( via / via )

The King Will Come.

"@gallowsfolk: American friends, emotional support Canadian here, how are [you] feeling tonight?

@shawnd202: Like a hostage who's just heard the police helicopters"
—@mouthyrenegade.bsky.social

White Rabbit.

Helvegen II.

( via / via )

"Trumpism is not a protest against how the world works. It is a rejection of the very concept of knowing how the world works."

"...‘Bird On The Wire’ appearing at funerals as a slightly more bookish alternative to Sinatra’s ‘My Way’.."

"English is not an especially good language for daring experiments with form or for pure style. There is a burgheresque stolidity to it. When I think of the lyrical richness and sheer romanticism or mysticism possible in the other languages I know, I am again startled anyone attempts the lyric or visionary mode in English." —Jayaprakash Satyamurthy via

"In a sense we defeated the Confederacy last night. But this time we must get Reconstruction right and not let it get sold out the way it was in 1876-7."

( via / via )

Africa’s most remote village/ Seen here celebrating MAGA’s demise/ Decency Prevails - The world rejoices.

Dear 2040,

If there's anyone still alive in 2040, it will only be because we did more than stand in line to vote on this crisp fall day. It will be because we stood up to monopoly media, tech oligarchs, & all the recrudescent bigotries of the early 21c, & refused to let them set the rules or keep the score. It will be because we individually decided that there was something in life more important than maintaining a cool vibe & flow of toys, endorphins & seamless fantasies. It will be because, after decades of trying to ignore that racket in the background, we chose to take our stand & fight.

(via)

"Can we simply… turn off the overfitting?"

"sonnet using a word by Majmudar"

Birnam Wood is come to Dunsinane,
& soon we'll find his head upon a pole...
or so the morning's ecstasy would hail:
soapbubble made of stone.

Groyperdammerung among the cars
returning to a pumpkin from a coach.
If not the Reflecting Pool, you else must parch
O scarecrow in God-Man clothes.

This long, strange trip or detour cruel
or bed we made ourselves by being dumb
ends in a margent-lit unpadded room
& a dying animal.

Birnam Wood, if we would carry trees
much lighter than our dreams' unceasing buzz.

This is the second new "apocalypse bingo sheet" i've had to make, sheesh.

( via / via )

"We all know what happens if you gaze long into the abyss. Her photographs give me the Void’s perspective on matters."

"lawyer up"

sometimes you must speak
in the language that they know
they won't heed consent
let the sharp subpoenas grow

Nuremberg is far
& the Hague too slow
the Rose Garden razed,
by a late sun's glow

Austin, Texas sounds like an Eastern European city that just overthrew a dictator.

Birnam Wood is come to Dunsinane.

From the Codex Seraphinianus.

( via / via )

"I am hearing that on the deathbed of MAGA, Laura Loomer received the light of Islam and unhesitatingly recited the Shahada."

"But there I have been living ever since." —RP Blackmur via

Great-great-granddaughter.

"snapshot"

a girl drugged & bound
in the rape room—
America

manifold the handlers

1950 Tatra at sunrise.

( via / via )

Battle of Maldon.

"torrents"

the shitbox on the president's back
senses that this ride will soon be done
the froufrou & the spluttering harangues
emptied one last time

Clear.

"It seems like no matter what fucked up, deranged, antisocial things Vollmann might say, the author still concludes that Vollmann is either a blessed angel or just 'a regular guy.' Sometimes he’s somehow both." —Eris and Discordia Review via

Little Things: a Ring.

( via / me )

The die is cast.

"TOAD WILL NOW WALK ON A HIGH WIRE, AND HE WILL NOT FALL DOWN."
—@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

"If it’s a factory,” Patterson tells Kevin Nance of Gulf News, “it’s a factory where everything is hand-tooled."

the dead wizard kept sorcering
crops were blighted
as cobwebs filled his eyeholes

Update from the Parker Solar Probe.

( via / via )

Ceramic animation.

hate is too weak a word
in the verminous darkness

as the robots say
this changes everything

i will accept vict'ry
but i want the game finished

let the winners
be the bartered brides of Epstein

Digging into a dusty old backpack for any leftover blotter.

"On November 1, 2026, the global sea-surface temperature anomaly exceeded 7 standard deviations above the 1982-2011 baseline for the first time, reaching 7.12σ.

In 'normal times' this would be about a 1-in-1,800,000,000,000 event." —Prof. Eliot Jacobson via

"They've convinced us these prisons are fundamentally portals."

( via / oil painting by me )

To his skeleton.

We kill Socrates anew in every generation.

Isn’t that what dreams (& by extension, subconscious-fuelled artworks) are?

"going in circles"

faces that recur
across the timelines
dip & flicker

im Bunker
im Bunker

Church, electricity, sky eye.

( via / via )

Hymnus.

"last & first algorithm"

you—burn
in your own way
golden-leaved pestilence
one light-day from Earth, jumping
bugs dream

"Decades later he admitted the most chilling detail of all: he could no longer remember whether the door had been open or closed when he found it."

