( me / via )

General Munro.

"Blood

It burns with buried light. It is a soil
rich with iron brought to melting point

and cooled to the clandestine warmth
of lanterns. Spread thin, it is as tenuous

as testimony from a blanching face;
yet testimony nonetheless,

this stream that carries like a folded note
your family name. One day that stream could be

the ink with which you sign your life away.

Still, let us take a moment to exalt
the oneness of your scarlet ocean’s salt

tenacity—it circles even now…
A crime that it should ever end in billows

pooling, crawling across the floor, a tarred
ghost. Ironic that the tide should end

almost as slow, and almost the shade
of sundowns."

—Huck Astley

"There’s another album called 2 Million something by S.N.R.T.M. – it’s a Moroccan signalwave album. When I saw that, I was like, 'Okay, I’ll make a Serbian signalwave album, just to represent my culture'."

( via / unused cover design )

Peacock spiders.

"Love is weird; objecthood is weirder. " —@avmarraccini

Windy.

"Preakness"

yankee doodle yard farm
yielding to thegn brainwash

yammering smooth smilers
build children in cages

empty field of eldritch
orbiting drone boneyards

great fireworks gratify
ogre of gilt bogus

in the pooldim turquoise
hush awaits cicadas

Istanbul vista.

( via / via )

The Hard Problem of the Sky.

      "lowkey contumely"

vanilla ice cream · no great distance
   cumulus clouds · clamber up
with the day waning · the weathered fence
   only this cusp · sky divides
in the frigid draft · of a frown spoon

Winding streets in Prague.

"Cleanliness is not next to godliness. Diligence is." —@barnes

Tu vuo' fa' l'americano.

( via via )

1661 Punica in heroic couplets. (via)

" 'Work on good prose has three steps,' writes Walter Benjamin, 'a musical one when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.' He omits a crucial step: a cinematic one when it is edited." —Lucy Sante via

Odd Man Out.

six-cylinder days
mild consent this vintage
      smashed nothing
   in its inning
within my gaze's · galloping ambit
sky of burning scorn
scribble with ache driblets
      list projects

   posey
rarefied waltz
   jolt pizzazz
riddle's jagged midpoint
that great broken stretch
in the cicadas' song

Aurora Australis from the International Space Station.

( via / me )

This is what the internet is for.

      "full steam at the sociopath factory"

   warning lights ignore
on a perfect mild morning
   in early July:

car will pass despite the lights
red here here & also here

City sunset in pixels.

"Oft in His troubled Sleep, rising by Night,
With horrid Cries His Servants Hee'd affright;
Who found Him, bath'd in Sweat, His future War
To wage, and beat with Rage the empty Air."

—Ross's Silius Italicus, I.

Manchester Rain.

( via / via )

Lost in Architecture.

"It seems to me that being a werewolf means living with an exaggerated version of the fear that you did something embarrassing while you were drunk, while the horror of being a vampire is that you’re compelled to meet a hard deadline every single day." —@liamthegrownup

Submerged Subconscious.

"Sea-Fever

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over."

—John Masefield

A Structure of Darkness.

( via / me )

Sociology of Philosophies.

   "Full of finesse in plotting and misrule,
Mercury one day tried to pull the wool
Over Apollo's eyes, fleecing His herd,
And promised, if he wouldn't say a word,
Old Battus would receive one well-bred bull.

This luckless wretch knew how to turn a tool
To his success, but wasn't the sharpest tool;
The guileful God came back to test his word,
   Full of finesse.

He promised him an easy pocketful
Of copper coins to pay his debts in full
And buy new shoes if he would say a word,
But he said more than He had wanted heard.
Of animals, the worst to be's a fool
   Full of finesse."

—Alex McKeown via

Road of Life.

Courage is the only form of faith that is real. The rest is attachment to words.

Auguries.

( via / via )

"What appear as crises of authorship, liability, governance, legitimacy, and consciousness may be different expressions of the same condition."

"I’ve just realized what SmackDown I mean Substack reminds me of: when I release jillions of newborn ladybugs into my raised tomato beds." —@elmosemiosis

Alliterative Shahnameh.

