( me )

Le Lac.

Demon attacking the East India Company.

Conspiratorial aesthetics.

( via / via )

Translation.

      "final defeat of the wasps"

clyte without recording
cull from washed-out colors
      squeaky hinge
desert Corvette vise-grip
   herald blackwinged
averted gaze blazing

powerless stray story
stigma of wig powder
      greenish shade
atop Deco tor-crave
   shelter thorny
terrible fast pastime

no record smirk wrathful
      herald black
rummage among pumpkins
armored irk corridor
   Hastur's foxhole
ev'rywhere knife wharfside

leave this record lackey
listless & miss most of it
small talk or smores sprocket
smattering of catnip
      the cars swerve
   for closed roadlanes

write the lean runeword
in not-yet ruined botfield
      cars don't swerve
to cross against cairn-storms
   suasivious
crow's shake of the head bedrock

In other news.

"When Elvis met The Beatles, he was living in a house in Hollywood that had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and he was renting it from the Shah of Iran." —@rmhaines

The Bonny Swans.

( via / via )

Tea Leaves & Brought Sheaves.

I grew up in the days of "duck & cover" & once used a protractor on a map of my city to estimate blast radius effects relative to downtown. There was a bomb shelter in the science museum at Fair Park (documentation of it can be found online), while the closest official shelter to my house was two miles away in the basement of a bank.

Glaur Tor.

"cane for show, cane for real"

all the houses

are bigger on the inside
siege of having surfaces
burnt umber somberness
watering
soundless sound of toast
a scheme tottering
staggers on

what of goebbels in the decoy jet
not his valet
sequence of actions
revealing values

a second piece of toast

3676 City Deconstruction.

( via / via )

Cave poem.

fierce surreal cerulean
& the surd martyred
       thick black thoughts
   traiking athirst
lame projects · leering fool's gold

full rendition fleshhook
faulty cult
       news breaking
   on the brick wheel

"We’d rather have a flawed answer than admit we don’t know."

"When you said it before, a snake’s-hand was something in talk. Now it’s a place.…

All right. I told you about Path: Path is like a snake, it curls around the whole of Little Belaire with its head in the middle and the tip of its tail by Buckle cord’s door, but only someone who knows Little Belaire can see where it runs. To someone else, it would seem to run off in all directions. So when you run along Path, and here is something that looks to be Path, but you find it is only rooms interlocking in a little maze that has no exits but back to Path—that’s a snake’s-hand. It runs off the snake of Path like a set of little fingers. It’s also called a snake’s-hand because a snake has no hands, and likewise there is only one Path. But a snake’s-hand is also more: my story is a Path, too, I hope; and so it must have its snake’s-hands. Sometimes the snake’s-hands in a story are the best part, if the story is a long one." —Engine Summer via

More evil than we thought.

( via / via )

The Hawk in the Rain.

"There’s no such thing as 'cyberbullying'. It’s just bullying." —Carole Cadwalladr via

"He was simply neglected and held in low regard."

       "trapezohedron prevalence"

1.
crape myrtle corridor
crass bladed assertion
gold glare with cerulean
regular dawn onset
       Klosterheim
   my balance shows
the dark web · has my number

programmatic kindness
can't fetch on my shirt tails
names name many things
next to ghosts disastrous
       ripped up signs
   left on the curb
longer a time · than i figured

2.
oldthink's grue gravity
Grodek's rawdog karma
       phantomnate
   the tanline Oort
witching hour · almost a known shape

alter timeline Toltec
attrition last wishbone
       from my hands
   its flight hindered
divided candle · cobalt basin

whereunder pinned emmets
be orange agented
       second swirl
   in the chord sway
we die like splotches · on a pixel esplanade

two moons to drape tinsel
tally uncounted desert
   roll robot
with a cam'ra
& the red sky · smiles at rest

you wander lost landscapes
of last thesterness garbled
       report back
   with a pert tune
limbs scattered · in the mild morning

3.
   perilous
the perne wander
   between blades
between bloodstains
   to narrate
like a nodskull
   where ash steams
from the stern darg

13 films for the nuclear age.

( me / via )

Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.

ruth & ruthless
diverged in a wood
janken diamat
in the air as it is
in the streets as they are
salvage of the sarsar
the old route of shelling

WW3 again (or already).

