"suddenly to have been dead a long time"
loud claim, amidst minstrels
this brokeback art
lost where horizons smear
password at the ghost checkpoint
all the songs bad covers
citadel
on spiral wings
teabag torn
leaks into the cup of tea
" 'For that matter,' he said, 'you could say the same thing about novels.'."
"i have nothing but slop art, & i must scream"
mortal ronin
white cloud dodge
marked alley
woodstain newel
hoist debt
"I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found that story."
- Virginia Woolf, THE WAVES via @alinastefanescu
"Hate all the same things I hated when I was eighteen, also some others."
"...there is
no aim but paraded hunger"
—Debbie: an Epic
Reading Weird Fiction in an Age of Fascism.
"DJ Arrest Quota"
dark shards cohere, fishhook
the shorn hour's furnace:
is it safe
serious quiz
game alone · in the parking garage
is it only art portals
ev'rywhere eye-buttons
Brownian
abrupt swirl-trail
drama in the flicker · on the drab sheet
trail as of old, trawling
tryst icy, loose gravel
marks where fell
not even a name
railroad crossing · wreck hauled off
to specify spiral
from spurious whirring
unsought smoke
amidst the smirr
on fire escape · clove memento
mahogany narghilay
or nonce expedient
words rising
to the ceiling
"tisane"
marble among · mind-shadows
breath armature · broken pathways
low light · in the tilted room
a box · made of bombed playgrounds
a cough is a secret
that the dogs bark to show
"You didn’t need to choose a brand so much as a side..."
"literary fiction is when your advance is $100k and you sell 5,000 copies and genre fiction is when your advance is $5k and you sell 100,000 copies." —@andymboyle.bsky.social
"I'm going to put on Satantango and tell my kids it's Harry Potter."
"Even the simplest journey was only the superficial evidence--the diagram--of another, more difficult one." —M John Harrison, The Course of the Heart (1992)
"team Moloch"
gray cauldron
cardboard
six foot step
cool thousand
mile teeth
choice
"a game of blindfold football"
complicated symptoms
captured in a snap
years of war outnumber
peace plus recent spate—
the sacrificial victims of the state
complicated rapture
cold battlefields rolled up
in the coruscating dawn
spawn of flycloud-clyte
the sacrificial victims of the state
I'm sorry, we don't have the drugs for this anymore.
"If I had a 'familiar' it would resemble less a nervous exotic animal than a chipped enamel sink. You would not find it on my shoulder but in its natural environment at the bottom of a derelict canal in the industrial Midlands. Our connection would be the source of my special powers, which would neither mimic nor metaphorise its qualities but be unmistakably sink-related. I would feel no emotion towards it even when events caused us to be separated and tortured. A sink can feel nothing. That is one of the baseline or default qualities of a sink. But wherever I went, I would know that out there, bedded in the mud beneath the slow black water, never more than a mile or two from my present location, its energies focussed, site-specific and calm, there my sink would be" —M John Harrison, Wish I Was Here (2023)
"Dwellers in precarity must provide themselves with a narrative future." --M John Harrison
"epinician ode"
clues from the quisling clinic
reclaimed polder, goldflake
innocence
bullied inchmeal
steer into glare · that glass house of thunder
shadowy shark deadbolt
pale shroud of the tailspin
weedy marge
blindfold amerce
steer into glare · that gleet-dripping ingot
stale cerulean story
stirious measurements
of the sky's
arval feedback
steer into glare · that gloss on Revelations
"Popular posters of the Kefahuchi Tract were taped up on every wall. The New Men had some kind of cult, centred round the idea that this was where they had originated. It was as sad as everything else about them. Every child knew where they came from and it wasn't there." --M John Harrison, Light (2003)
"schadenfreude & fumes"
unidentifiable cry
in the Brutalist labyrinth
find my car by the bumper sticker
among the other gray cars
grackle crosses my path
like someone with a purpose
unidentifiable cry
in the Brutalist labyrinth
"Nothing is more important than summer."
"Spleen (Baudelaire: Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux)
I’m like the King of some damp, rainy clime,
Grown impotent and old before my time,
Who scorns the bows and scrapings of his teachers
And bores himself with hounds and all such creatures.
Naught can amuse him, falcon, steed, or chase:
No, not the mortal plight of his whole race
Dying before his balcony. The tune,
Sung to this tyrant by his pet buffoon,
Irks him. His couch seems far more like a grave.
Even the girls, for whom all kings seem brave,
Can think no toilet up, nor shameless rig,
To draw a smirk from this funereal prig.
The sage who makes him gold, could never find
The baser element that rots his mind.
Even those blood-baths the old Romans knew
And later thugs have imitated too,
Can’t warm this skeleton to deeds of slaughter,
Whose only blood is Lethe’s cold, green water."
—tr Roy Campbell
I Have Faith in You. (When my wife played this, i thought it was a Leonard Cohen song i hadn't heard.)
"I consider the poetry reading to be the actual mode of existence of the poem, the actual place where it comes into its final existence. So that the written poem in the book is like the score for the poem..." —Gary Snyder via
"This is how fascists think and act; they meme themselves into being."
