( via )

( me / via )

Sixteen Tons.

   fine thistles
in the flown light
   era crazed
a crew of thieves
periscope broken off

   wrapped circuit
of rogue habits
   turn to screens
to scrape shavings
periscope broken off

   by the blades
that hurl sideways
   nicked this once
or halfway nailed
periscope broken off

   shapes that teem
in gloom sharpened
   therapy
to unstring them
periscope broken off

   is more real
each plate relish
   knowing scrape
of iron scaffolds
periscope broken off

   time's poising
with a grid tag
   the road churned
thick chariots
periscope broken off

Stairway to Heaven.

" 'I really have no experience,' he began.

'No one has any experience,' said the other, 'of the Battle of Armageddon.' "

—The Man Who was Thursday

The stars are yesterday, detailed oil painting, remedios varo, james ensor.

( via/ me )

Tanka.

"We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet." --The Man Who Was Thursday

"It is the stuff of dystopian nightmares."

here awaiting · what follows
   the morning grows clear
my thoughts thole · the thirstless tide
as if legions · languidly jostled
or plots concocted · their cast loops
here that is rounded · in a rude book
holding all · in an armature of words
i witness & surmise · more than one myst'ry
   curling with the smoke-shreds
like the grim grains · of my own past

Decimation of NASA.

( via / via )

They have travelled a very long way.

"CECOT where the fun never stops"

And now they'll pull the plug on NASA too,
seeing no glory for their Fearless Leader.

How i despise this irksome ape intruder
come to destroy my last felicity...

The world as we all know was spoiled & rotten,
& brought forth from itself its crowning garland.

As once a haunted portrait i spied in Holland
told me a secret cast out from the garden.

Thunder into the night that holds no warning

Klamath River Hymn.

“Occurs to me that Nabokov probably witnessed the burning of Montreux Casino during a 1971 performance by The Mothers of Invention, the incident recorded by Deep Purple in ‘Smoke on the Water’.” –@_ryanruby_

End-Song.

( via / me )

ICE in San Francisco.

I love: poets who don't make sense, paintings that scare me, music i can live with, friends who aren't needy, houses full of books, governments i don't have to think about all the time, & weather that doesn't try to kill me.

When The U.S. Government Tried To Replace Migrant Farmworkers With High Schoolers.

“Watch long enough, and you will see the leaf
Fall from the bough. Without a sound it falls:
And soundless meets the grass… And so you have
A bare bough, and a dead leaf in dead grass.
Something has come and gone. And that is all.

But what were all the tumults in this action?
What wars of atoms in the twig, what ruins,
Fiery and disastrous, in the leaf?
Timeless the tumult was, but gave no sign.
Only, the leaf fell, and the bough is bare.

This is the world: there is no more than this.
The unseen and disastrous prelude, shaking
The trivial act from the terrific action.
Speak: and the ghosts of change, past and to come,
Throng the brief word. The maelstrom has us all.”

—Conrad Aiken

Ablanthanalba ambigram.

( via / via )

SMOC for dummies.

"MY FRIENDS

My friends without shields walk on the target

It is late the windows are breaking

My friends without shoes leave
What they love
Grief moves among them as a fire among
Its bells
My friends without clocks turn
On the dial they turn
They part

My friends with names like gloves set out
Bare handed as they have lived
And nobody knows them
It is they that lay the wreaths at the milestones it is their
Cups that are found at the wells
And are then chained up

My friends without feet sit by the wall
Nodding to the lame orchestra
Brotherhood it says on the decorations
My friend without eyes sits in the rain smiling
With a nest of salt in his hand

My friends without fathers or houses hear
Doors opening in the darkness
Whose halls announce
Behold the smoke has come home

My friends and I have in common
The present a wax bell in a wax belfry
This message telling of
Metals this
Hunger for the sake of hunger this owl in the heart
And these hands one
For asking one for applause

My friends with nothing leave it behind
In a box
My friends without keys go out from the jails it is night
They take the same road they miss
Each other they invent the same banner in the dark
They ask their way only of sentries too proud to breathe

At dawn the stars on their flag will vanish

The water will turn up their footprints and the day will rise
Like a monument to my
Friends the forgotten"

--W S Merwin

"When the stars, one by one, tremble through æther..."

