( via via @ladyliminal.bsky.social / me )

The Rally.

in this
gloomiest world
blind cicadas pealing
taillights like burning carbuncles
lead me
past wrecked
curbs & shattered
sidewalks fenced off lanes
the words too are blocked from landing
their hent

"There are zero high-follower people from marginalized groups that I know personally where I haven't heard *at least* one story about a death threat that changed their day to day behavior..."

from "Testament of a Man Forbid" (1901)

"The rainbow reaches Asgard now no more;
Olympus stands untenanted; the dead
Have their serene abode in earth itself,
Our womb, our nurture, and our sepulchre.
Expel the sweet imaginings, profound
Humanities and golden legends, forms
Heroic, beauties, tripping shades, embalmed
Through hallowed ages in the fragrant hearts
And generous blood of men; the climbing thoughts
Whose roots ethereal grope among the stars,
Whose passion-flowers perfume eternity,
Weed out and tear, scatter and tread them down;
Dismantle and dilapidate high heaven!
It has been said: Ye must be born again.
I say to you: Men must be that they are."

--John Davidson

Peril (The Harbour Flare).

( me / via )

A bit of Sunrise.

"The Holy Ghost I think's a gull, best as a gull." --Gerald Burns, "Saint Oddseth Visits Gaul"

True story.

"Andromeda the Shining"

Andromeda draws us
a dry blur, incurring
lies our kind keeps lending
ears to in the years' toll
(ears to, ears to)

galaxy glints slantwise
glyph for earthbound berthchafe
what wheel are we nailed to
whizzing till our rizz fades
(whizzing till, whizzing till)

stupid apes with stone blades
storying bright fightsongs
Drake equation's quicklime
quarry trumps Man's gumption
(quarry trumps, quarry trumps)

"I never felt so old as when I saw fascist youths are really into putting anime decals on their guns and Dodge Chargers."

( via / via )

Ghost.

"around the garden
the night fights street lights
not going gently
another villanelle misses
the bin rim and rolls away"

--@rrichwords.bsky.social

TX Republicans Introduced 32 Anti-Trans Bills on First Day of Pre-Filing Period.

"All things by their own weight to ruine tend."

--1672 Ovid, II.1

"On November 23, 1924, a 35-year-old American astronomer called Edwin Hubble published a groundbreaking discovery in The New York Times. The Andromeda nebula — the name astronomers then gave to all kinds of fuzzy objects in the night sky — wasn’t inside the Milky Way galaxy, he claimed, but beyond it. It was, in fact, another galaxy containing millions of stars."

( me / via via @ladyliminal.bsky.social )

While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

"...the concept of ‘dark play’ developed by the American professor of drama, Richard Schechner. In Schechner’s dark play some or all of the participants are not aware they are taking part in a game and, implicitly, they are unable to consent to their participation." --Bobby Seal via

"We might have given birth to a butterfly..."

"The Raven Goddesses

      After Beowulf

Our ravens are called
Hide and Seek and Look at Me.

Hide squats in your corner-eye,
slyly she salts away your secrets.

Seek smokes the hag out of
memory’s back door. She crows.

Look at Me lands to roost on
the thought-eaves, peeping.

      *

(When Beowulf demolished
Daeghrefn– he pulverized that
Day-Raven, with a pow! and a
crack!– the Night-Ravens
scattered the scraps, corpse
carrion for scavenger-poets,
body parts and bloody heart
strings that thwack! and splat!)

In the clamour, we whooshed
to the woods and plotted.

      *

With beak and claw each
we teased out a feather.

One for the wyrd-woman,
sitting tight in her tree.
Her time is not yet for reckoning.

One for the queen of cups,
taking her turn in the hall.
Each dawn she gobbles her ire.

One for the scop-sister,
setting off on the raven-road,
our stories secure and satchel-safe.

When she unbuckles this book,
our voices will burn men to shame.

Inkwells for eyes, quills for fingers,
we are the manscaða
– we ravage the men who ravished us,
we pluck out their poetry,
scalp their goose-pimpled heroism –
They’ll not leave here unscathed."

--Laura Varnam via

"You know the "🔹AI Overview" you get on Google Search?" (via @colson.bsky.social)

( me / "new secret writing" by allyson grey in asemic grp on fb )

Working Class Hero.

"bible verse checkpoints"

maps shred · in the gamefied martyrdom
tired of pretending · torched bookshelves
passing the buck · abort causality
only ammo · knows the way home

Perception & reality.

