( via via / via )

Dreiländereck.

Life was pretty good.

I write only for Thomas Merton & his electrician.

(Riding).

( via / via )

"I’d say jazz drumming taught me how to write."

"It is cowardly to describe as illusion what we know is merely farce." — E M Cioran (tr P Traylen) via

The Real Zeno's Paradox.

      "Sojourner

   Shepherd's Law, Northumberland

The fettered hill.
The skull.
Old stone, among nettles fallen, near.
Her light brown hair.
The brief bales.
The bared hills, the load-bearing hills, the hills of Lammermuir.
Her coming headlong here."

—Gillian Allnutt

Nowhere Man.

( via / screenshot from google street view )

"For us, the contemporary poetry that matters tries make sense of the history of the recent past, a past that’s been propagandized, memory-holed, and co-opted to the point it can be difficult to remember, much less reconstruct a historical narrative about these times and their psychic darkness." (via)

   "this first fog, enough
to paint grass turquoise-grey, plus
   a few extra wisps"

—Jenkins Rising via

The kind of debate that makes me want to turn off my laptop & go outside, where the predators can be recognized coming at me.

Let’s keep snobbery in jazz where it belongs.

"The darkness in a Caravaggio is not, therefore, theatrical; it is residential. It: 'smells of candles, over-ripe melons, damp washing waiting to be hung out the next day: it is the darkness of stairwells, gambling corners, cheap lodgings, sudden encounters'."

( via / via )

Palate cleanser.

Central Market just upped the ante on highfalutin' coffee culture with a roast-it-yourself option in its own dedicated room.

What stocks should I buy right now?

"anchor in effigies"

questionnaire honk droppings
library halftime rhyming
your cloak on a coat hanger
catch the sun if shining
deputize a wise finger
Dilbeck's fallout darb

In Prison.

( me / via )

"Yet still the unresting castles thresh."

dragons, dragon holdings
a dreich name for framing
touch Gestapo gingerly
to a tune accelerando

God is a comedian.

“What we don’t want to look at, we think we don’t have to deal with, and then it owns us completely.” – Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor" —@jacobwren.bsky.social

Do not mess with this owl.

( via / oil painting by me )

Everything is great! Everything is fine!

" Like Tennyson, Larkin is half in love with his own melancholy. He is also warning us against it." —Jem via

"This is why the traffic between storytelling and metaphysics is continuous."

"The plum’s snow blooms are past,
Again I hear birds cry.
I fear this springtime grass
Will climb our polished steps too high."

—Wang Wei via

"My family and I (husband, son, dog and gecko) live in Montana, less than an hour from Yellowstone National Park, where wooly mammoths and giant camels and sloths once roved among the glaciers that carved the landscape into what it is today." (via @varaxes)

( via / via )

"Voronezh, the first part of which is voron, meaning raven, sinister bird, and the second part is ezh, hedgehog, whose sharp spines are like a killer's knife."

"manic noun"

maze full of reasons
moving through to sieve
here before to find
dust that's my sustenance
rich market of merch
many lost things winnowed
on the book dream path
dim days without music
gravel tracked in
animorphic shadows
share stage with reagents
& news its own game
avoiding what has happened
& in truth little sense said
would account for this war

"His wife barely seems to notice when he disappears for days or weeks to drive around the desert loitering in cheap motels. Perhaps this is because she’s just written a novel about the same thing called Play It as It Lays."

"There was a line of perfect boards, ready to be made into something. There was a door, warped and fallen into the street. There was a boardroom, where meetings went on so long that no one knew what decision had been made. In my apartment, the tulips have reached the stage of paper. When they hear music, they will turn from purple to yellow. They will become a tent in which I have always remembered sheltering. It is cold, and yet I shelter. The panorama is of the river, and on the river there is sailing, and the sails fill the river, and the sails are gone."
—@salrandolph

"He later sent money to place flowers on Crone’s grave every Memorial Day until his own death."

( via / me )

Sequence.

"Things that are inevitable: aging, growing less attractive, infirmity, disease and disorder, death, not getting what we want, the disappointment and boredom that are core to adult life

Things that are not inevitable: poverty, war, homelessness, disenfranchisement, cruelty, bigotry, exploitation

Our culture acts like it’s the exact opposite, and so naturally many people are miserable."
—@freddiedeboer

I’m glad to know about this i suppose but it is one of the most depressing things i’ve ever read.

