( me )

The Master of the Ghent Altarpiece.

The story that won the Granta Award was written by AI, or with the help of it, and it is obviously so.

( via / via )

Night Classes.

      "in mask-Axum"

pale spider/ asperities
passing the museum
known turn of the maze

Fillmore phantoms enter
      a cold draft
fabricating crab cakes
drizzle-won vigils
of the maze a known turn

leywalker's lookout
allotrope & rope trick
      pale spider
   pile of white ash

three-hundred-year-old light
maybe Betelgeuse
the birth of a new count

horseshoe-shaped kismet
shared at mome gloaming
gone now with the gurney
      rolled me there

gangplank named Plimsoll
   counting the days
empty glass of gospel
derivative note-glut

      pallid legs
 &nbsdp; upon umber
noise barrage waged on
ev'rything long-borne
      spider pale

to watch waves smacking
the worn old pier, sworn to
   follow a line
in the feral maze

Hormuz where we spiral
sputtering witness
      spinning yarns
   into yawning void
can't go there anymore

Yeats & his cobweb script
winning despite spindrift
      spider creep
   across umber
fathoms & war game pixels

vigilance, as if viral
verities, with timeshare
      defunctive
   puncture relics

kangaroo court gingham
   for paper
kylix swarming with milestones

   knowing only
vestiges of justice
jars of preserved organs
names of constellations

      star-fulsome
   desert frolic
count defeats by sixes

portrait of a sweven
a long swelter-courtship
      auroras
somehow stuck there

golden the chase gaslit
with ingot cloud powders
      drew logics
   out of their lair

some open mike marplots
murky with last lurking
      the chapbooks
   cast upon stone

forever return chevron
gliding shape of escapement
      under clocks
   bristling with clues
occult wander kindred

      survival
into carved granite larvae
   bearing dad jokes
what of the pale spider

eclipse of spire hirelings
what of the wharf witness
& whelp learning turnkey
      in silt trek

Icarus Descending.

To set a term for sleep... Sleep should be a wild thing.

War is Hell.

( via / via )

🚀‼️ Russian Roscosmos began placing advertisements on rockets due to financial problems.

"It maddened them that despite their having got acquainted with him, a man should remain as inaccessible as before . . . It is not enough that he moves and breathes differently from other people; the trouble is that we just cannot put our finger on the difference, cannot catch the tip of the ear by which to pull out the rabbit. Hateful is everything that cannot be palpated, measured, counted." —Nabokov via

"...a magical quality when taken out of context"

sleep like an island
the map indicates
but does not contain
sleep within each word
folded
like a fortune cookie

the rush to name sleep
in the shadow of the white nights

The Unravaging.

( via/ oil painting by me )

Wheelchair in the garage.

each fork's end fetching
unfastened from brass shroud
in truth tragical
a blindnress for the ages

old TV shows shambles
shipwreck drivethrough
nothing can be saved
of the great thefts

peering anxious whiplash
orgulous realm boygfare
still scribbling
in my doomsday scrapbook

through killhornet-hailstorms
& the hurt sky curdling
blind led by blitzkrieg
led from swamp into deserts

🧊.

" They have chosen pride over country. And they will carry that choice for the rest of their lives. And the rest of us are left to document what is happening and how they stood back and allowed it." —Heather Delaney Reese via

The Rise of Cthulhu.

( via / via )

"Once you understand that for the priesthoods putting together the biblical canon this was not primarily a spiritual document but a terms of service agreement for a new monopoly, everything falls into place.."

"Si le ciel et la mer sont noirs comme de l'encre,
Nos coeurs que tu connais sont remplis de rayons!"

—Baudelaire

(The sky is black; black is the curling crest, the trough
Of the deep wave; yet crowd the sail on, even so!"

—Millay & Dillon

"Though black as pitch the sea and sky, we hanker
For space; you know our hearts are full of rays."

—Roy Campbell via

"if now the sky and sea are black as ink
our hearts, as you must know, are filled with light."

