( via )

The Break.

"Maybe now is one of those times."

"At the time he was writing his Dissertatio, Leibniz was immersed in Polygraphia Nova (1663), a treatise on cryptology by none other than Athanasius Kircher, who proposed polygraphy as ‘all languages reduced to one’ and who, at that very moment, was likely in possession of the Bacon Cipher. If Marci’s letter is to be believed, Kircher was the last known owner of the manuscript before it vanished for centuries, until it was discovered again by Voynich." —Jared Marcel Pollen via

"Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual."

( via / via )

Still Raining in May.

"Because we members of Western society are not socially permitted to express despair in everyday life, we are more often than not forced into a kind of cruel and unsustainable quiescence." —Kate Wagner via

"But most of the actual research for this novel was not ambulatory. I mean, the river is completely gone... So it became more interesting to try to find descriptions of the river in works of literature, written by people who were seeing it, witnessing it, describing it, during the time of its aboveground existence."

"my garden
is wizened now
but soon
it will be plump
and ripe with snow"

—Debbie Strange via

"...the only surviving word of Khazar..."

( via / via )

"In the US, it seemed reversed: religious language was standard, while speaking about social welfare was almost taboo."

      "Cinnamemnon"

It's not yet apogee of the utmost furnace
      & anxious waiting bides
   the landing of the carnal birds.
Nothing in the stars dropped this deep minus
save blind unreasoning greed & hate in harness.
      Fresh parables encroach.
   Few of the righteous peal much starch.
I & other hobbits dread the onus.
   Pale cerulean party clothes,
   concrete ribbons' jagged path
         jingle both
      in Ozymandias jazz.
It's not yet apogee of the utmost furnace.

"Still I trip up, in this poem, over foil, and the oozing oil."

"Accountability is not optional. Accountability is the only vaccine." —I Fucking Love Australia via

"Someone recently asked me about why I call my Substack the Duck-Billed Reader."

( via/ via )

Marshawn testifies.

". . . How short it takes to go, dear, but afterward to come so many weary years - and yet 'tis done as cool as a general trife. Affection is like bread, unnoticed till we starve, and then we dream of it, and sing of it, and paint it, when every urchin in the street has more than he can eat. We turn not older with years, but newer every day." —Emily Dickinson via

Physical.

"GLACIER (Consonant Palindrome)

Our loose, cut ice retains its longing
Lit in a parade, it drowns unaware —
a dot, a drop, until gone, gone...
lost as Antarctica’s lore."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Bad Moon Rising.

( via / via )

"In 1982, horrified by the meanness, tedium and depravity of my existence as I toured the American South playing rock and roll music and going crazy in public, I purchased an abridged copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire..."

"Inwood/ Hampton"

elderberry lemon balm & kaputnik
frenzied witness
badminton gone wrong

paper cup drawback
dramamine whiplash
elderberry lemon balm
& kaputnik frenzied witness

A Thing of Evil.

“Regarding the ‘creative writing’ courses in our colleges, one must add that they tend to destroy the audience of literature. They do so by promoting into writers, and often opinionated writers, the susceptible but uncreative persons who might otherwise be the best readers.”

—Van Wyck Brooks via @robertminto

Just scrollin'.

( via [AI art] / via )

"Q: If Bizarro Fiction was a movie monster, which would it be, and why?
A: Megalon. Because he was a giant cockroach with drills for hands who shot lightning bolts from a horn on his head."

"A Damascus blade gleaming and glancing in the sun was her wit. Her swift poetic rapture was like the long glistening note of a bird one hears in the June woods at high noon, but can never see. Like a magician she caught the shadowy apparitions of her brain and tossed them in startling picturesqueness to her friends, who, charmed with their simplicity and homeliness as well as profundity, fretted that she had so easily made palpable the tantalizing fancies forever eluding their bungling, fettered grasp." —from Emily Dickinson's obituary written by her sister-in-law, Susan via

"Alligator Alcatraz is a stain on our nation and a blight on the Everglades, and I look forward to watching this depraved facility bite the dust."

"one of the things"

familiar pills in
unfamiliar bottles
grid of iconic fruit
gateswept blurs of scurry

unfamiliar bottles
array dim & fatal
of the few shreds of meaning
merles taking from the still one
last of my pills in a paper cup

fusillade ferrying
familiar pills in
reach desired zilchbrim
zeroing out blinkroster

"I had only just heard that Paul Dano and John Malkovich had officially joined the cast as Wyatt Gwyon and Recktall Brown respectively when I discovered that the series had been shelved indefinitely."

