( via zach whalen on tw / via )

Night and Sleep.

“If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.” —William Godwin via

A Signal from Mars March and Two-Step.

“AS I LAY WITH MY HEAD IN YOUR LAP CAMERADO.

AS I lay with my head in your lap camerado,
The confession I made I resume, what I said to you and the open air I resume,
I know I am restless and make others so,
I know my words are weapons full of danger, full of death,
For I confront peace, security, and all the settled laws, to unsettle them,
I am more resolute because all have denied me than I could ever have been had all accepted me,
I heed not and have never heeded either experience, cautions, majorities, nor ridicule,
And the threat of what is call’d hell is little or nothing to me,
And the lure of what is call’d heaven is little or nothing to me;
Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still urge you, without the least idea what is our destination,
Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d and defeated.”

—Leaves of Grass

Jenkem.

( Leonora Carrington - The Ancestor - 1968 / me )

1-Day Perspective.

   through a churn of smoke
myst'ry entered our hovels
   lobbed there to remain

(despite the stories we told)
—& now it is as crystal

Why I Write.

“I will not be outfaced by irrational things,
I will penetrate what it is in them that is sarcastic upon me”

—Leaves of Grass

Monkey Riding a Four-Headed Beast.

( via/ suzanne dyson via ruth reifeis on fb )

Runway Mothra.

   "Then you will begin
to burn the deserts.“ –Bill Knott

The Dream of the Rood.

tor of dearths
at the one war no one wants to enlist
word salad parses

the Praha clock delights a sober deist
car delivery caters
all our fierce inlets

the hardest
is adding idleness to our fun diets
frayed records in dust-caked crates

outside the walkers pass & repass
we drive without spares
to go back sev'ral edits

another mass shooting & how one reacts
depends upon the choice of hatreds
none listen

dug in but badly sited
you try to leave minimal traces
oracles silent

& i realize my final record is sparse
these frayed threads
say the biopic should be recast

feathered spears
on the wall hung · i let that contact be trashed
& cherished tinsel

at my feet ravenous tides

Song for Judee.

( me / @beeple )

Trail lifted bodily.

the Ever Given eludes our GRIPS
at the all-clown RODEO

IDEAL
soldiers sue for PEACE

wearing out all the parts of my shoes but SOLES
my shade, my terrible FETCH

moiré of the sky fidget EERIE
die this way is TRITE

something Einstein never said but gets CITED
victim HEEDS

wind rising · nothing on the RADAR
dead poet live one ADORES

cheer new DOLES
wear a mask & shudder at the ones who ARENT

cadge seventh-day RESTS

Dust on the Wind.

"To bore not one man, name not one robot." —@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Sound of Harris.

( via / @archillect )

Rusty Cage.

“how I thought of my well-worn books,–and our boxes of laughing bricks” —A Humument

Tanka.

"forensic analysis of the loopy D"

hollow glitz of glee-slog
détour glower meeting
the street has its stray zap
dodged strifeward codger
soundtrack & retreat call
breeze betraying season

Changing light across the walls.

( via/ painted by an elephant named khankluay )

Rionnard.

non-Euclidean DARTS
yet bulls’-eyes AWAIT
on the weather RADAR

thorny TIARA
sunglasses on a STRAP
salvagable FAUST

elegy’s AORTA
swerves with strange URGES
butterfly eats a STEAK

the magical TASKS
of a non-face BARER
pangolins ATONE

candelabra ROMAN
new edicts ENACT
thugs who collect the RENTS

Concerto de Arañjuez.

” ‘I came to Seattlehama to think about existence, contemplate the flow of time, and to learn how to play the steam koto.’ “ –Jon Armstrong, Yarn (2010)

Greatest crime.

( via / via )

"It’s the kind of Netflix special Terrence Malick would have filmed."

“Bedecker of imminences, bedecker
of the parenthesis.”

—David Smith’s Trilce

After Masking.

i have taken much too long
to round the Cape
& be headed home

the parrots
are in an uproar

i have taken much too long
to round the Cape
& be headed home

(2021)

My Halloween Gambit game.

( via / me )

Flintlocks.

"We: faded light, a path;
gilded all in art lumina.
Madness went —I say—
away, all lit.

Solemn, ill, I was sent.
I was a bird,
a sad rib;
as a witness:
a will in me lost.

I’ll lay away as it.
News, send a man.
I’m ultra nil, laded light.
A path gilded a few.”

—Merlina Acevedo

The Triumphant Chariot of Antominy.

"Those who are vulnerable move among mysteries." --Roethke

"Often, two subsequent feelings arrive to shore up our initial repulsion: first, a sense of righteous protectiveness over the hallowed tradition being milled into schlock, and second, resentment that someone else is enjoying a readership." (via aldaily)

( canyonlands national park, gustavo travaglini on fb / me )

No more "homework".

