( via / via )

Otters put away their toys.

"Richard Slotkin, in his Bancroft Prize-winning study of the American frontier myth, argues that the captivity narrative did not just function as propaganda aimed at Native people. It functioned as self-absolution." —Renee Stonebraker via

Whence & Whither?

"...academics in permanent roles are like faraway stars, whose light takes years to reach us on earth. Looking at them, you’re looking into the past."

( via / via )

The Art of Making the Same Deal Again.

No Need For Words.

"...the quality of her work persists and what we're really finding out is a large portion of her fan base doesn't understand camp" —@pavlovcat.myatpro.social via (thread)

"On 13th June, the day before Paris fell to the Germans, the Weil family hustled their way onto one of the last trains south, persuading the guards that the mass exodus required the presence of a medical doctor, Weil’s father."

( via / via )

Night Notes.

"French people are Italian people in a bad mood" —Jean Cocteau via

A length of cloth that agrees to be a person's shape for a while, and then is let go.

Mood.

( via / via )

Jimi Hendrix backing The Ronettes.

"ON RODIN'S "L'ILLUSION, SŒUR D'ICARE

She started up from where the lizard lies
Among the grasses; dewy hair, and flew
Thro’ leagues of lower air until the blue
Was thin and pale and fair as Echo is.
Crying she made her upward flight. Her cries
Were naught, and naught made answer to her view.
The air lay in the light and slowly grew
A marvel of white void in her eyes.
She cried: her throat was dead. Deliriously
She looked, and lo! the Sun in master mirth
Glowed sharp, huge, cruel. Then brake her noble eye.
She fell, her white wings rocking down the abyss,
A ghost of ecstasy, backward to earth,
And shattered all her beauty in a kiss."

&mdas;Trumbull Stickney via

It is no longer this.

"Most art objects created today are created for the ruling class." —Jay Isaac via

Aesthetics of the Hermit Crab.

( via / oil painting by me )

Autumn Road through the Glens.

"Poetry used to have prestige and popularity. These days it has one or the other, rarely both, and not enough of either." —Graeme Richardson via

Trilobites are still economical.

"I was born in Gaza

I was born in Gaza
In the city of lost yearning,
where memories fade
and hope goes missing
I was born there
With the taste of despair
memorialised on my tongue
I was born in a besieged land
where death, deprivation
and poverty still invade
I was born in Gaza
To redefine the meaning of peace
and soothe the city of fears
Where I was born,
dreams are buried alive
But I am not scared
to defy this throbbing life
and beat the stormy winds of wars
I was born in Gaza
and one day I will be back home."

—Mohammed Moussa

Stolen Neighbors Quilt.

( via / via )

"I have a young son who’s only four, and I wanted to write about what I would possibly say to him if we didn’t have the immense privilege of living where we don’t have to worry about bombs falling on us. ."

"Broken Arrow"

shipwreck rap sheet dwelling
half-hid ceasing to gurgle

bread that needs a knife
inherited fun, penumbra

driving by where a building
was removed by a wind

ciklono, clown messenger
from dead poem clown town

words in half the time
reach for their waif mark

before the buzz can start

sip down your brimming cup

shipwreck rap sheet dwelling

ODE: fulmobriloj.

"If you can catch a hare
and look into its eye,
you will see the whole world…"

—Anna Crowe via

Granite.

( via nightcafe / via )

Jewel-hinged jaw.

"A veritable Casanova in her 20s, by the time she died her only friends seemed to be the pet snails she cared for, which she smuggled over European borders in her bra." —Robert Minto via

"I don’t mind being assumed to be outside Art."

honey of the vandal vaults
pervades casket whisker
seine sanity
insists on landmine Xmas
blessings of the blaze scourge-all
blue upon black lampads
leisurely lodge
alert to brisk curtains
dire chronicle downward
faithful darkpen scathe-scroll
& the fools' fall
& the fire pyring backwhelm
a ditty asks duskright
else doom names no nextframe
amber jab-imped
only as the sweep deepens

"By 1782 it was said, though with some exaggeration, that ‘thousands’ of Europeans had become Indians, ‘and we have no examples of even one of those aborigines having from choice become Europeans’."

