"The greatest trick ideology ever pulled was convincing colonists they were rebels." --@unemployedneg
"Oracular Time
In this oracular time I sense you prowl,
My glistered demon, saint upon the coals
That quake to ash beneath your waking feet.
IUn this oracular time, the darkness climbs
Beyond the highest rung; illimitable Grace,
All space is you and moves in muffled shriek.
In this oracular time, how dare I speak."
--Lorita Whitehead
"XII
I escape from a feint, fluf for fluf.
A projectile I know not where it will fall.
Incertitude. Tramontation. Cervical articulation.
Zap of a horsefly that dies
in mid-air and drops to earth.
What would Newton say now?
But, naturally, you’re all sons.
Incertitude. Heels that don’t spin.
The knotted page, factures
five thorns on one side
and five on the other. Ssh! Here it comes."
--Cesar Vallejo, Trilce (tr C Eshleman, 1992)
"Theirs was a society subsisting, even thriving, on the brink of nonexistence--an enigma that repulsed wholesale deliberation by real people. And their habitats were all but ruins upon inauguration." --The Spectral Link
"Nevertheless, while all signs indicated the substance of what I had experienced, the real still remained as good as a guess. It always has. Yet the nightmare obtains sure, and sometimes may be shared." --The Spectral Link
srou jauza
sparaqa hayiqa
asyuca barai
pejapovatten
( 'crow/ Dog Days/ to visit for the last time// shadow of a camel' )
Mrs. Jeffreys Summons Her Master.
"Hot Air
So soft my pleasure came
Upon a dream,
Iced fire and frosted flame
It was, too brief for blame.
Yet sharp to seem
So soft. My pleasure came
And went--that was its shame,
Not that, supreme,
Iced fire and frosted flame,
It bore the ancient name
Harsh hearts blaspheme.
So soft my pleasure, came
A wind and woke me tame
To that regime
Iced fire and frosted flame
Had burnt to a black frame
Before their steam.
So soft, my pleasure, came
Iced fire and frosted flame."
--Vassar Miller, 1963
A Refusal to Anatomize Hauntology, in a Belated Year.
and the skies
move against us
were we wise,
and the skies
thick with flies
had not fenced us
and the skies
move against us
What if no religion used words? Imagine that they could impart, & urge to impart, certain rituals, behaviors & avoidances, & even the mental states appropriate to these, without the intermediary of language. There would be no question of faith, & none of truth. --And that is how i see them all. The immense mass of verbiage their adherents have created & continue to create, is to me only so much information pollution. Sometimes it is good poetry (oftener bad): that part is worth keeping. As poetry.
Green-ink letters. (via @saintsoftness)
"And temper foreign furrows with their gore" --Royston's Lycophron
"I believe in both palmistry and vaccination." --Ramón López Velarde
Blue.
as far from Woodstock
as Woodstock is from Armistice Day
bedizened malady
with perfect lipstick
take diff'rent pictures
of the same route
brillig Morgenrot
the cam'ra sequesters
back on Moonbase Alpha
in a world where Raygun lost
our farthest dreams surpassed
& the blueface fatwa
🦂.
"Ramón López Velarde: Wet Earth
Wet earth of liquid evenings when the rain
whispers and girls soften
under the redoubled pelting of the drops
of the roof terrace.
Wet earth of odoriferous evenings when
misanthropy toils up to the lascivious
solitudes of air and on them lights
with the last dove of Noah;
while the thunder crackles tirelessly
along the miry clouds.
We[t] evenings of steaming earth when I
acknowledge I am made
of clay, for the summer tears, beneath
the auspice of the light that is half gone,
the soul turns to water on the nails
of its cross.
Evenings when the telephone invites
naiads known for their knowingness,
who leave their bath for l[o]ve,
to strew their fatuous tresses on the bed
and to lisp, with perfidy and profit,
damp and panting monosyllables
as the fine rain harries the window-panes....