"Our broken empire, America, wasn't an empire for very long. But there isn't one part of its breaking that is not also replicated in each section of the culture. In cars, traffic, movies, buses, banks, schools, war, architecture, hospitals and labs, and in poetry." --Fanny Howe, The Winter Sun (2009)

The earth-killing asteroid isn't an asteroid, detailed oil painting, salvador dali.

( via / me )

"At times the book felt like a dark palantir, giving me glimpses of dreadful, haunted dimensions that my soft, gentle, animal being was never supposed to encounter."

"At least I know my tradition is among the contradictions" --Fanny Howe

The photo of Earth NASA doesn't want you to see.

"T@FFETARRED

new word: shralk
(n.) the sticky echo left in your mouth after confessing.

i’m taffeta tarred
shralking now
on your cheapmouth couch.
a shameful shimmer,
a libertine handshake.
delete this poem
in horror.
worship it later."

--@thedevilstuna.bsky.social

"The original title of the novel means ‘Maigret in a furnished [room]’, but meubler can also mean ‘break the silence’."

( me / via )

Diligence.

"written-on scraps reused"

   the barred border
obedient lintel
intel subfusc absinthe
ardent funest garden

   feral foreplay
filch pivots to shivwield
tough turning makes carnage
atoll where quirks circle

   bleeze-leam blazoned
blessing among fungoids
the cars ahead coldcocked
accuse these amusements

A Hymn.

"The collapse of the insect world is the most alarming thing I've ever read about. Silent forests, empty skies, crops without pollinators. Insects make life possible and yet pesticides, habitat loss and climate chaos are wiping them out." --@earthlyeducation.bsky.social

My Emily Dickinson.

Lithium on Mercury.

( me / via )

"stillness
winter grey
watching me"

--@poemexe.com

London Calling.

"micro-retirements"

rumorous turmoil · tawdry "Excalibur"
the vampede vernal · in daylight devourings

crinkum-cankum · carved in heat
floodwaters · flense the banks

old VHS fade · & new thunder
my lids drop · there is no way out of this poem

The barking of dogs.

( via / via )

"The first robot band that actually played their instruments."

"defunct hurricane tracker"

   aasvogel
on the mogul's shoulder floss
flimflam in the monkey cage
a gauge of murk glimmer
   word buzzard
or does the dirtiest bomb
in fields of Nephilimpeach
in creatures crazed by deftness

"But I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine requires selling the idea that doing things is worthless. Because if doing something has some value, then it must be somehow better than pushing a button and receiving Whatever for essentially no cost." (via Mefi)

"impatiently
gravestones
leading to nowhere"

--@poemexe.com

"More often than not, they just spoon feed us entertainment to fill the hole where our sense of history should be."

( via / via )

"The truth is that we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age. (via @evecastle.bsky.social)

"When we are exiled from the order and unities of culture, language, ethnicity that make up the great smooth national narratives of history, we are cast out into a multicultural, multi-lingual, multiethnic 'non-nation', an empire that frustrates our need to narrate a descent from origins and forces us to confront the lyrical unevenness of our lives. This is a confrontation that from time to time, for good or for ill, we try hard to avoid. ...the medieval [is not] a moment of past time since transcended but [] a metaphor for a kind of [artistic] practice that defies the national culture paradigm." --Walter G Andrews. introductory essay to Ottoman Lyric Poetry (1997)

"He doesn't say the Renaissance is a golden age. He says, we must try to make a golden age in contrast with this bad age we are in now by trying to imitate the arts and methods of the ancients and their golden age."

“AN ISLAND IN THE HARBOR

My own country my countrymen the exchanges
Yes this is the place

The flag of the blank wall the birds of money

Prisoners in the watch towers
And the motto
The hopes of others our
Guardians

Even here
Spring passes looking for the cradles

The beating on the bars of the cages
Is caught and parceled out to the bells

It is twelve the prisoners’ own hour

The mouse bones in the plaster
Prepare for the resurrection”

—WS Merwin, The Moving Target (1963)

It's great that we even have a name for the whale.

