandiose, megalomaniac: he is incapable of the intimate. And the force of his egotism makes it impossible for me to think of him as heroic. Heroism for me has something to do with the engagement with and for the Beautiful." --ibid


"Glancingly if fluvial cup protuberous conic plat."

    "Mirage

The hope I dreamed of was a dream,
Was but a dream; and now I wake,
Exceeding comfortless, and worn, and old,
For a dream's sake.

I hang my harp upon a tree,
A weeping willow in a lake;
I hang my silent harp there, wrung and snapt
For a dream's sake

Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart;
My silent heart, lie still and break:
Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed
For a dream's sake."

--Christina Rossetti

(via Beyond the Beyond)

   *Notes For Echo Lake - 4


Who did he talk to

Did she trust what she saw

Who does the talking

Whose words formed awkward curves

Did the lion finally talk

Did the sleeping lion talk

Did you trust a north window

What made the dog bark

What causes a grey dog to bark

What does the juggler tell us

What does the juggler’s redness tell us

Is she standing in an image

Were they lost in the forest

Were they walking through a forest

Has anything been forgotten

Did you find it in the dark

Is that one of them new atomic-powered wristwatches

Was it called a talking song

Is that an oblong poem

Was poetry the object

Was there once a road here ending at a door

Thus from bridge to bridge we came along

Did the machine seem to talk

Did he read from an empty book

Did the book grow empty in the dark, grey felt hat
blowing down the street, arms pumping back and forth,
legs slightly bowed

Are there fewer ears than songs

Did he trust a broken window

Did he wake beneath a tree in the recent snow

Whose words formed difficult curves

Have the exaggerations quieted down

The light is lovely in trees which are not large

My logic is all in the melting-pot

My life now is very economical

I can say nothing of my feelings about space

Nothing could be clearer than what you see on this
wall

Must we give each one a name

Is it true they all have names

Would it not have been simpler

Would it not have been simpler to begin

Were there ever such buildings

I must remember to mention the trees

I must remember to invent some trees

Who told you these things

Who taught you how to speak

Who taught you not to speak

Whose is the voice that empties"

--Michael Palmer (via)

Maybe we put too much faith in Moloch and Moloch's rituals. It kind of made sense at the time; we prospered. Then the shit happened. What did we do? We increased our sacrifice. It should have worked. Everything we knew pointed to that one colossal certainty. So why are we suddenly grumbling? Moloch is great.


"...I watched Bill Cosby summon his inner Malcolm X...."


"Years from now we'll be looking back at the early 21st century and wishing we'd all relocated there at this time in poetry history."




"Who now remembers the poems of Norman Macleod, for example, who was in 1930 the most published poet in America, invited to Moscow by the Russian government in respect of his accomplishments and convictions?"

(via Gabriel Gudding)

    "Cherry Rigel"

1.
Day of gray & green,
birdsong, glows;
cobblestones, an eerie wind
diverts the mild Satanic tontine.

2.
small book · with a difficult birth
lucky penny

red plate green bowl lime cup same
hues as this dust jacket

fragile cough

3.
tantalize
above the boneyard
sabotage · the word needful

poison buffoon · at the helm
in my fumbling
mimosas

story
all the bad lights


Moose Murders. Revived.


Earthbox.


"In the future they might just decide to ban all books that don't get five-starred reviews on Goodreads.com..."

white
gull · gray
sky · viaduct crossing

Scent notes. (again?)


chimney nestlings · dawn allergins
mystery word · spiralling oblique
the overhead speaker · cloud curb
garage sale · with nestling chimneys

    "the hunger to paint" (Yellow Submarine)

1.
Glass kerygma
having passed
into notoriety
--flower
power--:
but when will again come
music
if we think this is music

2.
Within myself to fadge a fierce survivor
Veeder-Root warning, zugzwang,
shinju in the City of Yes and No.


    "Cord Phone with a Dial"

Departed like the ice
vanished with the snow

our frothy sacrifice
departed like the ice

and we don't look back twice
but faster bid it go

departed like the ice
vanished with the snow


    "Five Hours' Sleep"

silent like the sky
silent as the grave
seasons i'd defy
silent like the sky

never asking why
song pervades a cave
silent like the sky
silent as the grave


    "snapping"

parch
scrutiny

glistening
on the dull tarmac

a streetlight
goes out

cop car watches
me like a hawk

poet's lunar shadow
advances up the broken sidewalk

(thanx Jeff!)

