( via / via )

Only an amateur believes in the magical efficacy of procedures.

"But what struck me in that moment was that the news had to blur the words the President used."

The Howling Spark.

( me / via )

The pleasure junks of destruction.

"OF SWORD AND SORCERY (Redivider)

Hero, deal one insight here:
Make swords quicken.
Trust tomes’ words.
Cast lessons,
to ward
the mage’s wand....
Eras lance sand, drag on.
Soft
wines
talk
in golden
trances
tonight.

He rode alone.
In sight,
he remakes words....
'Quick, entrust to me swords, castles, sons!'
Toward them,
ages wander,
as lances and dragons of twine
stalking old entrances
to night."

—Anthony Etherin

"The elevated language we associate with him is more an artifact of stuffy translation than a feature of the poems themselves."

"The deleterious effects of not having a hobby are becoming a defining point in this cultural moment—and who is poised to help? That’s right: the autistics. Job fair day where we all set up tables explaining our deep dives and give people a hand out, a path back to society."
—@saramchenry.bsky.social

Rabbit contemplates eternity on a quiet morning.

( via / via )

The Party of the Underdog.

"But most people who walk through campus have no idea that its buildings are just as decorative and fundamentally a work of fantasy as those in Disneyland." —Freddie DeBoer via

"I’ve been reading the poems of Borges, and it strikes me that he is a marvelously kindred spirit to that Cubano-French jewel of the Parnassians, José Maria de Heredia."

   spray thrown up glitters
in the early morning sun
   my jacket buttoned

new photos of the whole Earth
not even explosions show

Fashion in sci-fi settings.

( via / via )

"It is almost dawn in Tehran. So far, no air raid."

"the call of the loon"

war news, things they'll weasel
out of wording, birdlime
for a storm. black stirrup
& starburst eyeball vibeworm
as you sneeze blaze-snorkels

empty micowave running

One of you will betray me.

" 'Help!' cried Toad. 'My best friend is trying to kill me!'

'I’m only getting you ready for winter,' said Frog."

—@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

"A clear eye perceives the gap between the micropolitics of recognition and the macropolitics of annihilation. The demand for a new politics begins precisely here: in the refusal to let the exhausted signifiers of the old order survive the collapse that has unmasked them."

( via / via )

The Void.

"The future. I am afraid we all want it too quickly. As if the whole of mankind, from the Ancient Romans to the Babylonians, from the pharaohs to the here and now, are all possessed, lined up and in synchronized formation are marching steadily to their futuristic demise. We have become a robotic death march to an illusion. We never needed to fear them, we ought to have feared becoming them. And with all our toys, all the accessories of the present day, we are still locked inside the cave, shouting at the wall, mystified with fire, afraid of the dark, curious about our celestial company, and still sketching out brute portraits on the cave wall with blackberry ink and formulating our symbols inside tribes of no escape." —Judson Stacy Vereen via

The new gnosis.

"doctor death"

festooned void, matutinal
brinksmanship. green spoon warding
Preoria in the ire harvest

festooned void, pulling down
ornaments i put up Saturday

"Over the next decade, Ruth Coker Burks cared for more than 1,000 people dying of AIDS."

( me / via )

Simulation of Seattle.

"Brod und Wein 7.

But Friend, we have come too late. That yes, the Gods do live
But up above our heads, in some other world;
They endlessly work on, and seem to pay little heed,
Whether we live or die; so much they spare us, the Heavenly Ones.
For our frail vessel is not always able to hold them fast forever;
Only sometimes can man bear divine fullness.
A dream of them so then drives this life. Wandering,
Helps—like sleep—and necessity and night strengthen,
Until the heroes are grown enough in the bronze cradle,
With hearts as strong, in their nature, alike to the Heavenly Gods;
Thundering they roar awake. Yet often it seems to me,
It is better to stay sleeping than to exist so without companions.
How to wait, and what to do in the meantime and what to say--
I don’t know. And what are poets for in such a meagre time?
But they are, you say, like the Wine-God’s holy priests,
Who move from land to land in the sacred night."

—Hölderlin tr A.V. Marraccini via

It's Jesus who is wrong.

"The story our grandchildren, if any, will tell about the second and third decades of this new century is very much one of the rejection of a kinder, wiser America opening up to a post-Cold War planet, just as little Vlad’s grandkids will write of his sad attempts to reconstruct Ye Olde Soviet Union, nostalgia flecked with bombs and drone warfare." —Ron Silliman via

Interpretive.

( via / oil painting by me )

Giant stump.