—Robert Lowell)

Calypso Frelima.

"two moods of the firmament"

Sands run in the rizz flask
Rickety bridge fidgets
Grim façade of granite
Grows sky-wide war zone
Wake to thunder working
Lie there a long time thinking
Of loops I’ve traced wasteful
And intent, trash not taken out
And tales left off failing
Not connecting, nocturne
In the nether sands

"...more girls in Japan are starting to use traditionally masculine first-person pronouns."

( via / via )

Canicular relic.

"slackening Qeb"

the third quarter drags
drogulus our frogpith
internecine arsenic
aimlessly game wielding
Airstream rental floatpig
red Nonnos fleer storage

"The collapse of the simulation is not the end of the story."

"When the supply of tombstones ran out and new upstart families had set up a rival cemetery on the other side of town, a cemetery whose polished and tinted marbles sparkled like wedding cakes in the sunshine, the First Families of New Hoosic (for such was the town’s inaccurate name), most of them, like mine, played-out, down-at-the-heel, the heel bruised by stones not left unturned in the bumsteered search for Grace, scurried around until they found, living in a tar-paper shack near Arbor Lodge at Nebraska City, an old-timer, a stone cutter who delighted in the prospect of scaring the daylights out of quick and dead alike." —Margaret Boylen via

Send in the Assclowns.

( via / me )

The New American Gothic.

" 'In that strange yesterday from which I have come,' I replied, 'here prevailed the superstition that between one evening and the next morning, events occur that it would be shameful to have no knowledge of. The planet was peopled by spectral collectives — Canada, Brazil, the Swiss Congo, the Common Market. Almost no one knew the prior history of those Platonic entities, yet everyone was informed of the most trivial details of the latest conference of pedagogues or the imminent breaking off of relations between one of these entities and another and the messages that their presidents sent back and forth — composed by a secretary to the secretary, and in the prudent vagueness that the form requires. All this was no sooner read than forgotten, for within a few hours it would be blotted out by new trivialities.' " —Borges via @merothwell

Ronda de Sanabria.

"moth wrangler"

duck lisp · rodeo book
nebbish tome · rife cark
cis gaze · dispel hsigo
yak ska · yogi shlep
side zag · sick race
fire moth · sib enko
oboe dorp · silk cud

"His widow, Lady Isabel, described him as 'half Sufi, half Catholic' – or, more truthfully, she said, 'alternately Sufi and Catholic”'."

( via/ via )

Mary Shelley Outlives her Husband and Friends.

"mere wisps to tally"

glimmer-rue doula
Glaugnea leaves scattered
wall of bars gliding
barrage igneous rooks
translucent days
double rainbow ribbon
through ruinous calm Fillmore

A boat on the river, time unknown.

"Our age has no impress of its own. We have impressed the seal of our time neither on our houses nor our gardens, nor on anything that is ours. On the street may be seen men who have their beards trimmed as in the time of Henry III, others who are clean-shaven, others who have their hair arranged as in the time of Raphael, others as in the time of Christ. So the homes of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: the antique, the gothic, the style of the Renaissance, that of Louis XIII, all pell-mell. In short, we have every century except our own--a thing which has never been seen at any other epoch: eclecticism is our taste; we take everything we find, this for beauty, that for utility, another for antiquity, still another for its ugliness even, so that we live surrounded by débris, as if the end of the world were at hand." --Alfred de Musset, Confessions of a Child of the Century (1896, tr unknown)

Glimmer-rue irony.

( via / via )

"And certain stories stray to a faraway edge that tastes as unreal as saffron: metal crushed with honey."

"Everything in Virgil's poetry reveals that he was Gallic." —Curzio Malaparte via

You Drive Me Crazy.

"Trakl: De Profundis

There is a stubble field on which a black rain falls.
There is a tree which, brown, stands lonely here.
There is a hissing wind which haunts deserted huts---
How sad this evening.

