( via / me )

A sequence from the ROLIS camera on Philae from the descent to the first touchdown in the Agilkia landing site.

"Flappings of fear, great wheeling shapes of dread,
Tremours and shudderings shook me on the way..."

--J Stanyan Bigg

"But what is more than curious — indeed, piquant to a degree — is that an ancient god of storm and frenzy, the long quiescent Wotan,should awake, like an extinct volcano, to new activity, in a civilized country that had long been supposed to have outgrown the Middle Ages."

"How to Outlive a Rapist

His living haunted like the dead.
Even after his actual death.
The carefree girl I was,
the woman I become, side by side
staring down at his gravestone.
All three of us no longer
wearing the same face.
Death cheated. We can’t
get his stain off our skin.
Every breath we take trembles,
leaves wind surfing an open grave.
We stopped screaming for daddy,
long after our throats gave out.
She stayed with him; I grew older.
Today, both of us are wearing
phantom black and blue
neckties in his dishonor.
The girl loosens her grip on me
and fades back in memory,
back to when she skipped along
railroad tracks, arms outstretched.
I miss her, that part of me
who never had a chance
to test her wings.
I want the pieces of her
buried with him,
to sing to him in his grave.
Everything that hurt us
becomes a ghost."

--@sageravenwood.bsky.social via

"Navalny survives by savouring every cup of coffee and boiled egg, memorising the Sermon on the Mount in four languages, writing to his supporters and imagining that he’s on a spaceship headed for the Beautiful Russia of the Future."

( via / via )

Big Yellow Taxi.

"I wake up in the dark.
In dark I went to sleep.
There is a kind of stark
Accounting of lost sheep.

The day breaks with a dawn
So much like yesterday’s.
I turn the kettle on
And brew a dark malaise.

Things go from bad to worse,
Let’s call it entropy.
The blessing is a curse,
And treachery goes free

Or something. Never mind,
Here in the cradle of
Democracy I find
There’s history enough —

There on the shining rock
The entasis of state,
The subtle curves that lock
The crooked to the straight.

The centuries were slow
Where stood its solid scenes,
It took one night to blow
The roof to smithereens.

It boasts of Marathon,
It boasts of Salamis
Five generations on,
Of hemlock’s bitterness,

Between, the city nations
Of Greeks warred tribe with tribe
Why trouble with invasions?
It’s easier to bribe.

We still read Athens’ versions,
As though the Spartans lost,
As though the prudent Persians
Did not know what they cost.

Pericles died of plague,
And Phidias in prison.
Division’s sown, and vague
Suspicions have arisen.

It took nine years to build
Those columns in the air,
But half its marbles spilled,
Over fifty to repair.

It’s like a foundered ship,
That ruin on the hill.
It makes my heartbeat skip.
I’m afraid it always will."

--@aestallings.bsky.social via

The control tower in Acapulco. (via @billmckibben.bsky.social)

"For all of the adults were like the shadows of grotesque puppets dancing on a wall, and none was responsible. The puppeteer they dreamed of did not exist although he moved the strings."

--Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling via @anth.garrett.bsky.social via @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social

"It adds insult to injury to have this be the last thing you see before the black bag goes over your head."

( me / via )

"Too old to carry arms and to fight like others..." (via @mitchnobis.bsky.social via @joriegraham.bsky.social)

"The new Defense Secretary says women shouldn’t be in combat. The new Ambassador to Israel says the West Bank and Gaza don’t exist. The new Homeland Security Secretary is a dogkiller. The new SoS had a dick-measuring contest with Trump. Musk—who secretly talks to Putin—has an illegal job.

It’s Day 7" --@sethabramson.bsky.social

Shine.

"I was washing at night out in the yard

I was washing at night out in the yard—
the heavens glowing with rough stars.
A star-beam like salt upon an axe,
the water barrel brimful and cold.

A padlock makes the gate secure,
and conscience gives sternness to the earth—
hard to find a standard anywhere
purer than the truth of new-made cloth.

A star melts in the barrel like salt,
and the ice-cold winter is blacker still,
death is more pure, disaster saltier
and earth more truthful and more terrible."

--By Osip Mandelstam (tr Peter France) via @henryghenrik.bsky.social

Gruel and Piano. (via @vikshirley.bsky.social)

( me/ / via )

The day after.

Catabolic Dispensation · & the cyst grins
nabbed normalcy · nudges the clown
interregnum rife · with ruined hopes
our hoardings heaped · with helpless pathos
cling to clouds · & precluded off-ramps
there's a dragon dreary · as a land without heroes

"We've had the two hottest years in the last 125,000 and it's barely registered."

