( 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."

( via / via )

"Pynchon may have had an unfinished book set in Tokyo about an insurance adjuster assessing the damage done Tokyo after Godzilla."

Of course, the funny thing to me about 70s-nostalgia is, having come of age in that time, what i remember is the feeling of belatedness: i was too young to have seen all the fun that was the 60s. via

"To educated people of Fowler’s day, who grew up studying Latin and Greek, these words sounded gimcrack and ugly."

"a shift in the center of gravity from the journal to the online blog"

asides of the machine · at dusk
   slip through my fingers
confirmed carnivore · pearl gray car on a rack
   as i wait at the light

"This is interesting. I've attempted to make my own translations of some of the shorter poems.

This one possibly refers to his wife being brunette & his mistress being blonde. I don't know if critics have discussed the point before."

( via / via )

Patina.

pale ultramarine · rumble of speed bumps
overplus ounce · three red lights
empty storefronts · the next big thing
   feral architecture
pale ultramarine · classical guitar

Forgone.

"Hello to another day spent guzzling water while surrounded by cooling fans. It's like being Gregor Samsa if he woke up to find himself transformed into a datacentre." —@johncoulthart.com

Sherwood on the C64 (2026).

( via / via )

"The Gods are known μονοειδως because they are not subject to contraries and are therefore not mappable on the normal tables and categories. They are prior to all those modes of being and that BY WHICH those modes are made manifest."

"Running public elementary schools like a corporation was never a good idea for the life of learning, any more than it was a good idea for the life of art to create and sell over-hyped and correspondingly overpriced art-like commodities in corporate galleries and auction houses."
—Christopher Benson via

Caedmon's Chronicle.

       "physical media"

   no foothold
on the cold bright fairway
caves measureless mutter
unmerciful curses
pullulating pitfalls
perne furnace
fedayeen Finntroll

How Softly Runs the Afternoon.

( via/ via )

"The relationship of art to politics has become obscure, and so has any working sense of what is meant by critique."

my burdens
the shadow of a leaf

Triolet.

“We cannot understand what happens in the universe. What is glorious in it is united with what is full of horror. What is full of meaning is united to what is senseless. The spirit of the universe is at once creative and destructive — it creates while it destroys and destroys while it creates, and therefore it remains to us a riddle. And we must inevitably resign ourselves to this.”

— Albert Schweitzer via @johnstoszkowski

For most of my life whenever i try to talk about his book to other poets they think i made it up.

( me / via )

Bicentennicide.

Weariness of being a conduit.

"The ruling class is not in denial about the trajectory of the world it has built."

      "blue-veined kinsman"

1.
skincells winging hourly
cake the window sill
what does the hand retain

batteries on the menu
marooned

in the last cup

2.
put things back because of the cost
only necessary lights

i join
& i take apart

dim canyons of greenish ice

3.
jisei & signing · sep'rate rooms
   the car breaks this · & then that
furrows in the sky · ferrying smash
   it's so cheap now · robot death
before dawn scribbling · no new outcome
   bright conjunction · which planets
i will not visit

"There were worse degradations earlier in the week. There will be worse ones next wee."

( via/ via )

The Arrogant History of White Ben.

   cicadas drowned out
for a moment by airplane
   as i check the mail

Ten Forgotten London Films.

"One in ten classical Tamil words are Sanskrit-origin, with a higher percentage for religious writings and a lower percentage for everyday Tamil. This is actually on the lower end for Dravidian languages. Telugu, spoken in Andhra Pradhesh, has a thirty percent Sanskrit vocabulary; for Kannada, spoken in Karnataka, almost half the words come from Sanskrit, roughly the same percentage shown by Hindi. But Hindi is written in Sanskrit’s script, while the others are not."
—Amit Majmudar via

Reading Gravity's Rainbow in Hiroshima.

( via / via )

Yoin.

"Q: When referring to the upcoming 250th anniversary of the founding of our country, do we really have to use that awful word semiquincentennial?

A: No! Sestercentennial means the same thing, and it’s much easier to say!" —@alanhorn

Where to Now St Peter.

      "Hymn

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth
and go on out
   over the sea marshes and the brant in bays
and over the hills of tall hickory
and over the crater lakes and canyons
and on up through the spheres of diminishing air
past the blackset noctilucent clouds
      where one wants to stop and look
way past all the light diffusions and bombardments
up farther than the loss of sight
   into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth
inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes
trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest
   coelenterates
and praying for a nerve cell
with all the soul of my chemical reactions
and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

You are everywhere partial and entire
You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum
has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut
and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark
chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down
and if I find you I must go out deep into your
   far resolutions
and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

—A R Ammons

Microliths.

( via / via)

Witch Hunt.

Once i was walking down a road next to national forest & heard a loud thrashing nearby. I was sure it was a bear. Five minutes later an armadillo walked out. Not even a big armadillo.

"Some cunning Florentine hath stuffed a doublet with bran and painted it a face, and the bran hath leaked out."

      "The Night Is Freezing Fast

The night is freezing fast,
   To-morrow comes December;
      And winterfalls of old
Are with me from the past;
   And chiefly I remember
      How Dick would hate the cold.

Fall, winter, fall; for he,
   Prompt hand and headpiece clever,
      Has woven a winter robe,
And made of earth and sea
   His overcoat for ever,
      And wears the turning globe."

      —A.E. Housman

String Quartet No. 1.

( via / via )

Nights in Amsterdam #2.

      "beiged out"

novel in the present tense · prong of witness
   habit cohort · killing floor
the one way of rain · sharp wilderness
   cough like gravel · finely grained
parts of a story · fairly stupid
   tumblecearthward · parallel
tell 'em a hookah- · smoking character
   has given · you the call
prong of witness · when you're ten feet tall

Free for All.

"...however apically Volapucky..." —Finnegans Wake

Set in 2019.