rattatat-tat the rain chortles
sun risen but dim quizzical
heartache of nil-verdict vespers
reverse time's bad curse we'd squandered
"Frog and Toad went out to fly a kite. They went to a large meadow where the wind was strong.
'Our kite will fly up and up,' said Frog. 'It will fly all the way up to the top of the sky.' " —@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social
"Celadon to me always has been the colour of eternity."
“For what Ausonius and Claudian, amid many futilities and falsities, did manage at their best to make an expressive instrument becomes in the hands of Sidonius a hopelessly clumsy and dull mechanism. Yet he clearly has an almost frantic enthusiasm for the worn devices of rhetoric, and the stereotypical literary activity in which he and his friends delighted was felt by them as a noble expression of the tradition in all its fullness.” –Song of a Falling World
ricochets
my share grizzled
amber lunge
in the left squares
nothing moves
mountains of grief
imago
geometry
you look at
others' losses
lapse inly
out of whiplash
continue
the tarn daysail
imago
geometry
of course some
semblance will dwell
this ruin
rat-populous
poets too
will pullulate
imago
geometry
none of us
could narrate
none of us
described anguish
like the ones
in their war tents
imago
geometry
what is left
but lug hammering
mask adjust
in the murk glare
words erode
ridden by deaths
imago
geometry
suppose us freed · frack-clownishness
how can we hew · having seen bugswarm
routine reives much · & sweeps away
clobbering mishaps · clasped like mainchance
the neighbor · a Gadsden rag gives
shivers a morning · mirthless & wanhope
suppose return · to taking for granted
working ways · wanting but furtherance
eyes meet · in the midst of payback
who did you betray · when trust was a tinderbox
“The full moon, now, rears with unhastening speed,
sketches the black ridge-end, slides thin lustre
downward aslant its gouged and watered scree.”
–Geoffrey Hill, “The Orchards of Syon”, XIV.
rotting pumpkin offramp
erodes swift the gift rege
whereupon whiz hazards
whited clown won't founder
the price tags whirl—priggish
prankcheck—if a dank cough
wanders in from woundcount
await next big figment
"...as his [Goethe's] first romance he devised six brothers, each of whom 'wrote' chapters in a different language. Goethe thereby perfecting himself in German, English, French, Italian, Latin, and Judaeo-German (Yiddish)..." --Walter Blumenthal,
π΅ππππππ'π π΅πππππ (1955)
"Who am I then, in golden September..."
"The more 'illegal' immigrant workers deported, the more expensive lawn care gets, the more old folks can no longer age=in-place and must be sent to senior homes." --Jung & Mockus 2025
"the man with the hoe"
killing fields for Fergus
affordance drawn bone-dry
cobweb-wiggly chasms
this car in dark circles
dark gray to the dire north
dazzled though uneasy
journeying arch-iceberg
whets eyeshine & washboard
cicala curse-grinding
kept underground crypt-years
foray in the funhouse
Anyone can make a little 8 page zine.
"The most insane story I've read in a long time."
"krasnov agonistes"
none of them near him know
the knack to get gear done
& he sees it all ache
break one breath tree's pennon
"We’re about to reach levels of deep concern previously unseen" —@reshetz.bsky.social
"Every time i get a review i glow like a lightning bug."
"The more policemen you have, the more criminals you have; and the more criminals you have, the more policemen you have got to have to catch them: and so it go on and on, until a time will come when everybody will be either a criminal or a policeman." --G B Edwards, πβπ π΅πππ ππ πΈπππππ§ππ πΏπ ππππ
"shooter's motive sought"
what the shooter cherished
chars in the firegrate
Getting your feet wet in Old Norse prosody.
"blame the birds these vines
are bereft of blackberries
empty promises
last night i dreamed of a pie
that i’ll never get to eat"
—@dylankussman.bsky.social via @evecastle.bsky.social
"I thought the world would finally do something."
One Party Rule means never having to say you're sorry. --sayings of Asmodeus
“But she, remembering her old ruin’d hall,
And all the windy clamor of the daws
About her hollow turret, pluck’d the grass
There growing longest by the meadow’s edge,
And into many a listless annulet,
Now over, now beneath her wedding ring,
Wove and unwove it…”
—Alfred Tennyson, “Enid”
"I don't think there is a map."
curve of justice or a LAPSE
loved AGAIN
& we know with what kind of cobble
the Hell road is PAVED
all the incredible things i have discovered
fishing with a SIEVE
not a world but an eidolon of a world
has ENDED
When we went from mechanical hard drives.
“The Remorse of the Dead (Remords Posthume)
(Translated from the French of Charles Pierre Baudelaire)
My sable love, when you at last are lain
Unsought upon the lone, sepulchral bed,
And darkly keep your brothel with the dead,—
Your roomless vault that weeps with fetid rain;
Yea, when the ponderous carven shaft unshaken
Is the one weight your passionate nipples know,
And grinds you down and will not let you go
To find again your faithless lechers, taken
By fairer trulls—then, then, O harlot love,
The grave, which has my very voice, will sigh
All night about your sleep-derided corse,
Whispering ever: 'In the days above,
You dreamt not how the unslumbering wantons lie,
Gnawed by the worms which are the last remorse.’ ”
—Clark Ashton Smith
"Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing."
—John Ashbery via @jacobwren.bsky.social
[Unused] Preface to the Book of Dallas.
