( via / via )

14 vowel-sound poetry.

Haiku looth as though,
Whispered, the argent
Book boiled down all day.

(2016)

"The Fall of Baghdad"

Dark candle, you could call me
Now or let this knife make
Noise
Across my moon snow
Each slavish landscape void
Puts less out.

(4/2003)

The Dalliance of the Eagles.

"Remembered that year I wrote entirely in copperplate (I was 13, you can imagine, doing three languages at school 🙄 and humanities subjects, all that essay writing)"
—@minxmarple.bsky.social

"...it was a trip her 12-years old son had organized for the two of them - from flights to visas and hotels, from Tianjin to Abu Dhabi, London, Oxbridge and York - all were done by the 12-years old boy with the assistance of Doubao, the Chinese AI chatbot."

( via / via )

Triple and quadruple entendres, and the search for the elusive quintuple.

"Hanc brevem fabulam generis horrorifici Hugardus Philippus Lovecraft (1890-1937) anno 1927 exaravit. Ipsa, tamen, anno 1938, Lovecraft iam ante emortuo, typis est data.

Primam huius versionem Latinam exaravit auctor Latinus hodiernus Johannes Maria Tosi, cuius de vità pauca modo narraturi sumus." —Officina Latinitatis via

On the insane Alfred Hitchcock episode "Maria," Nita Talbot's husband falls for a chimp.

motor from this kit
grille from that
radiant Hannibal
malfunctioning shoppingcart wheel

"Grief is a (closed) system."

( via / me )

Don't Smoke in Bed.

"Try Tropic for Your Balm
(On the Properties of Nature for Healing an Illness)

Try tropic for your balm.
Try storm.
And after storm, calm
Try snow of heaven, heavy, soft, and slow,
Brilliant and warm.
Nothing will help, and nothing do much harm.

Drink iron from rare springs; follow the sun;
Go far
To get the beam of some medicinal star;
Or in your anguish run
The gauntlet of all zones to an ultimate one.
Fever and chill
Punish you still,
Earth has no zone to work against your will.

Burn in the jewelled desert with the toad.
Catch lace
In evening mist across your haunted face;
Or walk in upper air the slanted road.
It will not lift that load;
Nor will large seas undo your subtle ill.

Nothing can cure and nothing kill
What ails your eyes, what cuts your pulse in two.
And not kill you."

—Genevieve Taggard via

How to Latinize Your Name.

"I need not dwell upon the pallid, contaminated mash, which they call strawberries; soiled and tossed by greasy paws through twenty baskets crusted with dirt; and then presented with the worst milk, thickened with the worst flour, into a bad likeness of cream: but the milk itself should not pass unanalysed, the produce of of faded cabbage-leaves and sour draff, lowered with hot water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings, discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot, and tobacco-quids from foot-passengers, overflowings from mud carts, spatterings from coach wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joke's sake, the spewings of infants, who have slabbered in the tin-measure, which is thrown back in that condition among the milk, for the benefit of the next customer; and finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture, under the respectable denomination of milk-maid." —Humphrey Clinker

"The inhabitants of Tenochtitlan and surrounding regions that recognized their dominance were technically Mexica, but as far as is known the Mexica, along with other peoples of central Mexico, never identified themselves as 'Aztecs'."

( me & night cafe / via )

Cat, pigeon, vase.

"You want to destroy all the smartphones in the world, Alexander? You cannot even destroy one." —Alexander Fayne

That is the question.

"between two fires"

hulk wants to smash
but spidey says wait
between them gray mush
hulk wants to smash
it's the mutagen mosh
& plenilune waltz
hulk wants to smash

but spidey says wait

Old Phone Box, Barra, Outer Hebrides.

( via/ me )

Leonard Cohen, Clytemnestra.

"cyborg jailbreak"

black glass silhouette is mine
a rabbit with the coloring
of a tuxedo cat

disembodied sneeze

"Hey, Citizen Kane is great, but have you seen Touch of Evil?"

"...swift sheets of flitting vapor-gauze, follow'd by dense clouds throwing an inky pall on everything. Then a spell of that transparent steel-gray black sky I have noticed under similar circumstances, on which the moon would beam for a few moments with calm lustre, throwing down a broad dazzle of highway on the waters; then the mists careering again." —Walt Whitman via

This one, as in many of her drawings, features her patient number which was a symbol of dehumanisation to her.

