"...this particular pathology, reality experienced only through the mediating filter of prior representations, has reached a pitch in America that is no longer low stakes."

( via / via )

I added a new shader to my portal asset.

"Poema palindrómico de Merlina Acevedo

   Se anulan

Ella iba sola, ya iba honda,
de lo sola, mar era.
Mal o soledad no había;
y así, rara rosa, con él obra.
Nueva ave, un árbol en ocaso, rara risa,
ya iba honda, de lo sola,
mar era. Mal o soledad
no había. Ya lo sabía, llena luna es."

( via )

(Google translate:

    They dissolve

She went alone; she went deep—
so solitary, she was a sea.
There was no ill, no solitude;
and so, a rare rose, she acts with him.
A new bird, a tree at sunset, a rare laugh—
she went deep; so solitary,
she was a sea. No ill, no solitude
was there. She knew it now: she is a full moon.)

Iran war: 10 frequently used words and their meanings.

"The true poem is walking that edge between what can be said and that which cannot be said. That's the real razor's edge. The poem that falls all the way over into what can be said can still be very exciting, but the farther it is from the razor's edge the less it has of the real magic. ...And then some of them fall too much in the realm of what can't be said. Then they are no longer poems, they are meditation themes like the koan, or they are magical incantations, or they are mantras." —Gary Snyder, The Real Work

"When the recognition is negative it looks like rage-bait. When the moment is right it looks like zeitgeist."

( via / via )

Hausu.

"Panoneirism: few things have the coherence to be aware and reason. But all things are perpetually dreaming" —@ctrlcreep.bsky.social

"He quipped that he was 'a composer seduced into being a carpenter'.

“turmeric days”

an hour comes round again
& all the things i know to do
are burdensome of remedy
beside the effervescence gone

a little more strong coffee guides
my hand along the wonted groove
whether or not an ardent grave
is offered with the household gods

i feel there ought to be some word
awaiting me as light grows back
& matter in its staid alembic
reaches what we call the world

"Merlin obeyed the King's orders and put the stones up in a circle round the sepulchre."

( via / via )

"I woke up after my first night back home and realized I needed to change my life, and quit the insurance business."

      "virtual try-on"

scientists disappear · is it paranoia
      extra cold
   morning curdles
the luscious light · what peace looks like
seaweed winding · down the ravaged shore

"Gothic fiction is the literature of the body inside the institution. Not the body wandering freely, but the body governed, watched, classified, confined - by an architecture of power that has already decided what it is."

"...P D Ouspensky...in his book Tertium Organum, an English translation of which was brought out by Knopf in 1922 and became a favorite, not to say sacred, book for Hart Crane early in his poetic career." —John T Irwin, The Poetry of Weldon Kees: Vanishing as Presence (2017).

Operation Spider Web.

( via / via )

Fixate.

“Borges is capable of making up much better books and monsters and authors than anyone can find in libraries.” –Gene Wolfe, in: 𝐴𝑐𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑊𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑑 𝐺𝑎𝑙𝑎𝑥𝑖𝑒𝑠 (1990)

Bucket list.

“The End

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.”

—Mark Strand

My favorite scene from the Bible.

( via / me )

Now pursuing a master's in mathematics.

   "N. B. Symmetrians

We, the symmetrians, seek justice here,
And asymmetric nature makes a drought.
We wrap up handouts for the martyred poor,
Making sure to put in books and tin-can beer.
Each man relieved goes home and gives a clout
To mrs man, or pal-man, and slams the door.

The speechful day in knowing languors goes,
We seek again for salt and summer sky.
The pure-blue meteor flares and falls unburnt;
We take to our heels standing on staunch tiptoes.
We read half-works of science for the why
And scheme to balance marxly with what’s learnt.

Fastened and fasting in the bed-rock man
The assainted, snuffed-down halo strives to rise;
The unstabilized land still slips up out of ocean,–
Bears odd, imperiled flora built to plan.
A natural start is now no one’s surmise,
To take things as presented, no one’s notion.

They used to start a-fresh, but we try burdened,
Trimming the present’s future with the past.
It’s all the fault of inter-communication,
Mountains of dove-tailed pebbles and words wordened.
The newest prism is moulded from the last.
The simplest thing is: to laud the massive nation.

