( via / via )

Rippling.

"D.C. may not be a creative city, but I, a pretentious and annoying flake, got twelve RSVPs to my shoebox apartment for twelve poets to get drunk on absinthe and recite poetry on a Tuesday night, with only a week’s notice. The game was on."

"I had resolved to give up smoking today. Then I woke up and remembered the existence of AI. I have now resolved to smoke more." —@alexanderfayne

"Oh, by the way, there’s going to be a crisis in helium. Sound’s not like a big deal, until you notice that helium is essential to the production of superconductors. 30% of it also passes through the Strait of Hormuz."

( via / me )

Procrustean turn for this timeline, i'm all popcorn.

"If cancer did not swim in the same sea as us, we might admire it, as we admire sharks." —Geoff Ryman

This would indicate to me the existence of a complex society to acculturate to. Probably had schools, intellectuals, & bloggers.

"Against Refrain

The sound of someone learning to dance
again

A marionette’s awakening
and flexing of limbs that chafe
like wooden chimes

A song whose feet are bare
the better they might balance on each
root-note that appears

The sound of breath not quite controlled—
not quite the concertina
but the bellows

      *

Perhaps this coal-dragged dancer fought
the wrong side of a war

and spared from swinging
punishes herself

by limping through a regimen
of grace

      *

Or maybe this benighted piece
was once contender for
the National Anthem

and it would take some dusting off
to rescue from the hiss
another turn

      *

The sound of someone learning to dance
again

a novel world
of novel gravity
entangling her

Like dreams in which we try
to wade through water—
dreams in which the mind maintains
it can command the body
with even less of a claim

And so this former dancer finds
herself as just another
dream refiner

But clad in the state of the novel art—
a deepsea diver of empty heavens—
she listens for the rhythm
of the slipstream
of her pulse

the only sound she can
and must keep close

as with no atmosphere
there is no noise

      *

A murder of crows aggressively clears
its throat and shuffles up and down
a gutter like the brim of an old
hat (though everything is old
compared to Aves’ death-defying

bounds!)

      *

The sound of someone learning to dance
against refrain

the way air resonates
with shaky ground

as ‘dance’ itself reorders the sounds in ‘sound’ "

—@huckastley

"Authors have always elided reality, shoving their means of survival into the background so as to give over more words to other subjects. But in doing so they can sometimes accidentally give us the impression that they are floating above normal life, rather than engaging with it."

( via / via )

Orpheus turned to Stone.

i have not read
the books i have

stuffed shelves parade
i have not read

cell less arid
than the bustling hive

i have not read
the books i have

Time is a sword.

"Context is the first casualty of Oral Culture" —@varaxes

The Song of the Eternal Sailor.

( via / via )

"Imagined life is more exhilarating than remembered life.” In Ita."

"There are too many Wile E. Coyotes on this site and not enough Acme catalogs."
—@jordandavis3

Time's passage in Gaza.

"Figs, dates, cashews,
   washed down with boiled well water.

We sit in a cool, dark room
      and wait for nightfall."

—@kimdorman.bsky.social

It is, of course, important to talk about the downsides of being autistic too.

( me / via )

Essential Titles.

"infusion valor"

beautiful dark morning
necromantic bank run
dull shine of shrill street slicks
machine tales early flourish

spray & gray skulls grinning
grasp weakly the seek-wheel
taillight glow over tumbled
mumbletrip crippling

beautiful berm forming
to bury eyes' zymurgy
dashboard light my delicious
ligature to gig-aim

hell fire in the cloud fringe
cross handed these boss fiends
shattering tower that teased us
with too bumptious jump hoops

Hendecasyllabics.

To say that something should be burned down when it's already on fire is not saying much.

Prolegomena to End Literature.

( via / me )

US sanctions body count.

“For ours is a most fictile world; and man is the most fingent plastic of creatures.” —Carlyle

On the Inadequacy of Foot-Based Scansion.

despair monetized
motion of the Rorschach
four coins in the fountain
foraged carrion fairways
carrion fairways
wanhope fueled hatred
in the gutter leaves

"2025 will mark the year where the literary scene of this city exploded."

( via / oil painting by me )

Boudica.

"things known by the calendar"

psithuristic turnstile
guitar hero Pharaoh
rises from long lozenge
lunge from above hovered

leaves the city severed
serious blast pastime
golf cart full of gallows
engulfs werewolf furlongs

Tracing what remains.