"WORD FACT

A 'psithurism' is the sound of a tree’s rustling leaves. It comes from Greek psithurízō (ψιθυρίζω), which means 'I whisper'." —Anthony Etherin

Conceptual art often leaves me cold but this is genius.

( via / via )

The Natural History Museum ha[s] put a T-Rex in a Christmas jumper.

"There was one guy who edited and published War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Fathers and Sons: Mikhail Katkov." —Hyun Woo Kim via

“I Voted” stickers starting to accumulate at the Alex Pretti Memorial in Whittier, Minneapolis.

"Two Graves

Alone in Rome, I watch ash land on my dress.
Charred scraps float by and barely miss my drink.
The scrollwork of smoke rising from the west
bears an acrid stink.

One in shade and one in sun, as I recall.
And each had a friend to keep him company,
buried later – Severn, fearless and faithful,
and wild Trelawny.

Cicadas shook the trees like maracas.
The ring road sang with traffic.
On the enclosure wall, graffiti was
colorful and graphic.

Shelley’s epitaph took the impersonal view.
Keats’s stone was medicinally bitter.
Like crushed cans of Mountain Dew,
the pigeons’ necks glitter.

'The only true protest is beauty', says an ad
on the piazza wall. People stop their cars
to film the smoke, as if it had
style to rival ours.

Orpheus is dead. His music could bewitch
the rocks, the pines, all creatures, even lions.
No, lions are obvious. It’s the ostrich
he sang to. The shy ones."

—Ange Mlinko via

Walinska often paid her doctors' bills with paintings.

( via / me )

A look back at Cluster.

"Buffalo"

1.
the map of the bad place
& the safe route arrived at
poem by poem
discerpted
drawing with the left hand

2.
sound of paper towel tearing
cooling toast
that never popped up
first one nostril
then the other infected
living in the day after tomorrow

reply to a wrangle online
with your pithiest threadkiller

real ghosts haunted by
we write in water
sound of paper towel tearing
in the close dim kitchen

3.
before a mask was anything
bysack from those days
notes only i could figure out
poems in four languages
none of which i know

i did this
to my vocabulary

Monument to the Children Killed by USAID Ending.

"And who is this clown
doffing his mask at the masked threshold"

—Geoffrey Hill via

This Vortex for Awhile.

( via / via )

"Oddly, it takes a good amount of reading literature before a dictionary is at all useful to you."

"Too pompous to think about the ruin value of secrets, weren't you, Albert?" —The Rouse

Pluto, 1977. (Hmmm...)

"Nardo among the Simplifiers"

edged days no shortening
dizzy sunshine & churnwheels
melody thread madlibs
merge oblivious Divshroud
porch pirate of the witchhouse
poured Nardo gray & swaying

CHARLIE KIRK MEETS JESUS CHRIST.

( via / via )

The story of a house. (thread)

"Night in November

In the eleventh month, every hour
is the eleventh hour. Accepting defeat,
leaflorn, the oak trees sway on bony feet.
The last wings out can feel their blood go sour,
the royal jelly curdled, crystalled in the hive.
A terminal diagnosis latches on
to everything aloft, to everything alive
as gauzy opiates mummify the dawn.
There is a gnosis that begins with No
and dead ends always, always in November.
No reassurances, however tender,
that winter winds are ghosts that come and go
can seal the bone twig festering in the cast
or keep this night from feeling like our last."

—Amit Majmudar via

Volupté.

"It’s a song that crashes against the future, calling attention to the limitless possibilities that spread out before them, but also the rising terror that accompanies the responsibility to actually navigate this infinitude of futures." —Oh That Magic Feeling via

And Vates.

( via / via )

Hunting with Your Mom.

"Canadians are watching our elections the way you watch your drunk neighbor attempt to launch fireworks from his garage." —@sundaedivine.lol

Rest in Power.

"EMPTY THEATRE (Anagrammed Lines)

At the empty theatre, I was busy drinking
whiskey by the pint. I made a stranger tut.
He turned away, striking this empty beat —
but I kept rhythm. I was in a tense tragedy,
rethinking ideas better put away; myths
that weary my sun.... I’d kept the rising beat,
by angry muster, and I kept its white heat,
but the needy spirit was taking my heart...."

—Anthony Etherin

"What they all have in common, though, is that they are entirely fake and trying to con me out of money."

( via / via )

Wolf Town.

"recusant"

vile jabberwocky
that never ends with the last word
i will go among rabbits & lawns
& only sing
like they do
in the jaws of a trap

It Won't Take Long.

"You were not here at the beginning. You will not be here at the end." —William S Burroughs

AARON.

( me / via )

Continuous.

Outside the genre it’s not common knowledge that this decade (the 70s) produced not just one great writer—let’s say PKD—but ten or a dozen of the first water, all utterly unique.

Aluminum fountain pen. ($17 on Amazon.)

"interesting times"

tower usually faint
outlined clear today

stand by
for an unfolding

what could i do
with a lifetime of such clarity

call it clarity
not foreknowledge

the sun brought only the light

"Inside, the columns suggest a sacred grove, and the holiness seems older than the faith."