( via / via )

Reverse Suicide.

piebald Watergate · as the heat breaks
on the wire clicks · & the red dots cluster
fence grain · but no record
bleached jeans the hard way · Bleriot's wings
   & the limits of Rock
Tzara already · luxury minutes to midnight
   sow broken SSTs
& the first halting · words of cyberpoetry

unintended tells · like tanlines
swore by · the Scotch Gambit
pale cerulean · even in those days
   sewing machine encountered
on a dissecting table· clownwhite
   & the clankers say
piebald Watergate · as the heat breaks

Invocation.

“For I had pondered on a rune of roses,
Which to her votaries the moon discloses.”

—Ernest Dowson

I FOOL ABOUT with my night.

( me / via )

"Few more significant events happened in fifties American culture, I’d say."

"Tales take time to tell. To rush them is a form of theft." —Nocebo

"Clowns were forming mobs to terrorize the non-clown population."

but time disappears nonetheless
& my projects lie idle
i fumble my lease
but time disappears nonetheless
no wine in the chalice
the world itself turns turtle
but time disappears nonetheless
& my projects lie idle

Bad Moon Rising.

( via / via )

Banksy bought a used yacht, repaired it and retrofitted it to serve as a rescue boat to save migrants in the central Mediterranean.

   low moon, faint & fuzzy;
& the tiny lizard also i
   almost didn't see

On "Radium Age" scifi.

"Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part."

Moby-Dick, Ch. 11 via @celticstoic.bsky.social

Another great painter of nocturnes.

( via richard elsen / via )

Two Christs.

"We are the damned--the strain and moil
That Death has washed from earthly time;
Drawn down by tides of Hell, we boil
Like toads within a torrid slime."

—Clark Ashton Smith

Slow Blues.

      "ODE: Piso Olpe"

from myself secret
hawk's hood dipped
don't get your hunch in a bunch
clouds fade to land
no choice

narp2 widening wopwops
inward drawn
      emptiness
   with its fishhook
clouds fade to land · legend-laden edge

icy chair & bruisechase
achieved sessile blessing
      colors shift
   off in the West
from myself secret · clues in the firmament

foamcore legend fadged with
furious green ideas
      Tween Island
   hovers over
other silences · other breakings

cast my eyes past isthmus
aren't you mourning floor-shine
      windshield specks
   & the warped door
empire s brittle · as the brine crust

words that seem to settle
at some finny pinnacle
      not this blur
   or blaring chill
lost among leads · that end in lessons

the whole log handed me
by happenstance rancid
      years to read
   like fingerprints
betrayals burn · not theirs mine

less & less eclipses
clatter in the hat fact'ry
      those wall shapes
   with ochre traced
those beasts hunted · with harsh love

our hands turned tangle
to take what chase lost us
      now pixels
   portend keeping
carcasses in bits · sieved in the dark sky

"Building a time machine just to go back and destroy Less Wrong."

( via / via )

River Deep Mountain High.

"Distant Howling

In Alsace,
on 6th July 1885,
a rabid dog knocked down
the nine-year-old Joseph Meister
and bit him fourteen times.

Meister was the first patient
saved by Pasteur
with his vaccine, in thirteen
progressive doses
of the attenuated virus.

Pasteur died of ictus
ten years later.
The janitor Meister
fifty-five years later
committed suicide
when the Germans occupied
his Pasteur Institute
with all those poor dogs.

Only the virus
remained above it all."

—Miroslav Holub (tr Ewald Osers) in: Poetry With an Edge (ed Neil Astley 1988)

The Tiberi Tapes.

"Owning a senator is more attainable for most Americans than home ownership." —@arr.bsky.social via

T-Rex wedding.

( via / me )

Speculative haiku.

"...the lasting preservation of a secret is a miracle which the world has never yet seen." —Wilkie Collins via

Abandoned Autumn.

"spool pie"

dreamsward laden
more dread than reward
invadinta, konkerinta
cheating the landfill
watering this time this area
another time another area
dreamsward laden
mixed typescript & manuscript
like the one i made
on the subject of runes
parcelling out
in the lightless dawn
a route of days
invadinta, konkerinta
snow flurry on a comet
on a comet flurry snow

"Only the point is that there are some artists who do make us feel the true measure of things. It is a burden which they carry throughout their lives, and we must be thankful to them.."

( via / via )

"To part from someone for good is to divide sleeves, tamoto o wakatsu 袂を分かつ. To be unable to help: nai sode wa furenu, you cannot wave a sleeve you do not have."

