( via )

this really is THE WORST TIMELINE.

"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."

( via / via )

An afternoon spent printing in my sketchbook.

"home is far"

therblig-shy skein
unfinished finish
riant rule of thumb

journeying heart knows this

"The silence on the floor of my house is all the questions and all the answers that have been known in the world.."

"Actually I saw my book as more of a mood piece, using myself as the protagonist the way you eat chickpeas for dinner when a can of chickpeas is what you have around." —Meaghan Garvey via

Ideal Odyssey movie adaptation already exists.

( via / via )

"20 years feels like a nice, solid number. Beyond that, all bets are off."

"So after the Spanish took over Mexico, Aztec nobility got their lands taken. They sued within Spanish courts for their land back and surprisingly mostly won! They also got Spanish aristocratic titles and intermarried with Spanish nobility. The Duke of Moctezuma is still around, running a marketing agency in Madrid." —@friedkielbasa via

White Bird (live).

"to navigate this world"

blue rose of the toilet brush
woundered acuity
the lesser light to go by

cold water in a stained cup
tells the story
raindance on parchment
this is one of the ways

the age of elaborate breakfasts
as on a painted screen
clanking ammo box
i've had since the 80s
i keep my coffee in

Cat, Mouse, and Me (1997).

( via / via )

"...with closed eyes, I gently stroke as I would a cat all the things I might have said."

Videntian stabilimenta
starkly whisked off hey presto
midway the cold kitchen
can't think of why blinking
fading words of walg
ev'ryone keeps their bevy

murmurs from the Moog igloo
amerce my star-fed verses
tell them they are tiptop
will outlive this rainsieve

"How is it that Lord of the Flies has sold in the millions and is taught in classrooms around the world, while Skrine has vanished so successfully that not even a single copy appears to be available for sale?"

"Action/disaster movie called Y2K in which all the catastrophes that were supposed to be caused by this computer glitch actually happen. Planes go down, the grid goes down… Various characters across America navigate the chaos. Portrait of the late 90s – powerful GenX nostalgia – in the end they make it, we all make it, a new day dawns. Al Gore wins… the future is bright…" —@aaronlabaree

The Stephen Miller Slam Poem.

( via / via )

śuthina.

"How many anagrammists does it take to change a lightbulb?

One, but the glow is misty and black — hot ash, a granite magma...."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Baby porcupine crossing the road.

      "new words for the new weather"

cancer at the hairline
cancer talking tinfoil
      the usual
   madly yeckates
blue Jehu divebombs · that darn cat
deranged pale cerulean
rides bumpercar gherkin

Open.

( via / via )

"After seeing it, he phoned Taymor to tell her she had made a truly great movie, but one so far ahead of its time that it would be several years before people realised just how important it was."

"saving plastic straws"

steelmanning the chud-hopper
house usurpers' sherpas
arrow through lined-up cufflinks
lampads, adobe robots

eisoptroclastic clipboard
collects poems on soybeans
cinnamon roll ransacked
for replicant hepcats

tollway's wooden nickels
westering test cases
i drink black oblivion
where the bilge fill gathers

Ditch Lilies.

"A season of unseason is a time when everyone feels they are being crushed under the wheel of the wheel of fate. It’s a time that cries out for the hero that is in eternal war with the whims of fate, the hero who can make the impossible happen. The Trickster Hero." —The Dark Herald via

"The heist he keeps describing is one where the burglars broke in, did his dishes, and left a tenner on the bench."

( via / via )

'Two Cats' (Sam and Arry).

A poet who writes like his speaking is like a chess player who only plays against a home computer.

"Nothing disappears..."

In earthquake lands, one & one-storey only;
four years of caked-up dust, is it?--I can't tell,
in haiku or a cento paradelle:
a stony silence, broken just as stonily.

Now others have at times seen me more nesh
nor have i chosen, not at all, these ways;
as if in shelter sought from fiercest blaze,
my hunger & the dark's own hungers mesh.

