( via / via )

Nice montage with music.

“I wished on the moon
For something I never knew
I wished on the moon
For more than I ever knew
A sweeter rose, a softer sky
An April days that would not dance away

I wished on a star
To throw me a beam or two
I begged on the stars
And asked for a dream or two
I looked for every loveliness
It all came true
I wished on the moon for you

I wished on the moon
For something I never knew
Wished on the moon
For more than I ever knew
A sweeter rose, a softer sky
An April days that would not dance away

I wished on a star
To throw me a beam or two
I begged on a star
And asked for a dream or two
I looked for every loveliness
It all came true
I wished on the moon
Wished on the moon
Wished on the moon for you”

—Dorothy Parker

Back from the Word Processing Course, I Say to My Old Typewriter. (via @maryanncorbett.bsky.social)

"[Enter MACDUFF with Macbeth's head]

MACDUFF [to MALCOLM]    Hail, King, for so thou art. Behold where stands
Th'usurper's cursèd head. The time is free..."

—The Norton Macbeth

No Kings Anthem.

( via / me )

Drone show in China.

"Like bagpipes rotting through the walls." --Edith Sitwell

An undercurrent of mischievous menace. (via feuilleton)

      "not especially warm here"

    green armor
& a grim urn
   ricochet
sharkily rude
   voice carried
curse gone viral
   glacial verse
fossil water · flowing
mosquito found drowned in
rapped knee Jedburgh ringcam
i was really spillyard
green armor & grilled shades
no outcome grew grout for

Intelligenzallergiker.

( via / via)

"...half of me is living for everyone's enthusiastic response to this and half of me is thinking, 'Yeah, I ain't writing shit until I know these protests don't end in cops shooting civilians...' " (thread)

"Floyd as if Pink"

dark sky bright street—word for this—
a kind of candy · passing on the right
plans planted · in plain clothes
cloud entities · early skirmish

faint cry · of maybe a bird
i remember · muscling in
kairos skirmish · or thin scrape
not enough names · announced shortly

tilde tapestry · long ago traced
deep intoi it · our radio resumes
Rimsky-Korsakov · & curved auroras
at least three themes · threaded deftly

solitary dancer · solaced by stars
harsh spiced rule · that runs like a razor
along the most perfect · splash of leaping
animl life · anyone could dream

tracery troubled · with a truce like cobwebs
strung across morning's · pink pergola
my claim pencil'd · my trance patched
wires that entangle · & not enough time

hist'ry hight · if behest heeded
no deed darkening · dawn's theshold
won't live to witness · the wild finish
in twilight scribble · skraeling ogham

" 'I was pleased as punch to let it lie,' says the first poem, 'but then the bug bit me,' and indeed the book crawls with pests and vermin."

"the wreck and not the story of the wreck" —Adrienne Rich

Comet Lemmon over Mt Shasta.

( me / via )

Faint cry of maybe a bird.

"MSNBC Grandmas in Skechers seamlessly reclaiming the frog from 4chan Nazis in about six weeks has gotta be the political upset of the century." —@bencollins.bsky.social

Kara Walker chopped up a Stonewall Jackson statue and revealed a monster.

"Deneb"

cigar smoke smell, fall leaves
trees still—smize with pilcrow—
spelt out of filch future
afar spy miles—borrow
in the tired tor shadow
colors turning—dull dream
& a bill due balefire—
we were bearing fair deal
these bare gales cigar filled

Cenotaph.

( via / me )

Internal Processing.

"moth-lit jellyfish"

warpkernel of waning
will—succulent fuel cell
now do we prove conclusions
our lime batrachians sing
parked high on a hat perch
hence balancing vow-heeled
now do we learn the meaning
of slogans thrown on the air

Façade.

"...when she was five years old enjoyed an intense relationship with a peacock. This strange creature remained loyal, waiting for her every morning to come out into the garden, until Sir George bought a mate of its own species and Edith was left cruelly abandoned." —Edith Sitwell: Façade with an interpretation by Pamela Hunter (1987)

" It wasn’t the depression that was the engine of my work. . . .  That was just the sea I swam in." (via @evecastle.bsky.social)

( via / via )

Tanka.