    Delmira Agustini: Ofrendando El Libro

(to Eros)

Because you make the lioness your dog,
O stronger than Life, and bind her fast within
the rose-chain of your arm.

Because your body is the root, the knot
uniting the discordant stems of those
caladiums--pleasure and pain.

Because there blossoms in your beautiful firm
hands, as on a brooch of mystic diamonds,
the so intoxicating lily of Death.

Because higher than Space I can see you,
O bridge of fragrance, melody and light
connecting hell and heaven.

--With resplendent spirit and somber flesh...

(my translation: 1990)


Barbershop music.


"Berryman says Shakespeare’s five best sonnets are 18, 30, 73, 106, and 116..."

    "Long Day's Journey into Rottweiler"

Not more than my share
of hot water--not more than my share

My cousin in a buzzing oven
collects not more than my share.

Of the light which quagmires breed
i give not more than my share.


    "Long Day's Journey into Agnew"

oscilloscope
laughing whales
razors
curbside rubbish
over all these days
hangs the poignant, impenetrable veil
of what befell, just before the wreck:
the cause forever sought and withheld


    "Chorus of the New City and Citizens"

Unlearned the road, unlearned the ecstasy
in Medicine Winter's jocund paregoric.
Vanilla taboo, shadows sustained by pidgin;
and wafers is a cloud, and Skylab is a rook.


Tyvek.

    "Long Day's Journey into Zugzwang"

1.
Potomac
froth whispering
thimble
stick-up job
feels like steam parrot

2.
funeral of a white-coat
thrift
casting the runes

3.
by dead reckoning
the spring shakedown
a little enhanced
Trithemius · khaki

a twilight that never leaves
a word i mispronounced
with grave
repercussions

go out walking
like i used to do
till it all came clear

Hope Sandoval
by grace of the batteries
city of secret meanings


"...nor could the wise man
Turn aside his trouble; the strife too severe,
Too long, too malignant, that settled on that people,
Fierce-forcing persecution, night-frightfulness unequalled."

--Morgan's Beowulf


My favorite Finnish words.


"Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together." --Ray Bradbury


Word wooze thread.

The French Postman's Ideal Palace.

Neo-Benshi.


   "Where the Sheets have No Name"

Touareg chirg tide
gray skies · brown puddles cradling
taillights · glow
stuck halfway through the intersection · Downtown
narcocorrida · dull stomach ache
the stained concrete · how
high has the river become
after the night's
torrent · after the
night long noise


Rhapsody. (thanx Melanie!)


I heard that a US nickel is actually worth ten cents for the metal in it (oh all right,--seven) . So why doesn't the store collect all its nickels at the end of the day, & once a month truck them all over to the smelter for cash? Uh, i was just informed that this would be illegal. So the nickels need to be smuggled. It wouldn't pay to support a whole operation--unless this is what goes back in the empties from smuggling something more profitable. Suddenly i have a great plot: a person discovers the nickel-smuggling operation first, not realizing it's a drug lord's sideline.


Murder Most Confederate.


Fastest Chihuahua in America. (via Sclerotic Rings)

(via Mga Diskuro ni Doy)


   "Living in the Ruins" (The Good German)

city of secrets
sustained and inspired
shadows
a little enhanced
and all is alleys
high walls shuttered
windows behind which

the dark recognitions
how did you find this place

blame everything on the war
a turntable
can spin
light through the trees
falling
money half trampled
underfoot

these are not deutschmarks
in the moonlight
echoing
a little too precisely
and i find the light switch
notebooks filled
with a running tally

same four walls
that's all i know
i'm a Nazi
in this city of secrets


It occurred to me the other day that Lobster Boy should be done as a computer-animated movie, kind of in the vein of Frank Miller's Sin City. It'd be great--& what a portrait of our times!