"Echoes of Love

The house is creaking like a rocking chair.
I’m small again,
comforted by the sway of matter in a shift of air,
cosseted by wind.

Undulate earth, how do you slip your hum
around our roar
of concrete, needles, neon, wadded gum,
demented hungers, war,

discarded children? Your lap is full of us
and of our wrong.
How can you simplify the noise
to cradle our first song?"

—Isabel Chenot

"Cain needed somewhere he could lick his wounds. So he invented the city —."

( via / me )

"...Powys wrote a novel that he was sure would garner him the Nobel Prize: A Glastonbury Romance, published in 1932. It is his best novel, but instead of the Prize he received only a lawsuit, from a man in Glastonbury who claimed to have been identifiably and unfairly portrayed in the novel. The ensuing settlement devoured all of Powys’s royalties from the novel..."

"to paint anything other than the witches' sabbat at the witches' sabbat"

violet's shroud shrinking
shirked ghost trio
burning through ten of my nines
shadow boxing blindfold

"...the music said that a thrilling time when anything seemed possible was about to turn to stone and open into a future of dread and terror, into a realm where to speak falsely, or even carelessly, could be fatal to body and soul."

"Then the sitcom – and Bernard Black in particular – became a cult favourite; I picked up my first proper writing jobs in Mexico, to which I’d decamped as soon as I’d raised enough cash; and my memories of that winter above the shop – the utilities cut off, jacket potatoes as bed-warmers, my breath making tortuous sculptures in the air – took on a certain garret glamour." —Joseph S Furey via

"Today we live in the future she warned us about."

( me / via )

Yay Oxiana.

" ' My God!' he bit out.'“Of all the stinkingly unlucky arrests I could have made at this particular time--the arrest of Karl Imhoff--alias "Professor Waldemar Unruh"--alias "Paramoecium Pete"--alias "Amoeba Ambrose"--alias "Herr-Doktor Heinrich Zonenblink"--alias--' "
—@harryskeeler.bsky.social

Poems for Your Hands.

"UMAMI (Palindrome)

I’m a muse
to note,
raw at last:
salt, aware
to notes umami."

—@anthonyetherin

Browsing is one of life’s great pleasures, i’ll never understand how people just let go of it without a second thought.

( me / via )

Psalm 88 “Flowers cut will sing their clime”.

"Lunula

O luna novella,
Es digna fabella
Quae versibus edat
Itinera Sputnik
Tam ardua ut nic--
Tans Lucifer cedat."

—Van L. Johnson, The Classical Outlook (Dec 1957) via

"One might, were one inclined to the pejorative, term him ‘a think tank dorkwad’. A tankwad, if you will."

"I have a bunch of worlds that I’m world building for different projects. I’ve already world-built thoroughly the worlds for the next four series. And I’m working on the fifth one!" —Ada Palmer via

The Road to Plano Rona.

( via / via )

INTERNALATIONAL DICTIONARY OF NEOLOGISMS.

"Every time I’m in Union Square I think about how Tammany Hall, the seat of power for New York for decades, is now a Petco" —@cooperlund.online

Lebenserfahrung.

"clepsydra"

barrel-jeweloid
jazzy typeface fuseblown
Polish cold war neon
colder in here & cheerless

gas higher the whole world
hurrying pellmell hellward
barrel jewel the password
jester at monsoon fun'ral

mahogany milch · amass skypoints
      angst surfing
   the swift Imbolcs
at the right temp · i can gulp this starbucks
no eye on · Monday's urnclock
      Karg Island
   has been hours
in the barrel sun · of a jewel burn

internet out Biscayne
ill among flung robots
sky array of scare-drones
scumbled with pallid humbug

somewhere Substack tickles
salvo orc & elvish
handkerchief worn threadbare
threatens to pull wool up

      threatens to
   pull stark rank on
starbucks napkin · sonnet annuls

Waltzfrieze.

( me / via )

Every single patient.

“Clearancing DeLillo”

The names, somehow the blessèd names continue
In sonorous emptiness, down furrowed canyons,
Names for things long flown on fragrant pinions;
Believe it. Swift incarnadined Danube
Carried off America too, we huddle
Some pier with flickering clouds & dimming screens
Screaming for Daddy, shipwreck, or the needle.
We are the lucky ones.
Later, there will be monuments anew;
Records. Not the stories we’d have told,
But honest accounts. On these i sometimes brood.
A bard without a theme, without a role,
Chattering as this tutelary venue,
Burning house, collapses: words continue.

