( via / via )

Take my Number.

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

Lego Klimt.

"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.."

( me / via )

Snow-flakes.

"insect carving for dummies"

permanent daylight savings
since nothing's left to save
these underfoot pieces
permanent daylight savings

dare not criticize
hijinks repercussive
permanent daylight savings
—since nothing's left to save

The Hazel Copse.

Typewriters also have their drawbacks. For years i used a vintage one, & when the mouldering old office supply store that was the only place in town that stocked that kind of ribbon closed, i thought i would die.

Overuse.

( via / via )

Empyrean Series.

The one time i was a judge at a poetry slam, i got booed because i only gave 1’s & 2’s (on a scale of 5). Like, poetry isn’t a sliding scale.

Attis in Caledon.

"The Night is Chilly but not Dark

On nights when the moon creeps shrouded up the sky
And hedge and holt lie glimmering ghostly grey,
A voice still whispers in me, far away –
A good night, this, for wiring – and suddenly
There rises from the dead that shadowy hell,
The barbed-wire rasps, uncoiling through my hand,
The flares dance flickering over no-man's-land,
A dull machine-gun raps from La Boisselle.
Then fades the phantom, and once more I know
Our spider-webs of wire are rust by now,
Our battlefields reconquered by the plough,
And hands that worked with mine, dust long ago."

—F L Lucas via

"The scene is not a static allegory but a captured catastrophe."

( oil painting by me / via )

Hospice.

"macarthur spork"

margent pupeo purge
matutinal coolth trolling
pat tsk-tsk
crossing Apollo croonwisp

where this rumble Rorschachs
crazy rain
or drouth till the droogs crisp
zymurgy of zero-sum

drogulus xystering

Oversharecropper.

"Amazing detail I just learned from a discussion of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ student diaries: he once gave up looking at the sky for Lent" —@someflowerssoon

A Joan Mitchell painting was estimated to sell at aution for nearly five times the price of a Jackson Pollock painting.

( via / via )

"I live only on the surface. She descends into profound waters, her darkness obscuring her in the shadows from predators above, her iridescent lightness blending and absorbing her into the ice, the sky and the light to predators below."

I’ve often thought that instead of forcing highschoolers & sophomores to read books that they lack the language expertise to situate, they should instead be given lots of books from the pulp era, which is about as far back as recognizably current english goes & is entirely story-driven.

Crazy Train.

"stop short of the crosswalk"

icebergmask, oorie mortmain
iron logic of maw stodgefest
       kaiju chess
as the overpass · & its orange
   antlers chortle

mackerel sky skulking
escalate vacantcost
       woods shadow
   plans' shudder
pothole counting · piqued by this smooth stretch

Barbara Allen.

( me / via)

"[O]n the first day of ‘class’, they open up the course site in Canvas, or whatever other learning management system is in use. Then, they plug in their favored AI to the site to take the course for them."

"trial & execution of mike johnson"

deeper & deeper · tranche of darkness
bare unburial · bloody tissue spool
mackerel sky · scant shelter
cluttered desk · here where it was written

AI Bots Stole My Music.

"The good host, after a dinner where much rice wine has been served, sees to it that his departing guests wear the same hats in which they came." —@harryskeeler.bsky.social

To the Old Gods.

( via / via )

"The fires were extinguished by morning, and Privoz did what it has done for nearly two hundred years: it resumed trading."

"Toad ran back to Frog.

'Frog,' said Toad, 'this kite will not fly. I give up.' "

—@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Makes me want to pick up a squeegee again.

a Constable sky scowling
homesteaded shelves
time not quite defeated
my curse & my chariot
old songs
still being played on the radio
will not save us
squozen
beneath
this Constable sky

Nowhere Man.

( via / via )

Stavropol.

"1381.

I suppose the time will come
Aid it in the coming
When the Bird will crowd the Tree
And the Bee be booming

I suppose the time will come
Hinder it a little
When the Corn in Silk will dress
And in Chintz the Apple

I believe the Day will be
When the Jay will giggle
At his new white House the Earth
That, too, halt a little—"

—Emily Dickinson

Pixel stovetop.