The poor cannot be punished too many times for the crime of being poor. It's the last vestige of original Sin.


Five years ago, i published this poem in 100 Poets Against the War. As it is becoming a little hard to find on the internet, i am printing it again here:

    "Christendom"

there was once a king
a stupid king
son of a king

and he ruled a great empire
greatest of his time
and a pious king was he

so pious
he wanted to punish
everyone that didn't believe

and he made a department
to spy on his own people
this pious king

but it was war he loved
constant war
war with no object

he made war till he exhausted
the wealth of this richest empire
he ruined his country

to utter bankruptcy
and it became
the most backward country in Europe

and after this king
whose name was Phillip the Second
a Golden Age of art & literature

was snuffed out
like it never existed
and it was three hundred years

three hundred years
till Spain produced anything good again


Or as the old guys liked to say, sic transit gloria mundi...


(PS apologies to those who actually are from Spain--it's a beautiful country i've always wanted to visit--but parables are parables.)

"The latest journeymen are pornographers of scale." --Joyelle McSweeney, in Sentence 4


    "The Miles"

Roam the infinitesimal starry roads
Pilgrim, there is no place you can claim
isn't spinning madly, reft so soon;
isn't strange and scathing planetfall.

Then let these strangers honor you befitting
the custom of the land--they'll photograph
your disarranged and naked corpse, and cobble
a dozen witless rumors for the caption.


The Chinese Sonnet.

"I used to say that my autobiography ought to consist of a series of short stories like those about Sherlock Holmes; only that his were astonishing examples of observation, and mine astonishing examples of lack of observation." --G K Chesterton


    "Ten Plague Masks"

rows of identical packages
gnosis on the silk road

sandstone out of slow silt
poembook
planned for amazon

where i returned to
one or two walls still stand
dust hurtling through

i believe
i could find old pages of mine
on the silk road


* * * *

you don't know your courage
till you watch harm approach

sliver of a new moon
in forty years everything

* * * *

dubitation billabong
Cairene inferno
walla walla nuffink!
troubled
jog and jolt
pagodas of insomnia
shrinking
and if shrinking
can be part of a veil

* * * *

Herrenvolk yMiJleHie
brought · down
tinny
culpable
arrears tontine

spybots
Planet Agamemnon
mildewed in the mist


    "After Ptolemy"

Mortal, i know only this fleeting day
in which to dwell, yet when i let my mind
roam among the pathways of the stars,

then i'm no longer bound by earth, but stand
alongside Zeus, and share the divine ambrosia.

    "The Green Key"

pagodas of insomnia
forty hecatombs later
doublure
the King's Evil
noncompliant
the might of the Meerkins
robbers
an encyclopedia of Bloggs


    * * * *

white on black lettering
reflected in black rivers

knowing the refunds are here
police crack down on traffic violations

sky as in Zavijava
for a moment Tori Amos

on one side the shoulder falls away
and we keep swerving almost to the brink

color of deepest sleep, redolent of old
furniture & rooms a little dusty

what has happened to the struggle
of everyone? now everyone struggles

and though i should be heartened
i can't make the good news hopeful

i watch the foam rise almost to the brim
and think: we will have stars after this


    "Coöperate with Boötes"

