( via )

On Edward Gorey.

( via / via )

To the Postal Carrier, About That Railing.

Apophatic (II).

"A Philadelphia nun named Sister Rose Kuhn drives to a Texas immigration court weekly to sit next to unaccompanied children as young as 4 who are facing deportation hearings alone without relatives or an attorney so that they won’t have to face the judge by themselves."
—@therickydavila.bsky.social via

Zombie (throat singing cover).

( via / via )

Golden Mist of Error.

"And Xibalba is packed with tests, heaps and piles of tests." —Popol Vuh (tr Tedlock, 1996)

"...some poems 'you write' and some 'you talk about in bars': 'Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it’s fatal to confuse them'."

"tiny lizard got bigger"

a clean mask & clear sailing
shelves enough & night peace
Euclid neon
Lettie Lynton dress

Sistine Chapel.

( via / via )

The Days are Coming in Abundance.

"to own the Moon"

Radon Nardo Gray
rando in the plandark
baleful bully
bellicose ape-thumb scumbles
radon cinder block
sickness builds its triumph
gold on cardboard
decaying fash ashtray
all those years of saving
& pride tossed
cesspools found voidpull
Radon Nardo Gray

Northern Elegies, V.

"Right now, all of us are living through a renaissance in animation preservation. It’s a defining part of the 21st century..." —Animation Obsessive via

"That is the epigram. Small, bred for one afternoon’s work, disproportionately forceful, socially unreliable, and useless for the long amble."

( me / via )

Because it is.

"I had never heard of Flock cameras in my goddamned life and then one day I woke up and every town council everywhere had just unhinged their jaws months back and excitedly horfed down a full surveillance state." —catvalente.bsky.social

The Shuto Expressway that appears in Tarkovsky's Solaris.

salt crystals sparkle
redgreen & clear—like a reluctance
that is also a duty

"It was his own copy. It had somehow made its way from a gypsy cab in New York all the way through various book dealers to this place in Texas and back to him."

( via / via )

"They hunted nutria, apparently, and pelts had begun appearing on doorsteps. No one could agree whether they were offerings or warnings."

"FRANKENSTEIN

Deeds, lives allay me. Man, not law, decide.
End loyal rot, civilian, as a god.
Parts mix a monster, frets no maker tied:
A menace.... Voltage, plate me; rip a rod.

Pale, soon to rot, stuck carcass, end a sleep!
Dial sun, age... beg a raven egg of doom.
Moors liven. Idle here, we rift, far creep....
I peer, craft fire. We’re held in evil’s room.

Mood: fog. Geneva. Rage began us, laid.
Peel sadness. A crack cuts to rot. Noose, lap.
Do rap ire, metal peg, at love.... Cane made,
I trek. A monster frets. No maxims trap.

'Dog!' As a nail I, Victor, lay — old need.
Iced Walton, name my all as evil’s deed!"

—Anthony Etherin

"They are intended for people who want flowers so long as they are not really flowers."

"Every one of those brave and inspiring people you hear about on the news was exhausted and terrified the whole time. They were sad and angry and wanted to crawl into a hole and not come out. They wished they could have stayed in bed. Then they did it anyway. But they did it scared and sad and tired. We also all still had to go to work. People still had to find ways to spend time with their families and take care of their children. We still had to deal with mundane bullshit. And while we did that it didn't stop. Ice was at our work places too. At kids schools, at doctors offices. It didn't stop. So fucking cold, for hours on end" —@nolas-socks.bsky.social via via @ossuary.bsky.social

Don't Speak.

( via / postcard of robert w chambers mansion )

"a sort of Golgotha of the heart become immutable as bronze in the sonority of its plunging ruin..."

"The last time this country experienced this level of civil unrest, the music was a whole lot better." —@bluevoter24.bsky.social

Myself the lit-talk squanders.

"A Dirge

Why were you born when the snow was falling?
You should have come to the cuckoo’s calling,
Or when grapes are green in the cluster,
Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster
For their far off flying
From summer dying.

