( me / via )

The Painter Who Didn't Finish Pictures.

"In the U.S., you cannot sign away your labor, legally; that’s indentured servitude. But you can sign away your intellectual property. That’s the music business."

— Damon Krukowski via @jordandavis3

"Why are you analysing the sickly secretion of a machine that has no aesthetic taste, has no aesthetic intention, that just oozes a strange frankenstein-glomp of motifs, ill-conceived symbology, poorly mishmashed concepts?"

"The Last Toast

I drink to our ruined home,
To my cruel life,
To our loneliness together —
And to you, I drink —
To the lips that betrayed me,
To your death-cold eyes,
To a world brutal and graceless,
And to God, who did not save us."

—Anna Akhamatova (tr Victoria Stoilova) via

"The ruling changed how all businesses had to value unsold stock, and for publishers, the effect was devastating."

( me / via )

Woldclip.

"SOMETIMES (Lipogram)

Sometimes
it seems
time is mist.
It sits,
so moot.
It misses me."

—Anthony Etherin

Weird Woman.

"Everyone please welcome CBS News Immigration Analyst Viktor Orban." —@bencollins.bsky.social

"There’s a lots of things out there which I would say are genuinely new and exciting, but they’re not altogether pleasant or palatable to the middlebrow tastes of the present.."

( via / via )

"But leaving all the latex, profanity and gender-bending out of the ’80s is the equivalent of plucking only the flowers from the ’60s (daisies and bell-bottoms) and turning off the power by airbrushing out Vietnam."

"You want entire
armor of an omelet"

—Alina Stefanescu

CHRISTINA KOCH GREETING HER DOG AFTER RETURNING FROM THE MOON.

welcome hunger, wingspan
the mind's winter flyzone
episode red runoff
arraign unsweet plantain

yellow the spark spillway
asperity's heirloom
lintel antelucan
you lose at the rat game

row of subterranean lights

"Watched the first 10 minutes of a bad american tv show called 'the miniature wife'. it was really, really obviously written by ai.."

( via / via )

In the Desert.

"stockpile"

shadowy wings shearing
the day's shrill pavilion
grub carbaminimous
or grue shotglass plot point

full of refined soundings
fused with howling news dunks

The aroma of an old book.

"As the story moves to Tangier, Dutch lute player Jozef Van Wissem plays baroque melodies in non-Western scales, a suggestion of the sheer amount of years lived and continents traversed by our ancient protagonists." —Claire Biddles via via Feuilleton

"For most citizens, the immediate success or failure of these talks will not be determined by a handful of cryptic official statements but measured in simpler, more tangible terms—whether calm returns to their streets in the coming days, or whether they are forced to endure another cycle of violence."

( via / via )

Malcesine on Lake Garda.

"Someone mentioned the ending of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, and someone else mentioned Anna Kavan’s Ice, and I commented after each Note to the effect that I remember what it felt like to read those books despite the many intervening years, how powerful they were, to the point where I can summon the environment, the room I was in, and so on." —@simonjoycerandall

Attempt to unearth the profound ontological implications of the thought of Marshall McLuhan.

"Anna Akhmatova: THE GREY-EYED KING

Glory to you, inescapable pain!
The grey-eyed king died yesterday.

The autumn evening was stuffy and red,
My husband, coming home, calmly said:

'They found him after hunting, you know,
He lay there dead where the old oaks grow.

I feel for the queen. So young, taken away…
She’s gone white from sorrow just in a day'

Finished his supper, found his pipe,
Left for his usual work shift at night.

I will now wake up my little girl
Look in her grey eyes, hold onto her.

And poplars rustle outside the door,
'Your king is nowhere on Earth anymore…' "

—tr Chen Rafaeli via

"Forget this idea of lying, cheating senses. Your senses are extremely honest to you. You are just confused regarding what the senses are honest about.."

( me / via )

Triolet.

tentacled song · silk geometries
      iron table
   tale in leather
the blurred carpet · astrobleme map
body removed · many echoes
      these lit ways
   yet wear traces
orange square · circular cells
fadge word to fill
skyhole

Biblical.

"When every statue-avatar-pseudo-German Romantic who doesn’t read Greek finally gets down to it—indeed as Heidegger, and Hölderlin did—I’ll eat a pair of medieval peasant shoes, Van Gogh’s or otherwise." —@avmarraccini

"In the US, literacy peaked around 2014 and has been sliding since."