"It would be nice / to interfere with the accuracy of the world."
- Lisa Robertson, Palinode via @jacobwren.bsky.social

"I’d taken an inexplicable fancy to Samuel Johnson and James Boswell several years back. They are Frog and Toad for the adult female anglophile."

raj piranhamasia
rhost turpitude Britbox
tall blonde roast attending
teakwood sequence scatterlings
sugar on their meat, sugar on their veg'tables

Dance for Uneven Ground.

( via / me)

Tamebsz.

wrest duck-rabbit Easter
routine death mooted

bright Sunday, brindled fortunes
abrupt end to pinwheels

look! it's a bird laden
lethally, bound for teeth-testing

A sandwich for dinner.

Why this is class war; nor are you out of it.

Schooldays of Isidou Ducasse.

( via / via )

"I came back from the year 3056 to witness the birth of our music."

"Japan just unveiled a drone made entirely of cardboard." —@kyleruggles.bsky.social via

Mother of All Trolls.

“Unregarding

Put by thy days like withered flowers
In twilight hidden away:
Memory shall upbuild thee bowers
Sweeter than they.

Hoard not from swiftness of thy stream
The shallowest cruse of tears:
Pools still as heaven shall lovelier dream
In future years.

Squander thy love as she that flings
Her soul away on night;
Lovely are love’s far echoings,
Height unto height.

O, make no compact with the sun,
No compact with the moon!
Night falls full-cloaked, and light is gone
Sudden and soon.”

—Walter de la Mare

Trump Library 2030.

( via/ me )

The Basilica Cistern in Istanbul.

"To Emily Dickinson

You who desired so much–in vain to ask—
Yet fed you hunger like an endless task,
Dared dignify the labor, bless the quest—
Achieved that stillness ultimately best,

Being, of all, least sought for: Emily, hear!
O sweet, dead Silencer, most suddenly clear
When singing that Eternity possessed
And plundered momently in every breast;

—Truly no flower yet withers in your hand.
The harvest you descried and understand
Needs more than wit to gather, love to bind.
Some reconcilement of remotest mind—

Leaves Ormus rubyless, and Ophir chill.
Else tears heap all within one clay-cold hill."

—Hart Crane

["Ormus" = Kingdom of Hormuz]

Me forcing my friends to listen to my special interests.

“Howsomever, that don’t argufy in reverence of his being in a hurry; and a man may be sometimes a little too judgmatical in his conjectures.” —Peregrine Pickle

3 years ago, near Pleaantville.

( via / via )

It's tempting to use the analogy of rats.

"Author William Peter Blatty once won $10,000 on You Bet Your Life. When Groucho Marx asked what he planned to do with the money, he said he planned to take some time off to work on a novel. The result was The Exorcist (1973)." —@batboy222.bsky.social

"Then and there, I knew that color would haunt me forever.."

      "THE CRUCIFIXION

   And the centurion who stood by said:
   Truly this was a son of God.

Not long ago but everywhere I go
   There is a hill and a black windy sky.
Portent of hill, sky, day's eclipse I know:
   Hill, sky, the shuddering darkness, these am I.

The dying at His right hand, at His left
   I am—the thief redeemed and the lost thief;
I am the careless folk; I those bereft,
   The Well-Belov'd, the women bowed in grief.

The gathering Presence that in terror cried,
   In earth's shock, in the Temple's veil rent through,
I; and a watcher, ignorant, curious-eyed,
   I the centurion who heard and knew."

—Adelaide Crapsey

The problem with social media.

( via / via )

Pycnogonid.

“For Harvest

The year turns to its rest.
Up from the earth, the fields, the early-fallen dew,
Moves the large star at evening, Arcturus low with autumn,
And summer calls in her many voices upon the frost.
I who have not seen for weeping
The plum ripen and fall, or the yellowing sheaf,
Am not unmindful now of the season that came and went,
The hours that told off freshness,
The bud and the rich leaf.
Though I turned aside before the summer
And weathered but a season of the mind,
Let me sit among you when the husk is stripped,
Let me tell by the bright grain,
Those labours in an acre of cloud and the reap of the wind.”

—Léonie Adams

"Portraying Iran as a threat is neither consistent with historical reality nor with present-day observable facts. Such a perception is the product of political and economic whims of the powerful... if a threat does not exist, it is invented."

"It's just not plausible that someone is teleporting into a waffle house because waffle houses are anchored sites of hyperreality. I don't think tarot even works in them. If he was claiming that he spatially displaced into a denny's that'd be worth investigating" —@brunodias.bsky.social

"The dream of progress, like the dream of God from which it sprang, hangs over us like an old trauma: and, at times, when we see a hand raised in the corner of our eye, we flinch."