"critique of my generalship"

autumn that burns · in the old recordings
bold remedies · when there was something to burn
faint echoes · follow my footsteps
in the halls · of the hardly meaningful

Nardo Gray poignant.

"Standing next to my desk is an attractive woman of about fifty in a raincoat. 'Where are you from'" I ask in my library whisper.

'Malibu,' she says. Her name is Sally, and she writes mystery novels. Is she here just for this event? 'Yes. I've thought about it for thirty-five years. And I just felt I should be here to see if he shows up.' "

—[Raymond] Teller via

Dormant lawns in burnished light.

( me / via )

Orange Peel.

"Gavin Newsom is like, 'What if Don Draper was born in 1967 and got into politics instead of advertising' " —@joshdobbin.bsky.social

Discovery of radio emission from the exoplanet β Pictoris b. (Boabdil.)

"Memorial

If we do not lift quickly the dead bodies from the beaches
the tide begins to put them down like a disappointment
carried beneath the clothing, or hidden
in the intricate folded greyness of the brain.

Now we can know again, even more plainly,
how quickly the world changes.
The land and life too are interrupted
by the indomitable fantasy of extreme violence
and the awful terror.
The body, eager with its wants and its rich few years,
is dead now on the beaches.

The war came as a water rising, leaving us homeless.
The easy company of the dispossessed was a grave joy.

On the crest of waters we invaded the distance.
Recession will find our shells far: high up in mountains.
It will be explained how they came there.
It will not be understood."

—William Bronk

Sleazy Street.

( via / oil painting by me )

"The rational age has cracked wide open with the realization that man is not a rational apparatus. He is a stolid animal, or he is an hysterical ghost, or he is an effete avatar; but he is not a reasoning machine."

"TOMORROW

Now that the others are gone, all of them, forever,
And they have your answer, and you have theirs, and the decision is made,
And the river of minutes between you widens to a tide of hours, a flood of days, a gulf of years and a sea of silence;

If, now, there are any questions you would like to ask of the shapes that still move and speak inaudibly in the empty room,
If there are any diferent arrangements you would like to suggest,

Make them to the riverboats, whose echoing whistle will be a clear reply,
Speak to the seagulls, their effortless flight will provide any answer you may wish to hear,
Ask the corner chestnut vendor, ask the tireless hammer and pulse of the subway,
Speak to the family on the illuminated billboard, forever friendly, or to the wind, or to the sign that sways and creaks above the stationer's door."

—Kenneth Fearing

"I remember the exact moment, early in my transition, working in Copenhagen, when I realized I was being perceived as a woman by my male coworkers. I realized it because they were interrupting and talking over me in meetings."

" 'bed bug' and 'colonizer"'are synonyms" —@chanda.bsky.social

Fazon.

( via / via )

Action in the Infinitive.

"so i may be out of my depth here but hes at 30% approval, you elites can stop capitulating now"
—@ndrew.bsky.social

Apple Picking.

Pessoa: Ah, Quanta Melancolia

So final seems this misery,
so final this bleak solitude
that starry wastes invade my soul
and I feel frozen and without
any echo in my heart.

What an anguish stripped of hope,
what grief that only tastes the end;
if nevermore returned the ship,
if in the street a blind man fell—
give it up, there’s nothing else.

Without content, without repose
not a single hour of mine
in which a soul finds full employment;
the blind man in the street succumbs,
the ship then dwindles out of sight.

So final seems this misery,
so final this bleak solitude
that starry wastes invade my soul
and I feel frozen and without
any echo in my heart.

(My translation.)

It is Late Afternoon.

( me / via )

"But although we remember Lear as the genial, tubby, dome-headed, myopic figure with a beard and spectacles who wrote some of the best-loved poetry in English, he made his living as a landscape artist."

"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...."

—Anthony Etherin

Electrical clown with cables.

"When Theo died, he left behind his wife Jo, an infant son named Vincent Willem and hundreds of canvases the art world mostly despised.

Jo was left with barely any money and a rented apartment full of paintings and an infant to support." —Jo Piazza via via Mefi

"At the beginning, back in the 1890s, the folks who undertook this herculean task thought they might finish their multivolume lexicon in two decades. They were off by more than a century."

( via / via )

Just another glacier collapsing.

"... there is a word for the night the moon does not come[:]

'Mugetsu' (無月). No moon. The fifteenth night, arrived at properly, with the moon behind cloud.