The moon still shines beside the daytime star,
The waters weave, rain cools, dunes move, grain grows,
Soft words bring soft replies, muscles expand.
Whether we say the stars are near or far,
The polar lights still paint the glacier floes,
The temperate zones are yet more fully manned.”

—Gene Derwood, 1955

Robot at the starting line.

I have always maintained that Gentle Giant was just Emerson Lake & Palmer played backwards.

The Great Class War.

https://www.tumblr.com/babyfoxcollectionthings/810883423823609856

( via / via )

Le Doulos.

“Why should one not be an unbeliever when faced with the dilemma that this unsavory world was either made by God or hatched by a cross-eyed ostrich?” –RA Lafferty

It's about time Math Rock fused with Visual Kei.

“Why Cats Paint

Pergamum awaits.
In the shadow of the boarded-up tower
now never to complete,

Pergamum awaits.
In the Great Hall cold though spring without burgeons,
Pergamum.

In the armature of betrayals here
glistening like dawnwebs,
Pergamum, Pergamum.

Pergamum.
What haven’t I given you,
lozenge of sunlight creeping; what

haven’t I accepted
of your Vanilla Fudge sonatas,
of your skull under fathoms of estuary?”

—Adam Cadmium, My Struggle with Symmetry (1946)

Sounds like a plan.

( via / via )

There's always the possibility.

   “No haber caído,
como otros de mi sangre,
   en la batalla.
Ser en la vana noche
el que cuenta las sílabas.”

–Jorge Luis Borges

   (Not having fallen
like others of my blood,
   In the battle.
Being in the vain night
the one who counts the syllables. –Google Translate)

   ((Mine: Not to have fallen
as others of my line have,
   in the sanguine fray;
to be in vacuous night
the one that counts syllables.))

Restoring the bombed library.

"The crown falls from the monarch's head and splatters, as though it were nothing but gold and silver ink" —@ctrlcreep.bsky.social

Refurbish.

( via / via )

"No living American historian is as prolific as Blake Whiting."

"You could feel the early tremors, smell the sulfur billowing up the brimstone. An irrevocable fissure had formed in all areas where souls are entwined—in the covenant between state and subject, student and teacher, employer and employee, father and son. When such a pact is broken, when the individual no longer sees his own lot as indistinguishable from his brother’s, the mouth of hell is now truly yawning." —Eponynonymous via

Tundra.

“Full Moon

My bands of silk and miniver
Momently grew heavier;
The black gauze was beggarly thin;
The ermine muffled mouth and chin;
I could not suck the moonlight in.

Harlequin in lozenges
Of love and hate, I walked in these
Striped and ragged rigmaroles;
Along the pavement my footsoles
Trod warily on living coals.

Shouldering the thoughts I loathed,
In their corrupt disguises clothed,
Morality I could not tear
From my ribs, to leave them bare
Ivory in silver air.

There I walked, and there I raged;
The spiritual savage caged
Within my skeleton, raged afresh
To feel, behind a carnal mesh,
The clean bones crying in the flesh.”

—Elinor Wylie

The Trinity of Chaos.

( me / via )

Jason Limon's paintings blend early 20th-century packaging design with nostalgia and vintage aesthetics.

"Tear Me a River”

Prepare thy shadowy car
Prepare thy shadowy car
For tomorrow a rebus
For tomorrow a rebus
Thy shadowy rebus tomorrow
Prepare for a car.

My fardels outrun the thieves
My fardels outrun the thieves
Echoing to the battle’s roar
Echoing to the battle’s roar
Thieves outrun the battle’s fardels
The roar to my echoing.

Fardels for my car a rebus
To outrun the battle’s tomorrow;
The echoing roar
Prepare thy shadowy thieves.

(2004)

Starter pack.

"Another spoke of Chahiz of Basra, who said that the Koran is a substance which may take the form of a man or an animal..." --Borges, "Averroes' Search" (tr James Irby)

Global Grey Books.

( via / via )

Transition.

"You absolutely SHOULD NOT go around telling people that data centers are full of gold, silver, palladium, copper, and that the data centers are almost entirely unstaffed."
—@voxsocialism.bsky.social

"I conceived of a verbal music ringing through time, and the idea of a translation in the form of a historical, or diachronic, sound-collage started to take hold."

      "danger man"

ghostly rain · in the half dark
      whisper shore
   countable stars
subject to split · falling old paperback
in the half dark · ghostly rain

Army of the Apocalypse.

( me / via )

Cross Road Blues.