"Frog walked into the house. It was dark. All the shutters were closed. 'Toad, where are you?' called Frog.

'Go away,' said the voice from a corner of the room." --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Batalantoj.

( me / via )

Cold Case.

"Everything emotional in America becomes a mere show and make-believe. Americans are trained to invest money, are said to take even desperate chances on that, yet never do they invest [in] beauty nor take desperate chances on that."

—Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven via

The Quest for Knowledge in the Western Poem.

"Etiquette for Mechas"

brillig qabronda* · Gileadjunct
ice gale in the Negev
breath gallows
migrant imaginary

you will see some changes
mutant symmetry
beachfront bunker tour
& the squall doubles down

Crammel, hikikomori, quackle, clarty.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Taneraic 'to travel by car'

( me )

Gettin' Old and Gray.

the paused castle · countable sips
a chill achieves · chalice goldenness
i ride routes · rumble & fragrant
with lost shapes · no parsed lesson
the radio yielding · yellow laughter
all the images · that answer to these hands
bear defunctive date stamps · & forged passwords
what if a door there · was adroit once
or i passed positive · hours in a bed
i start stupid · with stalled traffic
in halcyon cold · homeless as a crow

"They got what they wanted—Hate Island is back on! All new episodes!"

I remember when NPR ran all the Ring cycle at some point in the 70s, & i watched all of them (with crappy little TV speakers). Later, i got boxed sets of all the records (as i worked at a used book store, where such things had almost nil resale value). I would wait for a rainy day at home (best time for opera, i think) & just start from the beginning & run it all while i went about making art or whatever. I think it's best in big gobs. The real narrative is W. discovering & elaborating his kink.

ORGAN CONCERTO G MINOR OP. 7 NO. 5 - ANDANTE LARGHETTO E STACCATO. Melanie heard Pachelbel's Canon in this & after listening, i did too.

( via / via )

"Do they have the right to kill, and the only right we have is to die?"

" 'I will go behind these rocks and put on my bathing suit.'

'I don’t wear a bathing suit,' said Frog.

'Well, I do,' said Toad." --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

AI-powered Jesus.

"Frostlight Wanderings

Eylebourne sleeps where the frostlight gleams,
its mystery weaving mysig dreams.
A titty-toit breeze sweeps the damp dawn anew,
as a dub-skelper wanders in patient pursuit."

--@thedevilstuna.bsky.social via

3 bit blues.

( via / via )

s/t PA Psych 1974.

i went back · to the bone church
a lifetime later · looted by pain
hues remembered · more by what they weren't
but the bones · ever the bones
remained to mock me

Season of the Witch.

“…I hate the politics/ which have crept/ into my poetry.” -Eric Lerner, Seditious Delicious #2

"Secret Side" & "Valley of the Kings".

( via / via )

"We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century."

“Everything on our way is slippery and dangerous, and the ice that still supports us has become thin; all of us feel the warm, uncanny breath of the thawing wind; where we still walk, soon no one will be able to walk.” –The Will to Power, 57

"Baumgarten’s treatise on poetry was, in many ways, the first time anyone in Europe talked about poetry as ineffable." (via)

appetite of VOLES
carolling the OZONE
tragedy two-LOBED

outcomeless ENEMA
in a black SEDAN
world at the frost LIMIT

cleave the vast INANE
cars of various MAKES
near zero INERT

at 6 AM TESTY
go hide the launch CODES
radar blogs OVATE

meet at my DACHA
make my poison ETHYL
last of seven SEALS

Optical Sound.

( via / via )

Sherlocking Tolkien's dróttkvaett poems.

“The Lineaments of Gratified Desire”

He retired to the sea.
There he found what he needed:
a surf-screen to shine his thoughts on,
a solitude wide and dark enough and seamless;
rocks to build the theater physical.

Only the gulls saw stone pile upon stone,
like the identical days of his stone exile
converging to a point just short of the sun
the round irregular walls.
He said the tower would give him a place to write
in the peace he’d sacrificed everything for,
but his typewriter’s mute, and the tower continues to rise.

(1981)

I went back to the bone church.

Chapbooks are poet money. We used to trade them with each other, back in the day, before internet swallowed everything. Now some of those people have died, & from time to time i think of how few copies were ever made & now i have one of the only ones left.

Feed the Birds.

( me / via )

"This impulse to cast the first stone is so strong that it is applied to a fictional regime in an unread book."

“On the way home we lost our way. My mother was worried.

‘We must get home,’ she said. ‘We do not want to meet the old Dark Frog.’

