( via )

6 Vintage Japanese Covers for J. G. Ballard.

"Civilwarland in steep decline"

Untergang gaslighting
gurgle circling the drain
expensive caffeine fueling
fad, sessile obsessions

Franz Ferdinand the musical

A Tradcath Wedding.

Bad Lilies.

( via / via )

Magnolia Ant.

"Midnight, and the room unmakes us." —@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social

Poem for Juneteenth.

"Advice to a Prophet

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?—
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?

Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close."

—Richard Wilbur via

Don't Blink.

( via / via )

"At the time that fish was caught, a local biologist confirmed it was over 100-year[s]-old."

      "algae autogolpe"

fadinger thirst thunders
frayed thespian griot
      winds asphault
   between roofsome trees
Frutiger Aero · for a day & a half

plugged-in dongle drywall
drastic granular ceasefire

Should a Rabbit have a Name?

I used to recommend Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but i need to have reread it more recently than 1980 to be sure.

Be that as it may, the next book after that might be The Book of Questions by Edmond Jabès.

This may be the second most important event of 2026.

( via / via )

Somoza Unveils Somoza’s Statue of Somoza at the Somoza Stadium.

"There is no point in taking opium; it is better to put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound ; for if you fall asleep and no longer feel the pain, then you no longer exist. And the point is to exist."

—Miguel de Unamuno, The tragic sense of life via @poeticoutlaws

Jar of Moles.

      "bolus"

kaiju hopscotch · hope festers
whipped cream in my coffee · in the killing dawn
i'm sure there are reasons · garage door
all the windows drawn · a weary cycle
inchmeal delivered · the long haul
described in scraps · a bard bundles
newsreels relish · & wild rumor
   in the chiming of the words

I do not even know how to caption this.

( via / via )

Herman Melville, Customs Inspector Number 75, New York City, 1871.

shade pedigree shrapnel
insure amber durance
between dog & superglued gilt
gunmetal clink welkin

slumberweed thing-drizzle
watchful with tart hurdles
breeze-moved curtains yielding
shade pedigree shrapnel

"And the rebuilt Temple will not be the same as the one destroyed."

"[Twin Peaks dwarf, backwards voice] That dark brandon meme you like is going to come back in style" —@rmhaines

"We have arrived at a place where the absence of colour is considered sophisticated and the presence of it is considered chaotic."

( via / via )

"Close reading always struck me as the drums in a free jazz trio: they might be holding something essential together, or they might not be there at all — you can’t always tell, and that uncertainty is the whole problem with the drums."

"Carl Johnes was working at Columbia Pictures in New York when his boss asked him to go over to Joan Crawford's apartment. ...She knew she wanted to give away some of the books...but she didn't have a clear idea of which ones to keep. ...The Rod McKuen and Jacqueline Susann books struck him as expendable, but she snatched Susann's away from him saying, 'She's one of my dearest friends!' " —Scott Eyman, Joan Crawford: A Woman's Face (2025)

The Six Great Elements.

"learning new systems"

big moth crushed under thin rain
burning oil refinery
talking philosophy
with my pencil sharpener

talking philosophy
with my pencil sharpener
deft footstool softener
as effigies atrophy

deft footstool softener
as effigies atrophy
big moth crushed under thin rain
burning oil refinery

Papa Was a Rollin' Stone.

( via / via )

Harris, We Have a Problem.

"cupola"

fill bags & never empty them
silence of the rain
car headlights through gauze

this telescope
for the far side of the moon

Cathode Heaven.

"Did everything that had magic have teeth?"

—Catherynne Valente, Deathless (2011)

"That month I rented a sharecropper’s cabin at Tallahatchie Flats, off Money Road. Grey clapboard, tin roof, a bare bulb and a box fan. The floorboards spoke mouse and cottonmouths held the lease on the shade beneath the porch."

( via / via )

"All the principal participants in this episode emerged with great fortitude and with sanity intact, with the exception of Grothendieck himself."

"AGIs might become more capable of changing our values than we are capable of changing AGI values." —Forgotten Languages Full via

"The promise of lore is that of a web that sprawls endlessly, thus allowing readers to discern the equally endless nodes of connection contained therein."