Why did you die when the lambs were cropping?
You should have died at the apples’ dropping,
When the grasshopper comes to trouble,
And the wheat-fields are sodden stubble,
And all winds go sighing
For sweet things dying"

—Christina Rossetti via Sally Thomas

Jueju.

( via / via )

In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote discovered the greenhouse effect.

"Decagon

Maybe if I could sleep, could dive
so soundly as to make the depth
unfold its silent field, the dead
would look no stranger than the live

There each would tend a plot, a stone
they burnish and dust; though none of them
would bear an epitaph or name...
only a pitch-black decagon

And hypnotised by one such grave,
maybe I’ll find its disc is no
decaying sun or pyring coal—
but the next pool that I must dive"

—Huck via

Grimshaw thread.

"Humans trying to achieve interstellar travel is like a troubled couple having a baby to save the marriage." —@wakeupangry.bsky.social

The Republic of Užupis.

( Buna Airbase via via / via )

Trading Mercator for Equal Earth.

"Through honeycombs of stone would now be wandering the passions in their clay. There would be tears and there would be strange laughter. Fierce births and deaths beneath umbrageous ceilings. And dreams, and violence, and disenchantment." —Titus Groan via

Approach.

Sawtooth Mountains
at sunrise
road-pulled wheel

rainmet envoy

Water rolling in over a salt flat in Turkmenistan.

( via / me )

Study of Sorrow.

      "ODE: Mavortia"

ersatz debris, brimstone
      galloping
brougham potholes, harm sought
   again to learn
halftime hour · fob good ghost
foist this rage not grooved wheelnest
      spiracle
rennet plunge into it
   speed for the course
watching the last stars · spiral t'ward sunrise

The Goat Star.

"We never considered the possibility that we might be trapped in the webwork of communication and transport that was supposed to make us free." —Wendell Berry via

"Unconvinced by that 'the first sustained overview' claim - A Year in the Country has put out no less than eleven books on the subject, there was this effort by the splendidly named Merlin Coverley several years ago, I feel like I'm blanking on one or two other books..."

( me / via )

Didgeridoo Escargot.

"Into that house where no man went, he went
Alone; and in that house where day was night,
Midnight was like a darkness that had fingers."

—E A Robinson, Cavender's House (1929)

"The route cannot be acquired by questioning the boatmen:..."

Ties for the Homeless

SLOTH invades, odorless gas;
TIARA of turrets, owner of, missing.
EATER out of my hand, tell
ANENT these splinters, in a code i can break,
LANDS where i may hie to you…

CIRCLE i am always outside of, waxreft
ICARUS, who only asks
RAREST boon; i know you are listening there.
CREATE a pink for my thorns;
LUSTER up the matte backdrop; concatenate
ESTERS in this alembic.

MERGERS happen all the time around me &
ETERNAL bliss some of them.
REGATTA we drive in, that must mean something:
GRAVITY denied… Desires
ENTITLE, no, but it’s not as if i gave
RATTLER-warning to the world!
SLAYERS of promises, the news, & a candle

DECISIVE in flaring its
EGOMANIA, but snuffed, still smokes; Newton
COMPUTES the odds & remains
IMPOTENT to make one smile eventuate.
SAUTERNE, best i ever drank,
INTERRER among pain-memories loses–
VIENNESE waltz of pagan-
EASTERED days–& other cries taboo in these

FRATERIES, do you bring me?
REGIMENTAL productivity i thole,
AGITATIVE with hate, dear
TITANITES unseen, unfallen from the skies…
EMANATIST that i am.
RETITRATE the consequences. A stain speaks:
INITIATOR in far
EAVESTONE spark-sojourning, are you even now
SLESTERED with the task to come…?

Batrachian (with Root-Hoard).

( via / via )

Flicker poem.

      "The House on the Hill

They are all gone away,
   The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray
   The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.