And this has been some little good i've done
when all the mad ambitions are driven off,
though i will rest not even then to gauge

this tower against the sun...
A rampart made half faith & half of scoff,
a tunnel out, itself one further cage.

(2025)

Boneyards thread.

( via / via )

Kikajon.

   "Poems

Poems are born when life is dead,
Or else so much alive
No ribs can give it residence,
No heart can give it hive.

There is no soul of transient thew,
No mind of common grey
That can subsist on such an air—
But poems come that way."

—Lindley Williams Hubbell, Dark Pavilion (1927)

"A thousand years ago, there was something at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois rivers that looked exactly like the United States of America, and behaved exactly like the United States of America too."

The conventional Anglicization "Odyssey" has always bugged me. I know it's meant to evoke the Greek, but for this to spell the way it's usually pronounced breaks about four spelling rules. It ought to be spelled "Oddicy".

The Barnard’s Star planetary system: stability, composition, and evolution of four sub-Earth exoplanet. (via)

( via / via )

"A local mariachi band greeted us with a song they wrote for our campaign!"

“Along the pavement roll’d the muttering head.” –Pope’s Odyssey, XXII

Launch.

      "palantyranny"

quotidian refusal
bruises from, ascian
      sky fiery
   neighbor swathcrib
where is it burning · whittled-down query

crowdmasked, no liquescent
lunar runescar following
      hallmark of
   smol haruspice
bard's pert · quotidian refusal

"While Vienna’s coffeehouses bred modernism, in Belgrade’s kafanas grew conspiracy and rage."

( via / via )

American Occupation.

"improving your site experience"

bonetrail crunch to a monster lair
on TV ranting
heroes scant & scared-y
depredations-skeptic
if he were here right now
i'd know what to do—
i don't even know

how to finish this poem

Only on Substack.

"We are really going to torch the only habitable planet maybe in the entire universe because someone needed to commit sex crimes and make a machine that lets you put tits on Garfield."
—Sarah Lyons via

Audio Visualscapes.

( via / via )

"Philosophy returns whenever the old answers stop working."

"Not since Sordello, Browning’s famously obscure and incomprehensible epic poem, had the echt Browning obscurity manifested itself so gloriously." —Adam Roberts via

"The Navajo, I have heard, bring a medicine to their people with painting done with sand. Part of the healing is scattering the art to the wind afterwards. “Forsaking the proximity” of theology in order to find shelter in a religion as art I wonder if we might imagine together what such a sand painting with our own particles and pigments might sound like on our tongue."

      "the black cake icing"

dregs tarrying · vague drottkvaett
   tiltdecantative noondim
awhile yet off now · wharf mistlost
   repurposed paper towels
   in the antelucan midrash
two jewels suspend · against spider velvet

"Once we accept that being offline is off the table for most, this is where 'analog' quietly steps in as a substitute, the dupe we can actually afford. And just like all dupes, it is only the appearance of the real thing, stripped of its substance."

( via / via )

Dry Dwellers of Eternity.

"either a detective or a victim"

one for whom things are certain
sans sleep on the boardwalk
morbid dialogs
by acidulous moonlight

drizzilicious droshky
windows an expense too far
sleepwalker a thousand years
arise with the morning

< One Hundred Visions of War.

“I’ve been married to a Communist and a Fascist, and neither one of them ever took out the garbage.” —Lee Grant to Gloria Steinem/1975 via @grissom

"The Weil is in that handful of books/essays where I remember exactly where I was standing when I first picked it up. Can't remember for sure which library it was though weirdly I think it might actually have been in the Fisher House (Catholic Chaplaincy) library in Cambridge, bit random. I do have a physical memory of my orientation in relation to the shelf etc. Something I only have for the books that have made the greatest impression."

( via / via )

The Wrong Sky.

"No science fiction could have prepared us for just how stupid the end of the world can be.