"In Occupied Shuttilon"

1.
jagged white line
circusy classical
another
another

Parnassian switchblade

2.
so far up the mountain
it just struck me how far
good luck & bad luck
from here
nothing matters from here
& there's decades more of climbing
& you will never reach the top

3.
voice swallowed by echoes
cold feet in wet socks
rosary of waiting rooms
& the far off fall of demons

dressed stern in the worst way
second guess my choices
why hustle a croissant down
it may rain all day

these rooms that are borrowed
makes them most of all my own
black coffee like an edict
you return to your book

"This dichotomy between an unsettling, hostile future and an eerily comfortable past coalesces in the aesthetic category known as ‘dreamcore'."

( via / via )

National anthem.

car without wheels
up on cinderblocks

one thunder revvs before the last has lapsed

Many such cases. I had a broken plastic hose on my car that ended up costing $500 because it confused the onboard computer my car didn’t need & i had to get someone from the dealership to reprogram it. We had to get an entirely new washer because the slight vibration it developed from being off-balance confused the computer in it that it didn’t need & there was no way to reprogram that one.

Imagine a whole civilization constructed on this basis. That might be the explanation for those mysterious jungle megalith complexes where everyone just up & walked away from it one day.

Count your fellow passengers’ eyes.

( via / via )

"There’s very little money in actually selling product."

"And the citizens, denied every word, invented an animal: the grass mud horse, a noble mythical alpaca whose name in Mandarin is a perfect homophone for 'fuck your mother,' which spawned songs, plush toys, nature documentaries about its battle with the river crab (homophone: 'harmony,' the official euphemism for censorship). The people built a fake zoology with one entry just to say the sentence on the parchment. The state banned the alpaca." —@terminallydrifting via

"The civilisation that could have given rise to an American Homer was wiped out when the settlers arrived."

only for the antler
ergot, fatidic burgle
dun skies over scaffold
skidmarks, plague-ridden
& we have the records
      the air thick
   with coming storm
in the old songs · not enough blood left
   on green neon walk

"Sisson is very good on how the making of a translation is the most attentive kind of reading one can do; but that most fully successful importations of a style or tone or form from one language to another are found not in translations themselves, but in imitations of various kinds, even if their success is rooted in the practice of translation."

( via via / via )

"Becoming a skilled and rigorous reader is a life’s work, informed by one’s own reading and experience, by the example of others, and by one’s character."

      "beautiful wrecked slalom"

legended · narrow stairway
      we crept up
   to my black sheets
fremd festival hosting
fastness holy pastime

scroll forward · a Saturn streel
      what's this land
   whelming toxic
steeple sealed with plywood
Plimsoll at skull ullage

ultracrepidarian bard
      wends his way
   to a black cup

The Scent of New-Mown Mayhem.

Oldsters who want physical media are like the last underground.

Going to California.

( via / via )

Commentary on Dictée.

This is a record i had to listen to over & over, with dawning recognition of its beauty & power. At first, i didn't even like it (& i listen to a lot of way-out stuff). I would say, a lot of free jazz depends on momentarily creating cadences which are played with & then mutated--or discarded--& it's not that hard for a practiced listener to recognize them in real-time. But with this record, Coltrane is not working with cadences but with textures & clashes of textures. He's utilizing implications & absences, & it's the knowledge of his deep foundation that is what grows on you with every further listen. Poets who are wedded to the unspeakable are occasionally allowed a place in poetry, painters make a fetish of their love of mysteriousness, but musicians who go to the same place only get a sad, knowing smile from "musician's musicians" because if this is also music, everything they've spent a lifetime learning is—wrong. via

Writing Self Writing Nation.

      "Gregg"

Mallalieu y l'Age d'Or
malfunctioning garage door
      tramped down path
   to the blue pool
absent · its sometime guests
watching the world · wake up from history
      watching out
   days of Hormuz
& mine sweeper grim

Previously Unpublished Works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

( via )

"Who are the great divagators of literature?"

   woodsmoke & dovesong
Venus & Jupiter vie
   step high in grass lush

Computer Hacking Documentries Mega Collection.

"I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams - like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves."

~ Hermann Hesse via @poeticoutlaws

Journacide.

