“A gritty Frog and Toad reboot where the twist is there has only ever been FROG” –@hottestsingles (via @chuckwendig)
The Katechon. (thread)
chambered nautilus
who keeps ev'ry book he read
back to the sandal’d road
whose dust must be washed off my feet
2 computers ago
surely things i needed to save
trust in the wayback
when all the breadcrumbs are gone
"Lemma"
lug bulletproof backpack
brave perilous airspace
Fearless Leader's fadeout
fawn imbecile crustpunk
Amon Duul II doula
duel emptying teahouse
long shadows fling shrapnel
shriek-whispering purview
"RFK Jr looks like that one guy in every zombie movie who gets bitten but refuses to disclose it out of stubborn egotistical idiot selfishness, all while getting progressively clammier and more unhinged, until he finally goes full monster and gets spectacularly killed" —@fozmeadows.bsky.social
"I won’t post it because I’m certain he wouldn’t want me to but one time I looked up the place Thomas Ligotti lives and it looks like the house from The Golden Girls.” –@CrampToe
rising of the bad moon
having asked a mad boon
rising in a ban mood
ev'ry sober man boo’d
not by setbacks frustrated
so much as hours stress-freighted
rising of the full Charon
begin extremer chull-faring
smoky veil
while a forest elsewhere burns
& my phantom-stuck veins
tingle, taut the knurl
quarters in the meter meanwhile
perhaps in time i’m fixed
cannot believe however
the far side of the river
seems never simply next
& rarely with a smile relaxed
under these conditions
shaped breath follows breath
a thing to injure with
among edged intercessions
brings Good News to the Martians
Language isn’t the map: it’s the territory.
Gaza no longer feels like part of this world.
"things music doesn't know"
fires in the dark circus
while the trapped fall silent
this other night scatheless
yet feels charged with margents
& blood rains unrinsing
"This is perhaps the danger of ‘eventness’."
"Living room is sinking deep" —Chicago
Finally, i end up learning that Le Verrier never actually saw the planet he discovered.
Through jarring clunks along the unkempt street
i track a certain dreaming that was mine
with java & no map & a frail routine
bright sun in fall makes all its turns less trite
honestly that was gantry to the launch
whose NASA now runs wholly in retreat
a blur whom saffron trickles haunt
abandoned bases, bunkers on the beach
spiralling seagulls claim unsteady perch
"If anyone asked me what makes me truly happy, I would say: numbers. Snow and ice and numbers. And do you know why? ...Because the number system is like human life. First you have the natural numbers. The ones that are whole and positive. The numbers of a small child. But human consciousness expands. The child discovers a sense of longing, and do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? ...The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something. And human consciousness expands and grows even more, and the child discovers the in between spaces. Between stones, between pieces of moss on the stones, between people. And between numbers. And do you know what that leads to? It leads to fractions. Whole numbers plus fractions produces rational numbers. And human consciousness doesn't stop there. It wants to go beyond reason. It adds an operation as absurd as the extraction of roots. And produces irrational numbers. ...It's a form of madness. Because the irrational numbers are infinite. They can't be written down. They force human consciousness out beyond the limits. And by adding irrational numbers to rational numbers, you get real numbers. ...It doesn't stop. It never stops. Because now, on the spot, we expand the real numbers with imaginary square roots of negative numbers. These are numbers we can't picture, numbers that normal human consciousness cannot comprehend. And when we add the imaginary numbers to the real numbers, we have the complex number system. The first number system in which it's possible to explain satisfactorily the crystal formation of ice. It's like a vast, open landscape. The horizons. You head toward them and they keep receding. That is Greenland, and that's what I can't be without! That's why I don't want to be locked up." —Smilla
“The supposedly unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics is just a reflection of the fact that systems near equilibrium are well approximated with only first and second derivatives.”
~Pedro Domingos, @pmddomingos, Source: bit.ly/32wD4lZ (via @pickover)
hide-&-seek rain & sunshine rouse
tea-desire here whose worry hews
to vans without scripture, horizon skull
for this word gig bills'-ease
say they want war & all that means
'midst teardown sweet of persimmons—
as if even the mansion's antic gilt
were built on tissue bones
gibbering clowns might cloy betimes
O to wake as the weird spell dims
these toys turn out to be crimson-handed
& dandle baked-in dooms
The Lineaments of Gratified Desire.
“The Watchers
Beneath the rampart, when the bending palm
Draws languid fingers through the opening bars
Of wind-borne ocean music, with pale stars
On lips and eyes, sit in a holy calm
The watchers of the dooms, and far away,
With orange fires and marbled stain of blood,
Sinks through the wrathful slanting of the flood
That citadel devoted by the birds of prey.