Evenings like an alcove under the sea,
its bed its bath;
evenings when a maiden
grows old in front of her extinguished hearth,
waiting for a swain to bring her a live coal;
evenings when on earth
angels descend to plough unerring furrows
on edifying fallows;
evenings of supplication and Pascal candles;
evenings when the squall
incites me to inflame
each frigid maiden with the opportune coal;
evenings when, my soul
oxidized, I feel
an acolyte of camphor,
slightly swordfish, slightly
Saint Isidore Labrador...."
—Translated from the Spanish by Samuel Beckett (via, with 2 typos corrected )
Neil Gaiman Reportedly Adapting Samuel R. Delany's "Nova" for Amazon.
"endless rain . . .
a grey moth
circles the lamp"
--@mkimdorman
"It feels like we’re alone in an abandoned mall." --@MollyJongFast
i cannot make amends,
a stranger to this shore;
what's strange in mountain lands
is stranger on the shore
the moon is ice on ice
still colder in the dawn
the ocean's hiss defends
no stranger on its shore
if any passage swerves
it seems to find no term
i know this passage ends
though stranger with its shore
those who leave it write
the melancholy scroll
in time the rhyme descends
a stranger on that shore
Graywyvern cocks an eye
at trees of flame and finery;
the season understands,
stranger, too, to this shore
𝗡⃥𝗼⃥𝗶⃥𝘀⃥𝗲⃥ 𝗲⃥𝘃⃥𝗲⃥𝗿⃥𝘆⃥𝘄⃥𝗵⃥𝗲⃥𝗿⃥𝗲⃥.⃥.
My specs, taped up, again resemble repaired.
My shoes slant where the heel's been ground away.
The hubbub in the hills gathers its strength
at wax of the moon, thereafter trickles away.
What one of us has graven on her blog
hovers a space, not long; then's tucked away.
The headlines catch a scrimmage on the wing,
count bodies strewn, let nascent shove it away.
Once this was where the fleeing sought their hope;
it's our turn now to shed, hope slipped away.
Saffron moon at dawn i'd have you delve
as i do, now my car gets towed away.
Graywyvern woned among green emmets whose veng
incurred deletion, while they moiled away.
I hope your weekend was a good one.
"He taught me how to take apart an ant-hill and find the caterpillar of a Blue which had concluded a barbaric pact with its inhabitants, and I saw how an ant, greedily tickling a hind segment of that caterpillar's clumsy, sluglike little body, forced it to excrete a drop of intoxicant juice, which it swallowed immediately. In compensation it offered its own larvae as food; it was as if cows gave us Chartreuse and we gave them our infants to eat." --Nabokov, The Gift (tr Scammell & VN, 1963)
Welcome Dear Computer. Connect Me To The Social Network.
"Whenever its name has been anything but a jest, philosophy has been haunted by a subterranean question: What if knowledge were a means to deepen unknowing? It is this question alone that has differentiated it from the shallow things of the earth. Yet the glory and also the indignity of philosophy is to have sought the end of knowing, and no more." --Nick Land
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.
"LEAVES (Triolet)
Whose sorrow grew these hanging hosts
that rustle in the endless breeze?
The forest holds a court of ghosts
whose sorrow grew. (These hanging hosts
were sentinels of ancient posts,
but now are noosed to nameless trees.)
Whose sorrow grew these hanging hosts?
That rustle, in the endless breeze...."
--Anthony Etherin
Fornax Void - Mercurius Machina.
"I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught." --Winston Churchill
I really, really want the inside of my quantum laptop to look like thi.
“ 'Courage does not take much account of other people,' said Matthew.
'All qualities leave victims in their wake,' said Rachel. 'Look at truthfulness and justice.' " --@icomptonburnett
Containment, quantification...
"write a tanka poem about brutalist architecture
Concrete giants rise,
Brutalist structures command,
Raw strength on display,
Harsh lines, shadows of the past,
Beauty in brutal embrace."
--ChatGPT
"OWL (Palindrome)
Too held in its tide,
tan, a meek owl woke,
emanated its tin, idle hoot."
--@Anthony_Etherin
Tumbleweed moments everywhere.