Nor is there one to-day
   To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray
   Around that sunken sill?
They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play
   For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay
   In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say."

—Edwin Arlington Robinson

Cityscape took over 20 hours.

"just got arrested for going up to a police officer while wearing meta glasses and saying 'computer, transfer $100,000 from this officer's bank account into my account' and then waving my hands like a magician" —@dieworkwear.bsky.social

Modern megalithic monument.

( me / via )

Tellegen Absorption Scale.

"Later, as in late autumn, there will be
the mass-produced wax berries, and perhaps
an unearthed wasps' nest like a paper skull..."

—Geoffrey Hill

"His reputation faltered as a new religion swept through the Levant, condemning him as evil. Perhaps he was too powerful."

"god's favorite metal"

1.
Goldberg barricade
autotelic tree-siftings
two abstract horses

compile autumn dishtowels

2.
shadowed pebbly texture
of the WalMart parkinglot

"Miss Marple is the code-name for the movement from loss to grace..."

( via / via )

On the Marionette Theater.

   binary twilight
soft turquoise rabbitwatch
   eighteen light years

his whole life proving a planet
that could not exist

The House.

"And fierce reluctance of disastrous stars" —Swinburne

"Once the stone itself can be copied at will, the story is no longer part of the value. The story is the value."

( me / via )

"Punk ain't really distortion and mohawks..."

"The frontier is the edge of civilization where we test our grit, are rejuvenated through a healthful primitivism, and feel big." —Dan Sinykin paraphrasing William Cronon via

Loving book restoration video.

      "ODE: Sikun"

bluegreen skin of skraelings
skelped so far unspeaking
      did not hire
   linguist's service
to supply argot · for the wobbly invaders

svelte cars & magenta
bobs for all the starlets
      calling out
   crucial numbers
at a silicon brink · in a Vietnam year

lunar shadows sold me

Käthe Kollwitz self-portrait in pastels.

( via / via )

Does your cat ever fall off the kayak?

"Homage: Vallejo

Brailed up from birth, these obdurate, obituary corners
of second life the hospital light ravened solstice

blessed with a caesarean and now we have a republic,
the bread under arm, water-bearer of the sea: Cetus, Christ.

After the blackbird I put on my herringbone jacket,
the feather hummed gargoyles bearing down buildings,

rain scowled down, Vallejo and Vallejo as I hurried
up Eager Street; Thursday, I remember the white stone

in the flask and wild asterisks hissing; Thursdays, falling
at noon, at Cathedral Street, blackbirds falling quietly at Biddle Street."

—Ishion Hutchinson

We don't know what happened after that.

“It is one thing to talk of literature as a medium through which we convey our awareness, or indeed our conviction, of an inveterate human condition of guilt or anxiety; it is another to be possessed by a sense of language itself as a manifestation of empirical guilt.” —Geoffrey Hill via

When 3M scientist Kris Hansen discovered that a chemical the company produced was in the blood of the general public, her bosses questioned her work.

( via / via )

Fiction books that point us back to our essential human nature.

"I hope death isn’t as close as he sounds. I can hear the glottal stop in his gloat, the ping of sun on a blade fresh from the stone." —Joseph S Furey

"It is not a person in the human sense, but it is a person of another order."

"Caw

Whose branch this is I think you know.
By how my (question-marks as) claws inscritch the bark.
How my worry-work along this bough
runs back and forth (and copper-keen) and evermore;
I got mocked and nicked No-Fly Bird

not for nothing.

Not for nothing have I picked this oak.
Though not thicktrunk-ancient as some angel-oak,
it’s sure the highest of our high so suits my lack.
—Charred wings won’t lift; I’ve got no glide
nor span to speak of. Ain’t this my beat : my usual limb.
Ain’t this pecking (carking) pulse

my far and wide."

—Atsuro Riley via

There's no handle.

( me / via )

Greatest Female Poets.