"I am alone with silence." —Arvo Pärt

Grothendieck thinking.

( via / via )

"It seems that in post-Soviet Russia, in a cultural situation in which people would like to reverse history and make a whole era disappear, an artistic form like the palindrome which can demonstrate the reversibility of time by retrograde devices of letter magic has its own fascination and attraction."

"these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain" —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

"Listening to ‘salon music’ has never done anyone any harm!"

"The Heart

Dark anxiety of death, as when the gold
Died in the grey cloud.

An evening in November.
A crowd of needy women stood at the bare gate
Of the slaughterhouse;
Rotten meat and guts fell
Into every basket;
Horrible food.

The blue dove of the evening
Brought no forgiveness.

The dark cry of trumpets
Travelled in the golden branches
Of the soaked elms,
A frayed flag
Smoking with blood,
To which a man listens
In wild despair..

All your days of nobility, buried
In that red evening."

—Georg Trakl via (tr O Sheppard)

Nuclear Thrones.

( via / me )

"The concept of a 'career' has been replaced by a series of elaborate heists."

"SUN AND MOON (Palindrome by Pairs)

A sun’s lair
is a rare moon.

More,
Ra’s aria is Luna’s."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

One is in despair..

Virginia Woolf: "The objection to the purple patch… is not that it is purple but that it is a patch." (via)

Nine Novels Worth Reading.

( via / via )

One must learn to love.

"Something about digging a hole in drought-baked clay makes it difficult to think about the fact that pedophilia has moved from the last taboo to something like a job requirement in the Grand Old Party." —Mark Slouka via

Acoma vases.

"Martian half-slip"

black earth overlaid with patchy snow
dilucular* clownhat
wasp curl
against worn red brick
invisible fingers

constantly snatching

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* e.g. 'antelucan' (Barnes)

"La Bohème positions itself as the first specialty coffee roastery and café in the Czech Republic."

( me / via )

Paul Lehr gallery.

      "raggeder towel slope"

surplus of quids glumly
taut glossolalia
      elegy
   in cobweb script
Sulawesi dark · my veins burnish

print a file & vorpal
widderproof nerfball
      synergy
   between two spooks
Sulawesi dark · my veins savage

"...many will leave the field in any case rather than deal with endless proofslop."

If we have to keep using these words, then i would find your idea [neo-Platonic Marxism] by far the most palatable of them all. (via)

"To the extent that there is a schematic or structure, it is best expressed through an early scene in which the narrator places a dead mouse into a toy glider and launches it through an upper-level window of the seminary."

( via / via )

"As if any work of art made in Germany at that time could escape being shaped by the horrors of the day."

" 'It is true that tragedy arouses pity and terror,' said Nance. 'In me terror is getting the upper hand.' " —@ivycomptonburnett.bsky.social

The Unsuspected. (After browsing in this.)

"welcomed pavement"

labyrinthine looth query
hospital socks, Spätstil
half-muted matutinal
rack of pills
derelict Calvary
muffled crunch of far-off
phantasms spasming
slime monster mash
these walls unshaken

all cries of hurt creatures
find their way here
vend my rigamarole careful
to include their names

no one knows their names

with bright plastic masks
front the abyss
hour by hour like a climb
i'm really good at dodging
wield apothegms
against onrushing night
labyrinth looth query

"Will you barter your nation's soul for development? What witness are you to its metamorphosis of spirit?"

( via / via )

The Snows of Yesteryear.

"arcane confessional"

reflection of a white metal chair
turquoise hovering
this hour & angle

out of the Aztec knife
we all struggle t'ward
& stragglers mock

twelvestep pyramid
white metal chair

"You’ll be able to tell a lot about a person’s political ethics by when they got off the bus.."

vroucolacharchy- rule by vampires

Coin-operated TV sets.

( me / via )

I think about this a lot.

"All the long moonlit nights I dream'd of Ule,
And in the dark half of the month, my heart was there."

—Frederick Tuckerman

Until You Come Back Home.

newsroom crepitance
silhouetted in the window
three or four reasons

trash that wants taking out

"These are handwritings, the only ones."