( via / via )

Maska. ☆☆☆☆☆

"Like building a maze as you go while at the same time getting lost in it."
—@jacobwren.bsky.social

"I had thought myself frail..."

      "wizardly impetus"

between dog & · wolf, twining
thread of light · alone where
      fluorescents
   softly bicker
passage to put back things

perishing thesh hour
static as the stone · on your own grave
      did you think
   the world would not
dodder on, amsace

between dog & wolf

"Over the last years, the annual festival in Kortrijk has become a real-life meeting hub for an otherwise decentralized online community."

( via / via )

"This was the console where, for 40 years, hundreds of thousands of slips of paper had been inserted into cardboard cylinders then sent up or down in pneumatic copper tubes in the stacks, 17 floors at its peak."

   clearer the garble
pages whose reason has fled

   button on the wall
& a code to keep up with

the cough no named intruder

The church will be finished in 2034.

"In 1950s Tokyo, an imported jazz LP cost 3,000 yen at a time when the average monthly office salary was 20,000 yen. The jazz kissaten was the solution to that arithmetic.

Japan's jazz kissa trace back to a single establishment: Black Bird, which opened near Tokyo University in 1929, playing Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong on an Electrola phonograph for students who had no other way to hear American jazz. By the mid-1970s, roughly 200 kissaten operated in Tokyo alone and around 600 across Japan. The typical room is dim and compact, stacked with vintage American audio equipment: Altec speakers, McIntosh amplifiers, Thorens turntables. More than 90 percent of these establishments still play vinyl.

The defining practice was silence."

—Michael Daniels via

"...in a single moment, diffused, profuse, complete and distant..."

( via / via )

Saints and Liars.

"Backrooms is basically what if Microsoft Teams was a real place" —@vasairena

"Substack being a platform combining in many ways the truest essence of Twitter and a substitute teachers’ break-room, the Cash Conspiracy took flight."

streels breakable calcspar
among coal black speed bumps
the road never gets nicer

connectivity snivels

"A niche writer may be as strange and as difficult as a cult writer, but they still tend to enjoy the comforts of civilisation, with its libraries and its dry cleaners and its peacock-shaped coat hooks in the toilets."

( via / via )

The Daphne du Maurier Short Story Scale.

   idol armor
thick clouds & lit foreground
lost in the spaces between

fresh breeze in the scrappy lane
mild-named season of rigors

"There is something futile in undertakings such as Picasso's Guernica..."

"Part of what Dead Mall Press is trying to do is tap into some of the qualities of the mimeograph era of approx. 1965-1985, which was a stripped down, DIY form of poetry publishing that existed among relatively underground poets. This era marked a time before non-profits, grad programs, and computers/internet changed everything." —RM Haines via

"Southeast Asia, the site of his trauma, also gave him the tools that he needed to recover from it."

( via / via )

Throbbing rectangle.

"The interiority bias, as is spelt in Jungian circles today, doesn’t as much belong to Jung as it belongs to Jungians - gazing inwards into the discipline that is more in love with the walls of its vessel than its content, processes and development." —Gabriela Sova Spulirova via

"He found that flow requires one specific thing: a challenge that matches your skill level."

"full fridge"

equilibrium lobbied
lab of worthwhile scarlets
book of primes pillaged
for Porlock oracles

crunk in the capitol

Kudzu in infrared.

( via / via )

"Spying an obtuse looking plastic media contraption emblazoned with the promotional artwork of a film referenced by a bunch of TV shows and suddenly feeling nostalgia for a time that you were never actually alive to witness."

noclip smirr smackdown
kismet early evening
substrate. Little Rome
after Olive Garden
      rescue dog
   of a derne yard
the sky full of portents · & pale steeds

The only way to read it, with those covers & some dirt weed.

"Theory: vinyl made a come back because Ikeas Kallax storage units fit vinyl records perfectly."
—@pauljholden.com

Ringsend.

( via / me )

Owl Impersonator.

Confirmed woolgatherer here. I can waste four hours without half trying.

"And they say perfect criticism doesn’t exist."