"Last Words

Forgive me for not writing sober,
I mean sooner, but I almost don't
dare see what I write, I keep mating mistakes,
I mean making, and I'm wandering
if I've inherited what
my father's got.
I first understood it when he tried
to introduce me to somebunny:
'This is my doctor,' he said,
then didn't say more, 'my daughter.'
The man kindly nodded
out the door.
I thought: is this dimension
what I'm headed for?
I mean dementia.
Not Alzheimer's, but the kind he has,
possessive aphasia: oh that's good,
I meant to say progressive.
Talk about euthanasia!
I mean euphemasia,
nice words inside your head not there,
and it's not progress at all.
No, he's up against the boil
after years now of a sad, slow wall
and he's so hungry,
I mean angry.
Me too. I need to get my rhymes in
while I still mean. I mean can."

—Mary Jo Salter via Maryann Corbett

"...that strange, devious and slippery personage, crawling with indefinable nationalities who is called, or claims to be called, Ivan Illich.."

Poetry is when language enters hauntedness. (via)

A good selection of rhetorical terms with examples. (Via.)

( via / via )

"Trumpism is far from gone. But when it does go, we won’t notice that it’s gone."

"The health of a culture can be measured in terms of how many new and interesting things are breaking through and gaining some amount of traction." —Charlie Jane Anders via

Clay tablet mail.

dormitating* dire turd
adroit at sprawl folly
       sundowning
   with the flag heft
fleas rummaging · on the bitter road

await queued pantomime
pundits all wage blood for
       theocrats
   & bandit chiefs
fleas rummaging · on the bitter road

---------------------------------------------------------
* Barnes word: repeatedly falling asleep

How to Write for Money.

( me / via )

The Last Command (1928). ☆☆☆☆

      "battlefield Fillmore"

being of sound mind · multiply beset
   advantageously placed
stocked with precedents · proveable saws
   comments not allowed
have walked away· from those i could save
   have sidestepped quicksand
for the sake of my shoes · chaperoned pills
   & poverty
to the bridge of unmaking · in the vale of glycerine tears
   package a pittance
witness little · less admit
   be one of the winners left
whose accounts may vary · but fadge consensus
   it was all the fools

Recordings of "Quiet Village".

"Visiting Philadelphia once, Terry Gilliam, the film director and former Python, was out in the city when he suddenly heard the Monty Python theme playing in the street. Is this a joke? he thought for a moment. Do they know that I’m here?

And then he realised that no one was playing the Monty Python theme: they were playing the Liberty Bell March..." —Alexander Fayne via

"Elyot (c. 1490-1546) was mocked in his time as an inkhornist—one who uses far too many loanwords."

( via )

Les Châtiments.

"His pattering steps and mine alone were heard, when we entered the magnificent extent of nave and aisle of St. Peter’s." —Mary Shelley via

Street art in Seattle's Pike Place.

      "ODE: Glencliff vifgage"

fast food suicide
diagnosed sayonara
      sing liftoff
   engines en pointe
don't talk about the Wall · from where it can see you

fake news suicide
system fnords persisting
      what's to do
   with porn ruin
on fumes from the bonfire · of the inanities

lemmingward apex predator
hapax leguminatrix
      words dissolve
   on the brisk wind
i can't tell you anything · in the winedark confessional

books i made unburdened
by likelihood hoodwink
      cloud swallows
   in a clear sky
pull the curtains to · lower the blind

whiteknuckle boredom
order of nine angles
      puissant sludge
   slathered-on whelm
forgot my jacket · in the gen'ral exodus

mad ascent of mousetrap
monstrous recap pawnstorm
      purulent
   pockets of change
dust of tires · settles on ev'ry term

become cartoon camwheels
curtailed as boss flosses
      wander bright
   empty hallways
ever unfolding · echoing footsteps

open package forwarded
to this Galapagos post

The Loud Literary Lamas.

( via )

A Song of the Petrel.