The Translator, Working Late.

"Don Fitch recalls that early zines were called fanmags, but Louis Russell Chauvenet (who's still publishing) coined fanzine about 1942 and it became the common usage, sometimes abbreviated to zine." —"Zine History" at Zinebook

At some point, backpacking became a curated experience.

( me / via )

Font Nerd.

Reluctant to bother to fill in the crosswords of a TV mystery show--clue, clue, clue. If i like how it ends, i'll go back.

Ritual & Enormity.

"thirlshoon"

to cut cancer research
more cash for that fascist
mild winter with furl doors
wailing silence-thudbrink

I knew i’d find some real Philosophy on Substack if i just kept looking.

( me / via )

Shifty square.

"playing war with the neighbor kids"

in the cracked china cup
creep swevens of grovewalks
decipher street struggles
stern with turnip carveface
the lanai full of photons
in the cracked china cup
creep swevens of grovewalks
ferry's rage to be drydocked

Scrabble.

"The word love 'resists being a word, almost successfully' " —@oldoldoldoldnew

Bang Bang.

( via / via )

Song of the Rider.

"You know how in a library no one’s trying to sell you anything?

That’s how the internet was." —@butisitart.bsky.social

China and the Future of Science.

taking Kharg Island
like a little bitch
blood splashes

at night in the empty kitchen
low sussuration in my ears

"White collar work and even the halfway point of an email job prove elusive; the tedious application processes function as force fields repelling the narrator. There’s a sense of middle class decline, of an educated man whose education has proved largely worthless, working jobs that would seem “beneath” him, even as he tries and often fails to romanticize their working class elements."

( me / via )

"...in every age God speaks in the language of Empire.."

stool without rafter beams · marriage
   my shadow on the kitchen door
the exhaustion · from rendering significance
   out of chicken scratchings
on a silicon screen · turquoise saucer
   parataxis of the moon

Two haiku by Masaoka Shiki.

"A charismatic technology shapes the whole field around it, the way a magnet organizes iron filings. LLMs may be the most powerful instance of this type in history. By the time the war began, the discourse had already become magnetized." —Kevin Baker via

Harry Smith in the Record Changer.

( me / via )

Server.

"‘byzantine’ as we all know is not a true descriptor, but instead a label used ex post facto by mediaeval scholars for the eastern half of the roman empire for the period after the mother city fell; now the people of the byzantine empire would not have understood the concept of ‘byzantine’ but instead always thought of themselves as roman, calling themselves rhomaioi; but you’ll notice that the word rhomaioi is not a latin term but greek; the byzantines were essentially romanised greeks;" —M E Rothwell via

Teach Phyllis Wheatley.

Columbia's · fallen can't get up
      outside there's
   setters barking
whirlpool of pangs · posh nimbus
wheels of death · dealing out hickeys
      fake wood grain
   the weak fulcrum
between the red sky · & erosion

"...the erosion of savoir-faire (how to make) and savoir-vivre (how to perceive, judge, and live with culture), and how under contemporary capitalism these functions are externalized into systems that destroy attention and taste."

( via / via )

Into Ghede.

      "Duckreturn in 2026"

pick my own pocket · with enough time
      stray boxes
   physical books
that candy you liked · in the lurk trenches
will come back in style · under blue skies

Overland from London to Venice..

"With Stupidity and sound Digestion a man may front much."

—Carlyle

"Our contemporary logos-ecosystem (so to awkwardly speak), and our global collection of readerly and writerly circles and scenes, often seem shaded and defined not by poets themselves, but by commentators of various species : reporters, observers, influencers, promoters, gamblers, professors, doctors of Religion, marketers, accountants, budget analysts, trend analysts, prognosticators, pontificators, and doctrinaire axe-grinders of many quasi-literary guilds. Those who are intent on advancing various theoretical potpourris of Old or New, the Great or the Transgressive, and so on."

( me / via )

Wishing has no place here.