"Sonnet Addressed to George Oppen, Arlington National Cemetery

I think of the dead, the disposition of
the grave, the marble here arrayed. I’ve found
my words to be but parodies of sound
or parodies of silence, and (above
all else, perhaps) mere parodies of love.
The ‘heartlessness’ of words, you wrote (you, bound,
as I), lies in their opacity. We sound
their depths—the force of clarity, a cove-
nant. Over by the Mall, the cherry trees
are finishing their dance, and the monuments
are softened by the scent of fading blooms.
Our wounded earth is flooded with a sea
of petals that flick and flutter as they’re spent.
Her broad back bends beneath their soft perfume."

—Eric Racher in Plough

Sharp dressed men.

( via / via [couldn't find a good pic of the richardson store] )

View from China Beach.

"stark wind of divestiture"

barricade of coral
cadence in small follies
my go-path ungathered
ganch of empty hallways

did i read to the end

The Jewel.

Antonioni was liminal before Liminal was Liminal.

Night Walking.

( via / via )

"My advisor mentioned casually, that we would have to purchase reprints of our own papers if we wanted copies available to mail out when requests came in.."

The only loser they have any use for is Robert E. Lee.

"... the vulgarity that is the hallmark of Trump and his surrounding circle of oligarchs is a symptom of something not at all trivial: The collapse of social norms."

"canned cocktail"

speltered Bialetti
Counter Reformation
Segway down Biscayne sidewalk

ascend pylons sandaled
vertigo gaunt featured
gorge crossed by a motorbike

tourbillon speed bumps

A Forgotten Myth.

( via / via )

"It matters who owns the ground on which we build, how the rules of the game are structured, and that we remember there are other games we can play together, less destructive and all-consuming than the winner-takes-all nightmare that has been presented as reality itself around here lately."

"The Timberstacks

They have such character—they are unlike
the mounds of raw materials you find
in quarries, construction sites—for the timberstacks
were once alive.

Today they mount each other’s pyres; tonight
their silhouettes
blazing through dusk…

Their rough-hewn pyramids
shoulder the glyphs with which they speak to me—
though what is it they say?

Of all the fates they couldn’t understand,
in this at least they find
themselves so closely packed,
more closely packed than in the deepest jungle;
and they need only whisper
to each other.

But what is it they say?"

—Huck via

Crystallize.

"What the classical writers were doing is what we have largely lost. They were not 'tolerating' tsuyu. They were not 'waiting it out.' They were treating the season as a guest in the room, with its own habits, and behaving accordingly." —Tōan via

"And with every step one takes, every corner turned and door stepped through, one gets farther from a way out, risking getting lost and becoming an unwilling inhabitant of a space impossible to inhabit."

( via / via )

If u think abt it 'The Yellow Wallpaper' was kind of the first entry in the Backrooms universe.

"Detail a terror retaliated." —Anthony Etherin

"Today’s upper and middle class have willingly chosen to conduct much if not all of their monetary and social commerce in this virtual environment. This can be understood as people adopting cartoon identities, and living part of their lives in a cartoon world."

in cheese coma, in chemtrails
feral karaoke
      back to some
   semblance of grid
the napkins creased · regions crosshatched

have not missed much of
militeledildonics
      bullet holes in
   high ancient walls
somewhere whited by · whilom bomb dust

library books buried

Gertrude Stein.

( via / via )

The wealthiest one percent are now responsible for more deaths than all geological hazards combined.

"siege by all candies"

whirlwind tardy tolling
we tell ourselves fables
thick heat among threatshapes
authorship conniption

go as we had giddy
nor Gehenna fended

The Stolen Child.

"poem is a tool for finding out, not a vessel to fill with the known" —@eireannmor.bsky.social via

The Man Who Mastered Time.

( via / via )

A gothic, dieselpunk spectacle.

"I saw both the AIDS documentary We Were Here and the feature film Milk (about assassinated gay rights leader Harvey Milk) in the Castro, films in which the theater itself appears, and to be inside a theater that is inside the movie you are watching is a wonderful Moebius strip-Russian doll of an experience. " —Rebecca Solnit via

Importunate Void.

"the building, barking & biting book"

the ghostly dryght · drizzles in subfusc
places once · a plan might have tarried
meanwhile mannikins · mightily arrayed
in the sky scrollop · redshift & shuffled off

Double tanka.