( 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.

( via / via )

Trump-Epstein Reading Room.

       "riddle of the sands"

diminishing mathoms
spore-munchkins scrunching
lost on the freeway
       calendar
   of some past day

cobweb into catwalk
crawl across like Falstaff
       classic rock
   arrears fathoms
wheels that stop turning

such sunset colors snarled
assailing the eyes
apocalyptic window
       warded off
   panic knowledge

& to keep snail snipping
       desert chrome
   & blood zephyr
snafu ciphered inly

what could these others
teach me of the telson
that is touch nonce onset
       each moment
   under that sky

Synthetic.

Central to and defining the poetics I am trying to suggest here is the conviction that the order man may contrive or impose upon the things about him or upon his own language is trivial beside the divine order or natural order he may discover in them. To see, to hear, to feel or taste [...] comes about in a formal organization so complicated that it remains obscure to our investigation in all but its crudest aspects. To be alive itself is a form involving organization in time and space, continuity and body, that exceeds our conscious design."

— Robert Duncan, “Towards an Open Universe” via @alinastefanescu

Final Moments of a Witch.

( via / oil painting by me )

The Curious History of "Mad Girl's Love Song". (via Jeremy Noel-Tod)

"The question is not whether poetry matters, but whether it matters that it doesn’t matter."
—Alexander Fayne via

Shipwreck with Northern Gannet.

       "thirsty work"

A boot stamping · on the human face
       forever
   or six months more
in the rain dark diner
doula seems unruly

Zeroing out · all the debts
      like a flood
   flensing records
jubilee for lab rats
liripoop bank nada

Or serve · less than symbol
      just wet drive
   wearier slog
madman with the launch codes
mold crept into g'rage fridge

Tale told · by an idiot
      fog shroud plunge
   into playtime
second cup of coffee
cajoles stanza doldrums

How do we find · scasttered our wits
      in soaked night
   shelves turned empty
guest we shouldn't have let in
lazar smooch the pooch screwed

Real sheepish · with murder in their hearts
   we lost souls
      chirp saturnine
among ropbots ringing
roughshod in the tall weeds

Ingot of fang fathoms
      ferrying
   topnotch fumble
Pachelbel's irked other
after many halftimes

Moselle mildew · Godzilla returns
      in thunder
   on the thirstshore
blindfold wispchore bluster
blameful awry-naming

Olive whirlpool · where each step lands
      sticker shock
   in ticker tape
fiery woes in warehouse
wearisome lies smizing

Famine mill · mainline flickerings
      the suits give
   gilded woundfare
sunsets rife with rancid
tumult & rank urncatch

Reckonings dodge · didjeridoo-dah
      as the poem
   puddles at feet
smouldering grief grab-bag
greebled song of bong days

Unwise heft · harrowing replay
      all we have
   will be taken
in the half-light halted
hare where grass meets asphault

Slow ombalom · slithers earthward
      grackle stares
   refuses yield
all tomorrow's Fillmores
mitigated gibbous

Turbid clears · as the light claws
      my phone clock
   hands me respite
bayonetted nidor
enough dreich to speak of

The Magi. (After many hours i was able to write this down.)

( via/ me )

An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles.

"The Magi

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor."

—William Butler Yeats

"...poems, she said in 1961, 'go surprisingly far—among strangers, around the world, even […] if they are very lucky, farther than a lifetime' ."

"TriQuarterly magazine, gasping on the floor in a pool of blood: Find the evildoer that did this to me. Find Substack. Avenge my death." —@petercbaker

The Waste Land.

( via / via )

The Book of Yolek.

"Then on through trackless woodland I went alone
and met no mark of human handiwork."

—Ausonius, "The Moselle" (tr Jack Lindsay) via, 78

Amphibious landing.

"Aldine Elvish"

sequestered tollbooth
terrier of murmurs
in the sill-locked city
flickers & stained concrete
carrier waves daven
the least sound of landing
you lean into hentquest

It Won't Take Long.

( via / via )

Tanka.

"false answer to get past this question"

cold again conclave
crenellated plating
of the Lakeside lidless

liaison with neons
who hold Sacla's secrets
days, some not sizzling

eye gas prices uglier
answer the bug census
chill steals inward: chain gang

achieves grievous window
where do you stow starlight
unless stabsheath futures

A Measuring Worm.