( via / me )

"Many of us are learning that the stories we inherited are not only suspect but in large part responsible for the threats we now face and will visit upon our heirs: the story of infinite growth, of survival of the fittest; the story of human supremacy, and, incongruously, an innate human selfishness and propensity to destroy."

“GHOST-CRABS

At nightfall, as the sea darkens,
A depth darkness thickens, mustering from the gulfs and the submarine badlands,
To the sea’s edge. To begin with
It looks like rocks uncovering, mangling their pallor.
Gradually the laboring of the tide
Falls back from its productions,
Its power slips back from glistening nacelles, and they are crabs.
Giant crabs, under flat skulls, staring inland
Like a packed trench of helmets.
Ghosts, they are ghost-crabs.
They emerge
An invisible disgorging of the sea’s cold
Over the man who strolls along the sands.
They spill inland, into the smoking purple
Of our woods and towns--a bristling surge
Of tall and staggering specters
Gliding like shocks through water.
Our walls, our bodies, are no problem to them.
Their hungers are homing elsewhere.
We cannot see them or turn our minds from them.
Their bubbling mouths, their eyes
In a slow mineral fury
Press through our nothingness where we sprawl on beds,
Or sit in rooms. Our dreams are ruffled maybe.
Or we jerk awake to the world of possessions
With a gasp, in sweat burst, brains jamming blind
Into the bulb-light. Sometimes, for minutes, a sliding
Staring
Thickness of silence
Presses between us. These crabs own this world.
All night, around us or through us,
They stalk each other, they fasten onto each other,
They mount each other, they tear each other to pieces,
They utterly exhaust each other.
They are the powers of this world.
We are their bacteria,
Dying their lives and living their deaths.
At dawn, they sidle back under the sea’s edge.
They are the moil of history, the convulsion
In the roots of blood, in the cycles of concurrence.
To them, our cluttered countries are empty battleground.
All day they recuperate under the sea.
Their singing is like a thin seawind flexing in the rocks of a headland,
Where only crabs listen.

They are God’s only toys.”

--Ted Hughes, from Wodwo (1967)

Never change, Blue Sky.

"Toad looked at the ground. The seeds still did not want to grow. 'What shall I do?' cried Toad. 'These must be the most frightened seeds in the whole world!' " --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Why are the Pyramids in Egypt?

( me / via )

Strange dreams these days.

"Period of bouncing around among so many books—by Vila-Matas, Piglia, Lisa Robertson, Calasso, Daša Drndić, Ronald Johnson—reading is no longer reading, but a compass for one’s own incapacities, a pointer for possibilities: way of jump-starting a kind of writing. An untenanted demesne for the taking." --@lattaj.bsky.social

"The black-tarred rook/ sells thunder..."

"Columbo villain"

drogulus hunt, drain-torn
drastic vale of railing
from the poop deck dipped
adornment-blaze morning
quisle the drizzle
in the gloomth glean glimthirls
—agley-turned the learning—
windowview flames, fled thieves
flummox-fissures umgang
quisle the drizzle
lizardly sizzle
fallen, lodged

on a thin ledge

Gaze at the marvels of Constantinople.

( via / via )

"...it's wild that an armed group assaulting an ICE camp near Ft. Worth, getting into a firefight, and shooting a cop hasn't resulted in more from the administration beyond a bland Tweet."

"CAESAR

My shoes are almost dead
And as I wait at the doors of ice
I hear the cry go up for him Caesar Caesar

But when I look out the window I see only the flatlands
And the slow vanishing of the windmills
The centuries draining the deep fields

Yet this is still my country
The thug on duty says What would you change
He looks at his watch he lifts
Emptiness out of the vases
And holds it up to examine

So it is evening
With the rain starting to fall forever
One by one he calls night out of the teeth
And at last I take up
My duty

Wheeling the president past banks of flowers
Past the feet of empty stairs
Hoping he's dead"

--WS Merwin

The Road Goes On Forever.

"And things like poverty and old age and death are shameful. We cannot help them; but that is the humiliation. To accept conditions that would not be your choice must be a disgrace." --@ivycomptonburnett.bsky.social

Call to Arms.

