"Robe & Sandal Days"
oil leak ill · of wheeled maladies
ring finger shrunken · memory-shred
into pale strings tangling · strange glow
in the gray commute · mute witness
to continuing things · taskshatter
but shadowed still
"A metre can ‘mean’ quite different things at different times."
Roma Riot Ska Brigade. (Looks like this may be AI of some sort. I still think it's interesting.)
“Sometimes I feel that it is the room that writes. But it needs the hot nib of my pronoun.”
(Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal) via @yoonkim.bsky.social
"Wasa Wasa"
mustyplum sunbrittle plastic
faded · sad fact'ry
platforming sift
of irked airplane parts
study dark promises
study how not to disappear
long table under lights
where we ate languidly
newly minted money
drinking dreams in the night
study dark promises
study how not to disappear
mocking drakes
appear in the turquoise pool
all things xeric dissolve
in the xiphoid process
study dark promises
study how not to disappear
"People live in growing isolation and with the feeling of low-level dread, and these are the defining conditions of living in a secret-police state." (via @ottiliemulzet.bsky.social)
hazmat spider sign
carved into a hunger stone
night sky full of such stars
when will this battery cease
of stones that are the muse’s flowers
Reichenbach's Soliloquy. (via @lastpositivist.bsky.social)
"It would be nice / to interfere with the accuracy of the world."
- Lisa Robertson, Palinode via @jaconwren.bsky.social
Czerwono - Czarni - Sandwicz ( 1967 ).
"But the moral injury feels less acute."
" 'You’re like our Katniss!' No the fuck I am not, the book is about class struggles and set in Appalachia. I was literally born into the aristocracy😭" --@thevivllainous.bsky.social
Treatise of the Three Impostors.
"AND THE CITY STOOD IN ITS BRIGHTNESS
And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned.
And life was running out, Ruteboeuf's or Villon's.
Descendants, already born, were dancing their dances.
Women looked in their mirrors made from a new metal.
What was it all for if I cannot speak.
She stood above me, heavy, like the earth on its axis.
My ashes were laid in a can under the bistro counter.
And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned
To my home in the display-case of a granite museum,
Beside eyelash mascara, alabaster vials,
And menstruation girdles of an Egyptian princess.
There was only a sun forged out of gold plate,
On darkening parquetry the creak of unhurried steps.
And the city stood in its brighntess when years later I returned,
My face covered with a coat though now no one was left
Of those who could have remembered my debts never paid,
My shames not forever, base deeds to be forgiven.
And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned."
--Czeslaw Milosz, Selected Poems (tr by CM & Peter Dale Scott, 1980)
meshes of the thwart
dull gelatinous path
a pus coming-forth
a kicked-through piney slat
the mist stings my face
that has no questions left
by dire minutes strafed
nonexistent address
& gas running lean
years with their brutal toll
say it's no big deal
to perish here alone
"But cloud in stead, and ever-during dark..."
" 'Frog,' asked Toad, 'did this really happen?'
'Maybe it did, and maybe it didn’t,' said Frog."
--@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social
"mournful wind
over quick sand
open skylight
lockdown"
--@poemexe.com
quebrith quisling · in food & air
the builder & dreamer drive
incongruous is in session · the dark cave
of the rain-threatened morning
running on fumes · furlglisten
a blurry machination
Team Quebrith · taunted by the thought of peace
rips up just-laid floor
looking for a lost · glimmer of hopelessness
Norman Rockwell on April Fools.
liberation day
no readability
libation ready
a diatribe only
a blarney idiot
bad airline toy
"bright moon
it looks very important
among the blossoming flowers"
--@poemexe.com
"...the worst music ever invented." yuk yuk
"If life gives you lemons, make giant brass church bells.
Oranges: ditto." --@adamroberts.bsky.social
"LILITH AND HADES (Palindrome-by-Word Shakespearean Sonnet)
'Rise, Lilith, see above the burning light!'
Skies hollow into empty, bleeding clouds.
Death purest, the revenge of weary night,
draws Hades where, below, the answer shrouds.
Breath steady, her resolve to follow snakes
roars measures she demands to ever hold:
Cold visions in opaque and fiery lakes;
lakes, fiery and opaque in visions cold.
'Hold ever to demands!' She measures roars.
Snakes follow, to resolve her steady breath.
Shrouds answer the Below, where Hades draws.
Night weary of revenge, the purest death;
clouds bleeding empty, into hollow skies;
light burning the Above — see Lilith rise!"
--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
"That sorrow ended. So might this."
