( via )

( via / via )

Maybe the best of all pop-up books.

      “THE WIND IS BLIND

Eyeless, in Gaza, at the mill, with slaves
   –Milton’s ‘Samson’

   The wind is blind.
The earth sees sun and moon; the height
   Is watch-tower to the dawn; the plain
Shines to the summer; visible light
   Is scattered in the drops of rain.

   The wind is blind.
The flashing billows are aware;
   With open eyes the cities see;
Light leaves the ether, everywhere
   Known to the homing bird and bee.

   The wind is blind,
Is blind alone. How has he hurled
   His ignorant lash, his aimless dart,
His eyeless rush, upon the world,
   Unseeing, to break his unknown heart!

   The wind is blind,
And the sail traps him, and the mill
   Captures him; and he cannot save
His swiftness and his desperate will
   From those blind uses of the slave.”

—Alice Meynell

Somali Rocket Docket.

"hachette isn’t canceling a book bc of the way it’s written, but bc they can’t copyright something generated by another corporation’s algorithm" —@patricknathan

Runes of Arecibo.

( via/ via )

Zoomorphic sculpture.

"Now, making a work is not thinking thoughts but accomplishing an actual journey." --David Jones, preface to 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐴𝑛𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚𝑎𝑡𝑎

Dr. Seuss’ dark side.

free paint stirrer
asymmetric peace
gray dawnlight of groansift
grist for the verb stillicide
Walnut St
Arapaho
new floaters to keep up with

Psyche in the Underworld.

( via / via )

Fiercest, truest love poem.

"problematic fav"

blearyeyed blame chiming
astrobleme tremendous
texture. despair spoon's end?
spiracle clog dogma
blow my nose nave-bound
anent bomb-winter
taperdimpse adept goes
dallying morn's floornail
hieroglyphic glucose
infirm glare sparingly
hostage to the sky scaffold

The set of The Addams Family was actually Pastel Goth.

"When I was a Stanford Prison Experiment guard I was always nice to everybody but no-one ever wants to hear about that." —@causticcovercritic.bsky.social

What Builds a Bridge.

( me / via )

Where foxes say goodnight.

"for all their ubiquity in the waking world, i barely ever see any electronic devices in my dreams" —@ulkharaghayeva

"We spent four years together, but that was thirteen years ago, and these thirteen years, like glaciers, have ground down everything they left behind."

"TRIAD

These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow…the hour
Before the dawn…the mouth of one
Just dead."

--Adelaide Crapsey

Sinogrime.

( via / me )

Peaceable Kingdom.

"A-sway,
On red rose,
A golden butterfly…
And on my heart a butterfly
Night-wing'd."

—Adelaide Crapsey (Shadow, 1911-1913) via @twicktwit

"At the same time, when I was in my ‘20s, we were not looking for old technologies to bring back to life."

"The current age is one of material abundance and spiritual poverty. It is odd for that reason by historical standards." —@syntheticsocrates

V. Revisited.

( via / via )

Night sky on Mars. (Not really.)

19c: grade school Classical Greek

20c: high school calculus

21c: two lanes taking turns to merge into one IS ROCKET SCIENCE

Triolet.

the mad king shuffles ballroom plans at an empty desk
      screaming comes across the sky
cool bright morning where i try to fadge some slack
      windshield crusted with false-spring pollen

Shelter.

( via / me )

"He came to literature in an unlikely way."

"APOLLO 11

*

ARMSTRONG (Palindrome)

Neil A., NASA peer.
Craft far,
creep as an alien.

*

ALDRIN (Palindrome-by-Pairs)

Char sea.
Run, ally Aldrin!
Skies, kind, rally a lunar search.

*

COLLINS (Palindrome-by-Triples)

Oil, kit,
daring wander.
Collins: Outer soul.
In colder, waning dark,
I toil."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Iran War - The Movie.

" 'Trump visits Graceland during the war' sounds like second-rate DeLillo but here we are"
—@rhhaines

My first sound release made from sonifying my analogue film reels.