“Music finds its way where the rays of the sun cannot penetrate.” —Kierkegaard

Stairway to Heaven.

"pleonasm"

golden gleam of morning
aghast smoky crystal

time denied in nomquab
nimble-to-trip rhapsode

sovran symptom chalice
settlement frore Bering

funest Melba marlscrape
amounts to long hangman

scroll of real description
scrupulous dord sidewalk

pale green & its granting
where gruesome wounds bristle

upscale scarecrow Anschluss
only the crows finish

my chapbooks once chiseled
a chess move's toit tattled

Melba among monsters
even as a master

names scurry escapeward
skillful if but leafless

& wander still whaleroad
that wears crescent passing

dawn among the myst'ries
mustering breath-earthquake

long shadows of laughter
future allots inchworm

sit here till the circles
of Saturn chime term-cairn

learning little whispers
along the curved larvae

Tanka.

( via / via )

Sometimes circle.

frayed-fold difrasismo
coded refuse museprints
the trail quaintly trodden
& since traffic baffled
card file rifled
honk if you love havoc
caraway hurt staircase
shaded lane of shrapnel
ash shelf & looped elf-runes
cardstock whiffle
underpass find andirons
for poor algid shoreleave
in elegy jolly
an abject-pilled grab bag
full of crab lice

Sunrise at the Rocks of Garheugh.

"They paved paradise and put up a sexting bot" —@azureemeraldempire.bsky.social

"Every day, another person wishing to carve out a life, or at least a consistent hobby, for themselves in the arts is met with the crushing reminder that there are people, completely arbitrary people who really should have no stake whatsoever in these matters, who can and will control their means of creative production." (via Mefi)

( via / via )

"It doesn’t matter whether the English translation was what was used to translate his books into other Western languages... What mattered was that the true original existed in Gĩkũyũ, thus helping to create a Gĩkũyũ canon of written literature."

" 'It must be the climax, the coping stone, the peak of youthful experience.'
'Oh, don’t use the word ‘climax’, ' said Josephine. 'It has such a suggestion of anti-climax. And we hope that things are not over for them yet.' " —@ivycomptonburnett.bsky.social

"Girlfriend of founder of imaginary group is, well, a very Kristi Noem category."

Edgefield winds its twinge
weird façade rathe-slaughtered
a movie skipped—map
to many long songthreads—
conspiracy sown
in surds that glow holy

"If the war had ended long ago, joy would have filled every home."

( via / me )

Bertrand Russell to Oswald Mosley.

“The first professional kyoka [humorous tanka] poet, Nagata Teiryu (1654-1734)…gained fame with one especially apt verse; when a Chinese-ink merchant from Nara presented the court with an unusually large stick of ink, Teiryu wrote these lines:

‘Although not the moon,
It has risen so high it dwells
Above the clouds;
I wonder what reason
There can be for this?'

[romanji text omitted] The entire interest of this poem stems from the puns on sumi (‘to dwell’ and ‘Chinese ink’) and on yuen (‘reason’ and ‘lamp black’). This display of wit so enchanted the court, even the emperor, that Teiryu adopted the name Yuensai (from yuen, lamp black). He soon gave up his cake business to devote his energies exclusively to kyoka, publishing his own verses and correcting those of other people.”

—World Within Walls

Choriambics.

“Songs, I think, have to be anatomically correct.” –Tom Waits

Machine Gun.

( me / via )

P. 66 of 𝐵𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑓𝑜𝑜𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐻𝑒𝑎𝑑.

“…day by day
New pollen on the lily-petal grows,
And still more labyrinthine buds the rose.”

—Sordello

"...they have roots sunk into the deep of things and penetrate the essence."

“The moment the incense goes
out. The mask in time. Desert
Ubar that was swallowed up;
walls where scarlet ivy was.
Let me carry the five-wick
lamp & balance a sixgun
against the math of qcebo,
Ubar that the sands reclaim.”

—Luther Futhark, Secrets of Winning Langpo (1977)

Reminds me of a discussion (i only heard of, secondhand) between two local poets, on how small is too small a small town to use in a poem. In poetry, details are everything. Whether you are being read by erudite academics or 21c silicon-bumpkins, sooner or later some known things will fade & some will entirely be lost. That isn't for the poem to worry. What's realest at the time of writing is the name to use.

