( via / via )

Harden my Heart.

" 'Democracy Dies in Darkness' is kinda like 'Don't Be Evil' as a slogan. It's a bit worrying when you choose it, but it's a lot more worrying when you take it down" --@grayathena.bsky.social

Everybody Knows.

Carnival.

( drawing by kauage in alcheringa 3 / via )

Wintersong.

like a soap op'ra
i lose the thread to:
someone else’s dying

far from me
the way other weather is far

We live in the ✨ world of tomorrow ✨. (via @tomtomorrow.bsky.social)

“All our humiliations come from the fact that we cannot bring ourselves to die of hunger.” –E M Cioran, A Short History of Decay (1949; tr R Howard 1975)

When Mary Pickford sneezes.

( de villo sloan "tide chart for a lost ocean #3" via fb / via )

Hermitage.

"Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk which ought to crawl." --@lastpositivist.bsky.social

Like Lucifer falling.

pangolin of the spreadsheet
old timer's tick-tock
orchid pact-trunk
gastroliths of glisk

pyres i peregrinate
look putrid
where nenuphars are nesh
to the spreadsheet pangolin

St Michael's tower peeping out.

( via / via )

The Story Behind the 13-Year-Old “New Yorker” Cartoon That Defines Our Climate Moment.

"The Clown Punished

Eyes, lakes with my simple drunkenness reborn
Other than the troubadour who evoked the gesture
As with a quill, of oil lamps’ ignoble smoke
I pierced a window in the linen wall

From my leg and arms clear treacherous swimmer
In increasing leaps and bounds, denying the bad
Hamlet! It’s as if in the wave I invented
A thousand sepulchers for it, virgin, to disappear

Hilarious gold of a cymbal with angry fists
Suddenly the sun strikes the nudity
That exhaled my pure freshness of mother-of-pearl

When you passed over me, stale night of the skin
Not knowing, ingrate! that it was all my consecration
This rouge drowned in the water of faithless glaciers

-- Jim Hanson's Mallarmé (07/31/08 )

The almost lost remains of Garlies Castle.

"I had my first thrilling thought in Philadelphia," Lynch once told Loud & Quiet. "Philadelphia, more than any filmmaker, influenced me. It's the sickest, most corrupt, decaying, fear-ridden city imaginable. I was very poor and living in bad areas. I felt like I was constantly in danger. But it was so fantastic at the same time." (via)

David Lynch and autism

( via / via )

2024 Symmys.

I didn't watch any television from the end of M𝑎𝑟𝑦 H𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑚𝑎𝑛 x2 (1977) until T𝑤𝑖𝑛 P𝑒𝑎𝑘𝑠 started (1990). Since i didn't have my own set, i rode a bus half a mile to my parents' house once a week just to watch it.

Near a Raven.

"The Monet Conundrum

Is evey one of these poems
different from the others
he asked himself,
as the rain quieted down,

or are they all the same poem,
haystack after haystack
at different times of day,
different shadows and shades of hay?"

--Billy Collins

Skua, Aftermath and Cello.

( me / via )

"I didn’t know it at the time—I was five—but the telescopes at the observatory at the top of the road were the place where humankind first really saw the universe spread out above."

siren in the night
splits the microwave's soft hum
& you knew omens

the senselessness of this earth,
our need to steer upon it

The Sylvan Embrace.

"I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath."

--David Lynch

Whatever happened to the Church of Anarchy?

( via / via )

In the Quiet Absence of God.

"a freezing wind
the parrots alight
a bottle of sake"

--@poemexe.com

What Year Is This.

Gilead, Gilead Lite · residual snow
  in the places where there's shade
the light gilds our · gridlocked dreariness
   inside each sad house a screen
ah Gilead last wrench · of the relaunched monster
  the devastated city acrawl

Cuarto Oscuro. (via @wendyo.bsky.social)

( via / via )

Paint It Black.

  news of a ceasefire
across all the yellow lawns
  of January

too busy to turn our heads
caught up in the phantom-chase

To understand a train.

"VENUS (Palindrome-Haiku)

Pure Venus, asleep,
slid off a daffodil’s peels,
a sun ever up."

--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

"The British sci-fi writer David Langford reported in a 2002 column that once a 'French publisher nervously asked whether Lafferty minded being compared to G.K. Chesterton … and there was a terrifying silence that went on and on. Was the great man hideously offended? Eventually, very slowly, he said: "You’re on the right track, kid," and wandered away'."

( me / me )

"Critchley has written more than twenty books on subjects as various as suicide and David Bowie; this must mean something."

