Saturday, February 28, 2026
Strangest book, stray cat wrote.
"it feels weirdly appropriate to have been rewatching The Prisoner this week, a tale of a man locked in a mad simulation of ordinary life, in which the rules constantly change and the underlying objective is to break him" —@tomtomorrow.bsky.social
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of garbled, misattributed quotes.
—Sayings of Asmodeus
"Balrog"
wag the balrog, Roger
bone-splinterers, scoot
renderers of scathe
tranches in the fam'ly tree
pills that represent hero-acts
in treacly posers
flashes on a mildewed monitor
words not to be beckoned back
Forty years of wandering later.
"Calefactor"
An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king
distracting from his crimes begins a war:
in this wintry discontent, nothing's more clear
& all a poet now can do is burn.
Our old sad habits, not so much deranged
as prodded by a chill beyond our ken,
our rabid discourse, this too must remain
sacrosanct, while bombs drop, soon revenged,
kigh teal ploo. It's hard to sit this out,
having seen much idiocy go down
—a new sun ev'ry day if you don't learn—;
ravels & dribbles, subject to hurt scorn;
bare trees' shadows my wheels in seconds cut,
the one thing left not taunting me with thwart.
"Why men rape seems to be a niche topic of interest reserved for women.
Why men do or don't get caught raping however, now that's a universal interest. Call in the experts."
—Celeste Davis via Annie Finch on Substack
Friday, February 27, 2026
"that top DOD officials spent the entire day feuding with a tech company and the boy scouts before launching a war in the middle of the night should probably inform your opinion about how well planned and executed this will be" —@golikehellmachine.com
Dorit Chrysler & a bit of Saint-Saens live.
"aside"
i would go Downtown · & make noise
here i'm far · from anywhere to stand
Downtown standing · is a sturdy thing
it's what you do · when your dirty leader
declares war
Their hunger for those robodobermans is palpable & scary.
"this is only Alma"
thirsty wetwork · limnned, SELAH
as the redbrick rubric · grapples grimthorn
mild the winter
slurred the mutter
of a slithering morn
fingerpaths pale · cerulean ERASE
for a moment mute · among gargoyles
this rathe gamble
takes someone nimble
nabbing its furled toils
mission of munchkin · launched like LAIKA
for long a cranched take · in the beige battlements
as kaiju burgle
the concrete jungle
for the last loose pence
splurge for a spliff · of ill-enough ASKER
dim here dally · with the cool covers
umber my droog
melting my iceberg
& its alphabet verse
still, the stern · harrow takes HEART
from mild Minneapolis · in the glist'ning snow
who face the Gestapo
—retrieves Polisipo
for my jedburgh snarl
They spoke to each other so contemptuously.
"How else can these forty-odd letters be arranged?
To be self-ordered and create the ghostly answer."
—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
lit part of the lawn
no lapine hop-venture
a cold draft drizzles down
Dracula-nip scripture
i don't like this episode
anguish pursues Reichproles
have yet to spot spoilworms
aspire tunnel heirlooms
The King in Yellow: the Forbidden Inversion.
Thursday, February 26, 2026
Curious Eno album list, with valuable comments.
adaptogen diphthongs
digging Austin prospects
my salad doze Rosilica
sifts, halftime of Romefall
& this song feasts fangglance
(affordance turned spurnprice)
& the blinds yield bloodstains,
blearily wooed food truck
To Remember in America. (via @paisleyrekdal.bsky.social)
"If we have to pay to rent movies again on a subscription service, we should just reopen Blockbuster." —@zoeysdown.bsky.social
"White Americans will invent self driving cars just to avoid getting on a bus."
—@eternalskies.neocities.org
"the yellow triangle moment"
stilbfurious fountains
snide fists serenading
Lipschitz angel tidepool
eloigns over raveglass
"Why Is the Color of Snow?
Let's ask a poet with no way of knowing.
Someone who can give us an answer,
another duplicity to help double the world.
What kind of poetry is all question, anyway?
Each question leads to an iceburn,
a snownova, a single bed spinning in space.
Poet, Decide! I am lonely with questions.
What is snow? What isn't?
Do you see how it is for me.
Melt yourself to make yourself more clear
for the next observer.
I could barely see you anyway.
A blizzard I understand better,
the secrets of many revealed as one,
becoming another on my only head.
It's true that snow takes on gold from sunset
and red from rearlights. But that's occasional.