( me / via )

"Like the Sasanian, Safavid, and Qajar experiences, Iran’s modern posture reflects a civilisational memory of survival rather than merely of winning."

"Wernher von Braun 'would have gone on trial in Nuremberg had not the urgencies of the budding Cold War welcomed him into the American space program, When a movie about him called I Aim for the Stars came out, someone suggested a subtitle: But Sometimes I Hit London.' " —@mostly

Tanka.

all those fruit flies
when a monster dies
come to stake their selfies
all those fruit flies
in the shade of Frankinstein files

singing torpid maladies
all those fruit flies

when a monster dies

"When I consider..."

( via / via )

"But of all the peoples who have used poetry to preserve their identity against the tides of history and foreign domination, perhaps none have done so more tenaciously, or for longer, than the Iranians."

"legos & logos"

tightrope woozy witness
awake in dark shaking
not to resume nimble
conniving ferch purchase
look out on that action
our orbs burn to learn of
& cannot stop keeping
cold track of in scroll dark

" In order to find out what I wanted to write I first had to write a lot of things I didn't want to write."

"The silence that fills the rooms after a cat has passed away." —Jörgen Löwenfeldt

Madman Across the Water.

( via / via )

The View from Dead Horse Point.

"SUNRISE (Palindrome)

Sun opus:
Awe was upon us.
No omen of onus —
a sun, of one Moon.
Sun opus:
Awe was upon us."

—Anthony Etherin

Periscope.

"Scheherazopf"

Melania lawyering up
funest downfallology
balalaikafest
in the mild winter Munchhausen

nebulous chess chattel
amerces the chirps
swirling about ratswarm
not a moment too naphtha

sway like namebrand
shadow of the shirk-gibbet

Maiysha.

( via / via )

Chesterton again.

"Spring

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers."

—Edna St. Vincent Millay via

Sunrise Currumbin Beach.

"Now that all the clocks have melted, let us salute Salvador Dali." —@andreicodrescu

"But as it is, I'm like an insect that's flown into a room of its own accord. I dash against the walls, dash against the windows, flop against the ceiling, do everything on God's earth, in fact, except fly out again.."

( via / me )

"Overall there are remarkably few typically bibliophilic indulgences, like his complaint that a catalog of arms, issued by the Bulletin of the Public Museums of Milwaukee in 1928, misspells the name of a pistol manufacturer (vol. 3, p. 39)."

"Fantasy stories have always let us vicariously participate with characters in confronting impossible crises, but seldom the sort of existential trap doors that Dick’s characters face. You’d have to go to the plays of Ionesco or Pinter or Becket to find anything similar, but Dick’s characters are far more real than theirs, and his characters’ situations are far more convincing." —Tim Powers via

"Robert Frost, like Jimi Hendrix, had to go to England to get famous in America."

"The Yellow Flicker Runway"

Sumatra in my ammo box, not yet done
with the old cheap coffee. Mild crepuscular war
on the airwaves taut with rages that concur
& i feel seen by tremulous shards of dawn.
Battlefields where hist'ry dropped the ball
& wounds expired without a chance to play.
I story them with tutelary awe
knowing that ev'ry one of us must fail.
This civilization bites the dust once more.
Disease in management is hard to cure.
Books accumulate like shadowy leaves
the World Tree sheds, hour by hour removes.
It is a riddle for Pellucidar
one raids with brisk, imaginary knives.

"I'm really supposed to be writing my novel, but instead I decided to write a passage capturing the Australian essence."

( via / via )

Irimias the Obscure.

the long flame dying
dry boardwalk in winter
      meniscus
   skewwhiff measure
turquoise clawsnatch · cliff crumble
the wind riffling wanhope
waning golden doldrums
      hospital
   view of havoc
pixel swarm · the swag store

Joyce on Joyce.

"SHELLS (Anagrammed Lines)

Dream the Earth's loneliness.
The islands are solemn there.
Hear sea, tormented in shells."

—@anthonyetherin

"You can safely ignore the reader's taste, but you can't ignore his nature.."

( via / via )

An Iranian girl playing on the swings on Khajeh Atta Beach.

"Things are so ugly politically, so violent, so merciless, so frightening. I want to run towards poetry and song to escape. But I do think of those who cannot run anywhere. For whom there is no refuge." —@zeeshanpathan.bsky.social

Borgund Stavkirke.