I used vintage typewriters for most of my life, until lit mags stopped taking paper submissions.

"In last night’s Musil Meeting, Samantha Rose Hill asked what the difference between a poet and a prophet is, which I tried to answer with a paraphrase of Emerson’s definition of the difference between a poet and a mystic in his essay, The Poet."

( oil painting by me / via)

"Soon it had began to bend my reality, all my other cultural consumption sucked into its field like a black hole, as if my life had been designed to meet this moment of reading."

"Because the bird flew before there was a word for flight, there will one day be a word for what you and I do"
- Marcelo Hernandez Castillo via @jacobwren.vsky.social

Blackest Pitch.

      "bullets are a popular way to die"

   prequel orts
reaped squishy puns
   selcouth slag

foment brutal
   stilted ash

Denmother Melania.

( via / me )

The Dreadful Lemon Turnover.

“Or Some Third Thing”

Gauntlet of dark
The drill’s entry
Cool water carve

Occult handbag
Eyewatering waste
To crawl on wheels

Pale blue speckle
Ever this recite
Sportive cannibal

Gauntlet of dark

I Walk on Guilded Splinters.

“This game, which I myself had invented, was based on the proposition that just as nouns could be divided into masculine, feminine and neuter, so there was a distinction between tragic and comic nouns. For example, this system decreed that steamship and steam engine were both tragic nouns, while streetcar and bus were comic.’”--Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human (tr Donald Keene 1958) [—H'm. Poetry is tragic, while blog is comic...but poetics is comic & blogger is tragic...]

Nothing Ever to Ask.

( via / via )

Ginsberg's Jungle Queen.

"Pitch" to me is a stink that fixes roads.

This Town Ain't Big Enough for 34 Lit Mags.

"Poem Beginning With A Line By Firdausi

'Ere from his lofty sphere the morn has thrown'
the full day's share of fire, forth I glided
after a Starbucks tea for my dear Lady:
slaughter on the radio, insane.

Day after day, week after week, I struggle
in Laocoön coils of sense & nonsense,
orange & turquoise clouds. But they remembered

what I would always get, & I then proffered
five quarters, two dimes, a nickel, & two pennies."

—Heidi Guerre, How Texans Saved Civilization (2002)

Pattern Poems of Hrabanus Maurus.

( via / via )

Yarusenai.

"autodidact"

& secret architecture
which way the toilet roll's turned
past made of alibis
concessions to bugpunk

the void filled by reasons

"The collapse of a society is a slow, mundane and brutal process (a process we are currently witnessing in real time)."

"I am gobsmacked that a movie this ingratiatingly insane got a big budget, major stars, and a wide release in tepid 2026, rather than 1973 or 1967." —Nathan Rabin on The Bride! via

"Was it AI that selected the Iranian school where at least 168 people were killed, mostly children?"

( me / via )

"Of course, the sad secret of the literary magazine is that few of them are for readers. They are rather places for writers to aspire to be published in."

"The typical human walks 900 miles per year and consumes 22 gallons of coffee during that same year.

This means that humans get about 41 miles to a gallon." —@ikiquest

Against Refrain.

"grimdark stranger"

Darjeelingfade, fadged in
fidgety gears-ouzo
jungle-reclaimed gemstone
Jonestown run as funhouse

Carousel Man.

( via / me )

Old author i never see written about but have always been intrigued by her covers.

"A Requiem

Neobulë, being tired,
Far too tired to laugh or weep,
From the hours, rosy and gray,
Hid her golden face away.
Neobule, fain of sleep,
Slept at last as she desired!

Neobule! is it well,
That you haunt the hollow lands,
Where the poor, dead people stray,
Ghostly, pitiful and gray,
Plucking, with their spectral hands,
Scentless blooms of asphodel?

Neobule, tired to death
Of the flowers that I threw
On her flower-like, fair feet,
Sighed for blossoms not so sweet,
Lunar roses pale and blue,
Lilies of the world beneath.

Neobule! ah, too tired
Of the dreams and days above!
Where the poor, dead people stray,
Ghostly, pitiful and gray,
Out of life and out of love,
Sleeps the sleep which she desired."

—Ernest Dowson

Separation.

It's not just the venom drizzle, it's the hell-stench.

Memoir scandals lately for those who don't keep up.