"Cynthia hijacked me, a loser, who desire/ had never touched before..."
To be the dancing ape, not the ape that bands together to kill.
"GLP/GPT"
the everflow
squidveil
& lodge pool
1 could stock mouse joints
Autumn Landscape with a River.
“Echo
Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope and love of finished years.
O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter-sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brim-full of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.
Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death;
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.”
—Christina Rossetti
I don't pay any attention to the words in Italian opera, either.
Lack of self awareness IS THE BRAND.
"a modern retelling of The Cask of Amontillado where Montresor tells Fortunato that they’re going to the Criterion Closet" —@theworldsgreatestwriter.com
Vegetative electron microscopy.
"adaptogen"
send a freenzied yawp up high
& crown the work of silence & dust
catculdesac heist
botox Melania
yawp up high
phishtexted Sunday
the crime scene oh so tidy
& spoonerized arch-malison
"love, lines, angles & shrines"
counter-Schicksaltaglodyte
refolding more correctly
imagine a society
just starting
to get light
stilts unbuilt yet, relic
vote-sticker unvectored
i evade catering
coming to rest rhyme scheme
respite made of vespers
standing close to staycease
stilts assembling scrimshaw
plastic drivethrough. plowversts
applaud choice of gaudy
goldenbathed storefronts
baroque blackbird wingbeats
"After the Armistice Nash was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to make large oil paintings as a form of remembrance, including The Menin Road. It shows a notorious stretch of country, ‘the most dreaded and disastrous locality of any area in any of the theatres of War’, Nash wrote." —John-Paul Stonard via
"There's no running-from that is not a running-to." —The Rouse
coming to rest
round putsch
highway stop
decoy
at staunch rote
"I think about that sometimes. How something can be over and still be on its way."
"Low Tide
The birds are gathering over the dunes,
Swerving and wheeling in shifting flight,
A thousand wings sweep darkly by
Over the dunes and out of sight.
Why did you bring me down to the sea
With the gathering birds and the fish-hawk flying,
The tide is low and the wind is hard,
Nothing is left but the old year dying.
I wish I were one of the gathering birds,
Two sharp black wings would be good for me —
When nothing is left but the old year dying,
Why did you bring me down to the sea?"
—Sara Teasdale via @sallythomas
“Of the welkin king, O irked imp!” —Sid Basu via
"The great Karl Popper: I think that there is only one way to science - or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part - unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children, for whose welfare you may work, with a purpose, to the end of your days." —@britishmythology
"diagetic payroll"
still can't go back to not caring
court reporter for the Cthulhucene
"If there's one thing right the day is made."
"untitled"
"My Druid heart" --Walter de la Mare
My Druid heart has found its final lair,
and in its last redoubt made fast its sleep;
yet this has not preserved from lancing pain
my Druid heart.
The world let go of me, but not the moon
in whose regard i dance out some charade
with rays that ricochet around the vugg.
Now i emerge, a pharaoh from the sand
or from the night, a lustrous crackling grackle.
Silvery-crackle-shines in another kiln
my Druid heart.
(publ in Illya's Honey vol 15 spring/summer 2009)
"One who reads with some awareness of the parapolitical theories, trying to discern what DeLillo himself thought about the assassination, is wrapt at once into a microcosm where more appears to be conspiratorial than possibly could have been, and yet where even the most naked cases (at least in the novel’s fictional account) of conspiracy manifest ultimately as little more than poetic enjambment, indifferent to the truth." —Gyres via
"You can tell AI is a very real industry by the way it implodes unless a sympathetic political party has totally unchecked power" —@stuntbirdarmy.bsky.social
New Updates on the Arc of the Moral Univrse
unlock leeway · lost inkpen
watching the insect · swarms descend
in the gloaming
i could walk now · out of this work
we set down · our dire directives
in the gloaming
opulence · one learns a taste for
old ruins · & new
in the gloaming
in the gloaming · in the gloaming
what might we not achieve
in the gloaming
A redemptive urge to wander the earth.
in close woods
dark hours pool
years-long plan
haywire
death foiled
"On his first day in prison, Russell Brand should walk up to the biggest, meanest-looking inmate and misquote Voltaire to him." —@pattonoswalt.bsky.social
"It has often struck me how few unarguably great poets did not also translate."
I should have been a pair of shiny claws.
"in 50 or 100 years people are going to read about the trump years in history books, learn about the president who spent all his time obsessing over grandiose home renovation projects while offhandedly imposing crippling tariffs and starting the stupidest war ever and...just not believe the stupidity" —@tomtomorrow.bsky.social via
Emily Dickinson Opines on the NSA.
veil thin hour
sootfall slow
choice-haunt
newsreels
rags set fire
"That's like Darth Vader losing the Death Star."
this gray sky
after so long blue
looks deadly
fraught
loud-voiced
"Hold on, are they selling printed Substack articles over there?"
America's decision to abandon psychology has had the very real consequence of rendering whole classes of problems insoluble.