1.
how little it takes
to enslave a man

a gun pointed
a command barked

a poet
to call it fate

2.
clubable

squalene
ferncool

tide
valor

thorn

3.
minstrel · wasabi
hologram cop cars

never quite sick
never quite well

where have i put them
once i was so certain of

4.
the ghostly incidence
alone reaping
from this ferment
of atomies

the white wages i sing
through springtime
and trees in flower

5.
During the whole of a dull
soccer sidecar
ruby flame a long ways off
rekindle
the thwarted apocalypse

    "The Man Who Played Dith Pran"

opened like a drain
the infinite paths of abjection

the things that accrue to one of these years
nothing has accrued

i who aspired to leave no trace
raven-brought clime
of Zubenelg


    "Star Witness in MySpace Suicide"

their crooked litanies gleam

the raven-fetched evangel
the never-ending sickness


    "A Book of Pyramid Architecture"

And those who perfectly know
and their speech, many-fathomed, churns
on the delicate cold air
and doesn't say
what they
have suffered
and we look away, ashamed to ask
the shadow of its darkness
the entirety of the long wounding
and those

who perfectly know


    "Miniature Groovy Wings"

twin cantors limn the fallen
outline of a monarch.
when i write, i siphon
garboil through my teeth,
and gurgle like a siphon.

the leader has no teeth.
amidst this night-fright fallen
only the worm reigns monarch,
of book-devourment monarch;
of hourglass the siphon.

lying through my teeth
to prove i've never fallen:
this protocol has teeth,
to use upon the fallen
from villager to monarch...

follow the gliding siphon.


"We strum our banjo-strings and call them lyres."
--Paul Laurence Dunbar


The Great Texas Airship Mystery.


"Survivalism, it seems, is not just for survivalists anymore."


Robosaurus.


One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula.

(via denney-net dot co dot uk)

    "Baisakhi"

swallow your tears, Storm Kennedy
Her mansion in this fleshly nook
to adorn the palanquin of our dreams
and singing, startle the dull night

a drop of water shall turn into a pearl
the cynosure of neighboring eyes
you guys are incomparable O travellers
not of war only, but destructions rude

memories of my childhood still lend fragrance to my breath
edged with the poplar pale
we can't decide our destiny, can we?
i've never been in this morgue before


    "For and Against the Veil"

The more i cling to hope the more it slips away
the refuge of denial thins

so long since the last
i have to start afresh

man pregnant with
potholey future
redbuds in bloom


    "Miasmatic Portico"

A row of crosses running along Royal
i can see through you
see to the real you
pigeons and billowing curtains

in a spare polar light
while winds outside prance
and revel
and shred each other

i can see for miles
and miles
to go before i sleep
and the pale crosses tilt

some this way some that


    "Terrifying Weekend"

i ask no peace, i ask no quarter, and i give none;
the whirling mist of the gray drone shortage is well
at morning, noon, and night my mind's aware
as a python of the rabbit he swallowed is always
of all the burning thistles in the desert
and all the deserts full of ragged thistles
and all those whose flesh is torn. i forget
hough there are times i do deny it, i lose
much, as i am given much, and Mt Rainer is a mountain
only saw that once, on my departure,
but i am carried far from the sight of land
as crawling shadows land on the upper deck


The Salt Roads.


"If instead of showing strength by spending billions on weapons of war, the West was to build a mosque on Ground Zero, it would be a remarkable symbol of our understanding of the Islamic point of view. It would be a major step towards world peace."


" 'I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?'

--Invisible in what spectrum?."


Art by Elephants archived.

    "A study of roadside bombs in Dallas county"

Gray phalanx
100 years of Cholera
bourse
the humane machine

the Moonstone is a harsh mistress


    "DJ Nontraditional Warfare"

tea of green and black
sea of gray and green
Elvis lives
heft the aubergine

march of folly ran
waking at the edge
Elvis lives
love is made of abs

farrago of lies
city of the dead
Elvis lives
treason of the turnstiles


    "Shoving Leopard"

Invasion Anniversary:
dirge & irksome shivaree...
Monsoon, then a sunny day
parade their insolidity.


    "Manifest Disney"

A blue bicuspid airspace
scripture code.
Go home and recollect the cries of the world.

Dirgebright at Baghdad.
A sharp edge of idealism
should we care

Within the chest-cage of Hanuman
canonical lack.



The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten.


More on Giraffes? Giraffes!.


