I greatly appreciate anyone who fights against Illich’s long & deep erasure. He is much needed now, as he was formative to my own thought. Today i cannot agree with his ideas on gender, & only a little with his ideas on medicine (having sojourned myself within the mortality-machine lately), but i know that anyone smart enough to understand his earlier writings would not have gone on to the present-day gender-critical & antivaxxer psychopathy they might superficially seem to lead to.
"taillights through Venetian blinds" (bivocalism)
Caesar
rends a leaden
paperback dream sérac
red hand dreaded, far swept fable
naked
"With the joyful grips of my fingertips
I held the oozy gunwale tight."
—Sheridan LeFanu, "Beatrice", in: Poems (1904)
" 'Is there a single word that one may practice throughout one’s life?'
The Master said, 'Perhaps it is shu — empathetic restraint.
What you yourself do not desire, do not impose upon others.'
子贡问曰：'有一言而可以终身行之者乎？'
子曰：'其恕乎！己所不欲，勿施于人。' "
~ Kongzi (孔子, aka “Confucius”, 551–479 BCE), Spring and Autumn period philosopher and teacher, from The Analects · Book XV: Wei Ling Gong (《论语·卫灵公》)" —@jianxu
"THE SHIRE (Bivocalism*)
In the shire,
winter nights,
we drink red wine
in frenzied inns.
We sip the finest bitter gins.
We find the gilded fire.
In the shire,
in the spring,
we sing the hills,
we drink the silver spires.
(*Only two vowels, which alternate throughout)"
—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
"...with a belly full of hope."
"The thunder could have been anything."
"Let the unshaven Nazarite of stars
Unbind his wondrous locks, and grandame's earthquake
Drop its wide jaw; and let the churchyard's sleep
Whisper our goblins."
—Beddoes
"adaptogen"
gather clues · in the cold gloaming
sixth floor perch
impaired alloy
rig seasonal · decorations
sheer clutter · of wrecked machines
Frutiger
Aero flooring
styrofoam's triumph · styrofoam's revenge
"Magic can live in words, but it is not catchable in words.."
"polymarket"
the bulky equipage · of the quagmire guards
the burned road
rattles our clank
some lit screen is · leering like luck
i found but forgotten · one click further
& people
peeling away
someone no longer · in the drivethrough window
empty space · on the spoiled shelf
soured laughter
belongs elsewhere
a crown crushed · by the gray of the sky
The US is no longer a liberal democracy.
“ 'They chose to stay as an act of resistance,' said Daderko. 'They were surrounded by violence and death on Jersey. They saw people starving in the streets, they saw people tortured, they saw executions.' " —Katie White via
Mamdani on St Patrick & the Irish.
“A good question is very hard to answer. The better the question the harder the answer. There is no answer at all to a very good question.”
- Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds via @jacobwren.bsky.social
"Every true work, like every true individual, is first of all a ‘that which is not'."
"From a Window
Up here, with June, the sycamore throws
Across the window a whispering screen;
I shall miss the sycamore more, I suppose,
Than anything else on this earth that is out in green.
But I mean to go through the door without fear,
Not caring much what happens here
When I’m away: —
How green the screen is across the panes
Or who goes laughing along the lanes
With my old lover all summer day."
—Charlotte Mew via
"MIDNIGHT (Anagrammed Lines)
Lawless midnight forever composes
verse from compelling shadows. I set
scenes from the improvised gallows,
the slow, simple coverings of dreams."
—@anthonyetherin
"George III
George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder."
—E C Bentley
"Elfwisk – a Hookland dialect word for fate. While it can be translated as god-wished, it's more often used to imply that ill or fortunate happenstances in a person’s life are being manipulated by unseen forces of a somewhat lower order, often for no reason other than their fierce merriment." —@hookland.bsky.social
white enamel iron chairs
in the cold early light
pennies, paperbacks
elfwisk
"THE FAILED CARTOGRAPHER (Palindrome)
Demand a hill, at solid nadir….
Damn it!
One morn,
I saw I was in Rome,
not in Madrid,
and I lost all I had named...."
@anthonyetherin
"Henry sats in de bar & was odd.."
"While close overhead clap the quick mocking palms of the Storm-Fiend" —Sheridan LeFanu
"They’re telling me a great empire will be destroyed if I attack Persia. Even the oracles who don’t like me very much, very nasty, they all said to me, “Sir, it’s one of the great empires, and it’ll be destroyed. And all because you attacked Persia.” That’s what they’re telling me."