( via (Not a real sculpture.) / via )

I take the philosophy quiz.

"Pandora’s box unboxing vid" —@oozeletter

"Their words left an archaising tinge on their faces, a thin but noticeable surface of rusty green and bronzed tarnish, (patiently, or not so patiently) waiting to be reanimated and reproduced with every ensuing epoch and its clamour for the vox antiqua reborn."

"world consumed at the speed of chewing"

old wrongs, like genocide
in another century

still going on

Stopping for a moonlit drink.

( via via / via )

Dreiländereck.

"Village Explainer Tells All"

soft dirgewrixle dockside
dazzle razzle clown lung
in the truck-trawled desert
plumes retrace my lost plumb

lammermeier misprint
      flayed digging
   antelucan
Mt Olympus · on Ozempic
silicon chip · harsh chassis
       break breadsticks
   my brain on kedge
turquoise cup · cold order
burnt orange

Life was pretty good.

I write only for Thomas Merton & his electrician.

(Riding).

( via / via )

"I’d say jazz drumming taught me how to write."

"It is cowardly to describe as illusion what we know is merely farce." — E M Cioran (tr P Traylen) via

The Real Zeno's Paradox.

      "Sojourner

   Shepherd's Law, Northumberland

The fettered hill.
The skull.
Old stone, among nettles fallen, near.
Her light brown hair.
The brief bales.
The bared hills, the load-bearing hills, the hills of Lammermuir.
Her coming headlong here."

—Gillian Allnutt

Nowhere Man.

( via / screenshot from google street view )

"For us, the contemporary poetry that matters tries make sense of the history of the recent past, a past that’s been propagandized, memory-holed, and co-opted to the point it can be difficult to remember, much less reconstruct a historical narrative about these times and their psychic darkness." (via)

   "this first fog, enough
to paint grass turquoise-grey, plus
   a few extra wisps"

—Jenkins Rising via

The kind of debate that makes me want to turn off my laptop & go outside, where the predators can be recognized coming at me.

Let’s keep snobbery in jazz where it belongs.

"The darkness in a Caravaggio is not, therefore, theatrical; it is residential. It: 'smells of candles, over-ripe melons, damp washing waiting to be hung out the next day: it is the darkness of stairwells, gambling corners, cheap lodgings, sudden encounters'."

( via / via )

Palate cleanser.

Central Market just upped the ante on highfalutin' coffee culture with a roast-it-yourself option in its own dedicated room.

What stocks should I buy right now?

"anchor in effigies"

questionnaire honk droppings
library halftime rhyming
your cloak on a coat hanger
catch the sun if shining
deputize a wise finger
Dilbeck's fallout darb

In Prison.

( me / via )

"Yet still the unresting castles thresh."

dragons, dragon holdings
a dreich name for framing
touch Gestapo gingerly
to a tune accelerando

God is a comedian.

“What we don’t want to look at, we think we don’t have to deal with, and then it owns us completely.” – Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor" —@jacobwren.bsky.social

Do not mess with this owl.

( via / oil painting by me )

Everything is great! Everything is fine!

" Like Tennyson, Larkin is half in love with his own melancholy. He is also warning us against it." —Jem via

"This is why the traffic between storytelling and metaphysics is continuous."

"The plum’s snow blooms are past,
Again I hear birds cry.
I fear this springtime grass
Will climb our polished steps too high."

—Wang Wei via

"My family and I (husband, son, dog and gecko) live in Montana, less than an hour from Yellowstone National Park, where wooly mammoths and giant camels and sloths once roved among the glaciers that carved the landscape into what it is today." (via @varaxes)

( via / via )

"Voronezh, the first part of which is voron, meaning raven, sinister bird, and the second part is ezh, hedgehog, whose sharp spines are like a killer's knife."