( via / via )

"...how, out of a tiny mention in Perec’s La Vie mode d'emploi /Life: A User's Manual (1978 / 1987 translated by David Bellos), Culley conceived of the large open serial form of the 'Hammertown' trilogy..."

"the fascination of trifles; the enchantment of frivolity; the spell of worthless things; the seduction of nonsense; the charm of idle pursuits; the lure of empty pleasures; the enticement of meaningless diversions; the allure of trivial things; the spell of slight things" —@timesflow.bsky.social

"We’re a week in. Do we really still need to explain the Strait of Hormuz?"

1. "caltrops"

bad charade at nightfall
where do the shards carol
calthumpian thirlsnooze
upthrust duppy vespers

Frankford invigilated
frabjous queue of abject
the gray miles grilseswindle
granular point blank bando

refugee of Egypt
Geronimo Kronstad
bad charade at nightfall
where do the shards guzzle

2. "liminal clownship"

   Algol blurb
egress dollhouse
   glimmering
absinthe clasp murk
   from obtuse
hellspawn Ogpu

3.

but what will come of it all
dark sky behind bright buildings
les lauriers sont coupés
another busted city

"The singer-songwriter portrayed by Timothée Chalamet in 'A Complete Unknown' credited his own songwriting breakthrough to an experience he had at the opera."

( me / via )

The time i learned what art is.

So many sadnesses,
like raindrops on a rainy morning,
there is no watching them.
Only submission
to a distant roar. Aurora
of the pole that is Pain,
the movie’s flicker-rate
in you becomes another movie.

10 Golden Age mystery novels.

"WORD FACT

A 'psithurism' is the sound of a tree’s rustling leaves. It comes from Greek 'psithurízō' (ψιθυρίζω), which means 'I whisper'."

—@anthonyetherin

The Diameter of the Bomb.

( via / via )

The mystery not solved yet.

"The 1936 discovery put this theory to rest. There were almost certainly no Christians living in Pompeii as early as 62 AD, and regardless all Christian writings were at that point in Greek."
—@weirdmedievalguys on the Sator square & other historical mysteries via

Hazlitt on a hatred true and beautiful.

"no comet, no eclipse"

indexical grievance
disproportionate response
briary morning wheelwell
the new bodies hung in the square

no representation rules you
more than being free of images
indexical grievance
disproportionate response

The Octopus.

( me / via )

"...with practically no one around in our institutions to defend such a generous approach to the human past, the past itself is left undefended from the invading barbarians who imagine themselves, likewise in classic cargo-cult fashion, as the brave upholders of civilization."

        "Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal Portion

Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion,
Scarce can endure delay of execution,
Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my
    Soul in a moment.

Damned below Judas: more abhorred than he was,
Who for a few pence sold his holy master.
Twice betrayed, Jesus me, the last delinquent,
    Deems the profanest.

Man disavows, and Deity disowns me:
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
Therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all
    Bolted against me.

Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers;
Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,
I’m called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence
    Worse than Abiram’s.

Him the vindictive rod of angry justice
Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong;
I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb, am
    Buried above ground."

—William Cowper

Derne genocide doulas.

The emblem of today is the violated body.

"The weight of flowers on Chengdu grows."

( me / via )

"Word Freak helped situate the game alongside chess and poker for strategic and analytical depth and sophistication, elevating and validating the people who devote their lives to understanding and excelling at it.."

"Art is the oldest portal we have.

This is why we cry at a girl on the ice doing her thing with joy, on her own terms, freed. Her freedom briefly becomes our freedom. Her joy illuminates the places where we aren’t free yet.

It is the grief under the joy that yearns for that freedom." —@summerisferal

No Swan So Fine.

"DEMON (Palindrome by Pairs)

One mad

demand

made a demon."

—@anthonyetherin

"Patsy, what's wrong?"

( via / via )

"Have we gone from H. G. Wells to Yevgeny Zamyatin in two short years?"

those without · the talent of empathy
learn to fake it · when others are looking
we should let them show · their ice to the world
a handicap · but nothing to reward
nothing to be proud of · & give power for

"To say Red Mafiya is timeless is to acknowledge we’ve been frozen in hell for forty years."

"For aeons, the confident quickly wound up dead unless they knew what they were doing, so we evolved to equate seasoned confidence with competence. But today, there is rarely a price for being wrong, so our attraction to confidence now attracts us to the most confidently idiotic."
—@gurwinder

First the war news, then the weather.

