( via / via )

Transition.

"You absolutely SHOULD NOT go around telling people that data centers are full of gold, silver, palladium, copper, and that the data centers are almost entirely unstaffed."
—@voxsocialism.bsky.social

"I conceived of a verbal music ringing through time, and the idea of a translation in the form of a historical, or diachronic, sound-collage started to take hold."

Army of the Apocalypse.

( me / via )

Cross Road Blues.

"Stalag 47"

Siphoning sores, newsreels
Sunday’s waste of racetracks

Are we there yet, oarlock
Ogpu with dog collar

Voice in my head hastens
To heckle staid radon

My fingers fly broadcast

Fantaisie Espagnole.

If textures are a world, those textures in motion are a story.

"Outside of the exceptions mentioned above, science fiction is written by empty people who have failed as human beings."

( via/ via )

"There are two named individuals known to live at the North Pole."

"Wrocław reminded me of Tel Aviv. This strange playground where you can smoke weed on the beach and eat interesting things for brunch, just up the coast from Gaza, the world's largest prison camp, one of the most impoverished places on the planet, where a few of the people who used to live in Tel Aviv before the street art and the clubbing now drink polluted water, inside a cage, under a rain of Israeli bombs." —Ssam Kriss via

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

      "data center"

1.
quibble-strewn disquiet
querulous slate hairball
      not yet wrecked
   intricate rote
build nothing · on this tide plain

show-through slashing threadbright
thole what is dole-silver
      rant burble
   boulder roll
skyey pinball · passage vouchsafed

jaunty enough Jehu
of gerbil-dug bughouse
      windshield caught
   pollen cargo
wipes smeary · with thin turmoil

rickety whorl reeling
rooky ukulele
      downside copped
   to dust dungeons
readier spewed · than spun as castles

2.
Rue Morgue sans rigor
riffles the thrist pustules
      polychrome
   across chasms
Radiohead · harsh in the prenoon

wanderer of windings
awash in soot footballs
      Gumby-stoned
   stupors recalled
but not the music · that would make them

we build even bolder
burst through skies of erstwhile
      turquoise blank
   blurted like death
& the parking stillness · stabs with consequence

if they sent armed saltines
to assail our fireplace
      foul honor
   in the airt bled
weaving fables · like worn out pennies

scarce legible, lessons
in losing face gracefully
      constellations
   to be renamed:
the Jackal, the Jester · the Jewel-Encrusted

Death Cults.

( via / me )

Greensleeves.

"eat otherwise for a week"

mote-strafed road to Stratford
stray alarm ping signalled
in the mere joust-music
lament encil crossed-off
mask faded furioso
enterprising gambit
gamut of thistles

"Yet it was not only the liminal visuals of the PBS rendition that unsettled; the thematic strangeness of Bierce’s story felt all the more acute against the banal daytime backdrop of McHale’s Navy or I Dream of Jeannie reruns cycling on syndicated networks."

"One must imagine Sisyphus on Notes" —@rmhaines

The Unwritten Room.

( via / via )

Escape.

It's always been my contention that the first Godzilla was a film noir.

Stepping Stone.

turquoise glance unglisters
& glaive without wavelengths
blame Elfwisk for ermine
allotropes that dally
& my own chin choices
chiselling through ruin
drapes slide to, slippery,
upon slag-heap wagons
with grinding gears trending
& gusts cling-fingered

Computer Nr 3.

( me / via )

"Writing bravely means something different today."

"The Gift

I speak from the deep end of night.
Of end of darkness I speak.
I speak of deep night ending.

O kind friend, if you visit my house,
bring me a lamp, cut me a window,
so I can gaze at the swarming alley of the fortunate."

—Forugh Farrokhzad (tr Sholeh Wolpé) via

"Kramer’s readers didn’t need the Malleus to be true. They needed it to give their fear a name, and a method.
So do these boys."

"I see countless think pieces about support, access, inclusion, persistence, belonging, and student success. I see almost nothing about purchase memory, product comparison, and seller accountability, even though parents who went to college have a lot to say about how the product has gotten so bad that 'navigation' through bureaucratic mazes and required apps is the rule, not the exception." —Hollis Robbins via

"For the first two years, they didn’t have an office."

( via / oil painting by me )

Wd like to think i’m “batman chess” but that’s not for me to say.

"the funniest thing about dating a (former) street dude is that whenever I’m annoyed about something, his first response is 'you want me to go "talk" to them?' and like I love the energy honey but that’s not how we get that editor to email me back" —@kimkelly.bsky.social

Boots on the Ground.

"Aspects of Robinson

Robinson at cards at the Algonquin; a thin
Blue light comes down once more outside the blinds.
Gray men in overcoats are ghosts blown past the door.
The taxis streak the avenues with yellow, orange, and red.
This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson.

