( via / via )

Smile.

"...the French, whose venerable monarchy saddled them with a fair number of incompetent rulers, have an expression for feckless kings: rois fainéants." —Arthur Goldhammer via

My current thoughts on recent geopolitical events.

"Baruch Spinoza

Hazy gold, the Occident lights up
The windowpane. The manuscript assiduous
Awaits, laden with infinitude.
Somebody is building God in twilight.
A man engendering God. He is a Jew
With sorrowful eyes and sallow skin;
Time bears him as the river bears
A leaf on its declining water.
No matter. Insistently the wizard works
On God with delicate geometry;
From his infirmity, his nothingness,
He manufactures God with stintless word.
Prodigious was the love presented him,
The hopeless love of ever being loved."

—Borges (tr Mulrooney, Christopher via via Also this. )

Le Grande Palindrome again. (Option to translate in the last link.)

( via / via )

Minotaur.

"iridium layer of art oddness"

1.
i sing the ending of the world
& its continuance
waspniche siren's call
mud castle shivered to dust
at the touch of a screwdriver

2.
those who belong to the land
are gladdest when the clamor goes
they'll still be digging up coins
when no one knows the emperor

3.
my people
even before

have seen extermination
they were rightly named

but there was room
before the process

in which to hide
was perfected

4.
you want fuckin' epic?

" I continue to ponder the significance of this."

"Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries." —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

"Relinquishment would dissolve the name of the child and replace it with a number and a new name."

( via / via )

This is my Sister.

"This month is the 36th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act and it reminds me that the ADA could not be passed today. It probably couldn’t get a vote in committee today."
—@ericmgarcia.bsky.social

Fantastic Genealogy.

"The Return of Absence

And the early summer
returned to your eyes,
and the old songs
returned to
the yellowed land,
the peasants to the hills,
the prophets to God,
the women to the mirrors,
the men to the road,
and memories
to the narrow alleys.
But your voice is gone,
and your face is gone.
If only I had never soared
in the sky of your nothingness."

—Mohammed Moussa

"...yet some other crystal..."

( via / oil painting by me )

The Hundred Dresses of Audrey Trotter.

"the crooked-built house"

matutinal blue rose
ruse vertigo lifting
panopticon dimness
damp shoe shuffle, movie
about the making of a movie
ev'rywhere food & the shadows of food

Tanka.

"I try to pet the cat. My fingers multiply, fracture, recrystallize—they are spatulas, cables, berries hanging in clusters off a stem, rippling plasma; they are orange fur interlocking with orange fur" —@ctrlcreep

Recovery.

( via / via )

A Stoic Prayer.

"In the same way that Knausgaard reclaimed My Struggle as title, my life’s work will be to reclaim If I Did It." —@rmhaines

Headcanon.

"the impossible map"

another day lost without saying it
broken pavement · a parlous footing
desaparecidos · companions
   in the shadowy realms
fat crescent · maybe a third full

The Man Who Discovered Uranus.

( via / via )

Tunga.

“Full Moon (Santa Barbara)

I listened, there was not a sound to hear
In the great rain of moonlight pouring down,
The eucalyptus trees were carved in silver,
And a light mist of silver lulled the town.

I saw far off the grey Pacific bearing
A broad white disk of flame,
And on the garden-walk a snail beside me
Tracing in crystal the slow way he came.”

—Sara Teasdale

The Man Who Laughs.

"Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn" —Tennyson

Tanka.

( via / still from La Notte )

"On the occasion of his departure from Yugoslavia, after his first expedition in 1933, he even became the subject of a heroic song composed by the singer (guslar) Milovan Vojičić and fully ornamented with traditional formulas: 'Professor Milman Parry the glorious,' the 'gray falcon,' who 'flew from the beautiful land of America,' 'to our heroic fatherland,' to 'gather songs of heroes'."

"when I feel down about my weight I like to look up how much I would be worth if I were a tuna" —@taramcgowanross.bsky.social

"I’m trying to find a way to tie myself to the mast, but in ballet, you’re also, and always, the siren and the rocks."

when we close down
the department of trumpology
& some of us can reopen
our feeds without trepidation
all the other sep'rate crimes
can frolic without authors
all the cruelty of nature
can rest
unvied with

Only Alchemies.

( via / via )

"...even when books do make it into English, they often do so through fragile, improvised, underfunded channels rather than through any stable literary infrastructure."

"Snail Paces

As I pry beneath crumbling bricks they come
to light, pale embryos unfolding. Slim
wands question space

touch-tentative. They lift small frills
to glide and teeter, balancing their shells
like the family china.
Or brace

on the hawser of themselves; the load stirs
and follows like a shadow. Each shoulders
his small world like a sack

and strains towards his half-an-inch horizon.
We are less to them than clouds across the sun.
Beneath the thrush’s block

we find them threshed out, littering our grass,
mute violated husks. Bend closer . . . Pass
down empty corridors,

intimate windings, moulded by the sheer
day-in-day-out of flesh. Mother-of-pearled,
the inner chamber of the ear."

