( via / via )

Listening to the Billionaire.

Read a New Poem Alone in Gaza.

"During the Cultural Revolution in China, rival Red Guards units would attack each other with clubs and guns, both sides screaming 'Long live Chairman Mao!' In the West, we do things differently. Here, we have politically motivated firefights between two non-white people, both of them devoted to Adolf Hitler." —Sam Kriss via

"Having only been able to make it 60 pages in: I do not believe that Strieber believes his own story—even as a good lie." (Which makes me wonder if Roxy's claim to have also been at that famous mass shooting...was plagiarized from Streiber?? That's a kind of joke on all of us for even listening to him.)

( via / via )

Here’s how many people have lost food assistance so far.

"Do we spend a seventh of our lives on each day of the week?" —Mark Scott via

No. Mondays are half.

Ristitamtsi.

"...the only runic inscription from Anglo-Saxon England which declares itself to have been made by a woman."

( via / via )

Peat Cutting.

      "LETTER IV.

Hatched in a rasping darkness of dry sand
   The child cicada some brave root discovers:
Sucks with dumb mouth while his long climb is planned
   That high must tunnel through the silt that smothers..."

—William Empson via

"I think of Melville as a New York writer, even though he's talking about whales."

"Pope, who was never known to laugh, was a great wit..." --John Dennis, The Age of Pope (1896)

"This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps."

( via / via )

The "dog" behind Dog Day Afternoon. (via @sardonicus.eu)

"*'The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st Century's frontier'

*The Gray Zone's not very sustainable. It costs a lot to maintain all those smart flying bombs, they need fuel, batteries, chips, cameras

*So what does the Post-Gray-Zone look like

*Chernobyl, maybe. 'Involuntary Park' "

—Bruce Sterling via

Talk of the Town.

       shards falling
   never from night's
& that myth-rendered · burg excavates
as storms worsen stabsong
astute bards break timebread

       these pavements
   full of victims
these screens shine · no ripe shelter
i no-clip pinched parkswards
pullulating great wormforms

       ancient caste
   leper king built

The Age of Pope.

( via / via )

Success.

best magic is old magic
a thousand years of repair
tall hats in dim corridors
calcspar box & hacksaw

calcspar box & hacksaw
Habsburg jaw on Liberty
DDT spiral
night without stars
nidor of sagas for Odin

Stanley Crouch, for & against. Much fun is had by all.

"there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue"
—@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

Untouchable.

( via / via )

PSA.

"Magnolia flowers are pollinated by beetles because the species is so ancient. They appeared on Earth before bees." —@mfcarter.bsky.social

The Darkness.

"Basra"

a wall of all alibis
umber floor, siege dumbshow
fizzogmany naughahyde
anon ponders
the sky's secrets, skulkshorn
skullface Epstein klepto
umber floor, flayed sideshow
flattens into dream-minted

the Furies chortle

Golden Brown.

( via / via )

this really is THE WORST TIMELINE.

      "old magazine"

wraith recompense · so long lapsing
      waterfall
   whose tide stands still
fragments afloat noggin
forcefed stilbs of rare bedlam

verse carrying casement
      pumpydoor
calcspar box hacksaw
   of dark inklings
cerulean road · rattletrap quokka

crank windows are coming back

"I once went to Vancouver, and asked a pharmacist how much a vial of insulin costs, they said $35. Then I called my pharmacy in the states, and they said $360."

"The most terrifying shipwreck would be to save ourselves" —@poemakontsa.bsky.social

Perfect.

( via / via )

My tanka books reviewed. (404 & In the Time of the Fall of the Towers)

Among the dancing apes a dance about not-dancing.

"It takes a bit of sacrifice sometimes..."

"THE CHRYSALIS (Anagrammed Lines)

A shy echo splinters
those shiny parcels.
The chrysalis opens
physical otherness."

—Anthony Etherin

ICE’s biggest supporters.

( via / via )

Antinous.

"manson's hit song"

more days off than on
stained concrete
the name of this harsh boon
green screen full of lies
the clever burning

the clever burning

Shushbooth.

"Their greatest discovery was of a humble guslar by the name of Avdo Međedović (1875–1955), a Slavicised Albanian Muslim whose recitation of a 12,000-line poem entitled The Wedding of Smailagić Meho would come to serve as the centrepiece of their collection." —Hinternet Editorial Board via

This is probably important.

( me / via )

Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

"The moment you start caring about what a gallery or a publisher thinks, you stop being an artist and become an employee." — Remedios Varo

Whine of a Sick Child.