Past the village pond
The gentle orphan still gathers scanty ears of corn.
Golden and round her eyes are gazing in the dusk
And her lap awaits the heavenly bridegroom.

Returning home
Shepherds found the sweet body
Decayed in the bramble bush.

A shade I am remote from sombre hamlets.
The silence of God
I drank from the woodland well.

On my forehead cold metal forms.
Spiders look for my heart.
There is a light that fails in my mouth.

At night I found myself upon a heath,
Thick with garbage and the dust of stars.
In the hazel copse
Crystal angels have sounded once more."

Translated by Jurek Kirakowski

Rainy Avenue.

( via / via )

Intimate.

"team building exercise"

through changed landscapes · my map ripples
long chittering · roads of madness
vaporized hub · wheel scattering
hallways revert · to scant whispers

You Sit on the Bed There.

"It could well be that all I have felt in poetry
Was no more than what never could be"

—Alfonsina Storni via

"She ran in the same circles as Kathleen Hanna; released a spoken-word record for the era-defining Olympia label Kill Rock Stars; and wrote a libretto for a puppet opera scored by the cellist Lori Goldston, who used to perform with Nirvana."

( me / via )

"I think coming back there, and seeing this place now overgrown, feels so important, especially in times when everything feels so replaceable and disposable. Even observing this place vanishing lifts my heart up in a strange way. Like I know this house stood there for 150 years and will collapse sometime soon, and I’m grateful it will return to nature."

"Some decades earlier, François-René de Chateaubriand had expressed his own generation’s malaise, warning of the ‘unsettled state of the passions’, the ‘tedium of the heart’ and the ‘secret inquietude’ of young people whose environment offered no outlet for their intense feelings. ‘With a full heart,’ he sighed, ‘we dwell in an empty world.’ " —Emily Herring via

"The worlds of the outer solar system – from its giants like Pluto and Eris, to its minnows like 2002 XV93 – are far more interesting than they at first appear. They are dynamic worlds, subject to forces and processes so alien and so familiar to us on Earth. They are worthy of attention – and in the case of 2002 XV93, a proper name as well.." [I say: "Animula"]

      "yahoodini"

bent heads scrolling · as the scrambled light
   finds this windswept bridge
peripheral stulm laughter
lattices the business

tapeshadow · shuddery ribs
   faded-name van
double arrow abscess
& airt taken starewise

so early trek · true north gnat-skewed
   circular church twice
speedrun through the thrum dark
thrash amidst ash-missives

storylost stagger · destiny erstwhile
   all the glittering shards

Triolet.

( via / via )

The Break.

"be brave"

glimmer-rue
other people be brave

security clowns
lost in the esters

thick trees look down
orange bowl fiestaware

glimmer-rue
other people be brave

"Maybe now is one of those times."

"At the time he was writing his Dissertatio, Leibniz was immersed in Polygraphia Nova (1663), a treatise on cryptology by none other than Athanasius Kircher, who proposed polygraphy as ‘all languages reduced to one’ and who, at that very moment, was likely in possession of the Bacon Cipher. If Marci’s letter is to be believed, Kircher was the last known owner of the manuscript before it vanished for centuries, until it was discovered again by Voynich." —Jared Marcel Pollen via

"Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual."

( via / via )

Still Raining in May.

"Because we members of Western society are not socially permitted to express despair in everyday life, we are more often than not forced into a kind of cruel and unsustainable quiescence." —Kate Wagner via

"But most of the actual research for this novel was not ambulatory. I mean, the river is completely gone... So it became more interesting to try to find descriptions of the river in works of literature, written by people who were seeing it, witnessing it, describing it, during the time of its aboveground existence."

"my garden
is wizened now
but soon
it will be plump
and ripe with snow"

—Debbie Strange via

"...the only surviving word of Khazar..."

( via / via )

"In the US, it seemed reversed: religious language was standard, while speaking about social welfare was almost taboo."