Sparks that will outlive us.

Hiraeth.

( via / via )

{ }.

"Forty-one years ago I bought a 40 acre farm. Ten acres of that farm had been industrial corn every year since World War II. When I took over that land and didn’t inject anhydrous ammonia into it it literally would not grow one single weed per square yard of land. Ten acres of bare lifeless clay.

Within 5 years I had it growing a full coverage of Korean lespedeza, a low productivity, acid tolerant, annual legume. Every year that legume died all its roots turned into life in the land. In another four years I got enough oats to grow on it to be worth hand harvesting grain and feeding to my horses. I returned the straw to the land.

Today it’s a forest." —Jeff McFadden via

Splooting redux.

"petition for thirty more years"

days of virulence & opium dreams
the ledge widens · but the whisper falls
we are here as on a hurdy gurdy
steam rises · from the standing cars

Lucifer Splooting.

( via / via )

Francis Bacon soundtrack.

"Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings

For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,
Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good,
To sound the constitution of just wars,
Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood.

Relieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust,
Their usage, pride, admitted within doors;
At home, under caved chantries, set in trust,
With well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs
They lie; they lie; secure in the decay
Of blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted,
Before the scouring fires of trial-day
Alight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head,
Budge through the clay and gravel, and the sea
Across daubed rock evacuates its dead."

—Geoffrey Hill, For the Unfallen

"Authors complained that not many people showed up to their readings, however, and those who did often left early."

Each monument to bad design is bigger than the one before it.

Paraceraurus spinulosus.

( via / me )

Journey to the Center.

"Consider Rudyard Kipling. The man sent his son to die in a war he championed, then wrote a poem instructing the rest of us on what it means to be a man. Do not take advice from this person." —Barnes via

"There's nothing the damned machines can't do when the humans bob their heads and take infallibility for granted."

"excantation"

1.
darker-than-grief grackles
aggress on art heartland
they have their rathe rapture,
rollicking ash snowfall
no one makes them write this

2.
goblinical gale-skew
gars redbrick sledding
spiky dovegray spar-veal
spiralling fire

tree corridor ridebarn
rude goblin in hobnail
mad king musing
a map with bright tapmarks

3.
Chevron shiv in charge now
shank array akimbo
kiln's line of cars
called the starry nidor

"The crab knows that the sand bubble is a byproduct of its search - once it makes a bubble, it doesn’t go back to it, it keeps going with new sand."

( me / via )

"It was a place filled with plotless stories..."

"The Road to Thebes II. Interlude

After the intolerable weight of tyrant suns
(Caesars with masks of gold), wave after wave the early evening

Comes with the sound of sea and siren cave
To continents and cities after the long heat

And echoes in buried cities—the azoic azure
Calls to the sphinxes of the silence and the unburied sapphires
Staring across lion-breasted sands in the great deserts,

And to the azoic heart (where Time, that Medusa, reigns, turns all to stone)—
To the orange-flower, the oragious hair of youth that cool airs lift—the orb;
And the golden nodding nurse that we call Eve

And evening, sighed, 'The first and final Adam, he who is one with the immense Ceres
And all day broke the gold body of the giantess as in love,

And he who forsook her for that other giantess,
The city, the vast continent of stone,

Are homeward-going.'
    Soon night falls like fire, yet vine-dark.
                In the cities
The girls, with breasts like points of sun in the vine-dark night
And gowns the color of the thunders' reverberations
Among the forests, seek a love in which to sink like the sea.

What do the seraphs and sapphires of air among the branches
Hear as the voices pass? 'Your hair is ringed as the tendrils
Of the first plantations of the Vine after the Flood.'

'The vines of the Sun? Or the vines of Darkness and of all damnations
The vines of Medusa's serpents?' 'Ah, your kiss is the light of the planets, burning among the leaves!'
                'No, It was Lucifer,

Son of the Morning—then it changed to the Prince of the Air, the brightness
That rules in Hell! Grown cold! I am Medusa—and my other
Name is Time!

    Come to my lips—the long horizon—
Cold with the serpents' buried wisdom, that has known the azoic
Continents, the secrets and night-haunted jewels of the catafalques!