( via / via )

A Number of Novels.

“Fata Morgana

A blue-eyed phantom far before
Is laughing, leaping toward the sun:
Like lead I chase it evermore,
I pant and run.

It breaks the sunlight bound on bound:
Goes singing as it leaps along
To sheep-bells with a dreamy sound
A dreamy song.

I laugh, it is so brisk and gay;
It is so far before, I weep:
I hope I shall lie down some day,
Lie down and sleep.”

—Christina Rossetti

Unpublished Didion, on the early Grateful Dead.

“Our students come to us from secondary school having read no works of literature in foreign languages and scarcely any works of literature in their own language. The very years, between twelve and eighteen, when they might be reading rapidly, uncritically, rangingly, happily, thoughtlessly, are somehow dissipated without cumulative force. Those who end their education with secondary school have been cheated altogether of their literary inheritance, from the Bible to Robert Lowell. It is no wonder that they do not love what we love; we as a culture have not taught them to. With a reformed curriculum beginning in preschool, all children would know about the Prodigal Son and the Minotaur; they would know the stories presumed by our literature, as children reading Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare or Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales once knew them. We can surely tell them the tales before they can read Shakespeare or Ovid; there are literary forms appropriate to every age, even the youngest. Nothing is more lonely than to go through life uncompanioned by a sense that others have also gone through it, and have left a record of their experience. Every adult needs to be able to think of Job, or Orpheus, or Circe, or Ruth, or Lear, or Jesus, or the Golden Calf, or the Holy Grail, or Antigone in order to refer private experience to some identifying frame or solacing reflection.”

—Helen Vendler, “Presidential Address 1980 [MLA]” via @themeanderingmiltonist

Take away the whirlwind of hours.

( via / via )

Venice in the Moonlight.

“Yet for all of us there were moments when the game we were all agreeing to play simply could not stand up to events: we would be gripped by feelings of unreality, like nausea. Perhaps this feeling that the ground was dissolving under our feet, was the real enemy…” —Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975)

"...now nothing but a discarnate, burning soul aspiring forever upwards, he recounts how he abandoned his loved ones and responsibilities and lured his men to a watery grave in the pursuit of lands and knowledge forbidden to mortal men..."

“The Closer”

the mists of Acheron intrude
amidst this sunned charivari
and those of us who still have jobs
cling tighter to the pyramid

deraignment from my druidhood
has not released me from the pain
of watching something vaster than
this game of synonyms go crunch

i carve the mists of Acheron
and lurch through squawking pyramids
and darkest in the sunlight solve
enigmas no one else can see

(2009)

"The movement soon began to take on a life of its own through the tourism that arose in connection with the media attention."

( via / via )

Long March 6.

"The Promise"

These make the last few embers of dinosaur sunlight.
This will be a legendary day: we were so free,
so bold, so murderous. Our mayfly-brief
glory will be unsurpassed & the talon
of our joy has marked the spot indelibly.

What is there more to say? We touched the stars
but our hearts were not touched. Our first resort
was annihilation. Waking now, we still won’t label
this fury of a pastime anything but innocence.

What wonder if our trinkets, that litter the earth,
when they work no more, become bleak plethora
of talismans? Holding them now, our karma upon us,
we still want to click on a window & do it over.

(2013)

"And You....?"

" '木漏れ日 komorebi' is a Japanese word for sunlight filtering through the trees, and people often say it is hard to translate. Honestly, I think it is fine as long as the rough feeling gets across. You can see komorebi in any season, but to me it belongs to May. The light gets stronger, pouring down onto the ground through the fresh green leaves." —Real Japanese Aesthetics via ( I know i found a word for this but it'll take some digging to find it--.)

Cyber Tartuffe.

( via / via )

"Although I have covered the works of numerous women writers on this site, the fact was that, prior to 2015, men and their writings accounted for over 75% of my material."

"i have yet to see a single cis person say something about the fact that the government just designated trans people a terrorist group and threatened to kill all of us." —Evelynn via

" Each year is more burdensome than its fellow."

"artisanal drizzle"

when a lowly canal gets
Main Character Energy
the hard parade rustles
with rued fender swelling

i would own that garden
Illig's reft lifetimes
tokonoma Badtz mug
tiny raised train loop

A Description of a Legislative Day.

