(via)

"How often, after a long day witnessing elementary education, School Inspector Arnold came home, sank into what I hope was a Morris chair, looked round him at the Age of Victoria, that Indian Summer of the Western World, and gave way to a wistful, exacting, articulate despair!" --Jarrell, "The Taste of the Age"

Geronimo's Cadillac.

Leave Your Sleep. (via Silliman)

"Neda"

ornament and useful both
shote doing roister towns · niqaap vIDaHa'
long highwire
haywire highway why
uproarious chide as adjunct they
yIvoq 'ach yI'ol youth's moor
champion; Deb rur

xunpalta cpana nabypau John
invites us
in Gadsby "not so much of summary" Whig
Qav charade
perfidulo torn black zodiac
mlechchha "ha' gone home" who took

"That gleam shone in Carthage." --Hichens

My specs, taped up, again resemble repaired.
My shoes slant where the heel's been ground away.

The hubbub in the hills gathers its strength
at wax of the moon, thereafter trickles away.

What one of us has graven on her blog
hovers a space, not long; then's tucked away.

The headlines catch a scrimmage on the wing,
count bodies strewn, let nascent shove it away.

Once this was where the fleeing sought their hope;
it's our turn now to shed, hope slipped away.

Saffron moon at dawn i'd have you delve
as i do, now my car gets towed away.

Graywyvern woned among green emmets whose veng
incurred deletion, while they moiled away.

A Dead City.

"The Gods of SeaTac"

1.
i would have liked to do nothing the
straitening
attosecond orero
coupon weekend game
plan a language only of vowels
start the washer come
back in an hour and the clothes are still dry
wall flower thousand deep threat
bare bodkin
dull · sitdown beat nickel odium

song of the dwelling just one place
in a consonants-only language

2.
saffron moon at dawn
G P S with woman's voice
tells the river where

as we jolt through a school zone
watch my car in the mirror


"Many writers have felt, like Pound: Why not invent an art form that will permit me to put all my life, all my thoughts and feelings about the universe, directly into a work of art? But the trouble is, when they've invented it it isn't an art form." --Randall Jarrell

I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield.

Three-Logic, finally, is not a syllogism but a response to the world. When ingrained, it takes the form of: a preference for triads in analysis, refusing to uphold tribal boundaries (Us vs. Them), "else also" in response to given dilemmas, an abiding sense of the mysteriousness of the world, and an unshakable faith of the validity of the imagination.

"Nor iris of the frail and lunar bow" -Smith


"Worry Bead Museum"

1.
collect pictures of breakage
tomorrow that will turn to structure
appreciation
that doesn't end in purchase
to have said something
lost on the solitary air
and goon saying

and watch it keep

2.
the cry went out
so i stood there
the call was for scissors
but i didn't care

tweezers not scissors
made the wrong kind of poet
in this epic debacle
who'd limn & intuit

some face for the gazers
& now they will goggle
tweezers not scissors
with scant honeyfuggle

O maybe it's banzu
but certainly chirg
in skugry to tweezer
a scissor's fey darg

Prophecy from 47 Ursae Majoris.

Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies.

"Closed Casket Days"

the same girl only red-haired

the part that i care about
was for you not to worry
small pocket garden
in the land of bright neon apocalypse
which is just
the size of any meaning past or future

shards of self-hatred still
some deeply interior vision
leading perhaps
to insight perhaps not

i'm sorry
we are not responsible
for lost articles

compassion
for the people
in that place of torment
do they want it wrapped in rhetoric
in superstition in advertizing
this is not about your nunytcu
to have said something

among the land mines
& their brazen silences

"Some of the government agents and inquirers swore the ignorant populace did really believe that, with the discovery of a new Word, everything in the world would be explained. A wild pamphlet did actually appear, in which the writer argued with insane ingenuity that, as all modern publicity and popularization consist of concentrating a book into a paragraph, or a chapter into a sentence, so at last the whole truth about the present problem would be concentrated into a word. Crowds of impatient malcontents were adjured to Wait for the Word; and apocalyptic visions were provided, of the scenes of world-change that would follow, when once the Word was spoken. The Word would contain in itself, it was gravely asserted, a complete plan of operations and an explanation for the whole organized strategy of the revolt." --G K Chesterton, Four Faultless Felons (1930)


Thriving, struggling, suffering.


"...from 2005-2008 the Koch brothers pumped in double the amount that even Exxon spent on undermining climate action over the same period." (via Metafilter)


"In these more recent stories about Hissa Hilal, however, the framing suggests that what is important is not so much how she does what she does...but what she wears." And: "I have seen evil..."

"From Dream... To Reality"

1.
whether these troubles are over
in a hundred
or in a thousand years

songs of teenage lust
& the need to find a slant on the chaos
that looks seems like purpose

for an hour
or a day
just to get through that djedi

like i do
at times when these pluja thoughts
look like so many spinning ice floes to walk

headline crashes
teeth of the Symplegades
across on the path of the raging aurora borealis

2.
the stars are se gusni jipno
of leaves
in the dark ricygri of the sky
my love for you is the dark tsani
it's the burden i carry

so when you suffer i don't
is that it
it's not something we share?
could you not stay awake
for one hour?
is the hour up yet?
the dark furling
under pressure of the dawn
is that a kind of magic too?
tomorrow i will hardly
even walk crooked
through the tents of the refugees
and the refugee-dug latrines

3.
a dimness of noon
the interior castle
ending at a set time

as will this roll of complaints,
their triggers, & the whole noise

"When the animate powers that surround us are suddenly construed as having less significance than ourselves, when the generative earth is abruptly defined as a determinate object devoid of its own sensations and feelings, then the sense of a wild and multiplicitous otherness (in relation to which human existence has always oriented itself) must migrate, either into a supersensory heaven beyond the natural world, or else into the human skull itself--the only allowable refuge, in this world, for what is ineffable and unfathomable." --David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (1996)


Shhh. (I'm the dude with the hat & the sideburns :)...)