—kenjennings.bsky.social
"to be smothered in cassia"
stabilimenta · in the scarecrow web
way station
worn desert sign
dreams of a glorious · green headlight
notepaper damp · nimble the bardquill
cuneiform
ruminations
as heavy night falls · across fierce acres
squandermurk · vermilion brillig
one good word
the wound stanching
"I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
'It is futile,' I said,
'You can never —'
'You lie,' he cried,
And ran on."
—Stephen Crane via @RobertAllenPoet / via
"While I do not believe suffering is good, I do believe that it is meaningful. " —Darcey Steinke via
"Compromise solution: we replace Winston Churchill with a badger on the bank notes, but we genetically engineer all actual badgers to have the exact face of Winston Churchill. Everybody wins." —@lastpositivist.bsky.social
"AT DAWN (Anagrammed Lines)
Shades flood dawn, in a memory
of meadows and soil and rhyme —
in dreams made only of shadow…. "
—@anthonyetherin
"These are not easy questions, but Cicero was in an excellent position to evaluate them.
weak coffee a waif sips
in the worn dark circling
heinous parable pinebox
porch light regolith scorching
crosshatch filled-in fistula
refer peppermint flatiron
where the sludge forms slabs
a slate of glib fireworks
still our routine tingles
attesting best practice
graves robbed for the granular
scrimshaw, grotto football
Edward Gorey and His Githerments.
"surely one of the all-time great (and forgotten) moments in history was when Proust was called gay in print by Jean Lorrain, also gay, and they went to the Meudon forest to have a pistol duel, both tried to kill the other, and both missed." —@simsben1
Exploring Khmer temples in Northeastearn Thailand.
"But the empty streets of Tokyo that night did not feel like a lost future. Rather, it felt as if reality itself were slipping away into a void. The present itself was disappearing." —Hana via
The place where Caesar was stabbed is now a cat sanctuary.
orchestrate inmost · urn shattering
these discards
& adroit thefts
Wuhan weathering · in a wave of nowls
just doesn't seem · ascent worth making
boarded up
bare cell for years
fumble the thimble · therapy dog
Solving the sidewalk fossil keyboard mystery.
"message from the grave"
rose garden no riddle
marooned Lego playground
missilefall maze season
mighty fine decline-yen
hüzün in the hewn path
hushed the tardy garden
these cities that served us
assail ev'ry Grail quest
erase other month page
roseless hardware garden
glowing green bunny
"Two years ago, we did not have to think about an army of tacticool-looking, redneck motherfuckers driving government vehicles around, just looking for excuses to ask people for their papers. We also did not have to find space in our psyche to accept that many people—people who eat hamburgers, pay with US dollars, watch TV commercials about weight loss drugs, people like us—find that as unoffensive a development as a new variety of toothpaste." —J Mimulus via
"GARDEN OF EDEN (Palindrome)
I made, in Eden, a cradle.
Here we were held.
Arcane, denied am I."
—@anthonyetherin
"Dahiyah"
duckspeak doula · ghoulish goulash
mall where i tore the tickets
while i worked on my painting · under wasp-regard
which paid for The Cantos
& what you love well · isn't always saved
died the pic's purchaser · & she i painted it for
bulldozers took the mall
little by little · as i watched
& a plague took the world
Location and Background of 'The Oldest View'.
"I was lost
when I met you on the road
to Larissa
the straight road between the cedars
You thought
I was a man of roads
and you loved me for being such a man
I was not such a man
I was lost
when I met you on the road
to Larissa"
—Leonard Cohen
A poem is a butterfly. A butterfly, that can live for a thousand years.
"I wish to preserve the difference between text and life and to avoid subjugating one to the other."
"The art looks as if disasters have passed through it, but it also looks as if it had survived those disasters and as if the strewn pieces of it could be assembled into something quite superior." —R A Lafferty via
"The Bird with the Dark Plumes
'The bird with the dark plumes in my blood,
That never for one moment, however I patched my truces,
Consented to make peace with the people,
It is pitiful now to watch her pleasure in a breath of tempest
Breaking the sad promise of spring.
Are these that morose hawk's wings, vaulting, a mere mad swallow's,
The snow-shed peak, the violent precipice?
Poor outlaw that would not value their praise do you prize their blame?
'Their liking' she said 'was a long creance,
But let them be kind enough to hate me, that opens the sky.'
It is almost as foolish my poor falcon
To want hatred as to want love; and harder to win."
—Robertson Jeffers
"different sides of the aisle"
sidecar return
wheypool
wheypool doomcookies
paleo
as an adjective
prizes handed out
to one side of the gibbet
"We cannot go back to the self that lacks the experience of desiring."
"Every time science advances, part of an art becomes a science, so art loses a little bit. Yet, mysteriously, art always seems to register a net gain, because as we understand more we invent new things that we can't explain to computers." —Don Knuth via
"Distractedly pawing at the old notebooks, ambushed by their scratchy configurations of desire.