"the usual suspects"

world ready to grab, legible
as an hour gone is not;
direction of losing

murderers are not caught

an emptiness enamored
of its not-being-crossed;
that color to the eye

murderers are not caught

looking back to those bad years
whose recipe is lost

Stellar Tunnel.

( via / via )

Procedure.

"cracked black crumble gumbo"

ogle Lego labyrinth
in the Stockholm Syndrome

pilgrimage parkinglots
empire of green fire ants

my outline dark pane limns
ogle Lego labyrinth

How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found. (REMOVED)

I guess writers will simply have to stop having commonplace reactions to typical subjects.

Ulysses. (1967)

( via / via )

"Giallobrutalism," or why everything looks like that. (that music is too annoying--i just substitute Harry Partch)

At one time i wanted to write a book about how the aphoristic philosophers provide a separate tradition from the systematic ones but i gave up on that idea, partly because the pre-Socratics who seem to have started it may have been nothing of the sort, only remembered in excerpts; & when being excerpted by someone else is the tradition, it’s only a kind of reading.

The S of the Snarl.

      "the boxes things come in"

glim absence · glaucous sky
   parables of sixish
symmetry's marplot · heavy on my mind
   like when you put change back
in a loose shirt pocket · then pat for it
   & it's not there now

"Aphorisms will always be niche."

( via / via )

Lāhainā Noon.

vast distances · in token crowd
      green table
   agreeable
crumpled paper towels cram
in the cardboard popemobile

venture without fathom · prevaricate
      on the wind
   the taking wind
taste of mixed coffees
pylonmaxxing dial tone

The other side of American Gothic.

"What I’ve never seen is hatred produce wisdom. I’ve seen it produce energy. I’ve seen it produce action. I’ve seen it produce revenge. But I’ve never seen it leave a human being more whole."
—Lonny McLaughlin via

The Empty Church.

( via / via )

First same-sex couple in recorded history.

"Show two-thirds of it dissolving into mist and you have given the viewer the rest of the mountain to build, larger and more alive, inside themselves." —Tōan via

The House Fire That Launched Robert Silverberg's Golden Age.

   the world of after
all the ingredients here
   colors that will rise

the garage door derelict
that addresses us daily

"Trump may be more porcine than equine—a Circe product. Even so, after all this time, we should have been able to spot a Trojan horse."

( via / via )

This Fastidious Erasure.

"i know something about size"

pinkgold fled jetscrape
conjures discalced ganja
gazing of void velvets
veritable sirens
entailed lamentations
white line's sere wheedle
nowhere-milled stillness
pinkgold fled jetscrape
jumble in my inkpot

"One after another..."

"For every artist whose estate becomes a foundation, there are hundreds whose work disperses, deteriorates, gets stored in conditions that damage it, gets given away to people who don’t know what they have, gets sold cheaply and without coordination in the months after death when no one is thinking clearly, gets argued over by family members who disagree about its value, or simply sits in a house in Wiltshire, doing nothing, slowly." —@blackbirdrook via

Borzoi Puppies.

( oil painting on velvet by me / via )

Tatianna Blass - Penelope.

"What if the Qur'an didn't even intend to speak about 'virgins', as sexual objects, and instead was echoing language found in descriptions of Sasanian banquets?" —David Bannoura via

Psychic Readings.

"the beginning of sentience in a phone"

without Thoth to gather
thoughts chickenscratched inchmeal
we are just Jestocaust
at the jedburgh erg crossing

highway of death
taken out of season

water in motion
always means something

"We should not allow ourselves to be imprisoned by the moribund political fashions of 1848."

( via / via )

An afternoon spent printing in my sketchbook.

"home is far"

therblig-shy skein
unfinished finish
riant rule of thumb

journeying heart knows this

"The silence on the floor of my house is all the questions and all the answers that have been known in the world.."

"Actually I saw my book as more of a mood piece, using myself as the protagonist the way you eat chickpeas for dinner when a can of chickpeas is what you have around." —Meaghan Garvey via

Ideal Odyssey movie adaptation already exists.

( via / via )

"20 years feels like a nice, solid number. Beyond that, all bets are off."

"So after the Spanish took over Mexico, Aztec nobility got their lands taken. They sued within Spanish courts for their land back and surprisingly mostly won! They also got Spanish aristocratic titles and intermarried with Spanish nobility. The Duke of Moctezuma is still around, running a marketing agency in Madrid." —@friedkielbasa via

White Bird (live).

"to navigate this world"

blue rose of the toilet brush
woundered acuity
the lesser light to go by

cold water in a stained cup
tells the story
raindance on parchment
this is one of the ways

the age of elaborate breakfasts
as on a painted screen
clanking ammo box
i've had since the 80s
i keep my coffee in

Cat, Mouse, and Me (1997).