"carceral blessing"

angular realm sundering
honeyshine
upon a violet plate

fulsome praise for the narcissist
for anyone else an insult

"hough I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter."

"They had already made sure they all knew I was videotaping, pointing me out to each other as they prepared to leave. Then, as they drove their unmarked vehicles slowly through our street, windows tinted dark, every single one of them slowed down as they passed me. One agent put two fingers to his eyes and then pointed them directly at me. “I’m watching you.” Another leaned forward and made a heart with his hands as he drove past. Another blew kisses at me. These were armed federal agents who had just descended on a residential neighborhood in masks and tactical gear, taken people away, terrified families, and now they were driving away laughing and trying to taunt a woman who had dared to stand on the sidewalk and record them." —Heather Delaney Reese

Venus i never prayed to.

( via / via )

Sirius is Too Young to Remember.

"The unique thing about Nabokov is that he practiced the writing of fiction as a form of sorcery. " —Thomas Ligotti via

Wagner looks at The Backrooms.

"carceral crossing"

mentat citadel querning
acquire celerity
with morning's flow
questions asked of objects
in the fair field of incidence
a cup a chair what chalice holds
of dismal cherishing

"Arday was less Don Quixote than Great Gatsby..."

( via / via )

"No sand-bags or strong-points anywhere. No road-blocks, no sentries. Not a man in uniform to be seen. Not a plane in the sky."

without the noise, my twin
would these blank pages fill
churning lack of will
to let world in

long tumbling to rest
car at speed will shake
flashlight's circle lake
no alkahest

runing toxic fun
can rescue not much more
cold on this coldest shore
the noise my twin

Virga III.

"...the real pièce de résistance here is the dazzling four-minute fragment from the otherwise lost The Case of Lena Smith, discovered by Japanese film historian Komatsu Hiroshi in a Chinese junk shop in Dalian in 2003." —Jonathan Rosenbaum via

The Woodpecker.

( via / via )

On translating the Daodejing.

"What would an expression be, after all, absent a deep scan of the vast expanses and histories of the expresser’s interior terrain, in search of things legible? " —Brian Leli via

I Go Among Trees.

"surface enough"

broken circus in my head
distance made of paper folds
amber fluid find
gray overcast sky watch
hoick lest reel stick
soot drool cough prowl
broken circus in my head
circle broken that contained
tattoed climb-back
surface enough like talking

Kingsnorth on Wendell Berry.

( via / via )

Elena Ferrante a hoax?

      "ODE: now, daystar"

failpyre parch averted
pullulating rulesnags
      frogboil slope
   dumbbell antheap
haywire stooge would crown · stop it

   an hour
that is an hour gone
hangs still in the air

guess Waldo brillig
brandish malign sinus
      chainpull blanch
   blurry outline
storm brink veldt · all void stodge goose

sloom among slime tunnels
tantamount to fountains
      foist vespers
   starved pool ace knows
hook hand writes · dowff fistdodge

skyey amerce caseload
custom sort of trustbreach
      cold plummet
   as cloud ooze flows
soft gleetcoil · glaze nook sighs

Eruption of Sarychev Peak, from space.

"And it was almost like when you hear thunder. It’s that shiver, you just go into a siege mentality when you hear thunder. It’s almost like you’re at war and hear the guns, you’ve got that atmospheric awareness that comes from hearing a sound that powerful, but that distant." —Will Bevan (Burial) via

To my Children, Fearing for Them.

( via / me )

"Perhaps Porter is the only painter more rewarding through a screen than in the flesh."

"When a war breaks out in Asia, both sides immediately try to argue that they’re fighting on the side of Taylor Swift." —Sam Kriss via

A Fable + Mirror.

      "a darker trade than magic"

startsnarl at firenoon
      Sirius
   from circular
to orbit eccentric · wild ride

if you hang on · trudge in owl-light
sloyd conclave
handbook for moon death
seed vault
mesquite honey

"...submitting to prestigious magazines feels a bit like gambling addiction."