      "Cinnamemnon"

It's not yet apogee of the utmost furnace
      & anxious waiting bides
   the landing of the carnal birds.
Nothing in the stars dropped this deep minus
save blind unreasoning greed & hate in harness.
      Fresh parables encroach.
   Few of the righteous peal much starch.
I & other hobbits dread the onus.
   Pale cerulean party clothes,
   concrete ribbons' jagged path
         jingle both
      in Ozymandias jazz.
It's not yet apogee of the utmost furnace.

"Still I trip up, in this poem, over foil, and the oozing oil."

"Accountability is not optional. Accountability is the only vaccine." —I Fucking Love Australia via

"Someone recently asked me about why I call my Substack the Duck-Billed Reader."

( via/ via )

Marshawn testifies.

". . . How short it takes to go, dear, but afterward to come so many weary years - and yet 'tis done as cool as a general trife. Affection is like bread, unnoticed till we starve, and then we dream of it, and sing of it, and paint it, when every urchin in the street has more than he can eat. We turn not older with years, but newer every day." —Emily Dickinson via

Physical.

"GLACIER (Consonant Palindrome)

Our loose, cut ice retains its longing
Lit in a parade, it drowns unaware —
a dot, a drop, until gone, gone...
lost as Antarctica’s lore."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Bad Moon Rising.

( via / via )

"In 1982, horrified by the meanness, tedium and depravity of my existence as I toured the American South playing rock and roll music and going crazy in public, I purchased an abridged copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire..."

"Inwood/ Hampton"

elderberry lemon balm & kaputnik
frenzied witness
badminton gone wrong

paper cup drawback
dramamine whiplash
elderberry lemon balm
& kaputnik frenzied witness

A Thing of Evil.

“Regarding the ‘creative writing’ courses in our colleges, one must add that they tend to destroy the audience of literature. They do so by promoting into writers, and often opinionated writers, the susceptible but uncreative persons who might otherwise be the best readers.”

—Van Wyck Brooks via @robertminto

Just scrollin'.

( via [AI art] / via )

"Q: If Bizarro Fiction was a movie monster, which would it be, and why?
A: Megalon. Because he was a giant cockroach with drills for hands who shot lightning bolts from a horn on his head."

"A Damascus blade gleaming and glancing in the sun was her wit. Her swift poetic rapture was like the long glistening note of a bird one hears in the June woods at high noon, but can never see. Like a magician she caught the shadowy apparitions of her brain and tossed them in startling picturesqueness to her friends, who, charmed with their simplicity and homeliness as well as profundity, fretted that she had so easily made palpable the tantalizing fancies forever eluding their bungling, fettered grasp." —from Emily Dickinson's obituary written by her sister-in-law, Susan via

"Alligator Alcatraz is a stain on our nation and a blight on the Everglades, and I look forward to watching this depraved facility bite the dust."

"one of the things"

familiar pills in
unfamiliar bottles
grid of iconic fruit
gateswept blurs of scurry

unfamiliar bottles
array dim & fatal
of the few shreds of meaning
merles taking from the still one
last of my pills in a paper cup

fusillade ferrying
familiar pills in
reach desired zilchbrim
zeroing out blinkroster

"I had only just heard that Paul Dano and John Malkovich had officially joined the cast as Wyatt Gwyon and Recktall Brown respectively when I discovered that the series had been shelved indefinitely."

( via / via )

A Number of Novels.

“Fata Morgana

A blue-eyed phantom far before
Is laughing, leaping toward the sun:
Like lead I chase it evermore,
I pant and run.

It breaks the sunlight bound on bound:
Goes singing as it leaps along
To sheep-bells with a dreamy sound
A dreamy song.

I laugh, it is so brisk and gay;
It is so far before, I weep:
I hope I shall lie down some day,
Lie down and sleep.”

—Christina Rossetti

Unpublished Didion, on the early Grateful Dead.