( via / via )

"How should an old man live his days if not in dreaming of his well-spent past? In that, at all events, there is no agitating warmth, only pale winter sunshine. The shell can withstand the gentle beating of the dynamos of memory. The present he should distrust; the future shun."

“But why do I talk of rascality? folly, folly is the scourge of life! Give me a scoundrel (so he be a sensible one), and I will put him in my heart of hearts; but a fool is more mischievous than famine, pestilence, and war.” –Peregrine Pickle

Doing the Great Loop on a jet ski.

Room Full of Light

Room full of light, emptying.
Me here, listening to a whalesong snatch
over the traffic, and then more music.

I could fall asleep by this window
wondering about the whales
and how they came to be on my radio just now.

Asleep in the sunlight–to wake in darkness.
It wouldn’t be hard at all.
A strange destiny like the recorded voice

of one sad whale stolen and smuggled into the city,
where it became, with a light enough room,
one of many recognitions.

(from Raps Clack Calcspar, 1984)

"Despite the name, sextrance has nothing to do with sex or sexuality."

( me / via )

On hybrids in music.

"death & transfiguration of america"

fighter down · desert rubble
      flick doubloon
   in the cruel flow
sonic crackle · sends its regards
sleepwalkers zigzag · in an empty field

Ratmobiles.

“[T]he most novel threat of our time might not be any particular piece of technology, but the widespread acceptance of the ideology of information.“

Lowry Pressly, The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life via @patrickjordananderson

"Just before Christmas, he posted the world’s first web page on a CERN server. A year passed before people outside the lab noticed his invention."

( via / via )

St. John’s in Annapolis just took a picture of their reading list and countless students have made their college decision because of it.

“Nevertheless, he still tarried about the skirts of Parnassus, translating some of the classics, and writing miscellanies; and, by dint of an invincible assurance, supercilious insolence, the most undaunted virulence of tongue, and some knowledge of life, he made shift to acquire and maintain the character of a man of learning and wit, in the opinion of people who had neither; that is, thirty-nine in forty of those with whom he associated himself.” –Peregrine Pickle

Irons's Eliot.

"dark clouds above Osage Plaza"

Innsmouth amsace turgid
Adderol-whirred padlock
repair where the whorl slows
Pyongyang playlist waystar
blockadefest & blitzkrieg
oblate spheroid meerkat

Liquid Sky soundtrack.

( via / me )

Plutocracy.

      "ontology"

deep charcoal · chiseled lurch
      smoke over
   urn headcarry
king non compos · court obsequious
burning nostalgia · stilbs rationed
      yet the song
   assumes airspace
wispily wanders · wards of deep charcoal

"Bergson begins not with equations but with experience: time as durée, indivisible, interpenetrating, a melody rather than a metronome. To spatialize it—slice it into instants, align it like markers along a track—is already to betray it."

“He thought the poets of the age were jealous of his genius, and strove to crush it accordingly, while the rest of mankind wanted taste sufficient to discern it.” –Peregrine Pickle

"I didn’t know classical music could sound this subversive and self-aware, so badass and cool."

( via / me )

No Miracles Today.

"Somehow depressing to picture the astronauts checking their Outlook accounts in space"
—@rmhaines

Songs of a Dead Dreamer.

"Rein a zebra.
Career a car.
Be zanier."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Rolling abstract landscape. (platform warning: twxttxr)

( via/ via )

"What language is this..."

"Purple Rain

Lord, a sunbeam simply drops
And like a note, implies such chords
But when that spotlight falls on me
I flinch at those assembled shards

The spotlight blinks; and as the graphite
Clouds read out a smeared name
I close my eyes—and almost hear
A tapestry of hanging veins

Fairweather fawn, I ran from night
By darting for the darkest hole
And when you drove the ploughshare past
My turning tail exposed a heel

For all I know, the river of time
Was never meant to run that way
And upstream-bound, I chase your cutting
Touch—with no idea why

Purple rain, purple rain
The color of celestial blood
Purple rain, purple rain
Finish this transfusion, Lord"

—@huckastley

"We'll take it from here."

"quackmire" —@geofhuth.bsky.social

Cecropia moth.

( via / via )

The great Wolverton, who was Dali among us & hardly anyone knew it.

“The most tragic form of loss isn’t the loss of security; it’s the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.”
- Ernst Bloch via @jacobwren.bsky.social

A Disappearance.

"death, physical abuse, injury"

hypertalion old news
have we always yet
which deaths to scrutinize
hypertalion old news

Cassandra on the nose
in the smart food riot
hypertalion old news
have we always yet

"While Trump was performing his humiliation routine in Miami, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Defence was signing a landmark defence memorandum with Ukraine — an integrated air defence pact covering drone warfare, electronic jamming, anti-aircraft systems, and AI-driven aerial threat detection."