( via / via )

"...with closed eyes, I gently stroke as I would a cat all the things I might have said."

Videntian stabilimenta
starkly whisked off hey presto
midway the cold kitchen
can't think of why blinking
fading words of walg
ev'ryone keeps their bevy

murmurs from the Moog igloo
amerce my star-fed verses
tell them they are tiptop
will outlive this rainsieve

"How is it that Lord of the Flies has sold in the millions and is taught in classrooms around the world, while Skrine has vanished so successfully that not even a single copy appears to be available for sale?"

"Action/disaster movie called Y2K in which all the catastrophes that were supposed to be caused by this computer glitch actually happen. Planes go down, the grid goes down… Various characters across America navigate the chaos. Portrait of the late 90s – powerful GenX nostalgia – in the end they make it, we all make it, a new day dawns. Al Gore wins… the future is bright…" —@aaronlabaree

The Stephen Miller Slam Poem.

( via / via )

śuthina.

"How many anagrammists does it take to change a lightbulb?

One, but the glow is misty and black — hot ash, a granite magma...."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Baby porcupine crossing the road.

      "new words for the new weather"

cancer at the hairline
cancer talking tinfoil
      the usual
   madly yeckates
blue Jehu divebombs · that darn cat
deranged pale cerulean
rides bumpercar gherkin

Open.

( via / via )

"After seeing it, he phoned Taymor to tell her she had made a truly great movie, but one so far ahead of its time that it would be several years before people realised just how important it was."

"saving plastic straws"

steelmanning the chud-hopper
house usurpers' sherpas
arrow through lined-up cufflinks
lampads, adobe robots

eisoptroclastic clipboard
collects poems on soybeans
cinnamon roll ransacked
for replicant hepcats

tollway's wooden nickels
westering test cases
i drink black oblivion
where the bilge fill gathers

Ditch Lilies.

"A season of unseason is a time when everyone feels they are being crushed under the wheel of the wheel of fate. It’s a time that cries out for the hero that is in eternal war with the whims of fate, the hero who can make the impossible happen. The Trickster Hero." —The Dark Herald via

"The heist he keeps describing is one where the burglars broke in, did his dishes, and left a tenner on the bench."

( via / via )

'Two Cats' (Sam and Arry).

A poet who writes like his speaking is like a chess player who only plays against a home computer.

"Nothing disappears..."

In earthquake lands, one & one-storey only;
four years of caked-up dust, is it?--I can't tell,
in haiku or a cento paradelle:
a stony silence, broken just as stonily.

Now others have at times seen me more nesh
nor have i chosen, not at all, these ways;
as if in shelter sought from fiercest blaze,
my hunger & the dark's own hungers mesh.

And this has been some little good i've done
when all the mad ambitions are driven off,
though i will rest not even then to gauge

this tower against the sun...
A rampart made half faith & half of scoff,
a tunnel out, itself one further cage.

(2025)

Boneyards thread.

( via / via )

Kikajon.

   "Poems

Poems are born when life is dead,
Or else so much alive
No ribs can give it residence,
No heart can give it hive.

There is no soul of transient thew,
No mind of common grey
That can subsist on such an air—
But poems come that way."

—Lindley Williams Hubbell, Dark Pavilion (1927)

"A thousand years ago, there was something at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois rivers that looked exactly like the United States of America, and behaved exactly like the United States of America too."

The conventional Anglicization "Odyssey" has always bugged me. I know it's meant to evoke the Greek, but for this to spell the way it's usually pronounced breaks about four spelling rules. It ought to be spelled "Oddicy".

The Barnard’s Star planetary system: stability, composition, and evolution of four sub-Earth exoplanet. (via)

( via / via )

"A local mariachi band greeted us with a song they wrote for our campaign!"

“Along the pavement roll’d the muttering head.” –Pope’s Odyssey, XXII

Launch.

      "palantyranny"

quotidian refusal
bruises from, ascian
      sky fiery
   neighbor swathcrib
where is it burning · whittled-down query

crowdmasked, no liquescent
lunar runescar following
      hallmark of
   smol haruspice
bard's pert · quotidian refusal

"While Vienna’s coffeehouses bred modernism, in Belgrade’s kafanas grew conspiracy and rage."

( via / via )

American Occupation.

"improving your site experience"

bonetrail crunch to a monster lair
on TV ranting
heroes scant & scared-y
depredations-skeptic
if he were here right now
i'd know what to do—
i don't even know

how to finish this poem

Only on Substack.

"We are really going to torch the only habitable planet maybe in the entire universe because someone needed to commit sex crimes and make a machine that lets you put tits on Garfield."
—Sarah Lyons via

Audio Visualscapes.