“Our students come to us from secondary school having read no works of literature in foreign languages and scarcely any works of literature in their own language. The very years, between twelve and eighteen, when they might be reading rapidly, uncritically, rangingly, happily, thoughtlessly, are somehow dissipated without cumulative force. Those who end their education with secondary school have been cheated altogether of their literary inheritance, from the Bible to Robert Lowell. It is no wonder that they do not love what we love; we as a culture have not taught them to. With a reformed curriculum beginning in preschool, all children would know about the Prodigal Son and the Minotaur; they would know the stories presumed by our literature, as children reading Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare or Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales once knew them. We can surely tell them the tales before they can read Shakespeare or Ovid; there are literary forms appropriate to every age, even the youngest. Nothing is more lonely than to go through life uncompanioned by a sense that others have also gone through it, and have left a record of their experience. Every adult needs to be able to think of Job, or Orpheus, or Circe, or Ruth, or Lear, or Jesus, or the Golden Calf, or the Holy Grail, or Antigone in order to refer private experience to some identifying frame or solacing reflection.”

—Helen Vendler, “Presidential Address 1980 [MLA]” via @themeanderingmiltonist

Take away the whirlwind of hours.

( via / via )

Venice in the Moonlight.

“Yet for all of us there were moments when the game we were all agreeing to play simply could not stand up to events: we would be gripped by feelings of unreality, like nausea. Perhaps this feeling that the ground was dissolving under our feet, was the real enemy…” —Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975)

"...now nothing but a discarnate, burning soul aspiring forever upwards, he recounts how he abandoned his loved ones and responsibilities and lured his men to a watery grave in the pursuit of lands and knowledge forbidden to mortal men..."

“The Closer”

the mists of Acheron intrude
amidst this sunned charivari
and those of us who still have jobs
cling tighter to the pyramid

deraignment from my druidhood
has not released me from the pain
of watching something vaster than
this game of synonyms go crunch

i carve the mists of Acheron
and lurch through squawking pyramids
and darkest in the sunlight solve
enigmas no one else can see

(2009)

"The movement soon began to take on a life of its own through the tourism that arose in connection with the media attention."

( via / via )

Long March 6.

"The Promise"

These make the last few embers of dinosaur sunlight.
This will be a legendary day: we were so free,
so bold, so murderous. Our mayfly-brief
glory will be unsurpassed & the talon
of our joy has marked the spot indelibly.

What is there more to say? We touched the stars
but our hearts were not touched. Our first resort
was annihilation. Waking now, we still won’t label
this fury of a pastime anything but innocence.

What wonder if our trinkets, that litter the earth,
when they work no more, become bleak plethora
of talismans? Holding them now, our karma upon us,
we still want to click on a window & do it over.

(2013)

"And You....?"

" '木漏れ日 komorebi' is a Japanese word for sunlight filtering through the trees, and people often say it is hard to translate. Honestly, I think it is fine as long as the rough feeling gets across. You can see komorebi in any season, but to me it belongs to May. The light gets stronger, pouring down onto the ground through the fresh green leaves." —Real Japanese Aesthetics via ( I know i found a word for this but it'll take some digging to find it--.)

Cyber Tartuffe.

( via / via )

"Although I have covered the works of numerous women writers on this site, the fact was that, prior to 2015, men and their writings accounted for over 75% of my material."

"i have yet to see a single cis person say something about the fact that the government just designated trans people a terrorist group and threatened to kill all of us." —Evelynn via

" Each year is more burdensome than its fellow."

"artisanal drizzle"

when a lowly canal gets
Main Character Energy
the hard parade rustles
with rued fender swelling

i would own that garden
Illig's reft lifetimes
tokonoma Badtz mug
tiny raised train loop

A Description of a Legislative Day.

( via / via )

From Rat Heart Nebula.

      "thirst for the fight"

lookin' like a made man · Rachmaninov portrait
       Topsy's eyes
   culdesac shine
rogue crescent respite
rawn Amontillado

Clair de Lune.

"I wish I didn’t know as much about the end of Reconstruction as I do.