Barthes: 'the fragment is a spoilsport.'
And: '. . . the problem of writing: how to put up with the fact that the great flood I have within me leads in the best of cases to a rivulet of writing.' "—@lattaj.bsky.social
"The Modern Poet’s Word Hoard
Hwaet!
Amid ancient hills alive with song
This wordsmith sits, with winking lights.
A wireless network, the world wide web
At my fingertips – friend, or foe?
Well …
Strange and wonderful space stallions surging
Farting fireballs, bright flame leapers
Climb heavenwards to the comet’s riding.
Newton’s progeny, the planet pilgrim,
Explores the emptiness, outward bound,
Carrying mankind’s message to a million stars,
Voyager, void hurdler, slowly vanishing.
But …
Back on earth, ensnared by the Internet,
That seducer of time and solver of puzzles,
That sleepless data-dragon on its mound of dark desires
Hoarding a billion wisdoms and wild dreams battling,
All facts, fictions, fantasies avid for attention.
This work of tech giants has created galleries of kittens,
Floods of fake news, and friends’ news, feeding the beast.
And …
Words are carried across the wind ridden ether,
Distance devoured, time zones denied,
Pictures follow from my pocket-talker,
Face-speaker, far-friend hailer,
Stalker of strangers, snapper of selfies,
A digital harp for my music board,
A library of stories lights up my screen,
The kindness of Kindle keeps me well read.
A riddle …
A nadir of culture, a nemesis of poetry,
A chance to find a wider fellowship.
What am I called?"
—Phyllis Wicks at FGR
"Why does death come to mind when thinking of love."
"forbidden island"
Nemesis unceasing
in suq antelucan
my own glib betrayals
trawl no shallower Glasnost
fed up with flerd ardent
flourishes yet, unfettered;
but Nemesis is Sampo
one grim bony motor
Nemesis will nitpick
narc where you laid darkness
the cells of your braille body
bode Nemesis its hymnal
Nemesis unceasing
till season's tall falling
too bad for the munchkins
whose modest urge burgeoned
First, try to be something, anything, else.
"As the tour continued, I thought how strange and sad it was: my grandmother, who had endured exile and displacement, now treated as a visitor in a museum that had once been her home."
—Ayşe Osmanoğlu via
Japanese Aesthetics for Life and Death: In Praise of Shadows, Fades, Fragments.
"Publishing a weekly substack is like running a one-woman newspaper for an imaginary town that doesn’t exist." —@laurafaulkneristyping
"Ramadan, Lent, Spring Break"
heart's Valhalla-foothold
heralded splint-winter
torn up road uproarious
with risk-averse esquires
where the torus tumbles
too much of a suchness
"And heatstroke took the piglets’ lives."
"glint among matte shadows"
flickering
shadow shamrock
whispering
mutilation
smithereens summoned
sasquatch open casket
the dartk light years yeckate
coyote sips spritzer
Mussorgsky
coded malware
gallop bumps
better than smooth
the pitch made by Paddock
paltry skulk i'll take it
delete liar's contest
politer chirg ragweed
scintillant
surging darkness
drove the snakes
snazzy dumpster
derringer chess chapbook
with charred pages bordered
redbrick igloo runagate
the roost of bright stooges
flickering
though our wyrd flows
castles stormed
inside shards strewn
someone has the Sampo
circulates cloud powder
not yet scattered scry-notes
scowling like appall-solace
This is still the realest thing ever said about America.
"Time's a credible dice
Time sacred, I bled ice."
—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
Elms.
"Verlaine’s pistol he used to shoot Rimbaud was once up for auction and was starting for around $80,000. I had about half that saved up from work + student loans + student grants and awards at the time. I thought maybe I could hawk everything I owned (computer, guitars, record collection, rare books) and sell my twink ass a bit to make up the rest. If I’d spent that money on the pistol, I would have had to drop out of school because I’d have no tuition money and would have been broke and homeless and in debt. Some nights I actually lie awake in bed soaking in my regret."
—Eris at Discordia Review
A fateful encounter with a poet.
"Lacaille 9352"
just king & the king's goons
carrying out foreplay
pale cerulean ragtime
berates the dung beetle
pillage the shrunk portions
on portico hoedown
no one stops at red lights
no one meets deadlines
we'll let mint massacres
mention us at floss time
overplus dusk aidles
car driving with tire flat
books i wrote reissued
robot-hoovered covers
the trestle my spraypaint
sprinkled now thankless
the king's gravel fortress
festers in its own time
never-sleep room's slippage
sly enough Fafnir
The greatest poem of all time was writ by an anonymous samurai.