( me / me )

Approaches.

"green & black word"

1.
across the inviolate years
brokedown caustic Abraxas

brushed steel basin
plegm çedilla
chirr

now echoing at sunrise

2.
only more solid
than rain or not-rain
scissors rock paper

house already hidden
fierce heraldry Vulcan
a trip for turmeric

maintain the pattern

3.
as peace is war by other means
depiction has its collard greens
the raven on the bust of Pallas
knows exactly what he means

& ev'ryone who lives in Dallas
scraping through its broken streets
one more mile the Reaper cheats
lugs dreams & heraldry for ballast

only more solid
than rain or not-rain

across the inviolate years

The Fates of the Dual.

—My watch! (slap) —My phone! (slap) —My watch is my phone!

Long Crowley memoir.

( via / via )

A classical Latin codex curated for poets, writers, scholars & language lovers.

"Because none of our current ruling class have ever read a book, none of them know what happens to them when a critical mass of the population cannot afford food."
—@dlbowman.bsky.social

McLuhan replied.

"the great offloading"

1.
shellhorse harg
short telegraph
pallid bice
food for agents

2.
koolaid drinkers' dwale
conducted liquidly
so much unspeakable

slaughter in plain sight

behind blue eyes
blasphemous hardware
as we herd together
in some final tally

wordless

black smoke horizons
how much farther to go
is there a land beyond
where they will say
Big Suicide failed

3.
song of moral injury
there's something stunned inside them
this makes perfect camouflage for

meet the new software
same as the old software
did they also debate

onboarding the Hakenkreuz

4.
cliff face
sheer
polynomial

Sappho in Middle English.

( via / me )

Cromulent and Esquivalient.

"siempre a tu lado"

pale bridge · in the brittle glow
not my turning · eye on the dashboard
storied intersections · still
though each thorn's facade · wields optics
inimical · to the dry wheel
Three Suns in Japan · murals
so much · not yet destroyed

"With the flickering of/ Cantillation..."

In my last year at the University of Texas in Arlington (1979), i found out that their library had just been linked electronically with other libraries, & i had been trying to find out the age of Alpha Centauri, so i got them to print me out all the references to Alpha Centauri they had. It was a thick stack of pages. Many of them i couldn’t find locally, but after a while i did get one with a number: 6 billion years.

i still have somewhere that sheaf.

A Stream in a Glade.

( via / via )

Another great myth bites the dust.

" 'So it is true that comedy and tragedy are mingled,' said Adrian.
'Really it is all tragedy,' said his sister. 'Comedy is a wicked way of looking at it, when it is not our own.
'Is that why people cannot laugh at themselves?' said Julius."

—@ivycomptonburnett.bsky.social

Kenneth Anger mentions HP Lovecraft in this KPFA interview transcript from 1974.

      "cardamummery"

golden washburn wildwood
werifesteria liftoff
      the rice cake
   with the best crunch
mist drifting · in the dreich hollow

bearing wall or bile dict
builder amidst Edsels
      road narrows
   my enemy
in the gyring · pustulent light

2021 podcast on the history of palindromes. (2h 43m)

( via / via )

"The film does not show underage girls. It does not need to."

   "My Birds that Fly No Longer

Have ye forgot, sweet birds,
   How near the heavens lie?
Drooping, sick-pinion'd, oh
   Have ye forgot the sky?

The air that once I knew
   Whispered celestial things;
I weep who hear no more
   Upward and rushing wings."

—Adelaide Crapsey

"Telangana rarely features in our imagination of Partition, yet its displacement rivalled that of Punjab and Bengal.."

"In past lore: more lost pain.

#palindromebypairs" —@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

"...what happens to dystopia when the date has already passed?"

( via / via )

"On the first day of class, he introduced himself by saying, 'I’ve written six novels, and they’re all out of print'."

"And iron clouds shall canopy the globe" —Royston's Lycophron

Boudoir Boogie.

no hazard pay this deft
hoosgow full stodged voidfire,
beat cop

Neolith.

Air tanker scores a direct hit on a fire line in the Hollywood Hills, dumping thousands of liters of retardant as Santa Ana winds threaten to turn dry chaparral into an explosive blaze.