"some version of the past"

   expert cough
frigid draft dredging
   elixir North
endorse arch parchment
   brisk schedule
a peek of pale turquoise
   skedaddle off
perne crystalline turnip
   cake cantrip

The Crossroads of Hecate.

( via / via )

The Horizon That Wasn't.

our hands free & our gaze far
   Africa is our home
savannah where the trees thinned
   & some of us learned to run
high up in a glass cage
   words fill the air
that first spoke from spread-out bands
   in Africa, in Africa

" 'Meaning yes, but message no,' Ashbery once said. 'There is no message, nothing I want to tell the world particularly except what I am thinking when I am writing'."

In my family there were cats raised from kittenhood by humans, & stray cats that adopted us; the former had more distinct personalities, & i came to understand without thinking about it too much that having a personality is an adaptation to being among humans, & only that.

"...Kant with his ‘Copernican act’, which consisted in the murder of the living, active I and the dissection of its corpse into two parts—with the aim of later assembling a whole body from the two dead halves."

( via / via )

"But over Faliero they just hung a black curtain. And when in the 16th century the room was redecorated after a fire, Faliero’s portrait was replaced by a painting of that black curtain..."

"In the afternoon heat, one feels language losing its ability to restore presence, becoming a form of administration of a traumatic, irreducible absence. Perhaps it is time for a return to the Economy of the Unlost." —@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social

2027 Nobel Prize in Literature.

worldlines i only intersect
as the seagull dips
bill to mail, marl caked
on the mismatched hubcap

so little it would take—
cars honk behind me
lowered electric window
along surd's worldline

Lovely night here in Texas.

( via / me )

15th Etheric Dialogue.

"starship picnic"

your mother's black ops outlive her
in the larval dawn
cracked cup of a dylanologist

Canceled.

"In Julian Wolfreys’ Haunted Experience, something I often forget: 'Silence figures the aporia that love conjures at the heart of the self.' " —@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social

Golden Verses.

( via / via )

Where i was in '76.

" 'Amtrak sucks' videos have enticed a growing community of 'foamers'—a term for train enthusiasts so passionate they’re said to foam at the mouth—who delight in watching content creators suffer every fresh indignity visited upon American rail." —Damage Magazine via

Who dat?

"the unauthorized burial"

the essential part fragile
framed leftovers roving
supply chain chapbooks
chiseled in cloud business
deliver lyre floorboards
literary pitbull
in the rivet vinyard

Our Hands in the Water.

( via / via )

Fables of Faubus.

   Not a Church Wedding

I never can remember the morning rain
so quietly does it become a mood,
& thence a land, where all things bent & dismayed
by Time’s oppression dwell in immaculate ruin.
The light indoors seems stronger, though unwell.
I wanna/ sit alone & contemplate the taste
of autumn, empire’s end, & death; i’d test
bounds, if but in parable, to wail
by a gray shore with the immaterial forms…
   Usually i have to go somewhere, which forms
the context of this feeling, for the tarn
i leave behind, unvisited, its murk
& mists & dragging winds lacking my bark
to laze there, counterpoise,
      —begins to churn.

Deserts.

"in tagalog, instead of saying 'whatever happens happens' we say 'bahala na si batman' which loosely translates to 'let batman handle it' and i think that’s beautiful" —@kmillz.lol

"Perhaps a better comparison is not to the old transplanted soul in San Francisco’s Chinatown, living out his days in a back room of his children’s dim-sum restaurant...but rather to the exiled Kurdish or Dagestani intellectual who spends his days in a brutalist Paris highrise apartment writing melancholy poems of the landscapes of his childhood."

( via / via )

Pieces of long-lost Louis Sullivan.

"The ancestors you choose will determine the writer you become." —Eliot Weinberger via

Eating Lotos with Alfred.

"al-fustaq"

loadmanage lures · lichen
survive on Mars · watertower pale
   against troubled sky
head & arm of Liberty · on a harsh beach
the opera singer · in a deserted square
the windshield dusted with sprinkles · at an idle overpass

Mama Meerkat.

