turbid patch on the surface
appurtenances minces
faint shadows
shiv'ring hour
resume zither · lattice adding-to
hot pink sticky notes pelting
paragon of lawn trim
bardic grimoary & notions
turbid patch on the surface
appurtenances minces
faint shadows
shiv'ring hour
resume zither · lattice adding-to
hot pink sticky notes pelting
paragon of lawn trim
"You must remember that because the mysteries come to an end makes them no less true." --Gore Vidal, Julian (1964)
"And when they reared, the elfish light/ Fell off in hoary flakes."
11.
Heorotweiler hailstorm
sweetness now
hasten onnthe lacewing
old bitterness
their house steep of staircase
wandering lorn
the stuffed owl ending
glass encased
12.
scribbled in stone · askew pylon
choc'late affogado
along broken sidewalks · the play of photons
Xmas in July is back
turbid patch on the surface
9.
small threat small evasion
smaragdine greenhorn
some thin road
of real traction
& the blood mist · gathers on gewgaws
not into a tartbook
attained through raindance
educed though
& river delved
the square filled · with a squamous mob
10.
deep cerulean
the drag gods
brick bared to
those gliding by
swirl of smoke
& no swimsuit
this hot spring
of harsh clinkers
missed future
all amercing
dragged to hell
by a small drone
"I carry my awareness..."
"I have just been reminded that Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” is set is 2026. Isn’t that fascinating? Someone 100 years ago thought the world be a stratified society with elites and worker slaves, pleasure places and religious figures driven underground…and artificial humans causing havoc for the human population in 2026?" —Sarah Light-Waller via
When you accidentally find your doppelganger on a painting made over 100 years old. 😀.
"Territory changes too fast to keep the maps up-to-date." —Catherynne Valente
7.
embossed ceiling balework
aboard tossing cosplay
the same terrible sirens
sulfur oblique weakness
fill up notebooks footfalls
feigned intricate bricktown
the odds taken irksome
by edge grayest sedgebrink
words fade to propelled Fillmore
fake ceiling or blue acorn
into the place plaints go
8.
are the bombs falling
is that car shade burgundy
this idle bubble
reached by driving an hour
keeping the computer mum
"I long to scatter far and wide, in verse that will not die, the glory of great Oughtred."
5.
skelterfugue in skugry
askew winter bent twig
sixty-eighth
aileron swerve
in a white bathrobe · benthic sentiments
twilight twisting the mauve death
can't wait in this spate mist
ahead course
most recursive
6.
in the shadow of the hat fact'ry
an abundance of tictacs
i am king of tictacs
with my smart glasses
& my military presence
as close as i ever want to see
to a death drop for real
"Maybe there's another army, invisible, even more invisible than ghosts, fighting over things we don't know and can't see, and they fill the ranks there. But we don't know." —Deathless
"It took him days to paint just the splash."
"...that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia..." —Finnegans Wake
3.
loadbearing stain
stark cusp of wastefulness
sudden quiet seeing
corsair calaveras
a wind out of Ardbeg
4.
atop one black castle
atop another
a year from now
wind through their empty rafters
so close bearing down
on our meager refreshments
there will come better days
"mallard lake"
1.
dark bars & dark clubs
beige ground zero
in the barking snowfall
starvation carves a place
it was a time of turmoil
glass figures shivered
on a dustless glass shelf
house that was a bus once
that once had wheels
room without demarcations
except in the mind
words that a crow dropped
on the way to somewhere else
gravel ath that petered out
2.
the war is going badly
in the thin winter light
fingeryielding
pavement of the dead city
"Cosmetics is an extension of the will." —Catherynne Valente
There’s different ways to relate to museums. Before i learned better, i used to try to look at every object in a museum at least once. Later i would only pick a handful out & spend fifteen or twenty minutes before passing any sort of judgment (while skipping everything else). Now there are a couple of paintings in the museums in the city where i live, that are old friends; i visit them whenever i can, & tell them my troubles.
Obelisk of Grixis, from Reuters.
"An increasing incidence of extreme weather events
We watched the charts all week
as the old hurricane's great lash
curled back across the ocean, not weakening
until we saw Bristol in its path.
The police told us to leave
for the nowhere we had to go
in the nothing we had to get there.
They would take the gloves off for looters.
Abandoned people are always crazy
like a fool who squares up to a storm.
Crazy like us, on the roofs of Easton
waving at the news helicopter
as the studio repeats the warnings
we were apparently ignoring
when we walked onto the M32
in a world already shaking and tearing
for a woman desperate to pass her child
into the mystery of a stranger's car
which was crammed to the corners
with the old necessities of home."
—Tom Sastry, Life Expectancy Begins to Fall (2025)
I do think our ideologies are rather like termite towers.
