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"The concept of a 'career' has been replaced by a series of elaborate heists."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

( rue morgue / via )

Fairport Harbor, Ohio.

" 'Don't stay on twitter so long you stop believing in sunscreen' sounds like an idiom people 200 years in the future will be using but won't remember what it means"
—@michaelhobbes.bsky.social

The other Marvel Universe.

"world without eyes to see the world"

parse the small bones left
smatterings made natal
storm & blazing blemish
obliterate lit scroll
focus on keeping fauxpas
& phantoms out doubtful
the long game is lambent
with luck's inward aspect
becalmed with my toucan crew
parse the small bones left

Tunnel into Hammer.

( via / via )

New piece, all hand drawn paper animation.

"more of the same at lunchtime"

in the quizchase unrequited
the prize given prolethwart
earthquake & loothprog
nevermore for niding

the prize given prolethwart
nudibranch promise
& drive among drizzles
dark wood & worn apothegms

earthquake & loothprog
drastic wipe
if escape were a reason
& scazons could run rampant

nevermore for niding
skullface rune
winner at the wrong game
in the quizchase unrequited

"Spotify partnered with a handful of production companies to churn out cheap instrumental filler, released it under fake artist names, and had employees seed it across the platform’s own editorial playlists so the company could pay real musicians less."

"The locust armies warping, on the bark" --Royston's Lycophron

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932).

( me / via )

"You need to smash every screen in your house curtis. you need to destroy them all and live in a homeless encampment under a bridge. those are your people now."

"Cicada songs abrade the air
All afternoon."

—Sally Thomas via

"The bottle was black and octagonal, alternating between matte and glossy surfaces. The name was meaningless and slightly strange. 'Black Number' sounded like a code, an error in a calculation, or the title of a film.."

"old story of dread & harsh injustice"

penurious trail, trawling
tralatitious alter
in cardboard make bone time
in barricades cradle
busier buzzdozer

tralatitious alter
patrolling flesh ashfields
no shade for the sharing
the sure fix of quicksand
& decay carved starvelings

in cardboard make bone time
in boneyards find playmates
pale turquoise, dark circus
resumes the clown clatter
cluster bomb found tempo

in barricades cradle
crystalline loss phosphors
spread maps of the madness
among whitecoat monkeys
perfect with bale bulwark

busier bulldozer
my muse & merch searchlight
one more golden goblet
ganch or stiff definition—
penurious trail, trawling

"As doctors use A.I. to get faster at writing prior-authorization letters, Dr. Wachter said he had 'tremendous confidence' that the insurance companies would use A.I. to get better at denying them."

( via / via )

Not to be confused with "quesadilla".

"cough that has a seat at ev'ry table"

1.
scenes of things we knew
in palindromes explain
the play of light
that holds nothing
for awhile set aside
i can't watch the thrashing
what is it all but thrashing
& patterns
that crutch of crutches
time's up

2.
vulturous feasting · as is done
      no hard times
   for henchmen

3.
overlaid fictions · old satisfactions
      wasp hovers
   by the back door
hour on its own tries
to tryst howling mallets

burgeoning kiln · cast off
      points of view
   vaporous rise
i find fizzled reasons
rose-overlaid fictions

At the Tomb of Agamemnon.

"Onstage, members of a full symphony orchestra supporting Mi’kmaw soprano Emma Pennell prepare to perform the piece You Can Die Properly Now – a komqwejwi’kasikl poem written by Mi’kmaw poet, artist and educator Dr. Michelle Sylliboy to honour the children who did not make it home from residential school." —Mackenzie Pardy via

I caught a butterfly.

( via/ me )

Monumental.

"...oil turns Time toward apocalyptic blasphemies." —Negarestani

Roberts on Crowley.

   failson shootout
at Not Okay Correl
   wasphaven
city on fire
   Nero violin
or recording biro

   failson watch
wearier inning
   wasphaven
having foundered
   windows down
before you go

   failson menu

⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ - ʅ͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡(̸̢̛̼̞̭͋ͅ)̸͚̰͛̔̾̀̿͒͂:̴͓̞̑̌̂̆̊͋̀:̸͎̟̯̂̓̌ ҉ ͡ ͞ ͞ ͞ ҉● ࿀ ● ࿀ ●.

( me / via )

"I mean, I thought I was gonna be as famous as Bertolt and little German schoolchildren were going to be reciting my poetry before school starts."

but i cannot · stop his mouth with clay
   the microphones from humming
treasure · i cannot turn redhats back
   into the broken children they were
come sit with me · in this becrimsoning
   chantpleure of crawlspace
sunset · where a million bucks
   is not too much for a bomb

Steering Wheel.

"How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man’s ire—by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs"
—@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

Bucket list.