"manic noun"

maze full of reasons
moving through to sieve
here before to find
dust that's my sustenance
rich market of merch
many lost things winnowed
on the book dream path
dim days without music
gravel tracked in
animorphic shadows
share stage with reagents
& news its own game
avoiding what has happened
& in truth little sense said
would account for this war

"His wife barely seems to notice when he disappears for days or weeks to drive around the desert loitering in cheap motels. Perhaps this is because she’s just written a novel about the same thing called Play It as It Lays."

"There was a line of perfect boards, ready to be made into something. There was a door, warped and fallen into the street. There was a boardroom, where meetings went on so long that no one knew what decision had been made. In my apartment, the tulips have reached the stage of paper. When they hear music, they will turn from purple to yellow. They will become a tent in which I have always remembered sheltering. It is cold, and yet I shelter. The panorama is of the river, and on the river there is sailing, and the sails fill the river, and the sails are gone."
—@salrandolph

"He later sent money to place flowers on Crone’s grave every Memorial Day until his own death."

( via / me )

Sequence.

"Things that are inevitable: aging, growing less attractive, infirmity, disease and disorder, death, not getting what we want, the disappointment and boredom that are core to adult life

Things that are not inevitable: poverty, war, homelessness, disenfranchisement, cruelty, bigotry, exploitation

Our culture acts like it’s the exact opposite, and so naturally many people are miserable."
—@freddiedeboer

I’m glad to know about this i suppose but it is one of the most depressing things i’ve ever read.

"Echoes of Love

The house is creaking like a rocking chair.
I’m small again,
comforted by the sway of matter in a shift of air,
cosseted by wind.

Undulate earth, how do you slip your hum
around our roar
of concrete, needles, neon, wadded gum,
demented hungers, war,

discarded children? Your lap is full of us
and of our wrong.
How can you simplify the noise
to cradle our first song?"

—Isabel Chenot

"Cain needed somewhere he could lick his wounds. So he invented the city —."

( via / me )

"...Powys wrote a novel that he was sure would garner him the Nobel Prize: A Glastonbury Romance, published in 1932. It is his best novel, but instead of the Prize he received only a lawsuit, from a man in Glastonbury who claimed to have been identifiably and unfairly portrayed in the novel. The ensuing settlement devoured all of Powys’s royalties from the novel..."

"to paint anything other than the witches' sabbat at the witches' sabbat"

violet's shroud shrinking
shirked ghost trio
burning through ten of my nines
shadow boxing blindfold

"...the music said that a thrilling time when anything seemed possible was about to turn to stone and open into a future of dread and terror, into a realm where to speak falsely, or even carelessly, could be fatal to body and soul."

"Then the sitcom – and Bernard Black in particular – became a cult favourite; I picked up my first proper writing jobs in Mexico, to which I’d decamped as soon as I’d raised enough cash; and my memories of that winter above the shop – the utilities cut off, jacket potatoes as bed-warmers, my breath making tortuous sculptures in the air – took on a certain garret glamour." —Joseph S Furey via

"Today we live in the future she warned us about."

( me / via )

Yay Oxiana.

" ' My God!' he bit out.'“Of all the stinkingly unlucky arrests I could have made at this particular time--the arrest of Karl Imhoff--alias "Professor Waldemar Unruh"--alias "Paramoecium Pete"--alias "Amoeba Ambrose"--alias "Herr-Doktor Heinrich Zonenblink"--alias--' "
—@harryskeeler.bsky.social

Poems for Your Hands.

"UMAMI (Palindrome)

I’m a muse
to note,
raw at last:
salt, aware
to notes umami."

—@anthonyetherin

Browsing is one of life’s great pleasures, i’ll never understand how people just let go of it without a second thought.

( me / via )

Psalm 88 “Flowers cut will sing their clime”.

"Lunula

O luna novella,
Es digna fabella
Quae versibus edat
Itinera Sputnik
Tam ardua ut nic--
Tans Lucifer cedat."

—Van L. Johnson, The Classical Outlook (Dec 1957) via

"One might, were one inclined to the pejorative, term him ‘a think tank dorkwad’. A tankwad, if you will."