My inhuman parenting-experiment which i never got to try (no kids): have 7 nannies, one for each day of the week in order, each of whom speaks a different language. The child will grow up octolingual.

The Book of Resonance.

( via / via )

Rondeau of the good old days.

"Writing this kind of document with an uncritical use of constructs like 'superintelligence' and 'alignment' like they’re self-evidently reasonable ontological primitives (like say 'Sun' and 'Moon' for astronomy) rather than deep theological commitments (closer to 'Resurrection' and 'Transubstantiation') is either disingenuousness or an oblivious degree of religiosity." —Venkatesh Rao via

Best Venn diagram.

"Docking at Ezhou in the Evening
(written in the war years)

Through a gap in distant clouds
We see the walls of Hanyang
Like a sail floating
Could reach them in a day

The water is so calm
The merchants spend the daylight dozing
We only know the currents
By the calls of the crew at night

In the Xiang country
My grizzled hair turned to autumn
My homeward heart
On this long journey turns to the moon

Sometime during the war
My old farm and fields were lost
But far, far worse
Is the sound of drums by the river"

—Lu Lun via

Ca'canny.

( via / via )

The Thief of Bagdad (1924).

astir blue star garden
rust viaduct the vista
no-go left turn leagues now
lesson-davening pavement

What the Odyssey actually sounded like.

"I think we are watching confabulation, deliberate lies, and political spin merge into something indistinguishable." —Heather Delaney Reese

The handwritten issue of Keyhole.

( via / via )

"...he wrote a 42-page pronunciation and spelling dictionary for children, Wörterbuch für Volksschulen, published in Vienna in 1926, the only book of his apart from Tractatus that was published in his lifetime. (A first edition of the dictionary sold in 2005 for £75,000.)."

"Isaac Newton’s quote 'if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants' was later commemorated on the £2 coin, meaning that Newton simultaneously coined a phrase and phrased a coin." —@olliebray

The rabbits are still working on it.

"the black book of neville chamberlain"

High John Conqueror
lets stranded cars through
pale cerulean rollups
stopped at a railroad crossing
the drone peers
cannot see my heart

summer's majesty of harm
happens unremarked
bodies ferreted off
before the sun comes up
the drone peers
cannot see my heart

in all ways heretic
as the slow walls make approach
& sing
as you were taught to sing
the drone peers
cannot see my heart

Anastatic Printing.

( via / via )

"It is a feeling of failure, loss and despair which, when pursued to its nadir, can yield new insight, and possible new avenues of exploration or modes of expression."

we have achieved liftoff
in the starry veldt
a box for manticore phlegm
damp cuff
rusted cufflinks
you have to move
the tree

these idiot games
with desp'rate outcomes

"I think of Whitman every day."

"The glittering promises of individual wealth and technologically mediated comfort and pleasure have proved almost irresistible to many human communities, and when they haven’t industrial modernity has very often been forced on recalcitrant communities by violence." —Ian Marcus Corbin via

Hegelian pun in German advert.

( me / via )

Henrietta remembered.

"FRAILTY (Anagrammed Lines)

Language has this frailty:
a hasty sunlight — a fragile,
largely aghast, faith in us...."

—Anthony Etherin

Tornado with a rainbow.

antelucan rain-hour
antlered fistful of mystics
      fin'lly set
   atop Mt Surd
orange saucer · floor that is murder

Very noir alley.

( via / me )

Cross at Stratford.

without music · into mere labyrinth
   the shadow of the words

Champion of the giant anteater.

"What finally re-carved the ground was not a better grade of politician but a broad and sustained external forcing that took a generation to build and a generation to apply – the muckrakers who made the skim visible and then intolerable, Ida Tarbell on Standard Oil, Lincoln Steffens on the shame of the cities, David Graham Phillips on the treason of the Senate, and behind them a mass movement that turned disgust into structural law." —Bob Tow via

Friends of the Library Sale.

( via / via )

Our quarrel don't last for years.

"Just remembering watching Christopher Hitchens on FOX News with my mother right after Jerry Falwell had passed, when he said, 'If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.' " —@rufus-hickok.bsky.social

Swan landing.