"The same dudes who fetishize the supposed lost strength and competence of their forefathers want computers to write their emails for them." --@kibblesmith.com via @aestallings.bsky.social

Tanith Lee at Astra. (via)

"rolling gargoyle"

iceberg masque in Usk
answerless enhancement
words emptied by winds
wassailing throb goblet

melt icebergs amerce
mincemeat in a dense fog
this parking lot's lurk
lurid with the curefail

"It’s like, what would Herblock do?"

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

"From then on, the idea of the new town as a point of tension – new versus old, planned versus organic, urban versus rural – would be played out on film, consciously or otherwise, time and again." (via @regretteruane.bsky.social)

  precursor
to the cold dawn
prank confessor
  precursor
  fur dancer
blank anodyne
  precursor
to the cold dawn

A Fish King Has Caught a Hoopoe and Is Full of Joy.

" 'My seeds will not grow,' said Toad.

'You are shouting too much,' said Frog, 'These poor seeds are afraid to grow.' " --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Another Song for a Mad King.

( via / via )

Slowcar to China.

"fireflies dividing the night by zero"

--David McKee in Password

Meryem Meryemti.

"The Writing in Blood

The fist of the world closes.
The bloody gift is given
And the wound widens;
History unspirals and
The fingerprints of death
Dig deep.

Fury and destruction;
Defilement and fire;
The only victory is for
Life’s devourer.

The child of humiliation is horror.
Who has forgotten this?

The olive trees are felled;
The spring of life is spoiled.
We endure on the edge
Of despair.

Meanwhile, in murder,
The fist spells out the future.
Blood, it writes.
Bring me more."

--Tom Hirons in Clarion

Medieval Bologna.

( via / me )

Counterpart.

"dirge for the American Empire"

an unkindness of azure
elsewhere beams ugly-derne
Grob's Attack the sole chess
astrolabe-found Rodan

"Shows that funny, which bear up under repeated viewings, are as rare as two-headed snakes."

"Frog and Toad sat on the porch, feeling sad together." --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Triolet.

( via / me )

"Anti-gender is one of the vectors through which fascist passions are stoked and circulated, and those are passions that support increasingly authoritarian regimes that justify their wars and their acts of destruction by appearing as if they are putting an end to what threatens society with destruction."

"drooping
deep in the mist
listening to snow"

--@poemexe.com

"Indeed, but for Mr. Trump's election and imminent return to the Presidency, the Office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial."

the days grow longer but the nights grow longer still

Landscape with urnbeings.

( via / via )

The Queen of Spades (1949). ☆☆☆☆

"drinking Fresca on the precipice"

chesspiece parsed in wood
perfect weight & gateway
cobwebbed now coigns rob
of coming here deerlike
out of the erg fog

Lines for Centos.

" 'Can you think of an average person?'
'Well, I would rather not think of one,' said Ursula.
'Most people must be average,' said Catherine, 'or there would not be such a thing.'
'Well, let us hope there is not,' said her sister."

--@icomptonburnett.bsky.social

"It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows."

( via / via )

"As a piece of treasured myth, to push across the table to each other and use in our stories, it’s a profound image. As a lifestyle it’s just kind of embarrassing."

"the holes in the wall
they look very important
a white moth"

--@poemexe.com

The Sorcerer to His Love.

indigo source ice
answers wistful discharge
cerulean crash wrench
roster holocaust crisp

indigo warp waned
of wiry snap firestorms
persuaded this sward's
swagfest in the dragnet

Karnak filmed when firn
festoons all the rescues
i walk between twerk
& twisterscape tryst-shrug

Nomos Alpha.

( via / me )

Symphony No 15 in A major.

attenuated toys
we rejoin the jungle
we are tired & juiceless
Ucalegon kindled

leet-day long past claiming

The Finn Juhl Chamber at the United Nations Headquarters.

"throwing rice at weddings is bad for the birds and that’s why i throw rocks" --@sixfeetofcandy.bsky.social

The eyeblink airt.

( via / via )

Somebody That I Used To Know.

"Whoever has no house now, will never have one." --Rilke

Monocle Lash.

sphinx of black quartz,
hear my vow
battling kites

sphinx of black quartz
tour of rickets
Lissajou snarleyyow
sphinx of black quartz

hear my vow

White Wedding.

( via/ via )

Carry On Wayward Son.