—Philip Gross via

"The combination of fountain pens and paper embodies a balance that has been worked out over a long span of time by people who write a lot. This phenomenon is called 'tooth' by aficionados."

There was a time when i did all this & i will say, the very best thing about using a fountain pen is you can blend your own color of ink. I like a very dark red, almost black, or blue-green anything that’s down from bright. These affect the voice that emerges when you write with them.

"I toyed with withholding this, frankly, but the story did happen, witnessed by Saul Bellow and told to Berryman, who waited a decade to use it and sent the Song to Bellow with this dedication: ‘For Saul – excusez mon vol – but I warned you 10 years ago that if by some point you hadn't used this, I would'."

( via / via )

"When we finished, everyone applauded, even the string players. And that's saying something. They never applaud for anything."

"To get a better pension, many people would leave their familiar spots and resettle in Siberia, the Far North, or the Far East before their retirement because, in those places, with extreme climates or other calamities, salaries were much higher and paid according to geographical zones." —Larisa Rimerman via

"The philological patience of attending to each sign and an essay published in a university newspaper that holds open the possibility of letting different opinions and standpoints coexist without resolving into one: both are ways of carrying rather than losing."

   the wasp swing
when does it cease to trail
a lashing out
across generations carried
nest might be dead
but i have prayed again
poison
poison
poison

"Tired in a way that is not about today."

( via / via )

Listening to the Billionaire.

      "Jimothy"

Zoom ringing rhymeless
aroma plunged dungeon
      of Lockdown
   show the doctor
miserably boxed · in the windowshuttered

brushing chimes to chastise
chains invisible tisma
      —the lurgy
   out there looming—
still though a shot · is half shelter

Zoom ringing rhymeless
rune perilous Fillmore

Read a New Poem Alone in Gaza.

"During the Cultural Revolution in China, rival Red Guards units would attack each other with clubs and guns, both sides screaming 'Long live Chairman Mao!' In the West, we do things differently. Here, we have politically motivated firefights between two non-white people, both of them devoted to Adolf Hitler." —Sam Kriss via

"Having only been able to make it 60 pages in: I do not believe that Strieber believes his own story—even as a good lie." (Which makes me wonder if Roxy's claim to have also been at that famous mass shooting...was plagiarized from Streiber?? That's a kind of joke on all of us for even listening to him.)

( via / via )

Here’s how many people have lost food assistance so far.

"Do we spend a seventh of our lives on each day of the week?" —Mark Scott via

No. Mondays are half.

Ristitamtsi.

   a cure too late—thugs
break into the lab, smashing—
   a hundred & four

with this picture perfect sky
ev'ryone in steel capsules

"...the only runic inscription from Anglo-Saxon England which declares itself to have been made by a woman."

( via / via )

Peat Cutting.

      "LETTER IV.

Hatched in a rasping darkness of dry sand
   The child cicada some brave root discovers:
Sucks with dumb mouth while his long climb is planned
   That high must tunnel through the silt that smothers..."

—William Empson via

"I think of Melville as a New York writer, even though he's talking about whales."

"Pope, who was never known to laugh, was a great wit..." --John Dennis, The Age of Pope (1896)

"This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps."

( via / via )

The "dog" behind Dog Day Afternoon. (via @sardonicus.eu)

"*'The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st Century's frontier'

*The Gray Zone's not very sustainable. It costs a lot to maintain all those smart flying bombs, they need fuel, batteries, chips, cameras

*So what does the Post-Gray-Zone look like

*Chernobyl, maybe. 'Involuntary Park' "

—Bruce Sterling via

Talk of the Town.

       shards falling
   never from night's
& that myth-rendered · burg excavates
as storms worsen stabsong
astute bards break timebread

       these pavements
   full of victims
these screens shine · no ripe shelter
i no-clip pinched parkswards
pullulating great wormforms

       ancient caste
   leper king built

The Age of Pope.

( via / via )

Success.

best magic is old magic
a thousand years of repair
tall hats in dim corridors
calcspar box & hacksaw

calcspar box & hacksaw
Habsburg jaw on Liberty
DDT spiral
night without stars
nidor of sagas for Odin

Stanley Crouch, for & against. Much fun is had by all.

"there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue"
—@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

Untouchable.

( via / via )

PSA.

"Magnolia flowers are pollinated by beetles because the species is so ancient. They appeared on Earth before bees." —@mfcarter.bsky.social

The Darkness.

"Basra"

a wall of all alibis
umber floor, siege dumbshow
fizzogmany naughahyde
anon ponders
the sky's secrets, skulkshorn
skullface Epstein klepto
umber floor, flayed sideshow
flattens into dream-minted

the Furies chortle

Golden Brown.

( via / via )

this really is THE WORST TIMELINE.