( via / via )

From Rat Heart Nebula.

      "thirst for the fight"

lookin' like a made man · Rachmaninov portrait
       Topsy's eyes
   culdesac shine
rogue crescent respite
rawn Amontillado

Clair de Lune.

"I wish I didn’t know as much about the end of Reconstruction as I do.

If you understood what is being unleashed now, how it will touch every aspect of our civic life, and how difficult it will be to undo it, you wouldn’t be able to think about anything else."
—@trevondlogan.bsky.social

One of the facts about this film i cannot forget is that Paul Celan translated the text into German when it was made to be shown there. (Wikipedia).

( via / via )

"...many generally well-informed Americans are still startled to learn how badly U.S. life expectancy has lagged behind other advanced nations..."

"One man, seeking to develop steel of a high enough quality to make razor blades that could compete with foreign offerings, sought out an aged former swordsmith in the mountains and became his apprentice. They attempted to mechanise the ancient tatara process of smelting iron ore into tamahagane, jewel-steel. Trial was met with much error, to the point that the old smith swore to the gods that he would disembowel himself if this one final attempt did not work. Thankfully, they got the air blast setting right and produced some very excellent steel, which became the foundation for the company’s razor blade business." —Jonathon via

Whatever happens to musicians will happen to everybody.

      "tracking deaths of despair at the jukebox"

the toast stirs · El Niño creeps
      a deep dive
   in dark waters
& nature's nard filches
Nemesis & hymnbook

foreign postage · Pitcairn Island
      this spice wind
   wandered wayward
the fridge nags chiming
frabjous not quite abseil

entity lost · with the leafturn

Some reviews i wrote about Dallas art.

( me / via )

"Most of the books we found in his apartment were subgrade later entries from these authors’ bibliographies, when their names had been established as marketable brands, producing endlessly iterative franchises."

"The Advertisement

In the Manner of the Earlier English

Whether to wend through straight streets strictly,
Trimly by towns perfectly paved;
Or after office, as fitteth thy fancy,
Faring with friends far among fields;
There is none other equal in action,
Sith she is silent, nimble, unnoisome,
Lordly of leather, gaudily gilded,
Burgeoning brightly in a brass bonnet,
Certain to steer well between wains."

—Rudyard Kipling via FGR

"And it's true, there is something interesting to be discovered there, despite - or perhaps in addition to - the ineptness of her films. It's like the equivalent to the psychoanalytic analysis of dreams, there is a latent content hidden between the recurring shots of feet, the strange editing and the overdubbed dialogue."

"In East Germany, the Berlin Wall stood for nearly thirty years. The regime called it the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall. The barrier that locked East Germans inside their own country was officially described as protecting them from the West. The state media and textbooks said it. Children learned it in school. Their parents knew what it really was. But both versions existed at the same time, and the citizen’s job was to choose the official one." —Heather Delaney Reese via

"Can you explain this gap in your resume?"

( oil painting by me / via )

Yellow & purple.

"Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can’st not go mad?" —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

Sunshower.

"Allah is great"

matutinal dove; crescent
songs beyond our cinders
scansion; dord's hardball
& the whole thing screaming

Allah is great; grackles
follow me past grieving
i run with the pack, rickshaw
i am five wide extinctions

24 Hours. With reference to my essay, Live at Brighton Polytechnic.

( via / via )

"It’s like cool nihilism, to put it facetiously."

      "anthrax island"

Parnassian leeway · lightless knowledge
   golden chewtoy flung
kill cascade · at the scenic outlook
   they'll name new eras for this
bend to pick · the quid shuffled
   without leaving my seat
things i have had my · fill of, marching
   to the spry horizon

Louis Armstrong performing for his wife at the Great Sphinx of Giza.

"The Maroon, our school newspaper, had published two articles completely written by AI. This had gone unnoticed for a few months before the only UChicago student with free time on his hands decided to see what sort of groundbreaking coverage of Chicago-area sports The Maroon might have and was certainly dejected to realize that instead of being furnished insider scoops on the Bulls’ roster moves, he was stuck reading sentences like: 'Chicago’s perfect start isn’t a fluke; it’s the product of cohesion,' and 'And through it all, there’s Giddey — the calm in the chaos, dictating the tempo and keeping the team grounded in the momentum.' " —Owen Yingling via

Echoes, built on nothing.

( via / via )

☒.

Individuals don't impel, but sometimes they catalyze.

ENIAC.