What is constant is white,
or is that only sight, a reflection of eyewhites
and light? Because snow reflects only itself,
self upon self upon self,
is a blanket used for smothering, for sleeping.
For not seeing the naked, flawed body.
Concealing it from the lover curious, ever curious!
Who won't stop looking.
White for privacy.
Millions of privacies to bless us with snow.
Don't we melt it?
Aren't we human dark with sugar hot to melt it?
Anyway, the question—
if a dream is a construction then what
is not a construction? If a bank of snow
is an obstruction, then what is not a bank of snow?
A winter vault of valuable crystals
convertible for use only by a zen
sun laughing at us.
Oh Materialists! Thinking matter matters.
If we dream of snow, of banks and blankets
to keep our treasure safe forever,
what world is made, that made us that we keep
making and making to replace the dreaming at last.
To stop the terrible dreaming."
—Brenda Shaughnessy
Stronger Together (In Times of Dragons).
" 'And you are afraid of nothing,' said her son.
'I don’t feel I am going to meet my Maker. And if I were, I should not fear him. He has not earned the feeling. I almost think he ought to fear me.
'I think he must,' murmured Hugo. —@ivycomptonburnett.bsky.social
Emil Cioran to Edmond Jabès:
“This curiosity may seem naïve. Yet one clearly senses that your reflections, your verses, or your formulations are the culmination of a process, and one tries to imagine this process without ever being able to reach it.
This impossibility does not harm the reading: on the contrary, it intensifies it. Thus one becomes grateful to the author for keeping to himself the secret of his face-to-face encounter with the ultimate presences.”
(Paris, February 14, 1983; trans. from French) via @yoonkim.bsky.social
again, enter the lists · in the never never
what paper drives us to · poor in spirit
the fog muffles · morning & noon
half blind · they caught me
said my cane · was a weapon
dropped me off · in the freezing cold
after escaping · one genocide
i died here · alone & afraid
The Celestial Compendium of Benevolent Machine Analogies.
"Time's fingers bend us slowly
With dubious craftsmanship,
That at last spoils all it forms."
—Krates (tr Rexroth)
"The authentic and pure values - truth, beauty and goodness - in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the attention to the object."
—Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace via @sanctorium.bsky.social
Wednesday, February 25, 2026
"agentic cage nit"
remigration grapnel
grugprab on the slab bleats
stop & go flow-strangury
stillborn wisp of hearseprong
Hertzsprung map my purple
penitence as chance reaps
in the street red wingspan
in this rout bard lockjaw
Poets are a subset of Clowns, but they don't know it. Which makes them the highest kind.
Every day I get closer to turning my home into a wizard’s tower 🔮.
Georges Perec:
“To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.”
(Species of Spaces, tr. John Sturrock) via @yoonkim.bsky.social
Poem in the Shape of the Poet Beating Henry Kissinger to Death with Their Bare Hands.
"the clowns retire my makeup"
those who escaped · from the Stechschritt sweep
so often could thank · one person's kindness
The Oversteegen sisters hunted Nazis in 1941. They were 14 & 16 at the time.
"Night on the outskirts.
Slowly the light's net is lifted
Out of the yard, and our kitchen
Fills with darkness
Like the hollows deep in a pool.
Silence -
The scrubbing brush creeps to life,
Above it, a patch of wall
Hesitates, hangs, not sure
Whether to stay or fall.
A night that wears oily rags
Heaves a sigh,
Halts in the sky;
Then settles on the outskirts,
Waddles over the square
And lights a bit of moon to see by.
Like ruins the factories loom.
But inside them a denser gloom
Even now is being produced. It sets,
A foundation for silence.
Through the windows of textile mills
Fly moonbeams in sheaves -
Moon thread till morning weaves
On motionless looms a fabric
Of girl workers' dreams.
Farther on, like a cloistered graveyard,
The foundry, bolt makers, cement works
Echoing family crypts.
Too well these workshops keep
The secret of resurrection.
A cat's claws on the fence;
And the simple night-watchman sees
A ghost, a flashing signal.
Coolly gleam
The beetle-backed dynamos.
A train whistle blows.
Dampness seeps into
The shadows, the boughs
Of a fallen tree.
The dust on the road grows heavy.
In the street a policeman,
A muttering workman, pass.
Now and then a comrade
Flits past with leaflets -
Keen as a dog on the track ahead,
Listening, cat-like, for noises behind him;
avoiding the lamps.