( via / via )

Adventures of Prince Achmed. (1926)

If they put the ten commandments on a big enough board, maybe it can serve as a life raft.

The House that Jack Built..

weeping wound · of a system scourge
too bright · for the breaking's witness

Keeper.

( via / me )

Zentangle.

"precious
and delicate,
these fragile lives of ours
cling to what they can for one more
moment"

--@xxyxxy.com

Burgundy evening eclipse.

"The art of divination by lightning distinguished eleven kinds of lightning..."

--von Cles-Reden

Heavy Summer Rain.

( via / via )

"I really do feel that in all the years I’ve been doing this … the Republican Party in the age of Trump has now become so disconnected from reality and so uninterested in reality and so uninterested in telling the truth or being grounded in anything that’s remotely true that it’s been shocking even for me."

Bad faith is like a stench you can never escape from anymore.

"I have to admit, sir, I didn't expect it to be this easy."

"Gaza has become a funeral home

but there are no seats, no mourners,

no bodies. In the caskets are nothing

but what remained of the

dead’s clothes,

and on the wall is a clock

that has not moved for twenty-one months."

--@mosababutoha.bsky.social

The Last Valkyrie.

( via / via )

FEMA is no longer going door-to-door to assist disaster victims .

"Prologue of the Earthly Paradise

Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing,
I cannot ease the burden of your fears,
Or make quick-coming death a little thing,
Or bring again the pleasure of past years,
Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears,
Or hope again for aught that I can say,
The idle singer of an empty day.

But rather, when aweary of your mirth,
From full hearts still unsatisfied ye sigh,
And, feeling kindly unto all the earth,
Grudge every minute as it passes by,
Made the more mindful that the sweet days die—
—Remember me a little then I pray,
The idle singer of an empty day.

The heavy trouble, the bewildering care
That weighs us down who live and earn our bread,
These idle verses have no power to bear;
So let me sing of names remembered,
Because they, living not, can ne’er be dead,
Or long time take their memory quite away
From us poor singers of an empty day.

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.

Folk say, a wizard to a northern king
At Christmas-tide such wondrous things did show,
That through one window men beheld the spring,
And through another saw the summer glow,
And through a third the fruited vines a-row,
While still, unheard, but in its wonted way,
Piped the drear wind of that December day.

So with this Earthly Paradise it is,
If ye will read aright, and pardon me,
Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea,
Where tossed about all hearts of men must be;
Whose ravening monsters mighty men shall slay,
Not the poor singer of an empty day."

—William Morris

They began to replace traditional motifs of flowers and birds in their rug weaving...with images of war planes, drones, tanks and guns.

"He banged his head against the wall, but he still could not think of a story." --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

The Chestnut Casts His Flambeaux and the Flowers. (via @maryanncorbett.bsky.social)

( via / via )

Tanka.

"Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time, / City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?"
- Tennyson (quoted by Jack London, 1903) via @celticstoic.bsky.social

The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.

is the Constitution only
a parable for lonely
dissenters to arraign?
our officials put initials
to a promise that's delicious
as a rainbow in the rain

humans are evolving
to a pinnacle involving
keeping promises not vague
which is why when this shit ravels
i expect to see the travels
of DeSantis to the Hague

DeSantis in the docket
who will claim he's just one sprocket
of a wider tragic chain
building Alligator Auschwitz
—already some can vouch its
hungry teeth on their domain—

but the Constitution matters
not a king whose fandom flatters
his insatiable demands
i want this den of gangsters
paying dearly for our anxious
daily scroll with shaking hands

& i'll see that grinning bigot
drinking payback from the spigot
in his own mosquito lands

Tanka.

( via / me )

Morning Twilight at a Rail Yard, 1939.

"Year Zero"

wire-mesh cages rise
in a putrefying swamp
with merch & tweeted hype
amateurs bearing arms

even given their record
of fakes & pocketed funds,
where the fascist temper treads
too much room is conquered

bystander as i am
i am chastened to describe
from blithe clips of a grab
this quota-meeting crime

flying monkeys darken
our skies for a clown-in-chief
for a cause like a bucket of barf
& eclipse of Liberty's beacon

this mischief may not last—
i hope to see its fall—
but it's nest-torn ants to corral
the aftermath of Pentecost

Colorful driving.