'The environment was on the brink of collapse, and so, rather than deal with that, we burned what fuel we had left getting computers to scam each other for money.' " —@reasie.bsky.social

There's a whole grisly genre of taxidermy children's books. The first one i ever saw was kittens. That thing still haunts me.

cancer fingerling
filling a schooner from the side
becrimson'd sky & decrees
decay drags its heels for

"I never met my real Grandmother on my Dad’s side. She was an artist. I finally got one of her paintings."

( via nightcafe / via )

"The film is set in a Tokyo preparing for the 2020 Olympics..."

"The Railway Junction

From here through tunnelled gloom the track
Forks into two; and one of these
Wheels onward into darkening hills,
And one toward distant seas.

How still it is; the signal light
At set of sun shines palely green;
A thrush sings; other sound there’s none,
Nor traveller to be seen –

Where late there was a throng. And now,
In peace awhile, I sit alone;
Though soon, at the appointed hour,
I shall myself be gone.

But not their way; the bow-legged groom,
The parson in black, the widow and son,
The sailor with his cage, the gaunt
Gamekeeper with his gun,

That fair one, too, discreetly veiled –
All, who so mutely came, and went,
Will reach those far nocturnal hills,
Or shores, ere night is spent.

I nothing know why thus we met –
Their thoughts, their longings, hopes, their fate:
And what shall I remember, except –
The evening growing late –

That here through tunnelled gloom the track
Forks into two; of these
One into darkening hills leads on,
And one toward distant seas."

—Walter de la Mare via @nigeness via @amjuster

Who Killed Cock Robin.

"Back in my Moscow days, anti-cafes (антикафе) were all the rage. You were charged for the time you spent at the cafe, not for individual drinks and snacks. They also had board games, video games, instruments, and books. My favorite, Tsiferblat (clock face), had a cool, improvised, slightly bohemian atmosphere, a bit like a Budapest ruin bar." —@pjkinville

Birth.

https://www.tumblr.com/endlessmazin/822025412882432000/the-great-rupture-in-ripplescape-realm

( via / me )

Save Dallas City Hall.

"I shaped my entire life around never needing a car." —Rhyd Wildermuth via

On Highway 11.

"how swarming party"

1.
staunch inchmeal stagger
      in the storm
   any armor
starkest aside hiding
coffeegrowl · grief is a country

landmarks, the lined pantry
      with the goods
   forgetful adds
allocates in winter
westering gravelpath · expert swallow

staunch inchmeal stagger

2.
Cyclopean sampler
clatteringly clueless
      candy pills
   brisk marzipan
the road direct · but ruthless

into broken antlers
ignominious figments
      candy hues
   on the armed guards

3.
cassowary
   dictionary
storage unit
   mundane ferry
cardboard boxes
   sordid praxis
books in limbo
   thinned-out excess
thoughts in harness
   outside furnace
forest in sparks-rain
   the blame onus
stalled routine is
   swaddled Venus
cassowary
   concertinas
mundane ferry

4.
lit "fifty one"
on black lacquer
snatched away

ears still ringing

Gebir.

( via / via )

Hellbound train.

   blindfold into
      blasting grounds
penguin suicide · sanguine three degrees
   clouds clustering darkly
   clyte not, elsewhere hurrying

   blindfold into
      blasting grounds
our games rattled · in scattered rooms
   storying it sternly
   our star-nosed hearts bartering

Solar Eclipse Over Snowy Central Park NYC, 1925.

"The image on the cover of the Joy Division album "Unknown Pleasures" is from a plot that radio astronomer Harold Craft made for his PhD dissertation, using data collected at Arecibo while studying the pulsar discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell. " via

A small literary press is exactly this.

( via / via )

Take my Number.

"We must imagine Sisyphus. That is the problem." —Alexander Fayne via

Lego Klimt.

   all the rats
waiting for their turn
   to jump ship

their pockets bulging
their consciences clear

"The environment shaped more than conduct: it decided which beliefs could be spoken, and the beliefs it permitted were the ones that matched how the place already ran.."