      "i am lost to the world"

"Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" —Friedrich Rückert

   capsules mesh
in the gray morning
   stern focus
staggers aimward
i am lost to the world

   as prices
tremble like drops
   of leaf dew
& shelfvoid looms
i am lost to the world

   worn habits
& hurt scribble
   solve nothing
that needs fixing
i am lost to the world

   mathoms heaped
in this rent house
   decades' work
to see no sun
i am lost to the world

   lifeline wire
a cloud threaded
   as wink ghosts
sometimes gaslight
i am lost to the world

   for a while
we would wander
   coffeehouse
& antique mall
i am lost to the world

   robots take
word after word
   —as i watch—
with rude vigor
i am lost to the world

   what remains
this culdesac
   two rabbits
   sometimes ducks
visit the pool
i am lost to the world

The Sunlit House.

( me )

Two Likely Difficulties.

        “Proem in Heaven”

Jubilee in the nostrils · never forest burned so bright
Crowns crushed · ferrying mercy
Brake for dun rabbit · “Ode to Joy” rides
Citadel of mayhem · mean hands Aztec
    On the golf course grass

Pale cerulean granite · parable of hogans
Whispering midnight · vociferous noon
    All that isn’t basalt
    Jubilee in the nostrils

It’s a question of quislings · lines you cross never
The child behind chain-link · the ballot box clouded—
And then some bleeze-leam · issues anagram
Opens culdesac · of the kuklux-polka
Drizzle of clown innocence · on the Odradek maremma
    Jubilee in the nostrils

“bleeze-leam: (Scots) lightning-flash

Number-rhymes (“rhime”):
64- never, noon, grass, hogans, mercy, clouded, maremma
55- Aztec, trap, cloud, anagram, polka, basalt

        “Portal: Forest of Straws”

altarpiece of botched mercy
    in clank parades
    threat-chintzy

melodies our madness rides
yes-men with lapel-pins plastic
    no setback rids

    & this stone mystic
burns his share of dino grease
waltz purged obsidian Aztec

     stars' disgrace
    limned in neon
green as Augustinain grass

chugging through the vast inane
    & perfect basalt
    fluttery pennon

hostage to some fralgrant insight
empty-handed save this cleaver
    shortcut dulcet

    dying never
gilded steely ixodid
& huge Cosmic Ice believer

    polka more crowded
    with anagram curtsey
at last all the masks discrded
quenched the buzzing paparazzi

Shoggoths and AI.

"To think by different lights. The unreadable philosophers do not submit to any changes in their light." —Elias Canetti

"This tending, repair, and attention is key to dwelling. The dwelling place, as a site, is not a static enclosure of limitation but a living habitat, that is made but also makes us."

( via / via )

Enter.

"A knife is neither true nor false. But someone who grasps it by the blade is truly in error."
– René Daumal, Mount Analogue via @jacobnwren.bsky.social

A beginner's guide to Chinese shoegaze.

pursuing & pursued
hum over the trees
trawler among molehills
immense lack of snack foods

"Without the Sacred, the profane is not really the profane. If one is done away with, the other goes with it, leaving behind only a vacuous liminality in which the active participant is replaced by the passive neophyte. Events continue to happen and new things appear, but there is no consideration for where they might have come from, who might have put them there, or what ideological implications their origins might imply. Rather than being couched in history, catastrophe seems simply to materialize..."

( me / via )

"As a mildly autistic person with an overdeveloped sense of justice, a special interest in bears, and who is quixotically pursuing the cause of journalism even as that profession is being destroyed by fascism, my bias is towards fact."

    "May"

vict'ry parade without vict'ry
evil throngs long after
my autumn, ort's witness
angst—Starbucks—harbinger

still a fire we'll fuel more
affordance worth onboarding
song of a fall sullied
by sixth extinction hijinks

I thought learning to talk would be cool.

"Refugee Camp → High-Density Pop-Up Community (Beta Phase)"

—Chafic Larouchelle via via @barnes7

Every mother's day I think of the time.

( via / via )

Chillsynth.

"I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, ‘Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone know and bear the cost?’ ” —Julia Ward Howe via

"And then, something no one expected from a Hungarian inauguration: the Gypsy Anthem, performed by the Sükösd Roma Child Choir, a group of children from a small town of 3,000 people in southern Hungary."

"Extraordinary Premises

I saw an angel in a teacup on a screen.
The Invisible Hand slaughtered it.