"transhumance"
white candle darkening sky
zircons in fiberglass
these deadlines
cast among expedients
music from the flaking loom
sparing of maps
upon cool umber
put the round aside
white candle darkening sky
zircons in fiberglass
The trouble with psychology is not that it’s not true; it’s that it wants to be respectable.
"There is for me just one simple, most exact definition :
Poetry is the music borne by speech."
—@henryghenrik
10 Books That Will Change the Way You Think About Books.
"Midsummer Loop
now in the stillness, the two still hours
between this meeting and that,
hours of silence in which the angel of conversation deserts us
to beat her wings above another gathering,
another long room, magnificent table and solemn pronouncement
made to the detriment of everybody else
and the glorification of the subject,
now we are abandoned to our own resources
on this one original summer’s day
and two hours fill like stones with the heat of the afternoon,
two flat stones placed on the stomach to steady
the heartbeat and the breathing,
a number of rabbits
emerge from their secret holes hidden about campus,
hidden but not undiscoverable holes
down in the beginnings of dry holly-bushes out of season
and the naked wooden roots of rhododendrons
from which the rabbits hop forward one hop at a time, one a minute,
a hundred little clepsydras
all set to different schedules, forward
on to the grass, where they balance, weightless as empty pelts
on the points of the blades, like martial artists
who lie unharmed on beds of nails
conducting their spiritual business, with two hot stones
weighing down their bodies, lightly, painlessly,
rabbits fanning out
across the sweeps of grass that sustain them,
across the blades that do not bend beneath them,
and they eat with steady hunger and enormous concentration,
clipping flat the sharp tips
precisely with ordinary, curved, discoloured teeth
again and again, masticating the strands
as they cross and re-cross the blocks of dark gold sun
laid across the lawns like golden doors
they pass through unharmed, through which we cannot pass,
both ears laid flat like banked canoes
and their great hind legs quiet and relaxed,
white scuts bobbing
gently across the campus, which is also their campus,
attached as rabbits are attached to their shadows
to a vast university invisible underground, the one ours mirrors,
intricate halls of residence and studios
round which the rabbits conduct themselves
in absolute darkness, by touch and smell alone, the wordless
sensitivities of their whiskers
brushing the walls and other warm bodies
or thrilling to an offensive discharge of fear in the air
undetectable to humans,
to the human who feels so pleased to have spotted
two rabbit-holes, there, at the foot of that blossoming tree,
now in the stillness, the two still hours
between this meeting and that"
—Frances Leviston via
( me / via )A $3 @mta.info subway fare and some good Q train timing can buy you one hell of a view of the July 4th fireworks and the Brooklyn Bridge light show!
Huge shoutout to the train operator for slow rolling over the Manhattan Bridge and the conductor for announcing it.
— Jason Rabinowitz (@airlineflyer.net) July 4, 2026 at 9:10 PM
[image or embed]
"...what if the foundational problem with AI is that we’re trying to code wei instead of wu wei?"
—Callum Hackett via
"crushing it"
wolf ladder on redial
diligence broken wheel
cerulean
sidewalks buckle
Scheveningen dugout · borogove guards
wolf ladder at leafturn
"The kitchen smelled faintly of badgers and despair."
Lovers Atop the Empire State Building.
charmed terrible chamber
this time furnished i failed
chart no further
like a debt delved
'gainst no beginning
darkest ghost
my kindness would have carried
(2024)
"...The host with someone indistinct
Converses at the door apart,
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,
And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud."
—TS Eliot via
“I only mean to figure in that late 20c anthology: among the 10 million minor poets.” —The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism
Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds.
"NOTHING IS SACRED (Anagrammed Lines)
Nothing is sacred:
the gods in cairns,
and gnostic heirs;
once-hiding stars
and echoing stirs....
Nights, scored in a
sigh constrained."
—Anthony Etherin
spirulina smoothie
smaragdine glitchwarp
filch silenced
in the mask aisle
where the pipes hide · page refreshed
ranting to the robots
rocking the twilight workshop
a sound might
sunder this depth
spew spirulina · thick Paris green
"you couldn’t write Lolita today because it’s narrated by an academic who can afford a car"
—@simsben1
Every former Confederate state.
"How I wish this milestone anniversary could have been a time to take stock, to admit to the failures and tragedies of the past as well as the achievements, and begin a process of self-reflection, reconciliation, and restitution with those who have been so badly harmed, as well as looking forward with realism and hope for all people..." —Beth Adams (The Cassandra Pages) via
"CALL IT ALL NAMES, BUT DO NOT CALL IT REST
Go, death, give ground, for none of yours is here.
Weep with no sound, figures around a well.
Here gales knock down the chestnuts year on year,
And block with leaves the entry to the temple.
There the inscription no man's eyes can spell,
Archaic, in the forgotten character.
Sleeps near the nymph the font that christened her,
A shell unfastening to the vanished marvel.
Apart, life suffering in a tale of shadows,
Her patience lives, like light on infants' graves.