Cthulhoid snack-food.


Naming Fomalhaut b.

"Sonja had come to treasure poetry, during the long marches between flaming cities. On the deadly, broken roads of a China in chaos, in the teeming refugee camps, she had come to understand that a memorized poem was true wealth--it was a precious work of art, a possession that could not be burned or stolen." -Bruce Sterling, The Caryatids (2009)


Whose thoughts outrun the hour, enfold its tangles now;
snares, mapmaker's troth busily mining.
Catalogue of all-defunctive dreams & plans,
what comes next is born of proceeds from disgorges from other womb.

I learn, at last i learn & if i squint into
the road ahead, it is with stoic sharp clenched heart
that i continue where i hardly see, & a wind
of no well fine bodings pushes back my hair.


Smogpunk. (via Docbrite)


"...because there is no workstation
it does not see you. They must modify your life span." (via Silliman)

"ghIqtal"

you flee without a clue
of my role in the fray
nor know how much i do
to speed you on your way

O Hoürs where we win
or lose what can be won
the viewless paladin
alone with just a a rusty gun

and yet at times i still
hold teeming such escape
as calls the tribes of will
a rattling of crepe light crepe


"The Balkan war was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia."

"That midden of the stagnant nadir skies" --Smith


no snoozing tonight
giant mesh face sweet vanilla yogurt thwart
and envenom'd habitat
ratatat the thing is being done
ratatat
to the intimate horizon come
Crashsound, aye! & Eschaton
bleak regrets amidst
can't tell even to these porous battlements
up this will
be the intuition's news
lens pops out of my shades
and falls to the floor
of the tow truck cab


"With all the broken skulls, genocides, cut throats, black site torture chambers and mass graves in this world, the flies of American and Mexican media somehow chose these five heads, upon which to alight. It was the Styrofoam coolers of course."


Prepper thread.

"Swampsploitation"

Hattie's on the side of ecstatic
a hero-monster frets no more, eh?

corridor of crimson
thole the edged diversions

this is not your average vampire rock star novel

horrific penance imposed
noises in the walls
power tools through the ventilators
or a brick through the window?

sous-veillance
of the Smilometers
Panov fandango
indigo fontanelle aversive uffish...

hangman and
addressbook watching adjunct Mapsco infrared

Ogpu for wish until educate
rictus Ogpu homily


Tori + Maynard.

"Our Eyes Thirst for Bright Orange"

i see the water moving in the dark intersection
the shadow solider · than what casts it
to leave in die vain night ice acid
on hot pink paper write broad cerulean
until now
until the end of the world
dried up snail & the last birds calling
under this pewter dome
craquelure
craquelure chrome
these black bitter hills
my own Sanskrit was born in
like a torch
fuming without lazily
hate voyage like bright help golem ruin awash
push one pawn forward
you can't opt out
and the odds're against
and the sea is contrary
and we never knew why until now
until
the end of the world

Sheikh Mohammed explains what 'Nabatipopular' poetry is.

we say "there will"
(there and there will be no sea)

not "you will" or "i will"
and the specific gut-ache
of a certain day in a certain year

this machine fills karcists
on safari with Meep & Glibber
while this machine is to him

wrapped up in black wool
just sitting by a dim lamp
waiting for the drugs to take effect

departed am i who loathe the snow
of my summers
something like that

the lines blurring
as the pencil wears down


"I came across this tiny traditional looking café when walking through the Medina."


Red Hot Patriot.

"Words for Snow in Late March"

'It would shatter all writing pens.' --Rumi

1.
denialists' sapphire
not visible anywhere
it's broken
and it won't get fixed
now that's value
arrive sooner
at destitution
the snow on the hood piled
four inches thick

dateline Hobbesian gnosticism

tawaf Elvis
it would shatter all our writing pens
get it on the first ring
in the desert
you can remember your name

2.
catch it on the second ring
brindled fire
in which we see · fathoms past loneliness
the help that is sure to come

3.
tundra, chull, exurb sprawl
oxygen facial starveling hordes
starveling art & starveling song
why can't zombies get along

flagfallen fired-up ignoramuses
certain of their "Pi is Three"
pushing at the trough & wild
to choose the worse in ev'ry trial

i'm made as well by this mad world
nor scathe-free look at it from high
my rodeo clownship ends with this:
desiring more at each witdimpse

4.
relentless queue while over & over
someone's being paged


Na'vi follow-up.

"Breakage High & Low"

'And strains from ruinous viols flown' --Smith

still half immersed in some pluperfect sleep
erasing for awhile viol-troubled day
i rise & hear beyond our mortgaged keep
thunder that means to stay

though one oblivion's purchase wasn't cheap
here in the gloom another's pending sway
draws with the force of dream and dreamless gray
remorse my trickle & seep

i bring to birth term echo & ricochet
of what's already lost; dissolute clay
begins to creep
from the drab cacophonous heap

clay, & a breathing more than mine


Scarlet Music.


"Let’s consider what the President would have to say to the American people if he decided to tell them the truth in no uncertain terms..." (via Kunstler)


Meanwhile, in other poetries... (via Silliman)


No more ACORN. (via Metafilter)