Come! I will seal your eyes that they no more shall weep,
No more behold another. Once, at your grief,
The unfraught sea would swell, and the unsought diamonds

Rise with your tears.
                Now you shall faithless be
To the flesh of orange-blossom and arbutus honey-hearted,
Seeing my lips, cold as the unburied sapphires in the desert air,
Approach your own:
The one horizon, the azoic continent of night and stone.' "

—Edith Sitwell, Gardeners and Astronomers (1953)

NOW i get it.

"TRANSFORMATIONS (Anagrammed Lines)

Transformations
first ran on atoms....

Transformations
form stars, anoint
arts, form nations
of man or transits
of storms... In an art
far torn into mass,
stir formats anon."

—Anthony Etherin

"Children are not afraid of their dolls coming to life—they may even want them to."

( via / via )

Beltontain.

"There is more tenderness/ than one can fathom in wearing what never happened." —Alina Stefanescu

On the Open Sea.

"more cold, more dark"

more & not after
    —the only way—
    nor epitaph
they'll bother, just a little later...
ruins-to-be, where lights now shine;
    our piracy fled
    in suicide,
& long time dream dread's flag again.
the concrete split, eyes lusterless.

Rorate Caeli.

( via / me )

Indexing.

"Snowdrops

I shadow her down a path and through
a small graveyard. She lifts the grey spar
of the gate, gives herself space to pass. A track

to the shelter of a few windblown trees. Winter
has come, but she presses on. She’s arrived here

because she didn’t want to be there
where she could not be useful, but now

this here has become another there
she wishes she didn’t have to be part of.

She would like best to be a firefly
of pure thought – of disinterested attention –
should that be possible. Her body is again

a burden to her and she trips as she climbs,
feet finding roots and ruts: clumsiness
as always, a path of discovery.

Why, she asks, have you brought me here?
I don’t know, I reply. I had hoped to bring you
somewhere ... where ... I could know you differently.

Well, I’ll be gone. She brushes past me – her habit
with anyone for whom she cannot see purpose.

There are memories of an island graveyard, fallen
stones illegible and edged with moss, a promised view

over choppy water, something fierce in the weather –
and the rest of the white page determinedly blank."

—Tom Pow via

This one is tagged "Clown Attack".

"Literature is a Force.

And like skateboarding, it does not owe you shit." —Stefan Baciu via

Welcome to Paradox City.

( via / via )

An entire glass by Marc Chagall.

"But meaning, in a gale, is the first to go." —Diane Seuss

Eventide.

the light itself cannot help you
it is a prisoner
just like you are
light that crawls from surface to surface
never delving deeply
never finding further facts
than texture, & the way matter reflects

"This is the change that no individual essay or article quite captured, because it isn’t an argument. It is the death of a question."

( via / me )

Crusty venture.

"geese of the golden triangle"

whalerescue in realtime
ruts multiply crosstown

Buckingham graves grackled
Sagrada webcam fadeout

Scourgezephyr.

"Certain paths are blessed with feral mystery. They pull you along them. Tease with a sense that around their next bend will be ghost collision, sprite glimpse. We walk them without loneliness for we keep step with invisible companions, walk the storied richness of the land."

—CL Nolan via @hookland.bsky.social

Waiting.

( via / oil painting by me )

" 'Don’t worry about the drinks,' she whispered. 'I just put them on Van Morrison’s tab'."

“Vengeance is mine saith the Lord but this morning He's going to fucking well have to share.”

― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife via @adamsnotes

Weeds.

"before & after wasabi"

1.
spidey bode garbanzos
bent catloaf sensor
hive bivouac inhabits
as the whole light polevaults
into ash ape ramparts

2.
the murders that occur are gentler things
commission in the cradle, ones & oughts—
though terrible enough when witness falls;
& there are no detectives avid like these,
& ev'ryone knows who, already, helpless.

3.
chip by chip · on the chain gang
      still mad sick
   in the pale crib
stained cup antelucan
& roadkill unwailing
fly out of the · fly bottle
moldy lemon · in fridge door
       maintenance
   with a bullet

4.
the T's have somehow gotten
all mixed up with the M's

"I believe that religion did a great disservice to the word soul by grabbing it for its own goody-bag."