"Stalag 47"

Siphoning sores, newsreels
Sunday’s waste of racetracks

Are we there yet, oarlock
Ogpu with dog collar

Voice in my head hastens
To heckle staid radon

My fingers fly broadcast

Fantaisie Espagnole.

If textures are a world, those textures in motion are a story.

"Outside of the exceptions mentioned above, science fiction is written by empty people who have failed as human beings."

( via/ via )

"There are two named individuals known to live at the North Pole."

"Wrocław reminded me of Tel Aviv. This strange playground where you can smoke weed on the beach and eat interesting things for brunch, just up the coast from Gaza, the world's largest prison camp, one of the most impoverished places on the planet, where a few of the people who used to live in Tel Aviv before the street art and the clubbing now drink polluted water, inside a cage, under a rain of Israeli bombs." —Ssam Kriss via

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

      "data center"

1.
quibble-strewn disquiet
querulous slate hairball
      not yet wrecked
   intricate rote
build nothing · on this tide plain

show-through slashing threadbright
thole what is dole-silver
      rant burble
   boulder roll
skyey pinball · passage vouchsafed

jaunty enough Jehu
of gerbil-dug bughouse
      windshield caught
   pollen cargo
wipes smeary · with thin turmoil

rickety whorl reeling
rooky ukulele
      downside copped
   to dust dungeons
readier spewed · than spun as castles

2.
Rue Morgue sans rigor
riffles the thrist pustules
      polychrome
   across chasms
Radiohead · harsh in the prenoon

wanderer of windings
awash in soot footballs
      Gumby-stoned
   stupors recalled
but not the music · that would make them

we build even bolder
burst through skies of erstwhile
      turquoise blank
   blurted like death
& the parking stillness · stabs with consequence

if they sent armed saltines
to assail our fireplace
      foul honor
   in the airt bled
weaving fables · like worn out pennies

scarce legible, lessons
in losing face gracefully
      constellations
   to be renamed:
the Jackal, the Jester · the Jewel-Encrusted

Death Cults.

( via / me )

Greensleeves.

"eat otherwise for a week"

mote-strafed road to Stratford
stray alarm ping signalled
in the mere joust-music
lament pencil crossed-off
mask faded furioso
enterprising gambit
gamut of thistles

"Yet it was not only the liminal visuals of the PBS rendition that unsettled; the thematic strangeness of Bierce’s story felt all the more acute against the banal daytime backdrop of McHale’s Navy or I Dream of Jeannie reruns cycling on syndicated networks."

"One must imagine Sisyphus on Notes" —@rmhaines

The Unwritten Room.

( via / via )

Escape.

It's always been my contention that the first Godzilla was a film noir.

Stepping Stone.

turquoise glance unglisters
& glaive without wavelengths
blame Elfwisk for ermine
allotropes that dally
& my own chin choices
chiselling through ruin
drapes slide to, slippery,
upon slag-heap wagons
with grinding gears trending
& gusts cling-fingered

Computer Nr 3.

( me / via )

"Writing bravely means something different today."

"The Gift

I speak from the deep end of night.
Of end of darkness I speak.
I speak of deep night ending.

O kind friend, if you visit my house,
bring me a lamp, cut me a window,
so I can gaze at the swarming alley of the fortunate."

—Forugh Farrokhzad (tr Sholeh Wolpé) via

"Kramer’s readers didn’t need the Malleus to be true. They needed it to give their fear a name, and a method.
So do these boys."

"I see countless think pieces about support, access, inclusion, persistence, belonging, and student success. I see almost nothing about purchase memory, product comparison, and seller accountability, even though parents who went to college have a lot to say about how the product has gotten so bad that 'navigation' through bureaucratic mazes and required apps is the rule, not the exception." —Hollis Robbins via

"For the first two years, they didn’t have an office."

( via / oil painting by me )

Wd like to think i’m “batman chess” but that’s not for me to say.

"the funniest thing about dating a (former) street dude is that whenever I’m annoyed about something, his first response is 'you want me to go "talk" to them?' and like I love the energy honey but that’s not how we get that editor to email me back" —@kimkelly.bsky.social

Boots on the Ground.

"Aspects of Robinson

Robinson at cards at the Algonquin; a thin
Blue light comes down once more outside the blinds.
Gray men in overcoats are ghosts blown past the door.
The taxis streak the avenues with yellow, orange, and red.
This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson.