( me / via )

I love writing because.

"strong impetus nothing of the kind"

song of the garage door
not the sound of it opening

draw a map where you'll be going
always reuse a plastic bag

hoard of calibrations
all the lights of them scurried off

this veering t'ward earth
after so long above

not presented as conundrums
but perfect textures

look up from deep reading
at a high cold window

song of the garage door

Textured Fate.

Most of the movies i go to see would have been much better as claymation.

A View of Things.

( via/ via )

Sizz Culture. More.

"An observation for literary sociology: in 'genre fiction,' a boarding school is a place where the protagonist learns the dark art of magic; in 'literary fiction,' a boarding school is a place where the protagonist learns the dark truth of eros. It’s like the difference between Jung and Freud."
—@johnpistelli

Darkness.

Oannes
a fishy story
dropped the onus
Oannes
would uplift in earnest
these dancing apes' telemetry
Oannes

a fishy story

IDK what everyone's talking about, the Great American State Fair looks great.

( via / via )

Hyperlexia.

a summer that will end
takes up so little space
like carrying flints
as all the other mischiefs braid
in the downfall of bitumen
in the afternoon of the human

fireworks ply the welkin
our small faiths don't refurbish
i scrawl in Elvish
epic like misshapen gherkin
   an end to summer

The Gulf of Araby.

"Poems should echo and reecho against each other… They cannot live alone any more than we can.” —Jack Spicer via

Pretending to be a 6-foot bird so an orphaned baby doesn’t imprint on humans.

( via / via )

The Men That Don't Fit In.

"An apocalypse is the opposite of a dream. A dream is falser than the outer life. But the end of the world is more actual than the world it ends." —GK Chesterton

Take Five (1964 live).

"Patronage

O for the days of assassin-dispatching, cousin-poisoning
Renaissance dukes with an ear for beauty in ottava rima,
Of big-spending cutthroat Borgias in papal regalia
Willing to lavish blood-slick ducats on the fine arts,
Kings with rotten teeth who hanged pickpockets from bridges
But paid their pet playwrights a living wage, sherbet-sipping
Sultans who shuttle between the harem and the mehfil,
O for my very own surveillance-state Caesar Augustus
Asking only that every so often a stanza liken him to Jove,
O for a dissolute aesthetic Pasha, or a Medici who gets me,
Or some Rilkean widow offering a rent-free seaside castle,
Anything but this committee of rivals and fossils,
Unpublishable judges with grudges in a coffee conclave
Glancing at my heart like a passport handed over
At heaven’s border, snug mediocrities with slovenly offices
Deciding whether I am fit to have a future here, the light
From my unwritten books still light years in the distance
Reaching me for now, though there’s no way to tell
If they’ve blinked out already, making way for the tenured night."

—Amit Majmudar via

Now that we know the backstory.

( via / via )

Without Air Conditioning.

port marrowpall mimsy
   swatch switchblade
massacre arch triumph
   laughable swarm
drizzles in my eyes of sixty summers fled
   same cicadas razz at me

Firebird.

“…we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature…” —Aristocreon recovered from Vesuvius via

"Over the previous three days, Dr. Lone Lone and a group of his men had evaded drones, fighter jets, attack helicopters and even paraglider pilots intent on chucking hand-held bombs at them."(via Mefi)

( via / via )

"Why would anyone in the EU invest here? The people are too stupid. There are maybe 100 smart people in the whole country. The only way to get something to work in this place is to send in a bunch of Germans to run it." (Sounds like Texas actually.)

"Frustration aside, Rimbaud’s procurement of weapons for Menelik II may have been his greatest contribution to modern African history. Scholars reckon that the guns he sold in 1887 likely helped the emperor defeat Italy in 1896 when the country’s troops tried to invade Ethiopia. As a result of the rout at Adwa, Italy signed a treaty recognizing Ethiopia as an independent nation."
—BuzzEthiopia via

"Oil is dead biomass in the same way that value is dead labor."