The Family--not Manson's, but er,--worse!

    "The Southern Road

There the black river, boundary to hell.
And here the iron bridge, the ancient car,
And grim conductor, who with surly yell
Forbids white soldiers where the black ones are.
And I re-live the enforced avatar
Of desperate journey to a dark abode
Made by my sires before another war;
And I set forth upon the southern road.

To a land where shadowed songs like followers swell
And where the earth is scarlet as a scar
Friezed by the bleeding lash that fell (O fell)
Upon my fathers' flesh. O far, far, far
And deep my blood has drenched it. None can bar
My birthright to the loveliness bestowed
Upon this country haughty as a star.
And I set forth upon the southern road.

This darkness and these mountains loom a spell
Of peak-roofed town where yearning steeples soar
And the holy holy chanting of a bell
Shakes human incense on the throbbing air
Where bonfires blaze and quivering bodies char.
Whose is the hair that crisped, and fiercely glowed?
I know it; and my entrails melt like tar
And I set forth upon the southern road.

O fertile hillsides where my fathers are,
From which my griefs like trouble streams have flowed,
I have to love you, though they sweep me far.
And I set forth upon the southern road."

--Dudley Randall

Twenty three years ago today.

"Kum is a Cambodian word for a particularly Cambodian mentality of revenge--to be precise, a long-standing grudge leading to revenge much more damaging than the original injury." --Haing Ngor, Survival in the Killing Fields (1987)

    "Variations on a Theme by Joyce

The war is in words and the wood is the world
That turns beneath our rootless feet;
The vines that reach, alive and snarled,
Across the path where the sand is swirled,
Twist in the night. The light lies flat.
The war is in words and the wood is the world.

The rain is ruin and our ruin rides
The swiftest winds; the wood is whorled
And turned and smoothed by the turning tides.
--There is rain in the woods, slow rain that breeds
The war in the words. The wood is the world.
This rain is ruin and our ruin rides.

The war is in words and the wood is the world,
Sourceless and seized and forever filled
With green vines twisting on wood more gnarled
Than dead men's hands. The vines are curled
Around these branches, crushed and killed.
The war is in words and the wood is the world."

--Weldon Kees, The Fall of the Magicians (1947)

Blogiversary.


    "Marsh Languages

The dark soft languages are being silenced:
Mothertongue Mothertongue Mothertongue
falling one by one back into the moon.

Language of marshes,
language of the roots of rushes tangled
together in the ooze,
marrow cells twinning themselves
inside the warm core of the bone:
pathways of hidden light in the body fade and wink out.

The sibilants and gutturals,
the cave language, the half-light
forming at the back of the throat,
the mouth's damp velvet moulding
the lost syllable for "I" that did not mean separate,
all are becoming sounds no longer
heard because no longer spoken,
and everything that could once be said in them has
      ceased to exist.

The languages of the dying suns
are themselves dying,
but even the word for this has been forgotten.
The mouth against skin, vivid and fading,
can no longer speak both cherishing and farewell.
It is now only a mouth, only skin.
There is no more longing.

Translation was never possible.
Instead there was always only
conquest, the influx
of the language of hard nouns,
the language of metal,
the language of either/or,
the one language that has eaten all the others."

--Margaret Atwood, Morning in the Burned House (1995)


Giraffes? Giraffes!


"It seems self-evident that the whole mythology has collapsed."

    "The Cat Who Ate, Prayed, and Loved"

we could not see the trouble coming
happy in that golden time
we saw our normalcy unfurl
lunar in that golden time

we watched our rosy miracles
batten in the sweet sunshine
and all our deals with Moloch throve,
Moloch, in that golden time

we knew what we had done was wrong
to all the lesser echelons
which did not stop us glorying in
freedom in that golden time

our aspirations harry us
as gift by gift they slip away
such stuff as dreams are built on, we
abolish in that golden time


"In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large." (via SuperGee)

    "Khamsin Scree"

Askance isthmus skiff
fancy incognito scurry festering

filament
askance stereo charcoal

ambush mumchance astatine ostrich
akimbo

filament after office
afghan fandango indigo scurry cyst

filigree anguish
across rotten Ogpu anagrams


Carnivale.