Some dry deaths in the panoply of villains,
memes unfurl with July's bad share of parch.
As errands crawl, the Resistance sweeps like pitch

on a chrome shore the Human Centipede garlands.

August with mad cicada insolence beckons
nor are we hardly done with walls of burning,
who count the clouds our foes this fervid inning.
Epic, could clown articulate the circus;

comic, except for barbed wire at the margins...

With less than radar track what's more than missile,
Pilgrim; then pack it into toothsome parcel
till layaway fulfills the cave religion's
interiority of bear-fat pigments—
other dry deaths remain but cursive figments.

Iran is on it.

( via / via )

The Dictators.

"Thirteen Poems from My Southern Garden

6
Seeking a style, culling my phrases,
Grown old carving grubs!
At dawn the moon hangs in my blinds,
A bow of jade.
Can't you see what is going on, year after year,
By the sea of Liao-dong?
Whatever can a writer do
But weep in the autumn wind?"

—Goddesses, Ghosts, and Demons: The Collected Poems of Li He (tr J D Frodsham, 1988)

Ferris wheel in a TV cabinet.

"Flickering in the Pleiades meant trouble on the northern frontier." —Eliot Weinberger via

This tiny blessed sphere.

( via / via )

Buried Between Her Eyes.

"Strip back the rattling chains and the cold spots and what you find, again and again, is someone who wasn’t allowed to speak." —CJ Cooke via

"Taste is making aesthetic choices someone does not want you to make. Everything else is public relations."

"Parallelogrampire"

Pale cerulean this tense July
Fun mortality blossoms;
Riddlethwarts destroy
As debris counts the lessons.
Bicentennicide swift and clean
Mellows in the hell-machine.

No one saw where assassins waltzed;
Outlines stand or they seem to.
Pickpockets say it's all our faults--
Xmas lights on the lean-to.
Bicentennicide's Potemkin vibe,
Hoedown for a toxic tribe.

Fireworks and AI-targeted drones
Dance in the heads of vatniks.
Doctor's verdict spills on stones
Dealwise necromantic,
And manly bicentennicide
Mogs the day the music died.

"I keep a cup I have used for nine years. I have written about it before. But the cup is mine in a way Ryōkan’s bowl was never his. The bowl was held lightly enough to be handed to a stranger. Mine, I would chase down a thief for.

( via / via )

Tricola.

"Requiem for a Staunch Trumpist"

When the tale of all of this is told,
Some were reluctant knaves, and some were bold.

Rainfield and Argument.

"I have come to realize that no matter how badly the algorithms fuck us up, the internet is still the front line of the struggle between the DIY movements surviving from the 20th century and the commercialism of global tech corporations trying to dominate the 21st-century world." —Hana &Co via

A Hinge in History.

( via / me )

"The trouble is that Adams has been using the machine long enough that he feels dependent on it, even if he struggles to get it to work as he wants."

"I used to get quite a lot of these emails and I did indeed take part in book clubs, festivals and TV programmes about books. The difference now is that the clubs, festivals and programmes don’t seem to exist." —Christina Patterson via

Sugar.

      "subvortex"

Nights in July in Texas, never dipping
under eighty, the pool bathwater-warm.
Cicadas all day long thrash raucous hymn
   nastily carping.
July nights, their annulling
      humid clasp
nothing before mooring
   our cloistered drift;
lit windows · that were less views
than unkept promises & now too late—
Texas July trundles into Europe
on Panzer treads; nightmares sponge-envelope
   (cicadas assert)
while here (heavily) · a glow ebbs.

Register.

( via / via )

Hnefatafl. Or. And.

"LA GIOCONDA
Leonardo Da Vinci
The Louvre

Historic, side-long, implicating eyes;
A smile of velvet's lustre on the cheek;
Calm lips the smile leads upward; hand that lies
Glowing and soft, the patience in its rest
Of cruelty that waits and doth not seek
For prey; a dusky forehead and a breast
Where twilight touches ripeness amorously:
Behind her, crystal rocks, a sea and skies
Of evanescent blue on cloud and creek;
Landscape that shines suppressive of its zest
For those vicissitudes by which men die."