“Maybe the ocean is the bardo and everywhere you land is karma.” –The Great Offshore Grounds

A blogger's story.

indeed i dree cerecloth
dead reckoning buncombe
with a shardborn relish

shown empathy's mothwings
delivered to tatters

"The true story of the hunt will not be told until the lion learns to write."

( me / me )

The Light Fantastic.

wind inside me
not like the wind outside

the wind is a castle
the wind is a thought
reddish-brown roofs
& a day without sunshine

swamped by ghosts
& only rid of them with night

(2021)

“…the modern term for philosophy, tetsugaku (哲学), which roughly translates as ‘the learning of the sages’ in letter, was a neologism coined during this period by the progressive Enlightenment scholar Nishi Amane.” (via dailynous)

“down the rusty rails
flowers bloom
no one replaces you”

–@poem_exe

Tanka.

( via / me )

A jovian exoplanet for Alpha Centauri A.

I just discovered that kviðuhattr can be sung to the "Magnificent Seven" theme.

"The body is the first archive."

hedge-blizzard maxims
view of a heliport line
& wraiths whispering

even this close to being
released · the same whispering

(2021)

Mountain stream backwards.

( via / via )

👀🧩.

The Literature of Stars.

orbs that can be worn
a rock on my pocket
is the Moon

compliance

With Shestov in Ukraine.

“We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to hell.”

—Franz Kafka, in a letter to Oskar Pollak (via wood_s lot)

Fist crushing a scorpion.

( via / via )

Because When I Go Home, My House Is Still There.

"The law of sequence in natural phenomena seems so plausible, so obvious, that one is tempted to look for its origin, not in the realities of actual life, but in the promptings of the human mind.”

— Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible via @philosophybits.com

While This Beast Drinks Poison, a Snake Sucks His Blood.

"i summon you"

enemy ice, whisper
ask not what your task is
what your task is
downed trees fend the trestle
true elegy smudgefire
elegy smudgefire

elegy smudgefire

Mood.

( via / via )

"When I slowed the movement and found the date I wanted, I looked at the screen for some time, feeling a detached fascination, a clash of impulses, really -- I think I was trying to be objective in the face of something revealed, an unexpected connection, a symmetry that seemed to be waiting for someone to discover it." (via Mefi)

      "ballade of the blood moon"

   a sad word
as the winds kill
   trust shattered
no share until
   & the bill
will be born soon
   our maw's krill
is a blood moon

   the sick herd
houses his will
   fray scattered
skullface windmill
   dying hill
& no derne boon
   got blanched chill
from this blood moon

   sorry flerd
flogs its pain pill
   our flag's bird
guts in its bill
   silos spill
for spank buffoon
   nightmares still
each new blood moon

   snap my quill
snubbing ice goon
   cages fill
cagmag's blood moon

The Loch Ness Monster's song.

"Rock music is built on distortion: on the idea that things are enriched, not degraded, by noise." —Brian Eno

"Sun, time, death—the universe forms in carnivores."

( via / me )

Marie Antoinette.

"CROW (Palindrome)

Deft,
I saw a crow,
over us,
a sure vow or caw
as it fed."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Where the wild winds are.

"Breakwater

Feel the wind slap on water;
watch small ripples, unruffled, rising
until whitecaps race

and the helm heels over:
past the last buoy the bow slaps against breakers,
harrowed to safe berth."

—Paul D. Deane

Triolet.

( me / via )

Did i know any good apocalypses?

sienna sky
over Anaheim
tenor arguments err

bear-worn caverns
like my brain by words

Valentine Out of Season.

"The cardinal importance accruing to number symbolism in ancient China may be gauged from the fact that every dynasty selected a number as a kind of modulus for its reign. The chosen number might be one of the numbered tones in the old pentatonic music, which automatically linked it to one of the five colours. It followed from this that when a change in dynasty took place, the colour of court dress had to be altered, and a new scale chosen for the court music..." —Wolfram Eberhard, A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols (1983)

Hex words revisited.

( me / via )

Looth compromised lurk.

Watching people drive explains to me why they vote the way they do.

Starting gun.

eclipse passed with close ties
the blood-clotted lotto
antelucan ichor
slaking ice-thirst pursestrings
O moon long our mingled
lure & mutter cutoff
beneath whose gaze gather
army-gobbling hobbits

"The deeply flawed worldview of John Muir did protect some places from development, and it begat the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, which became Earthjustice, which just recently went to court and won a preliminary injunction against Alligator Alcatraz, on environmental grounds, in a suit to which the Miccousukee Tribe was party."