( via / via )

But What's It About?

"The only kid who survived the massacre says:
I am the only one who jumped higher than everyone.
Neighborhood boys told me that this is something supernatural,
I am the one who jumped higher than everybody.
Yet I didn’t reach the sky.
Now you know very well;
that we need an open door
only for us,
it could be any door,
even the door of the sky."

—Mohammed Alkronz via Gaza Poets Society

I'd rather watch puffins than most human hijinks.

"fine shreds
pending above the rigid leaves"

—Denise Levertov via

"What people liked about these plain little books, when they saw and held them, was that they were little; appealing both to eye and hand."

( via / via )

The day I swallowed a hurricane.

“The kind of people I know now don’t have barbecues, Mama. They stand up alone at nights in small rooms and eat cold weenies. My so-called friends are bums. Many of them are nothing but rats. They spread T.B. and use dirty language. They’re wife-beaters and window peepers and night crawlers and dope fiends. They have running sores on the backs of their hands that never heal. They peer up from cracks in the floor with their small red eyes and wait for chances.”

― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South via @adamsnotes

"Sometimes the road there looks like words; sometimes it’s wet strength and skin contact with the starry dark."

   "Les Fleurs du Mal, CXII
   The Two Good Sisters

Debauchery and Death are pleasant twins,
And lavish with their charms, a buxom pair!
Under the rags that clothe their virgin skins,
Their wombs, though still in labour, never bear.

For the curst poet, foe to married rest,
The friend of hell, and courtier on half-pay—
Brothels and tombs reserve for such a guest
A bed on which repentance never lay.

Both tomb and bed, in blasphemy so fecund
Each other’s hospitality to second,
Prepare grim treats, and hatch atrocious things.

Debauch, when will you bury me? When, Death,
Mingle your Cypress in the selfsame wreath
With the infected Myrtles that she brings?"

—tr Roy Campbell

The Oriental-Occidental Express.

( via / via )

These are the Mice Temples.

"tiny white flowers
neighbor’s Parsley Hawthorn tree
its promise of fruit
—i often wonder why
peace can’t be this simple"

—@evecastle.bsky.social

"But there are limits to repudiation."

"Frog pulled Toad up onto the island. Toad looked in the basket. The sandwiches were wet. The pitcher of iced tea was empty." —@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

"Atonality has, in many senses, come and gone: it should feel as wound up with the decades of, oh, 1910-1950 as swing jazz or great Depression dustbowl ballads."

( via / via)

Tanka.

"Where do we see renditions of inwardness, except in a few images of Einstein wreathed in pipe-smoke?" —Sven Birkerts via

On Witness for the Prosecution.

"ant empire in our driveway"

merest lozenge of slime
lucky ticket
fever not emptied
by burrowing the Nine Worlds
early sunlight owlish
matter itself feverish
something i lose they keep for me

for i'll be back tomorrow

"On this day last year Israel killed my friend Bilal al-Masri and some members of his family at a funeral tent."

( via / via )

Still Life with Books.

"from the glegly bleeze-leam"

piste upon snow joyous
cough cark perks. exertion's
rainbow. hyaline phone book
highball in your eyeball.

Viscosity.

"Paul studies the pin and identifies what he calls wu, something no counterfeit can possess: a mysterious quality of spiritual presence. 'To have no historicity, and also no artistic, esthetic worth, and yet to partake of some ethereal value—that is a marvel,' he says." —Joel J Miller via

Our Love is a Carnival Ride.

( via / via )

"The joyous news is mine."

"If there is freedom from injury available to creatures like us, it is here. Not in forgiveness, which keeps the offender in his throne and drapes the throne in white. Not in resentment, which keeps the offender in his throne and curses him from the floor. But in the slow, unspectacular act of building a self around a different centre, until the throne is empty and no one has noticed that no one is sitting in it." —@beyondthresholds via

Emperor of Ice Cream.

      "cow's horn"

   otherwise
had it wended
   shades absent
in the igloo
   cover song
a wave sending
   pale high walls
purview lunar

   lost strongbox
a few old books
   scholar's chase
& chess castle
   blood traces
no pocket knife
   someone else
has the story

"The moment we cease to hold each other..."