See! Towers alone remain, like jewels ablaze,
Points of a sinking crown. The watchers now
Draw back in haste, save one with troubled brow
Who seeks those coming through the rain and haze.”
—Charles Spear
Because infinity is already here (in the form of fractal texture) there’s no room or need for another. Yet the multiverse remains, as a metaphor for ultimate contingency.
“Kindness is in our power…even when fondness is not.”
~ Samuel Johnson (via @addyiceangel)
bird strike in the strange dawn
clasp this struggle dugout
"Looking at the moon..."
Some kind of weird rotating die.
Fourth round of “American Laureate”. We have seen our candidates perform in the Confessional, Slam, & Cowboy Poetry genres; each time an aspirant has been eliminated. Now it’s time to do some Language Poetry. Jasper Mothman is first. Wild applause. After a commercial break, the judging. Simon scowls: “It’s not enough to not make sense!”
04 02 04
"All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothing." I might retranslate (paraphranslate) it thus:
"Laughter is all—& trembling dust—& vacancy:
it all grows out of senselessness."
{alternately: for all that is, is born of chaos.]
“From one point of view, magical progress actually consists in deciphering one’s own record.” —Magick in Theory and Practice
“Often, towards nightfall, there’s a feeling in the air of mystery, threat, frustration -all of these at once. I would like my paintings to have the quality of such moments.” Mark Rothko (via fernando luis pujato on fb)
“TIDES (Aelindrome in Ï€)
31415926535
Desire stowed ships on seas,
while air, a fragrant eddy, ran….
A fragile air whips on.
Seas wed shores, tides.”
–@Anthony_etherin
the rites small, but GROSS
my sweater starts to RAVEL
half-formed thing
intent when Mothra starts to OVATE
little souvenir of a terrible year
Briareus’ illimitable SETUP
vertical-ridged, tan water tower
since then i have SLEPT
only tea in the pantry
peach MANGO
Geiger counter holiday
Bikini ATOLL
low-rent rentier · spiritually speaking
a NOMAD
Raku the smoky progenitor
of this GLAZE
boulder on your shoulder (Sisyphus)
feel a bit OLDER
Hieronymous Bosch on tesseract acid
could have made these melting CARDS
apart together
& yet together APART
best music
never played commercial RADIO
oasis of the scribbling green pangolin
jonesing for a coffee DRINK
this is not the dining car
so shut up & STOKE
“Once upon a time I was immortal; my forehead was of white spindle-haired cedar; and in time I fell from the star-beds; and in my trouble came hope of coming forth again on the green earth from the three-roofed palace. Now, near home, I am ashamed to say, I am thirsty for blood.” –@gods_txt
Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100.
"the other moon"
shapes fade but their feel stays
feral in the sunset
my chores scramble scrap heaps
scrying other moon-phiz
no good deed is gathered
to the goof-heap baffling
sort-thirst & most thrifty
that belief in outcomes
suppose prison rainbows
proved but a world haven
rabbit on the runway
peruses these plane wrecks
cut by the curt shapes
"They came to the top of a mountain. The shadow of a hawk fell over them." —@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social
“the wood smoke
toppling trash cans”
–@poem_exe
“Fegfeuer”
Distances i never chose
& those to come
converse together where i stand
abandoned & dumb.
The birds sing shrill & very loud
in a crowded tree;
i wonder what it takes to cure
futurity
that sings within my bloodstream like
a psychic gale,
& yet allows no single bare
airt to prevail…
So i remain, & cobble whims
of crimson from
distances i never chose,
& those to come.
(1993)
Sex Pistols at the Longhorn Ballroom.
“Night Piece” (from the Spanish of Delmira Agustini)
Entangled in the nights of the tarn of your soul
I might litanize a web of silence and crystal
woven by insomnia’s great spiders.
Cream of lustral rain in a vase of alabasters,
O mirror of purity you polish the stars
and reflect the abyss of life in a sky…
I am the errant swan of the bloody trail,
I go leaving a stain and raising a churn.
“We are the clowns of the never-ending parade; for all the religions exist on the sides of cliffs that slowly descend towards the raging sea, like happy beings wishing to ride with death. The corpse is the believer’s truth.” –@gods_txt
"on the threshold, at september’s gate, ruin and radiance entwine in the dark heart of being" —@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
"But the god that notices them is Death."
appall a late petal
pale thunderstorm bursting
frothy silence settles
sign's ultimate impact
scarecrow whose dance darkens
down massacre-trick way
pushpin nimbus, pureshrug
of a poised moon-foison
frore preferred pronoun
farms pushpin nimbus
pushpin nimbus
"Reading snow is like listening to music." —Smilla