Rain drowns their names, the ground is full of echoes,
And there are rainbows buried in her naves.
Night cancels debts, the prince's and the slave's,
And one stays true, though quitted by his fellows.
The winter earth forsaken by the swallows
Rocks through blind storms their nest of cloistered waves.
The season's ritual offerings, fruit and leaves,
Die at her feet. Hazels in foliage dressed
Fall; but her tomb for men no increase gives.
Here for the thirsty no quick vats are pressed.
Yet her love's dayspring here breaks quietest,
Light for the doomed, and for the lost, reprieves,
Tthe ring-dove's changing light, heaven found through olives;
Call it all names, but do not call it rest.
Here where through trees death's voice, all-severing, blows,
Hung with stone tongues, the language of farewell,
Great doors are opened which no hand can close
And wide heaven flies into the bud's cold cell.
So is her sickness her last oracle
Where from its falling we may seed the rose
And her new joy from her remembered sorrows
Which time, being stony, has no tongue to tell."
—Vernon Watkins, Cypress and Acacia (1959)
Turangalîla live. (i'm guessing—in Venezuela?)
"phronema"
phalanx of Faust-glisters
on fire with new choirbench
small thing fit for comprehension
tiny honorarium
"Triumphant disaster was the sign under which the members of the Frankfurt School lived their lives."
"America keeps trying to get me to go to her birthday party and I’m like no girl u need to go to the hospital" —@audipenny.bsky.social
"A summer with Tarkovsky and Munch and ruins of time; with relics and writing on writing and the body as erotic trace and films that bring one face to face with the elemental and corporeal dialectic of memory and anamnesis; each a text on its own within an immanence of longing."
—@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
"Mediterranean
The days fly by but the moments traipse.
Sing it, cicada, summer's daemon:
How air is singed till the sun's semen
Incinerates the mother of grapes.
Drifyting glints on a brackish splash
Are seeds of coal in the sea's brazier,
As breakers stir the everywhere azure
Into an ecstasy of ash."
—@andrewfrisardi
"What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"
FOURTH OF JULY POEM
Enough done gone boom already.
“Those very philosophers even in the books which they write about despising glory, put their own names on the title-page.” —Cicero, pro Archia poeta
“Departed am I who loathe the snow/ of my summers” --Robot X, 1627.
"offering to the gods of ughten"
anastomosing noclips
i nab, cadence-laden
cold thicket
caroling in
scratches on umber · anyhow spell
mist signpost mastic
mutter frosty nutjob
night pool slip
flung reflections
anastomosing noclips
"Blood
It burns with buried light. It is a soil
rich with iron brought to melting point
and cooled to the clandestine warmth
of lanterns. Spread thin, it is as tenuous
as testimony from a blanching face;
yet testimony nonetheless,
this stream that carries like a folded note
your family name. One day that stream could be
the ink with which you sign your life away.
Still, let us take a moment to exalt
the oneness of your scarlet ocean’s salt
tenacity—it circles even now…
A crime that it should ever end in billows
pooling, crawling across the floor, a tarred
ghost. Ironic that the tide should end
almost as slow, and almost the shade
of sundowns."
—Huck Astley
" 'Shall we ever be able to face it?' said Robin.
'No, we shall not. That will be our solution,' said Andrew."
—Ivy Compton-Burnett, Brothers and Sisters
Save the Carbon-Based Lifeforms.
"Love is weird; objecthood is weirder. " —@avmarraccini
"Preakness"
yankee doodle yard farm
yielding to thegn brainwash
yammering smooth smilers
build children in cages
empty field of eldritch
orbiting drone boneyards
great fireworks gratify
ogre of gilt bogus
in the pooldim turquoise
hush awaits cicadas
1661 Punica in heroic couplets. (via)
" 'Work on good prose has three steps,' writes Walter Benjamin, 'a musical one when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.' He omits a crucial step: a cinematic one when it is edited." —Lucy Sante via
six-cylinder days
mild consent this vintage
smashed nothing
in its inning
within my gaze's · galloping ambit
sky of burning scorn
scribble with ache driblets
list projects
posey
rarefied waltz
jolt pizzazz
riddle's jagged midpoint
that great broken stretch
in the cicadas' song
Aurora Australis from the International Space Station.
This is what the internet is for.
"full steam at the sociopath factory"
warning lights ignore
on a perfect mild morning
in early July:
car will pass despite the lights
red here here & also here
"Oft in His troubled Sleep, rising by Night,
With horrid Cries His Servants Hee'd affright;
Who found Him, bath'd in Sweat, His future War
To wage, and beat with Rage the empty Air."
—Ross's Silius Italicus, I.
"It seems to me that being a werewolf means living with an exaggerated version of the fear that you did something embarrassing while you were drunk, while the horror of being a vampire is that you’re compelled to meet a hard deadline every single day." —@liamthegrownup
"Sea-Fever
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over."
—John Masefield