( via / via )

Encounters of the Nth Kind.

blood moon & the blind gaze
bleeze-leamericks curtain
scripture whiplash scrying
scruff nibbled-at lulldoom

Monstrous Moonshine aelindrome.

"Across this dun September atmosphere" —Trumbull Stickney

Reawaken ambition.

( me / via)

God.

“enlarge upon bankrupt ants and be relieved from doctrines” –@everyadage

Wruxled in White.

In the subfusc before-the-storm
imprecation of sky i taste
there is nothing of Innsmouth. Harlequin,
laugh. Hazards of absinthe,
but nothing of the Old Gods.
What was sunken shall rise, streaming;
what was fallen shall rule.
In the subfusc before-the-storm crisis

i can only think of Innsmouth's absence.

(2018)

My ridiculous drottkvaett writing process.

( via / me )

"She is a wolf disguised as a sheep, lurking to prey on the weaker wolf."

bright overcast eggshell
our bustle & faring fazed
almost feasibly
as tanks crunch concrete

rapt dream in the dark
crawling din
a story in grim stirrings

bright overcast eggshell

From the Files of Jack Stalnaker.

"In dust must splendid lads go down and choke,
Red dry their hands and dry their one day's sun
From which they earthward fall to fiery tomb
Bomb-weighted, from bloodying children's hair."

—Gene Derwood

The Blackness of the Grackle. Some 2018 afterthoughts.

( me / via )

Stolpersteine.

“Elle moves her queen’s knight ahead two spaces and one space west.” —Black Helicopters (=Durkin’s Attack)

A Late Walk. (via @evecastle.bsky.social)

we flee in wolf-pursued SLEDS
from the prospect of a permanent LABEL
clouds are EBONY

radar DENSE
with red · though ransomware is SLYER
poetry should be left-FLUSH

witness-statement trembling & LANKY
the daws just UNDID
blind SKIER

metalflake Cadillac -plane (skidding) HYDRO-
pivot to pick an ASTER
or pump SHALE

waiting on TAXES
“living longer” like it was mine to ELECT
symphony of Brutalist crisp RESTS

UTD Brutalist Flickr set. (When i was going there, i called it “Dr Strangelove without the Bomb.”)

( via / wikipedia?—i proposed for lojban )

"Snails were the guardians of the Pi ratios of the vault."

Out here, beside the turquoise pool,
unshielded from the traffic sounds,
i yet may dream of frozen moons—
or lying on a sun-dry towel.

No inspiration trammels where
the clockwork of a verse-wright grinds.
So Gautier who took such pains
could lose the tuning of his lyre.

Two shades of weathered wood enclose,
& both still darkened by the damp.
Some birds i hear, who sound like hope,
& less like all the other jazz.

Perhaps i may be on the mend
after so many days spent tiptoe
high on a wire, no ground in sight:
& uncompanioned save by wind.

Lifeforms.

Tribunal from the distant future. Brings up a 21c human for questioning. Who is unable to provide anything but lying or nonsensical answers, to every question.

Theme from Laura.

( kenmei fukiage in asemic on fb / Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners [1887] by Alexandre Cabanel [French, 1823-1889]. Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp. As described in Plutarch's Lives [Mark Antony] via The Long Victorian )

The Beauty of Cyberpunk.

“A caliph rebuilds the Taj Mahal out of nightmares.” –@MagicalRealismBot
(Somehow this sounds like 𝑎𝑛 𝑒𝑝𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑝ℎ 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒 21𝑐.)

One of Wales’s most infamous hauntings.

“CHOIR OF STRINGS (Palindrome)

Noise: Lyre.
Venom: music.
I’m any drone,
risen or of speed.

Divas send, as stress,
a mood for a bass.

A bar of doom
asserts sadness:
avid deeps,
for one siren or dynamic.

I summon every lesion…”

—@AnthonyEtherin/ @anthonyetherin.bsky.social

"So, am I done resurrecting Russophone Hollywood?"

( laura ostteen in dallas filth on fb / via )

Chess limericks.

“a summer shower
skeleton
now mine”

—@poem_exe

My Father Returns as a Luna Moth.

“For all’s not gold that glitters; and everything that makes an inky black aqueous solution isn’t the pure oxyrhodomate salt of platinum.” –@HarrySKeeler

System and Diaectics of Art.

( via / me )

Skyscraper.

“Whilst Viking knights fight griffins, I skirmish with the riddling sphinx…” –𝐸𝑢𝑛𝑜𝑖𝑎

"I wanted it to look like Dostoevsky's notebooks."

muezzin of nothingness
we frame with a crossing of wires
attentive to all the blurs
though they be tidingless

O Tower of Darkness sere
i have made my approach
perfected this tinny speech
to one that threads the door

"I’ve always had a strong feel for the 7 African Powers, who I feel have aways blessed me."