If you understood what is being unleashed now, how it will touch every aspect of our civic life, and how difficult it will be to undo it, you wouldn’t be able to think about anything else."
—@trevondlogan.bsky.social

One of the facts about this film i cannot forget is that Paul Celan translated the text into German when it was made to be shown there. (Wikipedia).

( via / via )

"...many generally well-informed Americans are still startled to learn how badly U.S. life expectancy has lagged behind other advanced nations..."

"One man, seeking to develop steel of a high enough quality to make razor blades that could compete with foreign offerings, sought out an aged former swordsmith in the mountains and became his apprentice. They attempted to mechanise the ancient tatara process of smelting iron ore into tamahagane, jewel-steel. Trial was met with much error, to the point that the old smith swore to the gods that he would disembowel himself if this one final attempt did not work. Thankfully, they got the air blast setting right and produced some very excellent steel, which became the foundation for the company’s razor blade business." —Jonathon via

Whatever happens to musicians will happen to everybody.

      "tracking deaths of despair at the jukebox"

the toast stirs · El Niño creeps
      a deep dive
   in dark waters
& nature's nard filches
Nemesis & hymnbook

foreign postage · Pitcairn Island
      this spice wind
   wandered wayward
the fridge nags chiming
frabjous not quite abseil

entity lost · with the leafturn

Some reviews i wrote about Dallas art.

( me / via )

"Most of the books we found in his apartment were subgrade later entries from these authors’ bibliographies, when their names had been established as marketable brands, producing endlessly iterative franchises."

"The Advertisement

In the Manner of the Earlier English

Whether to wend through straight streets strictly,
Trimly by towns perfectly paved;
Or after office, as fitteth thy fancy,
Faring with friends far among fields;
There is none other equal in action,
Sith she is silent, nimble, unnoisome,
Lordly of leather, gaudily gilded,
Burgeoning brightly in a brass bonnet,
Certain to steer well between wains."

—Rudyard Kipling via FGR

"And it's true, there is something interesting to be discovered there, despite - or perhaps in addition to - the ineptness of her films. It's like the equivalent to the psychoanalytic analysis of dreams, there is a latent content hidden between the recurring shots of feet, the strange editing and the overdubbed dialogue."

"In East Germany, the Berlin Wall stood for nearly thirty years. The regime called it the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall. The barrier that locked East Germans inside their own country was officially described as protecting them from the West. The state media and textbooks said it. Children learned it in school. Their parents knew what it really was. But both versions existed at the same time, and the citizen’s job was to choose the official one." —Heather Delaney Reese via

"Can you explain this gap in your resume?"

( oil painting by me / via )

Yellow & purple.

"Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can’st not go mad?" —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

Sunshower.

"Allah is great"

matutinal dove; crescent
songs beyond our cinders
scansion; dord's hardball
& the whole thing screaming

Allah is great; grackles
follow me past grieving
i run with the pack, rickshaw
i am five wide extinctions

24 Hours. With reference to my essay, Live at Brighton Polytechnic.

( via / via )

"It’s like cool nihilism, to put it facetiously."

      "anthrax island"

Parnassian leeway · lightless knowledge
   golden chewtoy flung
kill cascade · at the scenic outlook
   they'll name new eras for this
bend to pick · the quid shuffled
   without leaving my seat
things i have had my · fill of, marching
   to the spry horizon

Louis Armstrong performing for his wife at the Great Sphinx of Giza.

"The Maroon, our school newspaper, had published two articles completely written by AI. This had gone unnoticed for a few months before the only UChicago student with free time on his hands decided to see what sort of groundbreaking coverage of Chicago-area sports The Maroon might have and was certainly dejected to realize that instead of being furnished insider scoops on the Bulls’ roster moves, he was stuck reading sentences like: 'Chicago’s perfect start isn’t a fluke; it’s the product of cohesion,' and 'And through it all, there’s Giddey — the calm in the chaos, dictating the tempo and keeping the team grounded in the momentum.' " —Owen Yingling via

Echoes, built on nothing.