[image or embed]

— Digital Brain (@yourdigitalbrain.bsky.social) August 12, 2026 at 12:42 PM

( via / via )

Deep End neocities homepage with lots of blinkies.

"CURRENCIES

A current’s ease,
form into mist.
Occurrence sees
a current’s ease.
A currency’s
for men too missed—
a current’s ease,
form into mist. "

—Lori Wike in The Journal of Wordplay 12

Jeffers writes about sparrowhawks.

"West Coast noir insists that the sun-drenched beauty and free-spirit mythology of California hide a world of corruption and greed. Nordic noir suggests the presence of violence and hatred beneath the tranquillity and order of the Scandinavian welfare state, just as Southern noir peels back hospitality and charm to reveal repressed family secrets and moral decay." —Peter C Baker via

Cat gouache in “gothic” style.

( via / via )

Lullabyes.

“Wolf, I am a llama, I flow.” —Liz Was

You had to be there.

"LEMMING

a hardy, wayward dwarf
who charts a path across a hazardous coast,
past vast, hazy bays,
toward faraway harbors
by harsh outcrops of rock"

—@lukebradford.bsky.social

City skyline.

( via / via )

Boot-Cut Slacks. (thread)

      "halal U-Haul"

the grimdark · nativity story
      hurls apace
   shatters lapis
stray hair in my stringy
instructive swerve of buckshot

dead leaves huddle · where the wind harries
      pearls of haste
   false positive
trestle patina trudge past
partake of snake burlesque

"I think one stumbling block for a lot of people is the idea that if we cannot save everything, we cannot save anything, which is profoundly untrue and seems to arise from the habit of framing everything in all-or-nothing absolutes." (via Mefi)

"Russian has a word for what happens if they miscalculate: pizdets. It derives from the most obscene noun in the language, and it does not mean disaster. Russian has a full taxonomy for disaster. A zhopa is trouble you can still climb out of. Pizdets is the terminal diagnosis, the point past which nothing gets un-fucked and no one can be blamed hard enough to matter."
—Benjamin Stuart Reed via

"...with a John Crowley novel—well, the further in you go, the bigger it gets."

( via / via )

Haunting Gustave Doré engravings.

"on the plus side, i'm getting really fucking good at selecting images with bicycles"
—@gunsnrobbins

It's Not the Falling It's the Landing.

"arsenic spritzer"

stylus in the stern quiet
has to have succeeded
mainspring of Spetsnaz
& catsprawl folderol
eerie flashes flowering

Jack Hills Zircon.

( via / via )

Summer Sky, 1955.

"Empyrean"

if i should lose my place
in the book of life
'twixt pulse & pulse
if i should lose my place
of ullage, match, & surplus
but riffle it & laugh
if i should lose my place
in the book of life

"As at thy portals also death..."

"Any sufficiently advanced credential is indistinguishable from bloodsport" —@rafathebuilder

A proper tribute.

( via / via )

"The government had decided to punish my husband for being the son of a woman who was a translator for the Iranian hostage takers in 1979, before Eissa was even born."

I have experienced several [writing] workshops & flat decided that the parts of writing that are teachable are not the parts that make writing worth keeping.

One of Memling's devils.

dusklost wasp, cicada
still howling
bald-headed man behind the throne

red skelterfugue

I remember the sound they made sliding out & going back in, the smell of the cards, & the feel on my finger tips of skimming through them.

( via / via)

"Nietzsche famously said that 'Homer would not have created an Achilles if Homer had been an Achilles.' There is no doubt some truth to this, but a singular work like Jünger’s Storm of Steel leaves some room for doubt."

"True Face"

Poet & clown, coterminous, like the way
sea & sky at certain hours blend;
people laugh at stumble-escapade,
the mocker of our frailties is thin.

"We remember Capone, culturally, cuz he’s the only one who liked getting photographed, something avoided by leading figures of an east coast crime syndicate; but Al Capone was a twentysomething coke-addled narcissist with a brain disease who never said anything interesting."

"Asbury has arranged everything carefully: the illness, the letter, the misunderstood artist, the devastated mother. Then the structure gives way. He is left without the ending he had prepared for himself.

Grace begins there." —Dimitry Berkut via

Rat summoning.