"a world of dew
the melting snowman
teeth and bones"
--@poemexe.com
"Goldberg afternoon"
card there's cash on · bright morning
pants in my size · sold at the thrift
a walk wending · up from the haircut
months overdue · bypass the books
this redbrick · relict district
oddly apt · away fom outrage-
blazing news · none of us wanted
the belly battered · abaft splinters
of a frail future · we ferried long
did not foresee · savage downfalls
citizens shanghaied · off shivering streets
& one wearies · of wanting otherwise
of plenty planning · riven to splinters
can't process plight · unless dark lager'd
hours only · & dollars lost
a walk in sunlight · safe wand'ring
thrift & no threat · though black threnody
tells me toom · of the far boil
& stupor saves · not one wanderer
"So, the DOGE kids intend to rewrite the social-security administration's COBOL code-base!" (thread)
"meat contraption breaking down"
scolding riddle skydark
a scant quartet banters
when it's gone, gat-lightning
a gas kettle lassos
entails black metallic
totalized fret patrol
i want to see winters
The book with Alastair Reid's famous palindrome.
"As far as my inquiries have extended, there is not a building in Venice, raised prior to the sixteenth century, which has not sustained essential change in one or more of its most important features." --Ruskin
Hindemith String Quartet Op. 22. (via @violanorth.bsky.social)
“Season Finale”
When i return, it will not be to smile
At these bizarre shenanigans, or judge
By darker portals’ wisdom, how the play goes.
But let me return as one whom fresh delight
Or terrible fear can move, having partaken
Of that forgetful potion once more proffered;
I want to return as a child, with empty hands.
From Apostrophe (2002)
Pi (1998) online. Haven't seen it in forever, but i found myself thinking, "I'd rather watch Pi again, than Requiem for a Dream." ☆☆☆
"And out we flung and on we ran or reeled
Romeward. I have no memory of our way,
Only that, when at intervals the cloud
Of horror about me opened to let in life,
I listened to some song..."
--The Ring and the Book
Feuilleton on Meyrink's Prague.
"The locust armies warping, on the bark" --Royston's Lycophron
"DEATH ROOM BLUES
Before the songs I sang there were the songs
they came from, patent shreds
of Babel, and the secret
Nineveh of back rooms in the dark.
Hour after hour
the night trains blundered through
from towns so far away and innocent
that everything I knew seemed fictional:
the squares of light beyond the paper mill
where wolves crept from the woods and found their way
to soft spots in the slick of memory;
the boy who killed his mother in her bed
for Jesus' sake.
Small wonder that I overcame my fear
of sweetness, when the only white I knew
was first snow at the margins of the world,
and any chore is sweeter, now,
than scripture, where the hand that smoothes away
each local asterisk of stripped desire
can seem so much like something I once lost
I'm half convinced that childhood never happened."
--John Burnside, Black Cat Bone (2011)
ICE follies. More ICE follies.
we sent our weatherman out in the rain
to see which way is darkest
it's the future
"Toad walked along the path. A large, soft drop of chocolate ice cream slipped down his arm.
'This ice cream is melting in the sun,' said Toad."
--@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social
"We are but a moment's sunlight
fading in the grass"
--The Youngbloods, "Get Together"
My Flowers To Those Who Love Peace.
what spoiled chances tinchelled
chimp-questionnaire glairy
built as a halt boxcar
bonegate with a tone arm
defunct mall where mocked-at
messages are resting
too much of the turmoil
taps on eclipse rhapsodes
fangles a beast bargain
One voice that would be silenced.
Freedom Seeds. (via @diotimaellen.bsky.social)
enigmatic limericks
gem milk intricacies
desaparecido
cop-sided area
“The credulity with which we entertain the idea that software can become sentient, while finding any excuse to deny the sentience of our living animal relatives, is a deep, dissonant, incoherent psychosis.” –@Unpop_science
Hidden medieval courtyard in Angoulême.
"Glitch Art, which emerged in Chicago during the early aughts, attempted to mobilize the formal affordances of digital error to point toward the artifice of the interface." (--wait, "enigmatic limericks"??) --Hannah W. on Youtube.
"The inside of a man is a subway, there are levels and more levels—the lower down you go the more disgusted you get, but there are still vending machines at the lowest level, with chocolate, little treats, candies…"
--Céline, London via @avecsesdoigts.bsky.social
"Vita Nova
You saved me, you should remember me.
The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats.
Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.
When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling.
I remember sounds like that from my childhood,
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,
something like that.
Lugano. Tables under the apple trees.
Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags.
And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water;
perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him.
Crucial
sounds or gestures like
a track laid down before the larger themes
and then unused, buried.