"I have a bunch of worlds that I’m world building for different projects. I’ve already world-built thoroughly the worlds for the next four series. And I’m working on the fifth one!" —Ada Palmer via

The Road to Plano Rona.

( via / via )

INTERNALATIONAL DICTIONARY OF NEOLOGISMS.

"Every time I’m in Union Square I think about how Tammany Hall, the seat of power for New York for decades, is now a Petco" —@cooperlund.online

Lebenserfahrung.

"clepsydra"

barrel-jeweloid
jazzy typeface fuseblown
Polish cold war neon
colder in here & cheerless

gas higher the whole world
hurrying pellmell hellward
barrel jewel the password
jester at monsoon fun'ral

mahogany milch · amass skypoints
      angst surfing
   the swift Imbolcs
at the right temp · i can gulp this starbucks
no eye on · Monday's urnclock
      Karg Island
   has been hours
in the barrel sun · of a jewel burn

internet out Biscayne
ill among flung robots
sky array of scare-drones
scumbled with pallid humbug

somewhere Substack tickles
salvo orc & elvish
handkerchief worn threadbare
threatens to pull wool up

      threatens to
   pull stark rank on
starbucks napkin · sonnet annuls

Waltzfrieze.

( me / via )

Every single patient.

“Clearancing DeLillo”

The names, somehow the blessèd names continue
In sonorous emptiness, down furrowed canyons,
Names for things long flown on fragrant pinions;
Believe it. Swift incarnadined Danube
Carried off America too, we huddle
Some pier with flickering clouds & dimming screens
Screaming for Daddy, shipwreck, or the needle.
We are the lucky ones.
Later, there will be monuments anew;
Records. Not the stories we’d have told,
But honest accounts. On these i sometimes brood.
A bard without a theme, without a role,
Chattering as this tutelary venue,
Burning house, collapses: words continue.

The Translator, Working Late.

"Don Fitch recalls that early zines were called fanmags, but Louis Russell Chauvenet (who's still publishing) coined fanzine about 1942 and it became the common usage, sometimes abbreviated to zine." —"Zine History" at Zinebook

At some point, backpacking became a curated experience.

( me / via )

Font Nerd.

Reluctant to bother to fill in the crosswords of a TV mystery show--clue, clue, clue. If i like how it ends, i'll go back.

Ritual & Enormity.

"thirlshoon"

to cut cancer research
more cash for that fascist
mild winter with furl doors
wailing silence-thudbrink

I knew i’d find some real Philosophy on Substack if i just kept looking.

( me / via )

Shifty square.

"playing war with the neighbor kids"

in the cracked china cup
creep swevens of grovewalks
decipher street struggles
stern with turnip carveface
the lanai full of photons
in the cracked china cup
creep swevens of grovewalks
ferry's rage to be drydocked

Scrabble.

"The word love 'resists being a word, almost successfully' " —@oldoldoldoldnew

Bang Bang.

( via / via )

Song of the Rider.

"You know how in a library no one’s trying to sell you anything?

That’s how the internet was." —@butisitart.bsky.social

China and the Future of Science.

taking Kharg Island
like a little bitch
blood splashes

at night in the empty kitchen
low sussuration in my ears

"White collar work and even the halfway point of an email job prove elusive; the tedious application processes function as force fields repelling the narrator. There’s a sense of middle class decline, of an educated man whose education has proved largely worthless, working jobs that would seem “beneath” him, even as he tries and often fails to romanticize their working class elements."

( me / via )

"...in every age God speaks in the language of Empire.."

stool without rafter beams · marriage
   my shadow on the kitchen door
the exhaustion · from rendering significance
   out of chicken scratchings
on a silicon screen · turquoise saucer
   parataxis of the moon

Two haiku by Masaoka Shiki.

"A charismatic technology shapes the whole field around it, the way a magnet organizes iron filings. LLMs may be the most powerful instance of this type in history. By the time the war began, the discourse had already become magnetized." —Kevin Baker via

Harry Smith in the Record Changer.