Demand evolved to give us inner tubes and blue eyes.
Fireworks libate the billboard behind our house. Relentlessly, the markets provide
magic. We overhear many die quietly, and felt like commercials

for hearths lit by fake logs. The faux-hissing
of screens puzzled me. The extraordinary premises
the ordinary. I wore my palm

like an eye patch to silence the migraine, and stood
near the rotting wood window like a screened seraphim,
a girl on film making pain precious.

I pimped my pain-peonies for socil media.
Later, a wise screen told me that starlings take turns
sitting on eggs, though the mom always nominates
herself for the night shift.

The surgeon said do not run, do not bend, do not move
except to get water or go potty. If you can't follow instructions, no one
can help you. A screen told me two cute
radiologists read my film wrong.

I wore a fake log to the wake for my third
misdiagnosis. We overheard an eye patch telling a teacup
demand had evolved into a mother-like figure.
My stitches kept getting infected. My peonies
acquired some fungi. A screen sold me

a pain angel of positivity.
Only death and this little stool for company.
I stayed lit for the starlings on night shifts.

—Alina Stefanescu, My Heresies (2025)

"People talk to each other over video phones and watch streaming television services (the German silent movie channel) while they also listen to big bands (Eddie Heywood and his Orchestra) playing on the radio live from the rooftops of New York hotels as if it were 1939."

( via / via )

Nyckelharpa prog metal.

"flicker parade of wounds"

beyond the reach of music
the flicker parade
of wounds hastes to refuse it
beyond the reach of music
sends us after ersatz
& cloud signs to read
beyond the reach of music

the flicker parade

Farafina Mousso.

"Lightning is a kind of fabric, as evidenced by how it is measured in bolts. Ethereal and glowing gold, crackling every moment—kings used to wear it into battle, draped with shining murder" —@ctrlcreep.bsky.social

Superpower Suicide.

( me / via )

Various pulls on Strathmore paper.

"Yet to rouse the zeal of a true antiquary, little more is necessary than to mention a name which mankind have conspired to forget; he will make his way to remote scenes of action through obscurity and contradiction, as Tully sought amidst bushes and brambles the tomb of rchimedes." —The Rambler, 161.

"Trail of Deceit has since been written up and recapped in various Youtube videos and podcasts, as well as turned into an AI-generated metal concept album..."

"80s music"

words folded in fillets
fossil strata Batcave
recipe brings rancid
rathe gaiters together
clown stilts redbrick cloister
clabbered feldspar
paregoric lintel
words gifted with liftoff
correct intel
fossil strata Batcave

Marble Machine.

( via / me )

"Chess engines did not discover chess moves that human grandmasters could not see. They evaluated positions that grandmasters could see but did not have the time to evaluate exhaustively."

golden
calf —shark swimming—
bathtub full of water
as the calendar starts now to
matter

A Few Keys.

"One of the main political stories of the last 50 years, but especially the last 20, has been the displacement of planning by prediction." —@kevinbaker.bsky.social

"The shoe Judge picked to signal a debased future became the actual shoe of the actual present in the two years it took the studio to release his film."

( via / via )

Traveling Witch.

"Or sordid wealth, nor all the gaudy spoils" —Akenside

"Formed in 1971, Witch (an acronym for 'We Intend to Cause Havoc') were the scene's biggest and most popular band."

"robot reading my words out loud"

debating to buy another book i've read
Hormuz plug · glides down the python
sleepwalk is an art like ev'rything else
answering machines · on old TV shows
   May getting toasty

"This was actually the second ceremony held in just two days for gold statues of Trump."

( via / via )

Taken.

"how much higher will the antheap grow?"

rogaine energumen
gulf parallel ullage
       beautiful
   the bitter spring
spiralling downfall · in the dim portents

Orchestra Baobab live.

"The soft animal of my body loves what it loves, I mutter belligerently to myself, as once again, I try to triage all the psychic damage of living at the end of days with another little treat I can’t afford" —@regretteruane.bsky.social

Bernhard Gothic.

( me / via )

Burning the Confederate flag in a Tennessee statehouse.

"Maybe we could say that the genre exists entirely for this reason - that something exists in the world that is not adequately described by literature, art, or architecture." —CJ Cooke via

⋮.

"Trailing in,
Spring has come;
In the mountain streams
Between the rocks the ice
May melt today, I think."

—Fujiwara no Akisue via

Tangled Up in Blue.