Robinson on a roof above the Heights; the boats
Mourn like the lost. Water is slate, far down.
Through sounds of ice cubes dropped in glass, an osteopath,
Dressed for the links, describes an old Intourist tour.
—Here’s where old Gibbons jumped from, Robinson.

Robinson walking in the Park, admiring the elephant.
Robinson buying the Tribune, Robinson buying the Times. Robinson
Saying, 'Hello. Yes, this is Robinson. Sunday
At five? I’d love to. Pretty well. And you?'
Robinson alone at Longchamps, staring at the wall.

Robinson afraid, drunk, sobbing Robinson
In bed with a Mrs. Morse. Robinson at home;
Decisions: Toynbee or luminol? Where the sun
Shines, Robinson in flowered trunks, eyes toward
The breakers. Where the night ends, Robinson in East Side bars.

Robinson in Glen plaid jacket, Scotch-grain shoes,
Black four-in-hand and oxford button-down,
The jeweled and silent watch that winds itself, the brief-
Case, covert topcoat, clothes for spring, all covering
His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf."

—Weldon Kees

Tom Tomorrow may have just invented the next subway surfing.

( via / via )

Boist'rous bistro.

"exquisite class weaponry"

   flickering
of embers flounce
   glum moon of
Galileo
   two rabbits
romping across
   daily loop
my lit-up car

   celadon
& glaucous dirge
   leitkegels
for the rat king
   yellow blue
sparkles yawing
   & April
like orc diamonds

"Indeed, if anything, collections of verse on a coherent theme, like the books of the love elegists and their many Renaissance imitators, seem to have actively avoided sequences of poems of exactly the same length.."

"Dizzy, overexposed, he feels very much like the cockroach from that old Porrain play, who wakes in horror to find itself a man." —The Works of Vermin

& we poets think we got troubles.

( me / via )

Midwestern Death Trip.

Social media are like having Edward-Scissorhands; it's hard to do anything precise or tender with them.

Land of Nobody.

"slop worship service"

rubble-love in spades, spitball
ornament spared, sharing
perigee roughshod Mackintosh

arrow of toxic laughter
arrow of mocking slaughter

Ruins.

( via / via )

I think I remember this moreland.

"Another sonnet on sonnets"

Starless & indefatigable page,
Pyramid ascends in pristine silt.
Torrents of bullying, havoc, crazy-quilt
Epistemology take turns to wage
Punishment on one liquescent sage
And all his dire attempts to stave off wilt.
This art, of building half & half unbuilt,
Scurries through stupid climes & nasty cage
But somehow thwarts their mischief.
                        Let brisk bebop
Play, though gas is high & bridge trolls stubborn;
Senioritis foams in the flask of junior
Scribblers. It’s lit. It’s jingly & it’s ancient
Foolishness, on squares imbued with mollusk
Amethyst, if you can frame an edict.

Nets to catch the wind.

In my next life i want to read Russian novelists in Japanese.

"The gothic is built on the premise that the house is lying to you, that the respectable surface is a carapace, and behind it is something monstrous."

( via / via )

A deep consolation.

"BREAKING: A jury has found Live Nation and Ticketmaster to be an illegal monopoly that overcharges fans.

After the federal government settled the case, 34 states kept pursuing the giant ticket and concert company.

Now, the states have won." —@moreperfectunion.bsky.social via @chandra.blacksky.app

Akhmatova on Youtube.

cruelty's sneer in stone
already aims to fall.
while yet he wields control,
that place prepares the Eschaton.

in darkness we pretend.
all for a winning game,
noise as the smile turns grim;
tinsel-scrolloped & sanguine-rained.

nothing will be learned.
though lessons plainly tell,
dissolves our last real pearl
& drunkenness creeps back to bed.

"It was not merely a way to identify someone, but a necessary condition for continued existence after death."

( via / me )

Pietà.

"CLERIHEW"

Stephen Miller
is still a killer.
Though he doesn't stand at Pilate's sink,
his puppetry is broadcast stink.

"Querying is like alcoholic cirrhosis—suicide, but without the redeeming traits of enthusiasm or speed."

"I, too, had climbed to a dangerous height, with my face to the breeze, and felt magically alone of my kind." —Michael Chabon via

"I read to feel truths cupped in my palms, passed to us ragged and broken by our bleeding predecessors."