"urgentissimo"

pressure of crass pilcrow
plink stillicide roster
weathered wood fence angstrom

aware of spare changes
& the skyhigh fishhook

"For roughly 300,000 years, we lived in relatively small, highly egalitarian communities in which group decisions were made democratically."

( via / taneraic into blissymbolics via brendan )

Putin's Ashes. (via)

a low broken place in the concrete
black dirt accumulates
in a sort of shape

a sort of story
classical when i turn the car on

"The bulb, in Tanizaki’s argument, was not the villain. The villain was the assumption that 'what is seen is what is real'."

It’s interesting to me how scifi doesn’t much talk about Tiptree anymore. She’s a double scandal & reveals too much about scifidom in her success & her failure. Malzberg probably did it best. He had an unmatched feel for all the people that being a professional writer destroyed.

"Despair is paralysis, it robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the Earth… I choose joy over despair, not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the Earth gives me daily, and I must return the gift."

( via / via )

"One of the most egregious acts of Treason ever committed."

"In France, he got a three-year jail term for desecrating a bank — more than what Nadya got for desecrating a church." —Evgenia via

Tell them there's nothing left of the tribes of the Internet.

"captivity narrative"

wakeful flicker warren
warped candle carport
& pet grizzly greatcoat
granular quern banquet
sleep with its slant pinball

Some Great Books of the 20th century.

( via / via )

Intertwined.

   "saw the country
and returned—now deep at night
   I lie in bed and
fields of mustard flowers
bloom before my eyes"

—Masaoka Shiki
(Sept 17, 1867 - Sept 19, 1902)

Tr. Janine Beichman via @evecastle.bsky.social

Elementary Penguin.

"Won’t some dice decide most now?" —Anthony Etherin

"A Being darkly wise, and rudely great."

( via / via )

"By the end of his life, Bourdain was deeply aware of the damage tourism could do to places. I wonder whether he was equally aware of the damage mythology can do to people."

"By suffering willingly what we cannot avoid, we secure ourselves from vain and immoderate disquiet; we preserve for better purposes that strength which would be unprofitably wasted in wild efforts of desperation, and maintain that circumspection which may enable us to seize every support and improve every alleviation. This calmness will be more easily obtained, as the attention is more powerfully withdrawn from the contemplation of unmingled unabated evil, and diverted to those accidental benefits which prudence may confer on every state." —Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, no. 150

"But though Silicon Valley is increasingly finding common ground with Nazi political theology, Nazi aesthetics has few partisans among the practical-minded oligarchs in their boxy corporate campuses."

returning since the lockdown to my own pinched shelves
   then less with fluttery encroachment
a pastel blaze outside or churn of sad machines
   loud returning since the lockdown

violate ancestral tombs with glist'ning spades
   stone gestures the jungle claims
dusty Accord with broken window, suitcase trunk
   a line on a story might be told

green shade i glide beneath & clearer now discern
   written in pencil on cardboard boxes

Semblance of Velocity.

( via / via )

Write it Right.

cliff mansion clinch
clabbered vertigo
green algae pillage
grope in thick darkness
brake lines cut at brainstem
bruise upon the ruse sky

these empty rooms ample
error in snide parrot
music box a skullful
green algae pillage
damage of the years

smaller & smaller circles
smile on the ghost catcher
rabbit waits
as i walk to my gray car

clear peroxide clyster
priestcraft shrouds the pool
bags carried out the back door
ricochet cathedral

pillage green algae

"The heat is one thing. But the on-the-ground reality of managing the resulting complex, interconnected, unpredictable and dominoing fallout is another."

"Every Italian I have ever spoken to about it regards the dubbing of films as an art form, in and of itself; many regard certain examples of it as equivalent, or even superior, to the original films; and Italian doppiatori (the fact that we do not really use any English word is telling) are sometimes as famous in Italy as the actors that they dub." —Alexander Fayne via

"But though Silicon Valley is increasingly finding common ground with Nazi political theology, Nazi aesthetics has few partisans among the practical-minded oligarchs in their boxy corporate campuses."