—Michael Field in Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890's (1981)

"Been trying to figure out what it reminds me of and it's 'Main Street USA' at Disneyland."

"After this, and despite a long series of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sniping, they ['the Michaels'] converted to Catholicism, going so far in their zeal as to become Dominican tertiaries (lay sisters), though with a special dispensation that allowed them to continue attending the theatre." —David Wheatley via

Glasgow.

( via / via )

Carmel Point.

"My favourite part is a tie between the anecdote about sending postcards from his band’s New York tour to the Irish social welfare office, and his finding out a hallucinated group of pygmies due to a mushroom trip were, in fact, a tour group of dwarves coincidentally visiting the nightclub at the same time (!)." —Sam Enright

"The New Yorker, the prize culture, the MFA system, establishment criticism, the canon, imperial academics — these are not innocent bystanders to the suppression of the core and most vital American literary tradition, the suppressed people’s literary tradition, engaged literary populism."

"Spring View

The country is broken, though hills and rivers remain,
In the city in spring, grass and trees are thick.
Moved by the moment, a flower's splashed with tears,
Mourning parting, a bird startles the heart.
The beacon fires have joined for three months now,
Family letters are worth ten thousand pieces.
I scratch my head, its white hairs growing thinner,
And barely able now to hold a hairpin."

—Du Fu via via

Carolina Rain.

( via / via )

Beyond the Vessel.

"CROW (Palindrome)

Deft,
I saw a crow,
over us,
a sure vow or caw
as it fed."

—Anthony Etherin

Grover Leach.

"I will go to watch the animals, and let
something of their composure slowly glide
into my limbs; will see my own existence
deep in their eyes, which will hold me for a while
and let me go, serenely, without judgment."

—Rilke (tr S Mitchell) via via @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social

"The wildly allegorical, unsolvable ending of The Prisoner...got him out of one phase of his career and into another. It’s a little bit like Lou Reed making Metal Machine Music or Prince becoming The-Artist-Formerly-Known-As..."

( via / via )

More than a Folk Song.

"My dad was a poet so I could never really join in when the other boys would argue about whose dad could beat up the other dads, but I was confident that my dad could make your dad feel seen in ways that would quietly devastate him." —@sjksalisbury.bsky.social

Night piloting.

oomphdip seldom suffered
      both coffees
scary-steep graph our faring
   occult downfall
if you stick to ixodids

overwarm morning
      my old car
most of whose char windows
   open nicely
the parkinglot lurk-fang'd

new summerhat gnomon
      drivethrough line
nestled in a chessgame
   faraway dreich

This fish doesn't swim.

( via / at the grand hotel )

Tagged crab report reward pin.

"CROWS (Anagrammed Lines)

The crows are back at the
weathercock that bears
a hawk.... Both trace secret
arches to the backwater,
to caw at the brash creek."

—Anthony Etherin

"...grad school takes our desire to dedicate our life to some sort of learning, fosters it, demands vows even of a monastic sort, then tells us there is no room at the inn—and, with great cruelty, and not a little bad faith, that it’s our fault.

"...real detonation but false report..." —Finnegans Wake

July Evening.

( via / via )

Eleven Dantes.

I too have always been baffled by this seemingly hardwired feature of our literary culture. I enjoy reading translated works in languages i can't read, like Russian. But i also have explored (to a limited degree) poems in two or three of their original languages & the difference is what i like to call "a cover song versus the original"... Literary culture requires generalizations it 𝑎𝑏𝑠𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑦 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑏𝑎𝑐𝑘 𝑢𝑝, in most cases (unless the critic is someone like George Steiner). The alternative is having the humility to admit most of us aren't qualified to make the kind of sweeping critical judgments we would want to.

Caravans to Empire Algol.

boiling in the tar-pit
em'rald rain
vilipend neon lie
blinds drawn
ritual murder board
half empty

"Everyone talks about our cherry blossoms and sometimes our azaleas and magnolias, but Dos Passos is the first writer I’ve encountered to remark on the crape myrtles."