Robinson on a roof above the Heights; the boats
Mourn like the lost. Water is slate, far down.
Through sounds of ice cubes dropped in glass, an osteopath,
Dressed for the links, describes an old Intourist tour.
—Here’s where old Gibbons jumped from, Robinson.

Robinson walking in the Park, admiring the elephant.
Robinson buying the Tribune, Robinson buying the Times. Robinson
Saying, 'Hello. Yes, this is Robinson. Sunday
At five? I’d love to. Pretty well. And you?'
Robinson alone at Longchamps, staring at the wall.

Robinson afraid, drunk, sobbing Robinson
In bed with a Mrs. Morse. Robinson at home;
Decisions: Toynbee or luminol? Where the sun
Shines, Robinson in flowered trunks, eyes toward
The breakers. Where the night ends, Robinson in East Side bars.

Robinson in Glen plaid jacket, Scotch-grain shoes,
Black four-in-hand and oxford button-down,
The jeweled and silent watch that winds itself, the brief-
Case, covert topcoat, clothes for spring, all covering
His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf."

—Weldon Kees

Tom Tomorrow may have just invented the next subway surfing.

( via / via )

Boist'rous bistro.

"exquisite class weaponry"

   flickering
of embers flounce
   glum moon of
Galileo
   two rabbits
romping across
   daily loop
my lit-up car

   celadon
& glaucous dirge
   leitkegels
for the rat king
   yellow blue
sparkles yawing
   & April
like orc diamonds

"Indeed, if anything, collections of verse on a coherent theme, like the books of the love elegists and their many Renaissance imitators, seem to have actively avoided sequences of poems of exactly the same length.."

"Dizzy, overexposed, he feels very much like the cockroach from that old Porrain play, who wakes in horror to find itself a man." —The Works of Vermin

& we poets think we got troubles.

( me / via )

Midwestern Death Trip.

Social media are like having Edward-Scissorhands; it's hard to do anything precise or tender with them.

Land of Nobody.

"slop worship service"

rubble-love in spades, spitball
ornament spared, sharing
perigee roughshod Mackintosh

arrow of toxic laughter
arrow of mocking slaughter

Ruins.

( via / via )

I think I remember this moreland.

"Another sonnet on sonnets"

Starless & indefatigable page,
Pyramid ascends in pristine silt.
Torrents of bullying, havoc, crazy-quilt
Epistemology take turns to wage
Punishment on one liquescent sage
And all his dire attempts to stave off wilt.
This art, of building half & half unbuilt,
Scurries through stupid climes & nasty cage
But somehow thwarts their mischief.
                        Let brisk bebop
Play, though gas is high & bridge trolls stubborn;
Senioritis foams in the flask of junior
Scribblers. It’s lit. It’s jingly & it’s ancient
Foolishness, on squares imbued with mollusk
Amethyst, if you can frame an edict.

Nets to catch the wind.

In my next life i want to read Russian novelists in Japanese.

"The gothic is built on the premise that the house is lying to you, that the respectable surface is a carapace, and behind it is something monstrous."

( via / via )

A deep consolation.

"BREAKING: A jury has found Live Nation and Ticketmaster to be an illegal monopoly that overcharges fans.

After the federal government settled the case, 34 states kept pursuing the giant ticket and concert company.

Now, the states have won." —@moreperfectunion.bsky.social via @chandra.blacksky.app

Akhmatova on Youtube.

cruelty's sneer in stone
already aims to fall.
while yet he wields control,
that place prepares the Eschaton.

in darkness we pretend.
all for a winning game,
noise as the smile turns grim;
tinsel-scrolloped & sanguine-rained.

nothing will be learned.
though lessons plainly tell,
dissolves our last real pearl
& drunkenness creeps back to bed.

"It was not merely a way to identify someone, but a necessary condition for continued existence after death."

( via / me )

Pietà.

"CLERIHEW"

Stephen Miller
is still a killer.
Though he doesn't stand at Pilate's sink,
his puppetry is broadcast stink.

"Querying is like alcoholic cirrhosis—suicide, but without the redeeming traits of enthusiasm or speed."

"I, too, had climbed to a dangerous height, with my face to the breeze, and felt magically alone of my kind." —Michael Chabon via

"I read to feel truths cupped in my palms, passed to us ragged and broken by our bleeding predecessors."

( me / via )

"As soon as you put language into a dance, it can become bogged down by interpretation of words. Then it becomes like watching mimes on stage, which can be painful."

"this website is a screwball comedy inside a black hole" —@oldoldoldoldnew

"This move toward the sources—ad fontes—is a practice. It’s a way of doing something, not a way of identifying yourself."