A ninny & a narcissist went into a bar. He was served at once.

Play with Fire.

( via via mefi / via )

X-ray Eyes.

"Relics of a former world!
   Medals of Creation’s birth!
Ere Hist’ry her page unroll’d,
   Or man was tenant of the earth;

Say, in those early days of Time
   Did Angel spirits dwell below?
And free from passion, pain, and crime,
   In this terrestrial Eden grow?

’Mid groves of Palms, and spicy bow’rs,
   Whose verdure never knew decay,
And blooming with perpetual flow’rs,
   Gave out their sweets eternally;

Did those Celestials love, and live,
   And quaff eternal happiness;
Enjoying all this world can give,
   But free from man’s infirmities?

Or was the Earth, as now, th’abode
   Of Beings doom’d like me to err,
Whose path-way to the throne of God,
   Led through the gloomy sepulchre?

We seek in vain from ye to know,
   Relics of Ages long gone by!
Enough! Whate’er man’s fate below
   He’ll live in bliss beyond the sky!

Yes! Man, the erring child of Heav’n,
   Tho’ toss’d on this life’s troubled sea,
His failings, and his sins forgiv’n,
   Shall rise in Immortality!"

--Gideon Mantell via @aestallings.bsky.social

hacked eclipse predictor
prismatic unwisdom
furl · there are clouds snarling
in the selcouth welkin
your supply teeth-cloying

"Unless somehow stopped or talked out of this plan, it will be remembered as the first step in remaking the military from an apolitical force loyal to the Constitution into a MAGA Military, pledging fealty to Donald Trump."

( via / via )

I Hate This Place.

cancerreturn cornball
arcane spawn of brainworms
teadust cardboard tiredness
taunt born of the gaunt shades

"The endless memes of Trump as Rambo and rescuers and Jesus show how much the lost boys and Maga women want an authoritarian leader, and the fact they can make one out of the physically and mentally pathetic Trump is a testimony to the power of tech-fueled fantasy."

"For now, anyway, stories of ghosts. Death & ageing. Undependable epistemes rather than undependable narrators. Nostalgia as a complex resource. The admission of vulnerability." --@mjohnharrison.bsky.social

"...is Plato’s Socrates the ‘real’ Socrates, or a mouthpiece for Plato’s own views, or somewhere in between?"

( via / via )

Robots Smoking Cigarettes.

"I think it did amaze the Cyclades
To see me writing verses on the seas."

--1672 Ovid, IX.

"Real Roman Colosseum shit. ...And this helped me understand how the election happened."

"Glittering-throned, undying Aphrodite,
Wile-weaving daughter of high Zeus, I pray thee,
Tame not my soul with heavy woe, dread mistress,
   Nay, nor with anguish !

But hither come, if ever erst of old time
Thou didst incline, and listenedst to my crying,
And from thy father's palace down descending,
   Camest with golden

Chariot yoked: thee fair swift-flying sparrows
Over dark earth with multitudinous fluttering,
Pinion on pinion, through middle ether
   Down from heaven hurried."

--Symonds's Sappho via

"The literal end of the world does not excuse you from doing the best you can."

( via / via )

"I do not think we were wrong to try, but I do think this moment calls for adjustments."

"Call me
by our old name.
The one we had down there,
when we were set alight in the
darkness."

--@xxyxxy.bsky.social

"A cliff made, on closer inspection, of something friable between mud and stone."

"Continuing my comfort re-watch of MCU movies I watched some of Winter Soldier, a lighthearted film about Nazis taking over institutions of American government with a plan to eliminate undesirable citizens en masse. Very escapist!" --@tomtomorrow.bsky.social

"Never before have we seen these numbers."

( 66th perijove photo / via )

Pavane.

"I am wearied almost to death with the retrograde motions of things." --George Washington, 1776 letter

"How fascinating, herr himmler", detailed oil painting, hieronymous bosch.

otherkin gulag anthem
halcyon henchmen skies
ill hap used
in the lurgy labyrinth

London Calling.

( via / via )

"They’ve lived through all five mass extinctions..."

snowflake sunned in the furnace
burly bird flu season
see the bailiff
with his rods tied tight

snowflake cursing & cadging
tidbits of calm
his half-formed hatch
not at all certain of serving

Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.

"With Stupidity and sound Digestion a man may front much." --Carlyle

New Jupiter pics.

( me / via )

Cheaper Eggs.