Oceans of the solar system.


"The man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be."

    "Singing Pastor"

spiderous hamza
mortar · robot gecko
Baghdidn't
gray Earl Wyndham
Hamtaro
mortal Tarot


Richard Marsh.


"There was never any exit strategy."


"As a result, many attempt to sate the keening emptiness and mitigate the chronic unease by gorging themselves on the Junk Food Jesus of End Time mythology, which is a belief system wherein corporeal events and actions (personal and collective) have no lasting consequence because even the human body is to be cast aside, like a junk food wrapper, when the cosmic CEO decides to make the earth a part of his heavenly franchise."

(via ginacobb dot typepad dot com)


    “Politics of Gnosticism”

Gray domain, sad cyclical thirst for blood.
No gliding protocol in a maroon rain,
no hand of Fatima lights our haggard run;
but i will not admit that i’m afraid.
In this snaking baobab domain, command
wills its buzz through pliant skin and iron
and pours down Taproban to light a cairn,
cairn or monition told. This star is blind
on ruin thrown, and occult on fragrant blood
it calls forth from our flag a plastic doom.
Words among fathoms cold find tragic numb
in bloat-thrusting vault no click, its only food
annihilation and subfusc fuzzy thralldom.

    "Foaming Pipesnake"

the weather has turned mischievous
even as lately through wide eyes i saw
maggotjockeys
in the lonely temple that my heart is

it may be for nothing that we are
my green veils slips away
and you were hung up, dry, a fidgety ghost
stop flying high on that English

but in time the fading voice grew wise
whom do i hold it against?
i wouldn't wept at my state
as loyal as the thistle that in session

the Island won't let you


Dinos on the moon. (via Sclerotic Rings)

"Ecstasy and injury--who but the Russians would devise a word describing feelings the mind thinks of as incompatible but the heart knows belong together: umilenie [умиление]. It is an old-fashioned word you might find in Russian Bibles and Dostoevsky, describing a state of being in which you have been taken down, brought to your knees, humbled--when kaleidoscopic emotions of tenderness, humility, sadness, and rapture all wash through you." --Terri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (2006) --But according to Language Hat: To respond to the quote: aargh! Why do people feel this need to ascribe complex, untranslatable, nearly incommunicable meanings to foreign words? As the Wiktionary page says, the word means 'tender emotion'; it's not an everyday word, but it's not confined to the Bible and Dostoevsky either. Checking with Ruscorpora (an online Russian corpus) produces dozens of uses in recent literature; this quote from a 2001 novel by Bykov is representative: "The pine woods, pierced by sun, aroused quiet umilenie in the soul of the tired medical assistant."


"I look upon the geological record as a history of the world, imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines..." --Duncan quotes Charles Darwin in a 1955 letter, and goes on to say: "What if poetry were not some realm of personal accomplishment, open field day race for critics to judge, or animal breeding show--but a record of what we are, like the record of what the earth is is left in the rocks, left in the language? Then what do we know of poetry at all compared to this geology? and how silly we must look criticizing ...as if geologists were to criticize rather than read their remains."

   "A Secret 2 Deadly 2 b Shared"

Metroplex vacuity, thorn
garden

surrounded by sandalwood

and here
i watch gimp fisticuffs;
abide Bush countdown;
ply my aetherphone ve vreji

thookafied carriageway
murk jahiliyyah through
write on ras clat

insulin in da ice box



    "Baby Seal House Shoes"

A prayer for Eostar
pirate ship with a skeleton crew
a cufflink for the future
fire in their blood & doom in their eyes

i could not have done this
pirate ship with a skeleton crew
jungle hid pavilion
fire in their blood & doom in their eyes

    "Haberdashery"

Unfurl the map
stink-junkies use
in the language of fans.