Islands in the distance. My mother
holding out a plate of little cakes—
as far as I remember, changed
in no detail, the moment
vivid, intact, having never been
exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age
hungry for life, utterly confident—
By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green
pieced into the dark existing ground.
Surely spring has been returned to me, this time
not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet
it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly."
--Louise Glück via @rabihalameddine.bsky.social
Unauthorized remake of Georges Méliès's 1902 film.
"American children are about twice as likely as Danish children to die before the age of five." (via @timothysnyder.bsky.social)
“Heroics
Though here and there a man is left
Whose iron thread eludes the shears,
The martyr with bosom cleft
Is dead these seven heavy years.
Does he survive whose tongue was slit,
To slake some envy of a king’s?
Sportive silver cried from it
Before the savage cut the strings.
The rack has crumpled up the limb
Stretched immediate to fly;
Never ask the end of him
Stubborn to outstare the sky.
Assuming an heroic mask,
He stands a tall derisive tree,
While servile to the speckled task
We move devoted hand and knee.
It is no virtue, but a fault
Thus to breathe ignoble air,
Suffering unclean assault
And insult dubious to bear.”
–Elinor Wylie
First Word on Horror: Liz Hand.
“Skirr gloppened worriers thro’ the night;
Roar puteals that toads eschew”
–Betelguese: A Trip Through Hell
The Birds of Ancient Battlefields Visit the Suburbs.
“…I founder in desire for things unfound.
I stay amid the things that will not stay.”
–Geoffrey Hill, “Pavana Dolorosa”
Black Metallic. (Palate-cleanser?)
“Address to My Soul
My soul, be not disturbed
By planetary war;
Remain securely orbed
In this contracted star.
Fear not, pathetic flame;
Your sustenance is doubt:
Glassed in translucent dream
They cannot stuff you out.
Wear water, or a mask
Of unapparent cloud;
Be brave and never ask
A more defunctive shroud.
The universal points
Are shrunk into a flower;
Between its delicate joints
Chaos keeps no power.
The pure integral form,
Austere and silver-dark,
Is balanced on the storm
In its predestined arc.
Small as a sphere of rain
It slides along the groove
Whose path is furrowed plain
Among the suns that move.
The shapes of April buds
Outlive the phantom year:
Upon the void at odds
The dewdrop falls severe.
Five-petalled flame, be cold:
Be firm, dissolving star:
Accept the stricter mould
That makes you singular.”
–Elinor Wylie
"I don’t know if bringing you into this world was the right thing to do." (via @kameronhurley.com)
I die of thirst beside the fountain.
None of us has tried the fountain.
At night the fountain glows within;
dark bits of flotsam ride the fountain.
The desert-builders hedge their words
but drink, however wide the fountain.
The grotto seemed today run dry.
Just to be sure, we pried the fountain.
Let Graywyvern whisper deep
and you yourself provide the fountain.
Seneca (who i always thought had one of the most eventful lives for a philosopher).
One refuses self-improvement, one disdains the didactic, not because they're useless but because they're keeping score in a game that's no longer playable.
Normalcy as denial. Normalcy as resistance. Normalcy as the balance one can't quite remember the trick of.
manageable Fillmore
murders offstage, soft-pedal
the road riddled · with dark red radar
haze across land's end
hazard in dream-words
brillig in the Braille days
abrasive-muse newsreels
swerve ichneumon · in a Nakba rain
shattering cardboard
eyes on the welkin
Storming a Quaker Meeting House with weapons drawn.
"At Cadiz he saw a (polychrome 😉)..."
“From a Book of Hours
Bearing white myrrh and incense, autumn melts
Through flower and fruit and combed blonde straw;
Thunder looms on the mountain forest-belt;
The winter firewood purrs beneath the saw.
Our garden scents upbillow like the veils
Of Solomon’s Temple, shimmer in the rain,
And all is peace. Slowly the daylight falls,
And voice and lute bring back the stars again.”
–-Charles Spear
They've never met a problem yet that "more surveillance" wasn't the answer to.
Two Parrots Took a Walk Together in Spring.
Grok.
We are bombing ourselves back to the Stone Age.
"This is not an Age to hope for any encouragement to Learning of any kind." (via Mefi)
emissary Ishmael · before they closed the zoos
one thing more · that can be taken
"quisling quota"
this mummery · march into bare fields
singing jingles · snap thin fingers
want more same · the rows wiped smooth
what this skittles-sky · can't schedule
nor plumb plagueloss · not now nameable
shapes loom shambling · our share of New Spain
disappeared poets · in mid-accusation
unmet eyes · by the iron ringstand
Prayer to the God of Ketamine.
Our story for it is many things, but it all amounts to Habitat Loss.