( me / via )

Roofing.

"an experiment in kakistocracy"

grudge miles
ferrying black stars
would you pray down
crossroad sloyd

Lowrider bicycles.

“[The University of Buffalo poetics program] has changed American literature and it should be allowed to continue to do that work,” [Juliana] Spahr wrote. “Someday, someone will write a laudatory history, and if it ends now, that history will have to say who let it end and why.” —via

Better together: tailfins & Brutalism.

( via / me )

Best Gumby screen ever.

"nor is the piano's carnal humming
ironical"

—Debbie: An Epic

Off to Battle.

      "From Far, from Eve

From far, from eve and morning
   And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
   Blew hither: here am I.

Now—for a breath I tarry
   Nor yet disperse apart—
Take my hand quick and tell me,
   What have you in your heart.

Speak now, and I will answer;
   How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind's twelve quarters
   I take my endless way."

—AE Housman

The Black Drama.

( me / via )

Bayeux Wolf.

"Monster Means 'To Reveal'

[After] 'The Laughing Demoness' by Hokusai

The horror lies within these smiling eyes
which glimpse a Nothing deeper than despair.
After despair, it comes as a surprise,
a punchline: that there’s really nothing there.
All is well. Go, stroke your baby’s hair,
then twist the whole head off in laughing rage.
No harm is done. A bird flown from its cage.
Play catch with it, then toss it in the sea.
Or else go out and play the holy sage:
Point to the dumb dead face. You see? You see?"

—Elijah Perseus Blumov

Cherub with an Amethyst.

There’s lots of painters i like for themselves, but Francis Bacon is the only one (—& maybe Goya when he went black) who painted the world i live in.

"Ulalume"—the song.

( me / via [Follow-up.] )

"My wife is currently dressed as Tippi Hedren being attacked by Flock cameras."

"It took me a while to figure this out...It is called a Fecal Management System."
—@ebisback.bsky.social via

The Bagheeta.

"SONNET XVIII: On the Late Massacre in Piemont

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd saints, whose bones
Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold,
Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipp'd stocks and stones;
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese that roll'd
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubl'd to the hills, and they
To Heav'n. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow
O'er all th' Italian fields where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundred-fold, who having learnt thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe."

—John Milton

Penderecki's Devils.

( via / via )

Soviet uniform Halloween.

"the cult where he never died"

tall
blonde roast
in the claw-laden dawn
things the audience
doesn't know
ørlöglauss November
green star's discovery
understood only for the hue

The artist must’ve been into Hilma af Klint.

"Fierce was the wind. Fallen the willow." —Matthew Dickerson via

The ancient church of Kirkmaiden.

( via / via )

A deep dive into Young Frankenstein.

"the yew hedge of the Grosse Fuge" —Sylvia Plath

Worlds of If again.

"elite capture by shoggoth"

painted scary masks but not this street
don't knock
clowns eclipse aboutness of the whale
oil shock
Rorschach, leaves veer brown, unveil
shapes fleet
murmurations wafting in the mind
steer blind

Romanesque bird.

( via / me )

Lament in the Reign of Skordis.

"Dr Stephanie & the Rabbit"

1.
peeling blue dumpster
fun'ral march of the marionettes

a hundred dollars for a stuck key
ascian thinks it's Groundhog day

2.
Götterdämmerungfish
one skeleton registers
another to vote
going as Joan Vollmer
with a cutout of William
drive down Waterview
one meeting one tea

3.
chryelephantine misgivings

Pink Morgan.

"The causal power of the past inexorably rises." —Andreas Malm via

The Wicker Bunny.

( me / via )

"Commencing with architecture, Pound draws a distinction between the ‘medieval clean line’ and what he calls ‘medieval niggle'."

" Frog put the cookies in a box. 'There,' he said. 'Now we will not eat any more cookies.'

'But we can open the box,' said Scorpion.

'That is true,' said Frog."

—@ctrlcreep.bsky.social

Under Mars's moons instead of Earth's.

      "Miasma"

besoke flint brainfuse
brillig's spent tinchel
      could've gone
   to the gray fields
it's all recorded · all caraway

green-star stonebotherer
to stalk among stark angers
      vocal fry
   on the last trump
it's all recorded · all caraway

"The connections to Black Dandyism, Queer Dandyism, and the Post-Aristocratic modes of dandyism coalesce under the idea of occupying space; the middle and lower classes and marginalized groups struggle differently to occupy the stages of broader society."

( via / via )

Voodoo Priestess.

"planet of a green star"

Valley of Death we crossed, or most of us;
now this.
Madmen-run asylum, dirty trick
good luck.

Public was a resource to extract
bucks from.
Now it is a hollow thing & sham
bare plucked.

Waking from a dream of other days
long gone,
breakage & the suffered wrong remain—
fed jaws.

Will we rise to save the wreck they made
or—nod?

Ruins of Reality.

"To latibulate is to find a cosy corner somewhere and hide in it." —Susie Dent via

What is a Poem?