( me / via )

"As soon as you put language into a dance, it can become bogged down by interpretation of words. Then it becomes like watching mimes on stage, which can be painful."

"this website is a screwball comedy inside a black hole" —@oldoldoldoldnew

"This move toward the sources—ad fontes—is a practice. It’s a way of doing something, not a way of identifying yourself."

"Strike

No construction workers today. The rain
has no other place to be.
It falls continuously,
filling gutters with leaf stew.
No drills, no rivets, no gladiola
sparks springing from welder’s tools.
Steel girders blush rust,
bulldozers glazed like some giant’s
knocked out, rotten tooth. No
construction workers, unless you count
these yellow ducks circling the pool
where the foundation will be laid.
The moment they’ve built won’t exist tomorrow.
They form a line when I give them bread as pay."

—Todd Dillard via

"The Baptists liked the idea of projecting the Bible onto cinema screens, but they were offended by the title Wood had originally selected for the film. So Grave Robbers From Outer Space became Plan 9 From Outer Space."

( via / via )

"If you take Joyce in small doses, say a page at a time, and read him aloud, at least two things are apt to happen. First, the page will disclose a musical value, apart from the meaning of the words. Second, the words themselves begin to call forth in you dozens of confused, vague impressions, associations, memories. This sensation is inchoate and, I feel, meaningless, but it’s interesting.."

"My sister’s love is on yonder side.
The river is between our bodies.
The waters are mighty at [flood],
A crocodile waits in the shallows.
I enter the water and brave the waves,
My heart is strong on the deep;
The crocodile seems like a mouse to me.
The flood as land to my feet.
It is her love that gives me strength,
It makes a water-spell for me;
I gaze at my heart’s desire.
As she stands facing me!
My sister has come, my heart exults,
My arms spread out to embrace her;
My heart bounds in its place.
Like the red fish in its pond.
O night, be mine forever,
Now that my queen has come!"

Translation by Miriam Lichtheim via

"So hydrogen jukebox is murderous innocence."

"Thinking of that time Wendell Berry was invited to give a keynote lecture at a conference on hunger. He looked around at the audience & remarked (I'm paraphrasing here): 'I see a lot of well-fed people.' " —@the-big-quiet.bsky.social

"The loneliness thing is overdone. It formulates something you don’t want formulated."

( via / via )

Unseen jet fading.

"Of course Henry James had talent, but he makes one work too hard for such a small result."
—@ivycomptonburnett.bsky.social

He thanks the kitten.

"Reconciliation

If you piss off a crow—even accidentally—
maybe throw a pinecone in its direction
while scaring a squirrel from the bird feeder,

I’m told it will remember your face
and its grievance;
it will assemble friends

and instruct them in your wrongs.
Together as a mob, they will
berate and scold you, dive

bomb and follow you. They will
remember it next week,
next month, next year,

maybe even for the next ten years.
But if you are nice to a crow,
leave it a peanut, say,

or just greet it in a friendly tone, it will
hold your gaze to judge
your intent, then might come

closer, might even talk back,
converse about the day.
If you make such kindness a practice,

gifts could appear:
a screw, a piece of broken glass,
a paper clip or round stone,

or even something that you lost,
you had no idea where, and thought
you’d never get back again."

—Suzanne Matson in Tar River Poetry

We Speak in Kazoo.

( via )

Mimetic desire.

   unseen jet fading
not so, my suburban dread
   the car, shabby, waits

as if yesterday's world left
just this façade & none else

The Yellow Scale.

"...one thing that’s obvious when you’ve done a lot of this kind of work is that the poems you see most often — the ones people bothered to write down or pass on most frequently — are not necessarily the ones you find in anthologies today." —Victoria Moul via

A Schema for Artorius.

( via / oil painting by me )

Be the change you want to see in the world.

“You feel depressed and crazy because in every historical human culture known to anthropology, people sang together, danced together, and ate food together—and you don’t sing, you don’t dance, and you eat alone in the dark.

You are a singing ape, and you are meant to know fifty dances by heart, which hilltops are sacred, and the names of every plant it is possible to eat.”

— Jay LeSoleil via @panagiotopoulouolga

Anastomosing.

clogged drain · dismal clacking
will not pass · will not ever pass
quartet of Yorkies · yarrow shaken
anastomosing thoughtlets · no therapy
   in the Black Iron Prison
life & decay of smells

"The true and infallible genius of prophetic skill."