‘Who is that?’ I asked.

‘A terrible ghost,’ said my father. ‘He comes out at night and eats little frog children for supper.'” --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

"I am with those who consider that thought, consciousness, and culture cannot lead to poetry unless they pass through the senses."

"Winter Blues

Apanthropy's grasp has me in its spell,
As cold kogarashi sweeps through the fell.
Langlugs dart, their frost-furled fur,
Lit by a skafer, while mist steals the air."

--@thedevilstuna.bsky.social via

Explorations in 1980s computer music.

( via me )

Escher bookplate.

blue supermoon

nebulous moper
be onerous lump

or bluenoose ump
eon opus rumble

pursue noble Om
bolero menus up

Mu roubles, nope!

Bonhoeffer's family condemned the movie.

"The real story on Capitol Hill is the desire of GOP men to have transgender women in their bathrooms" --@adamkinzinger.bsky.social

The Helix Nebula.

( via / via )

Tanka challenge.

"Every morning as we try to dress our child, I think about Charlotte’s Web when Templeton tells Wilbur he needs to struggle when they try to put him in the crate" --@truebluebrenda.bsky.social

The birth of a star.

"VOYNICH (Anagrammed Lines)

I encrypt much, to vanish
into such ivy parchment —
in the script many vouch
vaunts no mythic cipher:
The Voynich Manuscript."

--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

True Thomas.

( via/ via )

"I saw in your eyes so many times the wish that I was not your child."

Oregon Blue
bluer than cobalt blue
appearing now
but not a sign
neither deliverance
nor harbinger of woe
in this development

of a pigment
hitherto unknown
Oregon Blue

when all the sky is gray
will be something to show
to the children
& say

this was once ours

Anabasis.

"Brief moment of happiness as I ate a glazed donut and drank some coffee after slipping in and out of the farmers market, just a typical Saturday morning. Then I saw a flag agitated atop its pole, which made me think of a growling dog straining at the end of a chain." --@mongibeddu.bsky.social

"One of the weirder materials I’ve knapped was refined silicon."

( via / me )

Mothra.

Blackmarket polio-vaccine futures are looking up.

Because stupid knows no bounds.

not as afraid now
what’s wrong is still wrong
mornings
and my hand finds
this light
wasn’t ours prior
and it flows
around us and is lost

(6-27-06)

Letter to a Bridge Made of Rope

( via / via )

"And what about those suspended laws?"

"On a photo of Saddam"

Bad Santa
without his minions

to kill and maim on command · now awaiting
hanging · but how many still

who would follow a killing command
a bunch still

of willing hands · who would not know what to do
without God’s bidding

(11-18-06)

A beautiful sight.

“The weakness that leads to folly, does not involve the strength to meet its results.” –@icomptonburnett.bsky.social

Přecvičování.

( via / via )

Modern dance in Intolerance.

Up until now, i confess, it hasn't occurred to me to ask which of my neighbors would have turned in Anne Frank.

"They were a nightmare like a Robert Aickman story, but with a lot less happening and a lot less learned."

ghost i only partly saw
flying away down a hall
unfamiliar roads
now i own and turn guardian of

"You’ve never beaten the first level of the game on bunny mode but are convinced you’d complete the entire thing easily if the difficulty went up to nightmare plus."

( via/ via )

"A writer-friend & I decided to start a little islander group to share emotional support, info & resources. She posted about the 1st meeting on NextDoor. IMMEDIATELY, MAGAs sailed in to scream, mock, & threaten us."

“evening mist
still waiting
leading to nowhere”

–@poem_exe

Throbbing Gristle are on the cover of the new issue of Electronic Sound.

"It’s all I can be, all I can offer, this small bent thing in the face of it, the wind and the Volga, and weight of human guilt. It’s all I can offer, this refusal, the form of the refusal that is our last laurel, woven into an inadequate and mostly posthumous crown." --AV Marraccini via

"There is a very specific visioning that happens when one generates art thru the copier, often times mistakes, slips of hand, degeneration, overprinting all come into play as ways of transcribing a new reading over an[ ] older reading."

( via / via )

St Louis Noir #398.

"More and more of the ice cream was melting. It dripped down on Toad’s jacket. It splattered on his pants and on his feet.
'Where is the path?' cried Toad. 'I cannot see!' " --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Start of a series on Wagner.

the truth of the dick · when other truths die
requires no quest · or qualification
marries its mandate · to the march of morons
called keep on building · the big gallows
   we only know how to do

Hauntology starter pack.