"selling the house
we quietly unmark
the pets’ graves”

–William Keckler in Modern Haiku 51.3

The Girl Hunters (1963). [free to register] ☆☆

“The Internet causes village idiots to form entire villages made up only of village idiots who have no idea they are village idiots”
--Vlad Vexler (via @joycecaroloates)

Kryptonite.

( via / via )

Division of labor.

“ ‘It is a pity that we have to know so much,’ said Terence. 'I often feel that I cannot sustain the weight of my knowledge. And with every day it gets worse.’ ” --Elders & Betters

The Sound of Silence.

“Night Wind

All through the dark the wind looks
for the grief it belongs to
but there was no place
for that any more

I have looked too
and seen only the nameless hunger
watching us out of the stars
ancestor

and the black fields”

–W S Merwin

"The Trump family are being positioned into a spot that has been created by several years of increasing propaganda depicting fascist tyranny as a romantic gilded age."

( via / via)

"I excerpt the conclusion of Pierre Boulez’s infamous elegy to Schoenberg below..."

“Faith upon the Waters

A ghost rose when the waves rose,
When the waves sank stood columnwise
And broken: archaic is
The spirituality of sea,
Water haunted by an imagination
Like fire previously.

More ghost when no ghost,
When the waves explain
Eye to the eye…

And dolphins tease,
And the ventriloquist gulls,
Their angular three-element cries…

Fancy ages.
A death-bed restlessness inflames the mind
And a warm mist attacks the face
With mortal premonition.”

–Laura (Riding) Jackson

Just jumped to the top of my time-travel bucket list.

"Behold! here's nothing but sad mourning lines,
So that my verse agreeth with his times."

--1672 Ovid

"...there is nothing unusual about fires in Los Angeles, which is, after all, a desert city with only two distinct seasons: one beginning in January and lasting three or four months, during which storms come in from the northern Pacific and it rains—often an inch every two or three hours, and sometimes, in some places, an inch a minute—and one lasting eight or nine months, during which it burns, or gets ready to burn."

( via / via )

Europa and Io.

"a fraternity hoodie that spells out ISIS in Greek letters, just picture it" --@dly.bsky.social via @francesmeh.reviews

"The fact that Quakers continued to use thee long after most of the rest of the English-speaking world abandoned it is somewhat remarkable, but ...even though Quakers retained thee, they eventually dropped thou (at least in colloquial style), using thee in its place."

a short car drive walked
in all temp'ratures essayed
the gray of old snow

"Since I am an actual dropout I always felt a degree of impostor syndrome about it, and I had no idea how my colleagues taught their classes. I was afraid to ask."

( via / via )

"The new people were something else before they were white-Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish-and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again."

ignoble spectacle
spastic the whirligig
out of the pentacle
enter devout floatpig

Modern Japanese Fiction in English Translation.

"Or spotted plush of panthers from the boughs
Of lush primeval forests..."

--J Stanyan Bigg

Regret rate.

( via / me )

nocturn.

"DiValo decided to let Wolf Gladish fry a little in his own money-hungry juices before telling him that where there was a legerdemainist in the picture, the war was never lost! So he held mutual post-mortem condolences with the other." --@harryskeeler.bsky.social

The Black Sun.

"Glacier

a gracile calcic acreage, regal, irreal, elegiac, clear—

eerie icicle cellarage,
glare carrier,
lilac relic:

all ice,
all age

all lag"

--Luke Bradford in Eunoia Review

thors helmet.

( via / me )

"In a time when assaults on higher ed are the most acute since the McCarthyite assaults of the 1950s, the University's leadership & trustees have abandoned any duty to protect the university's most precious resources: its faculty, students, & academic mission."

elfcap inference · fade into craft
svelte microclime · Svengali

bright sun on the · old snow
January resolutions · looted for sport

& it's elfcap inference · keeps us afloat
in the aftermath · of the munchkin cull

"...there are widespread videos of kids in Compton, where I once lived, helping their mother remove her belongings, and being labeled to the world as looters."

"The sexual tension between winter and depression" --@tomorrowx3.bsky.social via @4slars.bsky.social

Look at what was taken.

( via / via )

LA firenado.

" 'Yes,' said Frog, reaching for a cookie, 'we need will power.'

'What is will power?' asked Toad." --@toadandfrogbot.bsky.social

DuckTales took an unexpectedly dark turn..

"MERGING (Anagrammed Lines)

More winter seedlings —
more needless writing;
entire worlds seeming
to merge in wilderness...."

--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

You step outside and breathe in the ashes of your friends' homes while charred pages from someone's beloved books glide to your feet on poison winds.