( me / via )

Scrolled the launch back.

1.
Fuehrerbunker fakir
fast tracking the knackwurst
Cotofenesti helmet
harms the hands that command it
buried in the Fuehrerbunker

2.
kurgan, skugry skyhole

& if scowl fills Mousethirl?
pale cerulean polecat
reports flat battlements
gas pumps empty—gurgling—
& gaze crazed on screenswirl
my careful small kylix
smashed, caught in the fascist fray

3.
the stench of these days

Fruit Gathering.

"One of the crushing effects of endless colonization by the wearers of the mask has been a widespread adoption of a dualistic worldview." —@Gnostic Pulp via

Concerto for Piano and Woodwind Quintet.

( via / via )

They won the propaganda war.

"Americans are intent on going back to the moon like a couple with problems thinks having a baby will fix things" —@neutral.zone

"By putting improvised poetry onscreen and allowing us to see an awkward kid reluctantly spit out a line, Hawke gave it a reality that my cohort didn’t get from, say, reading the Beats."

"L’invetriata

The stained glass window
The smoky summer evening
From the high glass window it sheds light into the shadows
And it leaves a burning seal in my heart,
But who has (a lamp lights up on the terrace over the river) who has
At the Madonnina del Ponte who lit the lamp?

- there is
There's a rotting smell in the room: it's there
In the room a languishing red sore.

The stars are mother-of-pearl buttons and in the evening she dresses in velvet:
And the fatuous evening trembles: the evening is fatuous and it flickers but it is there
In the middle of the evening there is,
Always a languishing red sore."

—Dino Campana (tr Charles Wright?) via--possibly garbled--

"keen winds/ from Waka Bay cut deep..."

( via / via )

Better to Die in Iran.

"Ballad of the Trees and the Master

Into the woods my Master went,
   Clean forspent, forspent.
Into the woods my Master came,
   Forspent with love and shame.
But the olives they were not blind to Him,
The little gray leaves were kind to Him:
The thorn-tree had a mind to Him
   When into the woods He came.

Out of the woods my Master went,
   And He was well content.
Out of the woods my Master came,
   Content with death and shame.
When Death and Shame would woo Him last,
From under the trees they drew Him last:
’Twas on a tree they slew Him — last
When out of the woods He came."

—Sidney Lanier via via @isabelchenot

Mother with two Children.

"I asked A.I. to complete my novel using my own writing style and it did my laundry, went shopping, cleaned the kitchen and spent the rest of the day dicking around online." —@thewritertype.bsky.social

He is Not Worth This, America.

( me / via )

Ad Infinitum.

"I don’t think it’s really controversial to say that the average highly-fêted poetry collection is now much more shallowly rooted in the literary culture than used to be the case..." —Victoria Moul via

April Morning, Wet Pavement.

   "All All #72

Citizen is a term for the count.

Human beings just being don’t count

Afternoons are gone. What is a nap?

I ready myself to make music,

but I know it’s already a war.

I thought songs of peace were worth a life.

My life is needed in the deep ranks.

We’ve grown to knowing how much terror

is too much terror. We’re way past it."

—Darren C Demaree via

"Trump is building a wall around the United States. Not a physical wall — an isolation wall."

( via / me )

I hope.

"elegy for Tilly Norwood"

another moon jaunt · just launched—
      actresses
   generated
by computers seem · too creepy to sell;
i sent off a book · i know won't bolster
       anyone's
   portfolio
by the pure glare · of a Pink Moon
O Tilly · you will never emote about

Now is the time to get into CDs.

"The worst form of colonization may, in fact, be the colonization of the mind."
—@zeeshanpathan.bsky.social

Observational Findings. At his store.

( via / via )

"Finally, on January 9th, at 2 o'clock in the morning, Hudson brought out a bottle of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, 1949, and they drank to the overthrow of the law of parity."

"Polytropos isn't necessarily positive, at least in later uses." —Emily Wilson via

Not flat.

"Maundy Thursday (from the Ukrainian of Mykola Zerov)

Flames and warm smoke. A song of hopeless fate
and longing echoes down from the high choirs.
Surrounding us are guards and crucifiers,
the Great Sanhedrin, Caesar’s magistrate.

This is our destiny, its pattern dark and dire.
It is for us the rooster crows in warning,
for us the fires in the yard are burning,
the servants sing now in the bishop’s choir.

All those grim omens, all the Gospel stories
sound to our ears like subtle allegories
for what we see: our low dishonest times.

While in the graveyard, in the church—still there—
are children’s voices, candles, tinkling chimes,
and damp stars shining in the dusky air."

—Boris Dralyuk via

The Holy Mountain.