"apple of my ear"

lost bitterly · the bare cantrip
fadge a fam'ly · Avignon
in the late sunlight · cirrus frozen
alley empty · telephone numb
World War III · is just a number
Amazon van · leaves on the stoop

We recorded a goodbye video.

( @jakejfried / via google street view )

A pyritized ammonite.

"Baudelaire: The Albatross

Sometimes for sport the men of loafing crews
Snare the great albatrosses of the deep,
The indolent companions of their cruise
As through the bitter vastitudes they sweep.

Scarce have they fished aboard these airy kings
When helpless on such unaccustomed floors,
They piteously droop their huge white wings
And trail them at their sides like drifting oars.

How comical, how ugly, and how meek
Appears this soarer of celestial snows!
One, with his pipe, teases the golden beak,
One, limping, mocks the cripple as he goes.

The Poet, like this monarch of the clouds,
Despising archers, rides the storm elate.
But, stranded on the earth to jeering crowds,
The great wings of the giant baulk his gait."

—Roy Campbell

As much of my essay on Ohaeng as i feel like writing right now.

"There’s a flagrancy to this evil that I’ve never really seen before in my life. History is, of course, full of such episodes. But in this case it is combined with a sort of puerility. That is something much more rare, possibly unique. Bernanos is probably the only writer I know who specialised in depicting merged evil and puerility. I never thought I would see it with my own eyes."
—@nikprassas

"Tonight, you cannot trust the stars..."

( via / via )

New Empedocles found.

"DeLillo gives pride of place to baseball stadiums, nuclear weapons, and a sense of menace alloyed with the yearnings realized in our relationships with garbage, subways, typewriters, and remote controls. " —M H Rowe via

How I cried.

        “Autumn

There is a wind where the rose was;
Cold rain where sweet grass was;
    And clouds like sheep
    Stream o'er the steep
Grey skies where the lark was.

Nought gold where your hair was;
Nought warm where your hand was;
    But phantom, forlorn,
    Beneath the thorn,
Your ghost where your face was.

Sad winds where your voice was;
Tears, tears where my heart was;
    And ever with me,
    Child, ever with me,
Silence where hope was.”

—Walter de la Mare

Neandermaxxing.

( me / via )

Selena Calavera.

"the story of positional chess"

brillig pinnacle
words fade into words
someone else is aiming
ire-rockets at the tire tracks

Hormuz waters' wayzone
weary with clear nonsense
clockwork psychedelic
self poised at the wharf-brink

flashing yellow arrow
Leitkegels in vague line

The Moon.

"...no one has ever created a world worth living in without first breaking faith with the world they inherited and paying for the departure with something real." —Barnes via

Dostoevsky's Romantasy.

( via / via )

Gramsci's Ashes.

"BREAKING: Following the American threat of an 'Avignon Papacy', Robert Kennedy has begun a Diet of Worms" —@wesburdine.bsky.social

Rain in Charleston.

"FAR SIDE OF THE MOON (Palindrome)

Wonder:
a dark side;
to me, rarer....
A remote disk —
radared now."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

A Folklore Curriculum.

( oil painting by me / via )

"They met through writing graffiti."

grayblue spring, granules
engraved with harsh flavors
      chase across
   crystal landscapes
armament fact'ry · fluorescent lit
vanilla scent covers
a faint oiliness
      filtered air
   smileyface safe
security badges · with bad photos
a racial mix · good benefits

"Some of her poems are intensely devotional whereas others question or rage against the whole idea of a benevolent Creator."

"Presenting the reopening the Strait of Hormuz as a victory is like the Greeks failing to take Troy but celebrating the safe return of their wooden horse" —@henrymance.ft.com

Various moonlight paintings by John Atkinson Grimshaw.

( me / via )

Trad Cosplay on the Predator Savannah.

"The whale was now going head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual tormented jet" —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

Ontario Apeiron.

"original drum"

lunar walnut lollard
allowed selcouth welcome
shades drawn on the shindig
ashram for the sampos
asperity's speed-run
spurious-out surrey

Smoke-Jumper.

( via / me )

Armagideon Time.

"Fillmorbidity"

far side of the mizzenmast
a little war · almost like practice
hircinian melee
corsepresent · clown of the hour

lawnmower awakened
to the old frenzy · & a topped-off tank

Orange Floyd.

"It’s hard to believe Floral Shoppe is 15 years old." —Twerb Jebbins via

Thristnidinghent.