"When the market no longer needs workers in large numbers, it loses even the instrumental reason to sustain the institutions that restrain its tendency toward moral corrosion." —Charlie McGill via

"The modernist creator would approach his craft Janus-faced, looking backward even as he moved forward, and with every step, he would produce something novel, indeed wholly original."

"The Dry Heart

The world where the dead live is a dry heart.
Every world is a heart, a rhythm spherical,
A rhythm of impossible intentions
That yet sings itself, imagining heard music.
The world where the dead live is a silent choir.
It does not hear itself, it sings itself not.
Its will has frozen into memory,
Black as still blood, without flow.
To the painless sorrow of death it throbs.
The world where the dead live is a heart alive
In a body once alive.
The dead move neither into heaven nor hell.
Their afterwards is their before.
The world where the dead live is a dry heart,
The same heart as always, even dry."

—Laura (Riding) Jackson

"Surely Cavafy is the most important 20th century poet to publish primarily in zine form."

( via / via )

"What is most threatening about conversion is its (perceived) irreversibility and totality."

"Tired of bitter rest (Mallarmé)

Tired of bitter rest where my laziness offends
A glory for which I once fled the adorable
Childhood of rosewood under the natural
Blue, and seven times more tired of a harsh pact
To dig by evening a new pit
In the avaricious and cold ground of my brain,
Gravedigger without pity for infertility,
-What shall I say to this Dawn, O Dreams, visited
By the roses, when for fear of its pallid roses,
The vast cemetery unites the empty holes? -
I want to abandon the voracious Art of a cruel
Country, and, smiling at old reproaches
Which my friends make to me, the past, the genius,
And my lamp that however knows my agony
Imitating the Chinese with a clear and fine heart
To whom pure ecstasy is to paint the end
On his cups of snow to the delighted moon
From a bizarre flower that perfumes his transparent
Life, the flower which he smelled, child,
Being grafted onto the blue filigree of a soul.
And death as the only dream of a wise man,
Serenely, I am going to choose a young landscape
That I would paint again on a cup, distracted,
A line of thin and pale blue would be
A lake, amid the sky of bare china,
A clear crescent lost in a white cloud
Dips its calm horn in the icy waters
Not far from three big emerald eyelashes, the reeds"

—Jim Hanson 04/25/2008 via

"For them, these principles were linguistic, such that a proper understanding of the laws of language could shed light on the course of history."

"When I encounter the word 'dopamine,' I stop reading." —@bibletranslation

"...kill quotas flash in boxes..."

( via / via )

Let it Ride.

"I just read online that Andrew Tate announced at some point that he refuses to sleep with vaccinated women.

And people still have the audacity to say vaccines don't work." —@mossandmatchsticks

What are the great artworks about tiredness?

plague psithurism
plucked chrysanthemumchance
plenary misreading
plucked from the punk headlines

"While the systems that govern us...are premised on rationality, the world they operate in is completely irrational..."

( via / via )

A23a R136a1.

      "track lighting at 6 a.m."

wavescrolloped · wearyshore
      emergent
   div pavilion
burnt-umber surface · sapphire fathom'd
the keep shattered · shareable still
      outside, rain
   in packs rustles
wavepentagrammed · roninshore

Burrowing Owl on the ground.

"I think something is gained in Bulgakov through his expansion of the fundamental options from two to three and mapping on the antinomies of philosophy to the Trinitarian persons."
—Naucratic Expeditions via

The Berkeley Town Hall Reading.

( via / via )

Brevity, a sonnet sequence.

"The dawn is not off the sea, and Odysseus’ ships
have not yet passed the islands. I must watch them still."

—D H Lawrence via

Big Borges.

unskull grin · the scarcest window
      days of vast
   disaster sprawl
focus on tiny · tenable sprig
the tires soft · for a road full of edges
      flowing tongs
   to string tinsel
thousand year old clock · clicks out throngs
i await word · scribbled over
      tailfins swarm
   in bright guesswork

The Gallop.

( me / via )

Rock n Roll was born 111 years ago today in Arkansas.

      "query letter"

   putting the plant out
that knows neither hand nor war
   only this sunshine

nor i the new equinox
earth in its tilting squanders

Coqueluche.

"In 1913-14 Noguchi was invited to lecture at Oxford on Hokku (haiku) at the invitation of Robert Bridges, the poet laureate..." —Dr Jonathan E Wilson via

It’s That Bird (Again) .