Translating as a branch of acting (i.e. impersonation).
stacked TASKS
some bullshit AFOOT
bat with faulty SONAR
no-eucalyptus KOALA
far STRAY
"There's something people need to understand about these school shootings."
"fitness journey"
pavane, viral painstep
purling through spike worldlets
cam'ra ready rampikes
aurora now prouding
pavane: vast new pasture's
averted-yurt minefields
& tall trolley-gallows
"remember folks, we cant have gun restrictions because if we do the federal government will occupy our streets, imprison people without due process, ship dissidents to foreign gulags and things of that nature" —@ndrew.bsky.social
"Charles Mingus was dying when he saw Joni Mitchell in blackface."
"If only Americans loved their children as much as they love their Cracker Barrel logos." —@bryanbehar.bsky.social
donald trump in hell
could only be where no one
can see him or hear him
maximum security
past the orbit of Pluto
donald trump in hell
is for others to treat HIM
like he’s treated them
a pussy to grab or a
pocket to pick · no diff'rence
donald trump in hell
we should be beyond all that
no punishment but
having to BE donald trump
as tiresome · as limited
donald trump in hell
but we all are in that hell
capitalism
a game that rewards cheaters
more than those who play it straight
donald trump in hell
or maybe just a courtroom
that isn’t MAGA
when we start to speak the truth
about predators like that
the ecosystem
that makes his kind possible
becomes another
where no one would encourage
him saying bigoted things
no one would cheer him
no one would clap for him or
cherish his image
on overpriced merchandise
or trust his bad promises
& when he opened
his mouth they would turn away
as from a noxious
smell · no one would confuse him
with something that they needed
(old)
The Wolf That Lives in Lindsey.
Noseblind in Gaza. (2014?)
"Sonnet XXV
As in the midst of battle there is room
For thoughts of love, and in foul sin for mirth;
As gossips whisper of a trinket’s worth
Spied by the death-bed’s flickering candle-gloom;
As in the crevices of Caesar’s tomb
The sweet herbs flourish on a little earth:
So in this great disaster of our birth
We can be happy, and forget our doom.
For morning, with a ray of tenderest joy
Gilding the iron heaven, hides the truth,
And evening gently woos us to employ
Our grief in idle catches. Such is youth;
Till from that summer’s trance we wake, to find
Despair before us, vanity behind.”
—George Santayana
Boomerfying the Masses for a Past that Never Existed.
“Patriarchal poetry makes no mistake.” –Gertrude Stein
The trouble with the idea of reincarnation, is that being an animal is not the punishment. Being human is.
dreamlessness: only
trail across this Sahara
is self-delusion…
live on stones along the way,
disinterred alabaster.
Outta de Cobwebs: Premonitions. (pdf)
the slow road of slather
sludge—simmering birdlime—
though we know Norns' winding
net merrily kills each
even the tall towers
tagged Harrowing-Foethwart
“Only the paltry, superfluous, shameless wishes are fulfilled, and the great ones, the ones worthy of a human being, remain unattainable.”
—The Secret Heart of the Clock, Elias Canetti; tr. Joel Agee (via @dreamsofbeing_)
Corporations are people—& people ain't.
Cheetoh's crumbling craters
cross section of feckless
grifters also—grilsetoward
grisly jumpsuit, bumptious—
M Valdemar's mildew
mansion limns their blanchdream:
a spell bricktoss-broken,
& brim curbs with perv-dust
"The Great Silence
Prithee, phantom — lend me pity,
while I, blind and weary, tend my
lamplight. Tell me truly, do you
sit before me, like some pilgrim,
waiting mutely in these shadows
for the warrant of my welcome?
Must I quell my heart to harken
for a whisper at my hearthside?
Must I shelter here at midnight,
like a boy who waves his lantern
from the shipmast on the ocean,
hoping that a star might flicker
in reply? Or have I summoned
my assassin, come to see me die?
*
Prithee, phantom — am I foolish
to be pleading for your pardons
while abiding by this gravesite?
Am I ghoulish from my hunger,
longing for a throng of chorists,
when, instead of forests, I scry
only barrens, where no song can
flourish? Am I meant to take my
lesson only from your muteness?
Do you tutor me while songless
in these tundras, where a brutal
hunter seeks, unseen, to slay me
for my flints and tinder? Do you
eye me from an eyrie, like a spy?
*
Prithee, phantom — reassure me
that my grieving has its witness.
Tell me, must I be the first slave
waking in a vacant death camp?
Must I be this frail thing aching
in a broken mousetrap? Dare I
fathom what has yet to smite me,
like some plague or famine, be it
falling moons or blasted atoms —
speak! I sigh, to break this silence,
all these beacons lit to make me
worthy to have earned a greeting.
Do not let me burn, unknowing
if no others hear me say: goodbye."
—Christian BΓΆk via
"I know everything costs a lot more now but at least it's also worse quality" —@im-all-id.me
"we’d love to turn off the machine that convinces children to kill themselves, but we can’t really justify losing our ability to lay off customer service agents, now can we?" —@joolia.bsky.social
"a flawless square on Mars"
grain-against—Grim's whetstone—
grinding for but bindweed
to fight shadow fodder
in fellow trick-victims
never meet the movers
nor mark where their lairs hide
can't even fadge entry
to only route Clowntown