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

—James Baldwin via @ruthz.bsky.social

"It is very difficult to sit here..."

( via / via )

A child is pulled from the rubble.

"AI isn’t the disease — it’s a symptom of a colonizer’s model of schooling that is extractive and dehumanizing, rather than liberating." --Jesse Hagopian via

"There are nine planetary boundaries and we’ve only dealt with one of them — the ozone layer — and we think we’ve saved ourselves from that threat. But we passed the seventh boundary this year, and we’re in the extreme danger zone."

“The Great Game”

Salad days of vampire,
Warp for which a people longs,
In the black scripture told.
Halcyon dawns of autumn
Fracture my sense of ingrown wrongs
In the black scripture told.

These are the taken tokens
Fires by night & deals awry
Wandering fires i answer to
Like a drudge with random songs
In the black scripture told.

Tithe or crimson fathom
Stars that the legionary names
Dying far from comfort
While the laughter rings of throngs
In the black scripture told.

How to Write a Poem in a Time of War.

( via / via )

"The plan is the lightning rewires us together and we all smell like mud and grass and ozone but can intuitively, and collectively, always keep the beat."

   williwaw
stubborn craw where words are krill
the sun not yet sizzled out
bugs' cry risen above fret

"Each card is labeled with a tactic she’s learned to spot: Deny, Attack, Play the Victim, Perform the Hero, Create Crisis."

Rather than stand under a sign of the Zodiac, one can stand under the sign of a Chess Opening. Even without playing it, it casts shadows of another world.
   Vaporwave is an allegory of this.
There is not just one dream, there is not just one artist's-world. There is not just one chess opening.

D.O.A.

( via / me )

"A dilapidated stone piggery with a partially collapsed slate roof sits next to a large barn converted into a modern Airbnb rental. Beside these is a small cottage that dates back to the 17th century."

"My translator tells me 'thoughts & prayers' is an American political expression that means 'we'd rather have a secret police force than a weather service'." --@darthputinkgb.bsky.social

"...in every age, there have been those rooted in conscience and often in faith who refused to let empire have the final word."

tragic rainlight Rudyard
Rutabaga mooted
where explore still waters
westering sane rainlight

RFG Inventions for Cello and Computer.

( via / me )

Ethiopia, 18th c. (?).

"don't cry, insects
in summer shirts…
the waterfall roaring"

--@poemexe.com

Geraldine Chaplin in Peppermint Frappé (1967).

The Youtube psych/prog algorithm is the only one we should keep.

"Had not realized that was what they had to teach those of us marked out as fair game."

( me / via )

The Child Dreams.

“And all the ruins of distressful times” - Richard III (Act 4, Scene 4) via

"We had to put up razor barb wire."

"The Question and Its Mark

May I cast a spell on the many swans of Leda,
making at last one spastic blizzard in spring
with only enough divine mania to take one
blinding day from her?

The godbirds and their scopophilia
keep her open for view and review, with ever
new speculum and never the elegant jewelry
of stigmata or a heart of quartz.

May I give her only one death? Can we live if she
lies closed in a single final pose, no syphilitic
autopsy or cygnet interrogation?
May I mark her prophecy,

her presence in the very air, with a single
gargoyle on the streetside wall on a place
of worship, finally allowed inside if only by
disappearing into the stones?

Leda possessed a pair of knees that also bent
in prayer. I ask of you only what she asked for there."

—Brenda Shaughnessy

Raymond's Road.

( via / via )

You Must Live.

"Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie
   Dust unto dust
The calm sweet earth that mothers all who die
   As all men must;
Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell
   Too strong to strive
Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell,
   Buried alive;
But rather mourn the apathetic throng
   The cowed and the meek
Who see the world's great anguish and its wrong
   And dare not speak."

--Ralph Chaplin, in The Match (Summer, 2004)

Games We Play.

"Child of Omelas? That’s thinking too small. What if like eight billion people suffered so a few dozen guys could live lives so insane they convinced themselves it’s more likely they’re inside a computer simulation" --@ceej.online

New favorite picture.