( via / me )

Hit due to the limited entertainment options at the time.

“Why Cats Paint

Pergamum awaits.
In the shadow of the boarded-up tower
now never to complete,

Pergamum awaits.
In the Great Hall cold though spring without burgeons,
Pergamum.

In the armature of betrayals here
glistening like dawnwebs,
Pergamum, Pergamum.

Pergamum.
What haven’t I given you,
lozenge of sunlight creeping; what

haven’t I accepted
of your Vanilla Fudge sonatas,
of your skull under fathoms of estuary?”

—Adam Cadmium, My Struggle with Symmetry (1946)

Comedy from Riyadh.

“The real war is in the air, civilian. We’re just skirmishing on the macrolevel.”

—Gregory Feeley, The Oxygen Barons (1996)

Otherside.

( via / via )

Cycling a green byway.

"You know what my book would smell like? It would smell like an old, well-worn, dog-eared paperback that's been sitting on a shelf in the basement for 30 years: dust and perdition, forgetfulness and spiderwebs." —@mariahaskins.com

The World of The Dark Crystal.

"a hankering to breathe tear gas"

broken tropes to track down
traction on this lacking
dawn grips with bone grinning
greebled despair's fairway
our sad hero heads out
a whole desert rolling
where a drone sky skinflints
my skiffle band handouts

exurb of the abscess
object-orient vorpal
-lice state making mousepad
for the much-scrolled cold case
coral bleaches—blueray
issue (bless their vicious
cardiac fist castoffs)—
i can't find my blinders

evergreen this grieving
grown fantasy dustup
old tunes that were ill-turned
at the time still chime some
& wars not now worried
wield shadowy lowdown
potholes where a pet fell
part word & its guerdon

"Tubular" live.

( via / via )

Who Goes Nazi?

“Shiver Theory

Go flotted turnip
& stutter the neverant pitchearth
no blown out reorderings for fake ediction
go basalt scrounge mortifier
soaked in sprite sort

folio ham is mighty yarn
a palfully selfaware bullet of bread crusts
wagering hugely on an empty veil

she was the soda we meant to tackle
matter-of-fact in a cage match

you can pretend yourself until final believing
bellying sort strung self-impaired

or be lucky enough never to believe your own story”

—Highway Rob

Some pretty geometry.

Another penetrating diagnosis! 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭’𝐥𝐥 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐰 ‘𝐞𝐦.

Emotional support jellyfish.

( via gerald blow on fb / via )

Pangolin playing the ukulele.

Accessories we are to murder, and worse. In self defence, we point the finger at Nazis.
How useful it is 𝑡𝑜 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑑 𝑁𝑎𝑧𝑖𝑠!

ICE arrests a guy in a giraffe costume.

“Odyssey of the Wind Materials (first line by Claude McKay)

‘Stray melodies of dim remembered runes’
Return when I am anything but ready.
What is a poet stricken thus, but giddy
With future thwarts, and present lost balloons?
I fail, and I am wise with a plangent mist
That tells me all I need to know of beginnings.
Riddle me more, or let the next swift innings
Contain their inmost cure as much as thirst!

Ah, well. I dwell among such eerie forms,
I learn and lose my way as at the first;
Someday when a chance wind sends me reeling
I"ll know what sort of monster writes these norms,
And what black seas I carry for my visit’s ceiling.”

—Yoko Mandelbrot

The Old Rugged Cross.

( via / via )

Absolute noise terror.

"ditty"

my brushes in quebrith clean
my lines on barbed-wire foul
though epic i feel
i write always as clown

dance with the basalt phosphene
in the dancing-master’s cowl
broken the keel
& cruel is the tyrant’s frown

gather the fragrant latrine
nepenthe applied with a trowel
my brushes in quebrith clean
my lines on barbed-wire foul

If i had one of those i would absolutely make a card for every one of my books.

It was the kind of poem someone writes who has written many poems.

YOU MUST VISIT HELL TO SEEK THE MASONS OF YOUR FATE.

( via / via )

Experiment from a few weeks ago.