      "old magazine"

wraith recompense · so long lapsing
      waterfall
   whose tide stands still
fragments afloat noggin
forcefed stilbs of rare bedlam

verse carrying casement
      pumpydoor
calcspar box hacksaw
   of dark inklings
cerulean road · rattletrap quokka

crank windows are coming back

"I once went to Vancouver, and asked a pharmacist how much a vial of insulin costs, they said $35. Then I called my pharmacy in the states, and they said $360."

"The most terrifying shipwreck would be to save ourselves" —@poemakontsa.bsky.social

Perfect.

( via / via )

My tanka books reviewed. (404 & In the Time of the Fall of the Towers)

Among the dancing apes a dance about not-dancing.

"It takes a bit of sacrifice sometimes..."

"THE CHRYSALIS (Anagrammed Lines)

A shy echo splinters
those shiny parcels.
The chrysalis opens
physical otherness."

—Anthony Etherin

ICE’s biggest supporters.

( via / via )

Antinous.

"manson's hit song"

more days off than on
stained concrete
the name of this harsh boon
green screen full of lies
the clever burning

the clever burning

Shushbooth.

"Their greatest discovery was of a humble guslar by the name of Avdo Međedović (1875–1955), a Slavicised Albanian Muslim whose recitation of a 12,000-line poem entitled The Wedding of Smailagić Meho would come to serve as the centrepiece of their collection." —Hinternet Editorial Board via

This is probably important.

( me / via )

Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

"The moment you start caring about what a gallery or a publisher thinks, you stop being an artist and become an employee." — Remedios Varo

Whine of a Sick Child.

"the usual suspects"

world ready to grab, legible
as an hour gone is not;
direction of losing

murderers are not caught

an emptiness enamored
of its not-being-crossed;
that color to the eye

murderers are not caught

looking back to those bad years
whose recipe is lost

Stellar Tunnel.

( via / via )

Procedure.

"cracked black crumble gumbo"

ogle Lego labyrinth
in the Stockholm Syndrome

pilgrimage parkinglots
empire of green fire ants

my outline dark pane limns
ogle Lego labyrinth

How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found. (REMOVED)

I guess writers will simply have to stop having commonplace reactions to typical subjects.

Ulysses. (1967)

( via / via )

"Giallobrutalism," or why everything looks like that. (that music is too annoying--i just substitute Harry Partch)

At one time i wanted to write a book about how the aphoristic philosophers provide a separate tradition from the systematic ones but i gave up on that idea, partly because the pre-Socratics who seem to have started it may have been nothing of the sort, only remembered in excerpts; & when being excerpted by someone else is the tradition, it’s only a kind of reading.

The S of the Snarl.

      "the boxes things come in"

glim absence · glaucous sky
   parables of sixish
symmetry's marplot · heavy on my mind
   like when you put change back
in a loose shirt pocket · then pat for it
   & it's not there now

"Aphorisms will always be niche."

( via / via )

Lāhainā Noon.

vast distances · in token crowd
      green table
   agreeable
crumpled paper towels cram
in the cardboard popemobile

venture without fathom · prevaricate
      on the wind
   the taking wind
taste of mixed coffees
pylonmaxxing dial tone

The other side of American Gothic.

"What I’ve never seen is hatred produce wisdom. I’ve seen it produce energy. I’ve seen it produce action. I’ve seen it produce revenge. But I’ve never seen it leave a human being more whole."
—Lonny McLaughlin via

The Empty Church.

( via / via )

First same-sex couple in recorded history.

"Show two-thirds of it dissolving into mist and you have given the viewer the rest of the mountain to build, larger and more alive, inside themselves." —Tōan via

The House Fire That Launched Robert Silverberg's Golden Age.

   the world of after
all the ingredients here
   colors that will rise

the garage door derelict
that addresses us daily

"Trump may be more porcine than equine—a Circe product. Even so, after all this time, we should have been able to spot a Trojan horse."

( via / via )

This Fastidious Erasure.

"i know something about size"

pinkgold fled jetscrape
conjures discalced ganja
gazing of void velvets
veritable sirens
entailed lamentations
white line's sere wheedle
nowhere-milled stillness
pinkgold fled jetscrape
jumble in my inkpot

"One after another..."

"For every artist whose estate becomes a foundation, there are hundreds whose work disperses, deteriorates, gets stored in conditions that damage it, gets given away to people who don’t know what they have, gets sold cheaply and without coordination in the months after death when no one is thinking clearly, gets argued over by family members who disagree about its value, or simply sits in a house in Wiltshire, doing nothing, slowly." —@blackbirdrook via

Borzoi Puppies.

( oil painting on velvet by me / via )

Tatianna Blass - Penelope.

"What if the Qur'an didn't even intend to speak about 'virgins', as sexual objects, and instead was echoing language found in descriptions of Sasanian banquets?" —David Bannoura via

Psychic Readings.

"the beginning of sentience in a phone"

without Thoth to gather
thoughts chickenscratched inchmeal
we are just Jestocaust
at the jedburgh erg crossing

highway of death
taken out of season

water in motion
always means something

"We should not allow ourselves to be imprisoned by the moribund political fashions of 1848."