"Strike

No construction workers today. The rain
has no other place to be.
It falls continuously,
filling gutters with leaf stew.
No drills, no rivets, no gladiola
sparks springing from welder’s tools.
Steel girders blush rust,
bulldozers glazed like some giant’s
knocked out, rotten tooth. No
construction workers, unless you count
these yellow ducks circling the pool
where the foundation will be laid.
The moment they’ve built won’t exist tomorrow.
They form a line when I give them bread as pay."

—Todd Dillard via

"The Baptists liked the idea of projecting the Bible onto cinema screens, but they were offended by the title Wood had originally selected for the film. So Grave Robbers From Outer Space became Plan 9 From Outer Space."

( via / via )

"If you take Joyce in small doses, say a page at a time, and read him aloud, at least two things are apt to happen. First, the page will disclose a musical value, apart from the meaning of the words. Second, the words themselves begin to call forth in you dozens of confused, vague impressions, associations, memories. This sensation is inchoate and, I feel, meaningless, but it’s interesting.."

"My sister’s love is on yonder side.
The river is between our bodies.
The waters are mighty at [flood],
A crocodile waits in the shallows.
I enter the water and brave the waves,
My heart is strong on the deep;
The crocodile seems like a mouse to me.
The flood as land to my feet.
It is her love that gives me strength,
It makes a water-spell for me;
I gaze at my heart’s desire.
As she stands facing me!
My sister has come, my heart exults,
My arms spread out to embrace her;
My heart bounds in its place.
Like the red fish in its pond.
O night, be mine forever,
Now that my queen has come!"

Translation by Miriam Lichtheim via

"So hydrogen jukebox is murderous innocence."

"Thinking of that time Wendell Berry was invited to give a keynote lecture at a conference on hunger. He looked around at the audience & remarked (I'm paraphrasing here): 'I see a lot of well-fed people.' " —@the-big-quiet.bsky.social

"The loneliness thing is overdone. It formulates something you don’t want formulated."

( via / via )

Unseen jet fading.

"Of course Henry James had talent, but he makes one work too hard for such a small result."
—@ivycomptonburnett.bsky.social

He thanks the kitten.

"Reconciliation

If you piss off a crow—even accidentally—
maybe throw a pinecone in its direction
while scaring a squirrel from the bird feeder,

I’m told it will remember your face
and its grievance;
it will assemble friends

and instruct them in your wrongs.
Together as a mob, they will
berate and scold you, dive

bomb and follow you. They will
remember it next week,
next month, next year,

maybe even for the next ten years.
But if you are nice to a crow,
leave it a peanut, say,

or just greet it in a friendly tone, it will
hold your gaze to judge
your intent, then might come

closer, might even talk back,
converse about the day.
If you make such kindness a practice,

gifts could appear:
a screw, a piece of broken glass,
a paper clip or round stone,

or even something that you lost,
you had no idea where, and thought
you’d never get back again."

—Suzanne Matson in Tar River Poetry

We Speak in Kazoo.

( via )

Mimetic desire.

   unseen jet fading
not so, my suburban dread
   the car, shabby, waits

as if yesterday's world left
just this façade & none else

The Yellow Scale.

"...one thing that’s obvious when you’ve done a lot of this kind of work is that the poems you see most often — the ones people bothered to write down or pass on most frequently — are not necessarily the ones you find in anthologies today." —Victoria Moul via

A Schema for Artorius.

( via / oil painting by me )

Be the change you want to see in the world.

“You feel depressed and crazy because in every historical human culture known to anthropology, people sang together, danced together, and ate food together—and you don’t sing, you don’t dance, and you eat alone in the dark.

You are a singing ape, and you are meant to know fifty dances by heart, which hilltops are sacred, and the names of every plant it is possible to eat.”

— Jay LeSoleil via @panagiotopoulouolga

Anastomosing.

clogged drain · dismal clacking
will not pass · will not ever pass
quartet of Yorkies · yarrow shaken
anastomosing thoughtlets · no therapy
   in the Black Iron Prison
life & decay of smells

"The true and infallible genius of prophetic skill."

( via / via )

"The United States is destroying itself."

"secrets of the vanishing church"

dream fun'ral, draining
drudgery of skull-scrolling
still gray & the grinning
grotto sports sharp quartzite
sharp quartzite

Enemy's position captured singlehandedly by robots.

"Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
I do not think that they will sing to me."

—Cento by R S Gwynn via

"I'm only now beginning."

( via / me )

Collateral.

Irony & sincerity are opposites, but intimacy is the contrary of both. They are equally forms of disconnection. Sincerity is a pleading to be seen, across a distance of not being seen. Friends don’t need to be constantly updating this plea.