Isn’t reviewing just like earnestly reading the face of an inanimate thing, to find out its thoughts? We look at everything as if it had a face—except each other. We look at each other as if we had no faces.

This guy so impressed our ancestors they made the first letter of the alphabet in his image.

Moon. And aftershock. How the mystery travels
isn’t important. Anyway, it goes
through you and me, and walls, in keen disguise;
our bodies barely privy to its revels.
Moon. Is that a name? And when it wanders
so do our frenzies wander, Darfur camp
where last we met, and said the one escape
for either of us might entail doc shredders.
You rise, the Moon between us. Lights a trail
all clowns dissolve upon, for they must keep
fitful vigil. Here, the dying sing
as twilight more than steals among warm cinders,
and someone in a white coat whose control
the valley has not seen, betrays the Moon.

Lot of yikesy things about this.

( via / via )

"Let's consider a Yasusada poem and ask ourselves whether the fiction of the poem's authorship makes it less emotionally authentic, or whether the poem's revelation of human experience and feeling is exaggerated by our presumption that it was written by an actual Hiroshima survivor and not by someone else."

The Call-Up

With this fatidic flesh
i tip the candle
awake so i can watch it dwindle,
ash
of stars that i am, who’ll then extinguish
another shadow
by means of a poem’s new window
upon my anguish
opened… I don’t believe in death;
i’m warm
& rungry tonight, but i remember
–sometimes: my faith,
that i have died before, as i have known love’s storm—
more times than i can now number.

Perry Mason theme.

The promise of its becoming a story is all that keeps us going anymore.

Son of a Preacher Man.

( via / me )

Bloom.

“Substance abuse is in a polyamorous relationship with emotion and climate change.”
—@magicrealismbot

"I’m not saying it was OK to tear them down. I’m saying that since it’s happening, we might as well face the fact that they weren’t perfect before, and now we can rebuild them."

“The One Thousand Days

There is the mourning dish of salt outside
My door, a cup of quarantine, saucerless, a sign

That one inside had been taken down
By grieving, ill tongue-tied will or simple

Illness, yet trouble came.
I have found electricity in mere ambition,

If nothing else, yet to make myself sick on it,
A spectacle of marvelling & discontent.

Let me tell you how it came to this.
I was turning over the tincture of things,

I was trying to recollect the great maroon
Portière of everything that had ever happened,

When the first first stopped its transport
& the weather ceased to be interesting.

Then the dark drape closed over the altar
& a minor city’s temple burnt to ground.

I was looking to become inscutable.
I was longing to be seen through.

It was at slaughtering, it
Was at the early stain

Of autumn when the dirt-
Tinted lambs were brought down

From the high unkempt fields of Sligo, bidden.
Unbidden, they came down.

It was then that I was quit
Of speech, a thousand northbound nights of it.

Then was ambition come
Gleaming up like a fractured bone

As it breaks through the bodiced veil of skin.
I marry into it, a thistle on

The palm, salt-pelt on
The slaughtering, & trouble came.

That the name of bliss is only in
The diminishing–as far as possible–of pain.

That I had quit the quiet velvet cult of it,
Yet trouble came.”

—Lucie Brock-Broido in Daedalus

Anachuttle.

( via / me )

"...when one of the wounded men had ended his own suffering by shooting himself in the head, Trakl had fled outside only to be confronted by the sight of local peasants hanging lifeless in the trees."

“Early as a morning

If she was envious, she
   departed herself
There she might have been a
   morning even though she went like a
      grace
She traced
She unearthed the hands, foreign and early
   as clients
The sight of aurora
   reworked to twilight in the cold”

—Robot X, 2690

"I suspect that much of our mourning is for ourselves, for the things we yearn for, the opportunities we have lost, and how we wish our lives could have been."

“if syncretism is wrong why does it feel so good” –@aesthetikeit

Tanka.

( via / me )

All the Way from Memphis.

Sometimes i abandon a project only to realize years later it was trying to tell me it was done but i wouldn’t listen.

Pumpkin.

“word wall”

things the poems don’t know
jostle the aether
sometimes are the main show

will not be dissuaded
by your throwing them another passenger

Visions of Johanna.