'Ugetsu' (雨月). Rain moon. The fifteenth night, in rain.

Both are established autumn season words." —The Tokyo Hermit via

The Plural of Octopus.

       "Stetson Cocytus"

quern's final catcher
can't gnash on a whiplash
       morn-golden
   galethesterness
Brutalist algebra · Illig dividend

course of fierce finagling
confessed not at gunpoint
       morn-golden
   taken back oath
halfbuilt timbers · of the World of Tomorrow

beast equinox boxcar

From Issara Winitchai Throne Hall.

( via / via )

Mechanism.

"praticle xiphics"

Sopwith Camel caltrops
occult Plath pathworking
malliberigita
greets pale cerulean
cerulean
gorillas in black leather

thousand cuts of thoughtcrime
therapy merle furlongs
glare blinded at Blair Witch
blithering smithereens
smithereens
gorillas in black leather

sparkledew predictions
deduct quartz fortnights
punch drunk in the slow lane
overpass shadowed sliderule
sliderule
gorillas in black leather

"So staunch in his outlook, he almost wrote himself out of the historical record altogether."

"Someone from Exeter was buried on Friday and one of their wishes was to have dinosaurs and the Grim Reaper present." —Johnny Mains via

The Whitby.

( me / me )

Atmospheric paintings by Tim Wilson.

"Touching grass is not enough I need to fight a raccoon over a pizza crust"
—@lukelukeluke.bsky.social

Catwoman.

fulmvortoj
chance rain
walls pushed on
tribe
without melt
green pool

"...the meandering, nerve-raw flashbacks of one Maria Wyeth (Tuesday Weld), recalled and recounted from the grounds of a posh mental hospital. (Which looks instead like a tycoon’s estate garden and is in fact Greystone Mansion, locale for a notorious gay murder-suicide, in 1929.)"

( via / via )

"How many more times can I declare victory?"

"A petrified cry,
Suspended breath of one who
Had hoped for better."

—@rayhourigan.bsky.social

Exile.

"The krasny ugol, the beautiful corner, is where the icon hangs and the little lamp burns under it, and you cross yourself towards it from the door; you do not approach, no one stands there, and yet it steadies the room as a keel steadies a boat, anchored in a place forever out of reach."
—Vittorio Zappa via

This is the reason.

https://www.tumblr.com/endlessmazin/822873630296948736/morphokinetics

( via / me )

To a Minor Poet of the Greek Anthology.

"Gas has hit a price where siphoning it is a white-collar crime." —@sundaedivine.lol

"Ultimately the story of Lucien is a tragic one, and the reader can decide if that’s due to the faun in the early part of the book, or because of Lucien’s own desires."

Equinox soldier
bounced back email
wood pylon

coign lose

"It occurs to me that preliminary sickness of Yage is motion sickness of transport to Yage state."

( me / via )

Existential threat.

"moon lost between moons"

living with halfsilence
hilch like Jimothy
shadow from two suns
marplot at my own wisecracks

half-seen, half-felt, what next
in a world that's wholly dark
black light & sparklers
on a whisker

Astronaut Still on the Edge.

"Japanese counts small creatures with one word and cattle and horses with another. Silkworms are counted with the cattle. Ittō 一頭: one head of silkworm. They were given the best room in the farmhouse, and the name for them was o-kaiko-sama お蚕様, the honourable silkworm, with the suffix otherwise kept for customers and gods." —Renares via

Cintra Wilson prints now.

( via / via )

Bruce Conner's film & one more.

"Riches are certainly no proof of merit: nay they are often (if not more commonly) acquired by persons of sordid minds and mean talents: nor do they give any intrinsic worth to the possessor; but, on the contrary, tend to pervert his understanding, and render his morals more depraved."
—Humphrey Clinker

Narrative of an American Girl.

"redefinition of the second"

stormlight, jet plane
still, some ploy
spools past rout
caught on beastfoot

Don't tell black people.

( via / via )

That Force.

"Venus ate its moon"

leapfrog bookcrawl
Sunday
with web lure

why sort clouds
at boil

Mina Loy paintings.

"One moment at the Marlon James Powell's event I wanted to highlight, because it made me happy: We both love The Church's Under the Milky Way w/ fond memories of hearing it the first time. There's a great paragraph about the song in his new novel The Disappearers that captures the essence of the song" —@jeffvanderbeer.bsky.social

Moustache Blue.