Go,
manky Hanuman,
your parables
have too much cholesterol.

Sleepyheads
& refuseniks
share the same airspace.

The giant crab
is not an ideogram.



Chess in Idaho schools.

    "Vat Transmutation"

Wambly peripherals
from da reading otchkies.
Can't walk in dese.

Da
whispering unborn,
an army ov paper towels.

Sumfink escaping
worship sniffles
backup stain

flowering crab clouds
or dire chrysanthemum
goes 2 Ixtab

In da gossip pinds
a train ov lately undead
hunts 4 eyebright

concrete
terrain

inborn skint


I remember there was a trick, but i don't remember what the trick is.

    "The Year of the Smiling Music"

The morning is a thrum
black fistulas pursue:
O storytellers, come
and tell us something true.

All the thrills of noise,
and warfare too.
This rapture never cloys
like wretched limits do.

The rose tattoo
of a hurled bomb.
O storytellers, come
and tell us something true.


The Innocence Project.


"It was my hope to prove that cephalopods of a freshwater variety had once claimed the area as their uncontested domain."

(via Centauri Dreams)

    "On Fatalism

Not always wealth, not always force
A splendid destiny commands;
The lordly vulture gnaws the corpse
That rots upon yon barren sands.

Nor want, nor weakness still conspires
To bind us to a sordid state;
The fly that with a touch expires
Sips honey from the royal plate."

---The Holy Imam Shafay


Florilegium Anthropocene.


Khaufpur. (via Under the Fire Star)


"This is what I want to say today, at midnight on the Thursday I turn 72."

    "The Organ Trail"

Like water closing around a stone
the Lie reforms; the Lie will be reborn
tomorrow; there is nothing kills the Lie
but the clear light of stars that now have vanished

Acres of diamonds back the cowry shell


McDonaldization.


Why Fantasy and Why Now?


"Why is nonviolence so threatening?"

" 'Crossing the Odd, to some of the other abcities,' Jones said, 'if you're brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn't, or No York, or Helsunki, or lost Angeles, or Hong Gone, or Romeless...' " --Un Lun Dun (2007)


"There is no justice; there are only limits." --Notebooks of Camus


Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole.

    "Chocolate Ralston"

Haptic orology
interrogates a
bluegray dawn. I
am empty enough.
Killing an hour
until they come.
Such alien ways
have all the wan
and dismal gods.
Grasped as mist,
rune lightning.
Inly sap creeps.
No one is coming.


(1985)

Once i gave my name to the police as "Arthur C. Clarce" (note the third 'C'); duly documented in the Yippie anthology Blacklisted News.


"The poet's role is not to oppose evil, but to imagine it..." --Robert Duncan to Denise Levertov, 1971


    "Names of the Dead"

Locrian rain condom;
the mistletoe that hadn't sworn.

Pumpkin spice granola
plus coffee-flavored yogurt.

This subterranean light.
This war-eclipse of our reason.


"It was the writtenness of the epigram, as its essential feature, that for centuries confined it to the ranks of the minor arts, to the category of the decorative and the trivial." --Kathryn J Gutzwiller, Poetic Garlands (1998)


    "LVSTRVM"

Five years now the hobgoblin
fails to heel at our power.
Through the chull a lone pilgrim
goes in search of Nineveh.



"Your fighting spirit destroyed you in battle, Proarchus, and you by dying
cast the house of your father Phidias into black grief.
But the stone above you sings this lovely song,
that you died fighting for your countryland."

--Anyte of Tegea, op cit

    ""Carnage for the Chicken Hearted"

Monsoon gong abilify
crowded arable
stone embrasure lemming.
Blue bicuspid.
Slithy almond sunset ester

is blur alongside this
is can not see
more than a few;
a study of roadside bombs
in Dallas county.


Text of Obama's speech.


Living with War.


Starhawk deported from Israel. (via Cursor)


Japanese "Smoke on the Water". (thanx Melanie!)