"Amid the rise of exclusionary rhetoric, this cover feels more real to us than the original."

"desert building and desert breaking"

cannibrillig, brine shrimp
Abraxas. Jinxmaxxing
the Twisted Slippery Years
subfusc hoedown sad
in the silt-elegy feldspar
onrush of derangements
roaring school zone Gulag
Twisted Slippery Years
highway with snide howdahs
hilches testily westward
out walking komodo
Cairngorm ogive voguing
Twisted & Slippery the years

Sordorable.

( via / me )

"America, the great playground of complicity, where every good fortune comes at someone else’s expense..."

"eternal darkness"

squidcloud dissipating
seriatim scrimshaw
green greener on gray days
granular angst plonk-Styx
traffic valor vowfurl

I Leave Myself.

"The moon keeps the score" —@jordandavis3

15 lesser-known masterpieces of European literature.

( me / via )

The Painter Who Didn't Finish Pictures.

"In the U.S., you cannot sign away your labor, legally; that’s indentured servitude. But you can sign away your intellectual property. That’s the music business."

— Damon Krukowski via @jordandavis3

"Why are you analysing the sickly secretion of a machine that has no aesthetic taste, has no aesthetic intention, that just oozes a strange frankenstein-glomp of motifs, ill-conceived symbology, poorly mishmashed concepts?"

"The Last Toast

I drink to our ruined home,
To my cruel life,
To our loneliness together —
And to you, I drink —
To the lips that betrayed me,
To your death-cold eyes,
To a world brutal and graceless,
And to God, who did not save us."

—Anna Akhamatova (tr Victoria Stoilova) via

"The ruling changed how all businesses had to value unsold stock, and for publishers, the effect was devastating."

( me / via )

Woldclip.

"SOMETIMES (Lipogram)

Sometimes
it seems
time is mist.
It sits,
so moot.
It misses me."

—Anthony Etherin

Weird Woman.

"Everyone please welcome CBS News Immigration Analyst Viktor Orban." —@bencollins.bsky.social

"There’s a lots of things out there which I would say are genuinely new and exciting, but they’re not altogether pleasant or palatable to the middlebrow tastes of the present.."

( via / via )

"But leaving all the latex, profanity and gender-bending out of the ’80s is the equivalent of plucking only the flowers from the ’60s (daisies and bell-bottoms) and turning off the power by airbrushing out Vietnam."

"You want entire
armor of an omelet"

—Alina Stefanescu

CHRISTINA KOCH GREETING HER DOG AFTER RETURNING FROM THE MOON.

welcome hunger, wingspan
the mind's winter flyzone
episode red runoff
arraign unsweet plantain

yellow the spark spillway
asperity's heirloom
lintel antelucan
you lose at the rat game

row of subterranean lights

"Watched the first 10 minutes of a bad american tv show called 'the miniature wife'. it was really, really obviously written by ai.."

( via / via )

In the Desert.

"stockpile"

shadowy wings shearing
the day's shrill pavilion
grub carbaminimous
or grue shotglass plot point

full of refined soundings
fused with howling news dunks

The aroma of an old book.

"As the story moves to Tangier, Dutch lute player Jozef Van Wissem plays baroque melodies in non-Western scales, a suggestion of the sheer amount of years lived and continents traversed by our ancient protagonists." —Claire Biddles via via Feuilleton

"For most citizens, the immediate success or failure of these talks will not be determined by a handful of cryptic official statements but measured in simpler, more tangible terms—whether calm returns to their streets in the coming days, or whether they are forced to endure another cycle of violence."

( via / via )

Malcesine on Lake Garda.

"Someone mentioned the ending of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, and someone else mentioned Anna Kavan’s Ice, and I commented after each Note to the effect that I remember what it felt like to read those books despite the many intervening years, how powerful they were, to the point where I can summon the environment, the room I was in, and so on." —@simonjoycerandall

Attempt to unearth the profound ontological implications of the thought of Marshall McLuhan.

"Anna Akhmatova: THE GREY-EYED KING

Glory to you, inescapable pain!
The grey-eyed king died yesterday.

The autumn evening was stuffy and red,
My husband, coming home, calmly said:

'They found him after hunting, you know,
He lay there dead where the old oaks grow.

I feel for the queen. So young, taken away…
She’s gone white from sorrow just in a day'

Finished his supper, found his pipe,
Left for his usual work shift at night.

I will now wake up my little girl
Look in her grey eyes, hold onto her.

And poplars rustle outside the door,
'Your king is nowhere on Earth anymore…' "

—tr Chen Rafaeli via

"Forget this idea of lying, cheating senses. Your senses are extremely honest to you. You are just confused regarding what the senses are honest about.."