( via / via )

The Hexadecimalist Heresy.

"But Love is gone; and Silence seems to grow
Along the misty road where we must go."

—Lord de Tabley via

Horn Concerto No. 3 in E-Flat Major, K. 447: 1. Allegro.

"podcast"

Sharkhenge going up · vifgage twirl
lemming camel's eye · carousel lurch
in the nugatory night · shards gathered
i call puzzle · blazoned way
digital thong · therblig perne
old TV show · telltale colors
things explode · in the plural dark
& cold vertigo · throughout the land

Fushitsusha 不失者 @ St John-at-Hackney 5/10/2012.

( via / noealzii on tumblr )

"The problem, though, is the corollary to all this charming American exuberance, which is the repeated bouts of mass murder."

"News from Paris

Down through Venetian blinds the morning air
Sifts from a sky where peach and azure fuse;
Street noises enter too, and in a distant square
A regimental band plays Sambre et Meuse.

It is Felicity: she sits and reads once more
The Gothic script of the West-Easterly Divan;
Her silver shoe just touches the waxed floor,
And pot pourri transcends the vase from old Japan.“

—Charles Spear

146 moons.

"The age of a need to manufacture consent is coming to a close. All they need to manufacture now is confusion." --Eris @discordiareview on subst

Vidar just quietly prepares for the end of the world.

( me / via )

"Philosophy can no more do without reason than music can do without silence."

"Once a sign of technical limitations, pixel art in video games now serves the same purpose as black-and-white film in movies. It signals that a game is both low budget and highbrow"
—@varaxes

Monitoring the Situation.

a faint whistle sipping
in suq antelucan
bunched-up sleep battles
barely delivered serve

the rich coffee scratches
cranchneed & brawl-folly
outside war is waiting
& work of foist-moisture

rumble-of-tires Rorschach
rista made of thirst traps

Philosophy & Theory Roundup - March 6, 2026.

( via / via )

"The post-historical period in which aesthetics become what only theory can determine has turned out to be another period in history, another finite chapter in the narrative that gets tiresome at times but never ends."

"recusatio"

the merry prank rolls on
or generational curse
as loss upon swift loss
overflows the urn—
world plated on a terrapin

tornado-warned, we dine
on just-downed albatross
wary of knocks from ICE,
frogs fallen on the lawn
world plated on a terrapin

& it's to you i sing
O turtle of our crunch
ignore vast monkey wrench
our great wheel of dung
world plated on a terrapin

a little longer wobble
as i creep t'ward dust
no poet of holocaust
but daedalist of bubble
world plated on a terrapin

sober as lidless judge
the canteen's out of ether
this spectacle takes another
sort to clock its siege
world plated on a terrapin

i only will joke & whine
& parse shades of giving up
fell squibs of queasy stripe
or even waxwing pun

worldplay to don a terror pen

Be hard like Avvakum.

"I wonder if there is a 'Tao of Polycrisis' where no crisis is ever confronted and resolved. Rather, the ever-renewing crises gently compost the older crises, which fade from awareness, because their victims are mostly dead" —@bruces.bsky.social

Top 15 Weird-Folk Albums.

( via / me )

The Mandé Variations.

"I finally saw this [One Battle after Another] and can best describe it as an ABC After School Special for the Weather Underground." —@pagesandframes

Four Walls. (via)

squirrel outside
in dead flowerbed
brown on brown

Too hard to train.

( via / via )

Preview of coming attractions.

“The Prisoner

I walked along the winding road;
It was high summer; on one side
Behind pale foliage sinuously flowed
The hand-sown wheat in rustling pride.

Grey sprawling stone, before me towered the school;
I touched the chapel-corner through the hedge,
Traced dimly in the window’s painted pool
Three mitres and the shield with rope and wedge.

Deep peace! Yet there was panic terror shut inside;
The bronze bells rolled and reeled in flowing tide.
Against that shock time buckled to resist,
And no sound pierced the loneliness, no voices cried;
Only the great towers trembled in the pouring mist.”

—Charles Spear

Robber uses Google translate to announce hold up at Ecuadorian restaurant in New Jersey.

"The real body count is how many people are in therapy because of you." —@justmackenzie

Why I Like Strange Books.