"For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live forever." --Thomas Carlyle

Backyard aurora.

"Celebration of Failure

Through pain the land of pain,
Through tender exiguity,
Through cruel self-suspicion:
Thus came I to this inch of wholeness.

It was a promise.
After pain, I said,
An inch will be what never a boasted mile.

And haughty judgement,
That frowned upon a faultless plan,
Now smiles upon this crippled execution,
And my dashed beauty praises me."

--Laura (Riding) Jackson

Won't Back Down.

( via / me )

" 'American reality stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates,' [Roth] writes, 'and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist'." (via @mckenziewark)

the Devil three times
has to be asked
those are the cursed terms
the devil three times

but now the Fox teams
with ready lies are tasked
the Devil three times
has to be asked

"Rage is a form of prayer too."

"howling like a damp dog in November" --Basil Bunting

Tarantula Nebula.

( via / via )

Five minutes' hate, detailed oil painting, hieronymous bosch, norman rockwell.

"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason."

--Sir John Harington via @ae_stallings

Five minutes' hate, detailed oil painting, hieronymous bosch (another try).

"To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing

Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors' eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult."

-W.B. Yeats via ilya kaminsky via sheryl st germain on fb

In Jabalia camp.

( via / via )

Entering Gaza City. (via @mosababutoha)

once there was a gas they used for cooling
until they found out it messed with the ozone layer

i think that was the last time all the world
could see a vital problem & correct it

last times, last times, who could count them all
with all this neat stuff filling up my feed

yet i will live to tell from under the overpass
the face of the last tornado filling the sky

Family of Bones.

"The world has become too twined, too insalubrious with suffering, to float through it, as if one had the right to be anywhere." --Gary Indiana, Do Everything in the Dark (2003)

Five Minutes' Hate.

( via/ via )

Common Man.

"Gone into the night, complicit,
a star-
porous leaf
for a mouth:

something remains
for wild wasting,
treeward."

— Paul Celan (translated by Katharine Washburn & Margret Guillemin) via @isidro_li

Work Song.

  who will be the first
he will come for?--this question
  ricochets the room

a kind of numbed hush flickers
on the handheld tiny screens

Five Spanish pioneers. (via miekal on fb)

( via / via )

Naked Brunch.

  bully in bully pulpit
like it's a new TV show
  awaiting ratings

& the stocks take a jump for
private prison companies

I Try to Keep in Touch.

"Wooing with whitest hands this angel's love" --J Stanyan Bigg

Two Hangers.

( via / via )

Final Speech. (thx Melanie!)

"Sarah Longwell, who studies focus groups, told NPR, 'When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, "What is an authoritarian?" ' " via

Dance Me to the End of Love.

they made war their passion
in the final days
like they wanted nothing
human left to stand

like they wanted nothing
living left on earth
nothing of their treasures
nothing of their hopes

in the last days of humans
they made war their aim
all that they were good for
judging from the spoils

puzzling should another
species find their toys
cast on nearer planets
out of the burnt-out crib

Otherside.

( via / me )

"Putin played the long game, and he won." (via @jorie_graham)

dawn sky reflected in the night pool

my map apart in shreds

"Where is the novel about this?"

"You write poems
because you need
a place
where what isn’t may be"

-Alejandra Pizarnik via @blanc_alba

Not a Pretty Girl.

( historic dallas grp on fb [1950] / remember? )

The new planet may not be what you think.

for J. A.

Long ago · in other dark times
A few friends gathered · to practice poetry
And whether whelmed · by the dark like most
Or immortally blazed · in the world’s blear eyes
It was ever · such a circle
And affirmed now · in such a friend

One of Us.

  now begins the race
of his failing faculties
  & his heir's stark greed

not to mention betrayal
may fetch him a shiv from Kyiv

"...imagine Roosevelt had not only remained shamefully neutral in the Spanish Civil War but gave Franco the bombs to drop on Guernica." (via @aliner)

( via/ via )

"Today the Trump family posed for a post-election photo. Missing from the group was former first lady Melania Trump.."

"So if that I am any thing, 'tis thine,
And none through thee, to spoil me more were able,
Who wisht to see me bear a shipwrack table."

--1672 Ovid, V.

"There is nothing..."

"a labyrinth is not a maze"

begin in murk · as many things must
nor can i conjure · lithe prospering
a house hoists · its haven-bones well
the spray of the years · ergo respects
while these days dour · demonstrate building
on sands frail shapes · surely tumbledown

Chemische Lust auf glückliche Nacht.