The tavern door belches out
A tainted light, its windows
Vomit, leaving puddles.
Inside, a half-stifled lamp
Slowly swings,
A solitary labourer keeps awake.
While the inn-keeper snores and wheezes,
He bares his teeth at the wall,
His grief climbs the stairs. He weeps,
Cries out for the revolution.
Cold metal, the water clinks.
A stray mongrel, the wind
Wanders. Its great tongue hangs
To touch the water, and laps it.
Straw mattresses are the rafts
That drift on night's currents.
The warehouse's hulk is aground.
In the foundry's iron dinghy
The smelter dreams red babies
Into the metal moulds.
All is damp, and heavy.
Mildew draws a map
Of misery's regions.
And there, on the dry meadows,
Rags and paper litter
The ragged, papery grass.
How they would whirl and fly!
They stir, but inertia holds them.
Night, your sluggish breeze
Is a flapping of soiled sheets.
Like frayed muslin to cord
You cling to the old sky,
As wretchedness clings to life.
Night of the poor, be my coal,
Smoulder here on my heart,
Melt the iron in me, to make
An anvil that never will split,
A hammer that clangs and glints,
A smooth blade for victory, night!
Grave this night is, and heavy.
I too shall sleep now, my brothers.
May our souls not be smothered by want.
Nor our bodies be bitten by vermin."
—Attila József
Translated by Michael Hamburger via
Writing is not about attention but deliverance.
Tuesday, February 24, 2026
shiv the day · dark powers
in the tall wire lattices
inscrutable sky · skelp minions
who can't shelter in place
what if we were · people...
plain as this overpass
the thought dissolves · into zigzag & culdesac
This is one of five surviving works by her.
Sometimes reading is swimming, sometimes flying, sometimes crawling.
Oldest known recording of a whale.
“I think the warning labels on alcoholic beverages are too bland. They should be more vivid. Here is one I would suggest: 'Alcohol will turn you into the same asshole your father was.' "
― George Carlin via @audiomite.bsky.social
"mirror for seeing around corners"
divisible Boswell
debuts a cold poledance
almond shard, shapeless
festschrift & smoke vespers
scurry along lantern
leading to but speed bumps
15th Street's no short cut
caterwaulology
"bread that can't be toasted"
well turned if turned at all
not the take back whisper
teal cup & a calm load
"What I didn’t anticipate was how much of reading is loss."
"But I wonder if we're not all living in a culture of moral distress and injury, and if it might not help to at least begin to name this." —Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg via
Creatures of the Cambrian period.
“Lovecraftians are like a hereditary priesthood where the lore is passed and iterated upon from initiate to initiate. From Derleth to Houellebecq through Borges, theirs may be the greatest longitudinal collection of fanfic in modern (literary) literature—and it started as pulp.
Note: I consider Borges as a most uncomfortable —but ultimately additive— Lovecraftian; a longheld impression that I honoured with a comic tribute to There Are More Things in my first book. TAMT is a distinct outlier in the Borgian corpus; a reluctantly accepted glitch.
So when I say “through” Borges, there is his implied antipathy and resistance, too. Over the years I have come to think of TAMT as an outstanding case of literary sublimation. It does not sit well in The Book of Sand, but there it is: a trace of blood in a sea of ichor.”
—@lapsuslima (3 tweets)
"Postcard 1
by Miklós Radnóti
written August 30, 1944
Out of Bulgaria, the great wild roar of the artillery thunders,
resounds on the mountain ridges, rebounds, then ebbs into silence
while here men, beasts, wagons and imagination all steadily increase;
the road whinnies and bucks, neighing; the maned sky gallops;
and you are eternally with me, love, constant amid all the chaos,
glowing within my conscience — incandescent, intense.
Somewhere within me, dear, you abide forever —
still, motionless, mute, like an angel stunned to silence by death
or a beetle hiding in the heart of a rotting tree."
—translated by Michael R. Burch
Ever.
74 Publications That Pay Freelancers for Book Reviews, Interviews, and More.
Rosilica cut-throat
carps pentacle rictus
ghost of a snowfall
nowhere seen
wadded paper windlass
wangles smaller cauldron
insomniac's yelp rampart
streeet of burnt-out hulks
in my mind
where young lungfish frolic
Another translator of Louise Labé.
How the purple falls · not a horse race
But perceived as such · he helped foster;
And this garish game · given over
to a gameshow host · will harry us all.
—my continuation of this