"He allowed himself to love these streets, as though they were a poem he had once memorized, and the years when he had first seen these colors and stones and studied these faces seemed a rich and vauable part of what he was now." --The Master
"We isolate, we exile our great men, whether by ignoring them or praising them stupidly. And perhaps this isolation we offer them is our greatest gift." --Conrad Aiken
The roof, where it was possible to dwell,
was its own world. Not that you could see
very far at all. But from the roof
ev'ry view was looking down. The roof
gave of itself this boon & that was all
you needed on the lovely roof. A dome
had one time been attempted. The bare rods
grew streaked with rust. I never went up there
to visit. From across the street i watched.
"XXXIII
Then came I to the shoreless shore of silence,
Where never summer was nor shade of tree,
Nor sound of water, nor sweet light of sun,
But only nothing and the shore of nothing,
Above, below, around, and in my heart:
Where day was not, not night, nor space, nor time,
Where no bird sang, save him of memory,
Nor footstep marked upon the marl, to guide
My halting footstep; and I turned for terror,
Seeking in vain the Pole Star of my thought;
Where it was blown among the shapeless clouds,
And gone as soon as seen, and scarce recalled,
Its image lost and I directionless;
Alone upon the brown sad edge of chaos,
In the wan evening that was evening always;
Then closed my eyes upon the sea of nothing
While memory brought back a sea more bright,
With long, long waves of light, and the swift sun,
And the good trees that bowed upon the wind;
And stood until grown dizzy with that dream;
Seeking in all that joy of things remembered
One image, one of the dearest, one most bright,
One face, one star, one daisy, one delight,
One hour with wings most heavenly and swift,
One hand the tenderest upon my heart;
But still no image came, save of that sea,
No tenderer thing than thought of tenderness,
No heart or daisy brighter than the rest;
And only sadness at the bright sea lost,
And mournfulness that all had not been praised.
O lords of chaos, atoms of desire,
Whirlwind of fruitfulness, destruction's seed,
Hear now upon the void my late delight,
the quick brief cry of memory, that knows
At the dark's edge how great the darkness is."
--Conrad Aiken, "Preludes for Memnon"
"Elon Musk is like a Scooby Doo villain who dresses up as a ghost to scare everyone away from the theme park but forgets that his business is theme parks" --@DrMatthewSweet
Gerty Gerty Gerty Stein is Back Back Back.
"Twitter is a former conference hotel that got sold off to a budget chain and now the pool is drained, the parking lot is potholes and breakfast is Great Value cornflakes" --@Sensualcmt via Mark Saltveit on mastodon
duck into rabbit
by magic of cicadas
& then neither one
suddenly shadows perish
spun of mechanical prayer
Ģ̴̶̸̴̭͍̰̘̟̜̈́̎̔ͣ̄̂́ͪ̚͡M̶̷̢͈̬̞̗̤̞͆̉ͮͦͭͮ͋̂͘͝_̢̲̯̟̭͐͐.
"Fibonacci Aelindrome
1-1-2-3-5-8-13
No sires
a progeny
of tenacious sums,
we deny,
often,
a progression."
--Anthony Etherin, from Fabric
Plano Rona LP. (One drawback with reversing a primitive electronic album, i belatedly realized, is that pure generated-waves such as sine & square are highly symmetrical, thus changing relatively imperceptibly when run backwards. Almost any other sound-source would be more noticeable! The differences i can hear are more due to the control device itself: attack, sustain, & fade, which become, perhaps, a cumulative effect of slightly-increased uncanniness.)
"An apocalypse is the opposite of a dream. A dream is falser than the outer life. But the end of the world is more actual than the world it ends." --GK Chesterton
〜⚪︎〜.
"He knew that there was no point in claiming that if the play had needed cuts he would have made them before he finished it. Every day now he made excisions, and he thought it strange that after a few hours, he remained the only one who noticed the gaps, the missing moments." --Colm Tóibín, The Master
accumulation
other rule of entropy
clutter increases
in the house & in the mind
can't find what you're looking for
as if anyone
could make things clear · not the clear
more than the obscure
chirring waves overhead blend
into the heat of summer
"If one is defective, as are we all in some way, being uniquely defective is something of a consolation in the absence of a cure." --The Spectral Link
C o d e ⇾ s t r u c t u r e s.