( via / via )

Don't fear the Reaper.

"The air is thick with invisible ciphers, while we, so trusting in our citizen lives, carry on with our retro- sense of how the world works." —Sven Birkerts

Afterimage.

"mysterious alien egg"

barely notice the wasp-swerve
on the way out the back door
Backrooms Overlook bivouac
Goldenseal en queue
Geist infustigation
turn over a new loaf

add a link
without even listening to the song

overhang menace
overnight has grown

looth maintenance
in a cranny of the sheer face

"Systems can persist in dysfunction indefinitely, and absurdity is not self-correcting."

( via / via )

North American Cardinal, Heard in the Attica Zoo, Greece.

"blue lamp in the witch house"

tentative touchdown · mandolin intro
Mulciber eerie · riddle of the bluefin

minor character · in some murder tale
conceited & sad · on the putting green

shrunken knurl · wishkebab
thrown at random · with no cars parting

the old castle crumbles · at broad noon
we touch wonderingly · on the way elsewhere

in my sleep vision · i beheld ending
that tangerine monster · who eclipses Godzilla

& such joy spilled · that at once i woke
in a curdling world · that calls itself future

"And that is what the difference consists in."

"The 1878 El Niño caused widespread crop failures, floods and epidemics on a global scale. In parts of the planet, crops were scorched by intense drought. In other zones, the rain hit with such a ferocity that entire regions were washed away.

Weather upheaval caused the death of 50 million people around the world. This represented as much as three to four percent of the global population.

Follow-up weather chaos between 1896 and 1900 caused mass famines and widespread outbreaks of cholera, plague, and malaria. As many as 30 million died.

Mike Davis, in his book Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño, Famine and the Making of the Third World, writes that these events were so catastrophic that they broke apart many social/political systems and left large parts of the world susceptible to the rise of gunboat diplomacy and the emergence of what became known as the Third World." —Charlie Angus via

"The deeper they conceal him—the more remote the cell, the smaller the cell, the colder and stonier the walls of the cell—the more vivid and living is the writer."

( via / via )

"All the efforts of the Ottoman state to ban coffee and coffeehouses ultimately were to no avail."

"...if a Glasgow were a unit of measurement, it would be the shortest distance between a swagger and a stretcher." —Joseph S Furey via

Aftervisions.

"monkey gone to purgatory"

doc intersection
sick Fillmorlocks sortie
mugglemelt August
mazesong is ray's cavern

calendar watch kitschbleed
occult gold filter
marrowbright bear trap
intrusive thoughts goosestep

sworn carnal sweven
chanceweb along jangles
jungled-up orc trail
atmospheric Flatiron

fallout feast crystal
festination seiche slobber
wake woozy tarn edge
werifester cistern

scoriac rue, briarcrown
risk attends lost hatchet
post into verstveldt
involves tragic hedgekeep

bed vigil budging
burly gulls dive earwax
my origami
mirthlessly rides sidecar

Gloomy Sunday.

( via/ via )

I have a farm in Africa.

"on trading a pajama top for a dress shirt of the same color"

dark labyrinth of using
yegg cornered by feghoots
pistachio shell, stalag
trail, stirious freon
secret rain before sunrise

"At the banquet, another notable figure was present: the novelist Thomas Mann, who took the seat beside Disney and brought to his attention the book about a young deer named Bambi."

What i don’t like about religion is how religion makes people act.

Early Sex.

( via / via )

Carcosa Stories; Or, a Stoic Caress.

"... there is no other city on earth the idea of which is so fiercely promulgated." —Sam Leith via

The Insane Story of Natalie Harp.

"Elegy for a Shadow Follower"

Ah, but they have made a cult of war
   that never needs to advertize;
its toys & sickly liberties come gloze
   in flickers that belie the fire.

Obedience & the willingness to kill
   are still the measure of a wight—
the castle's stones, from some high parapet—
   & not their essence, which is vile.

"This was madness on a whole different scale, even than Epstein’s."

( via / via )

For Our Students Reading The Odyssey.

"the usual suspects"

world ready to grab, legible
as an hour gone is not;
direction of losing

murderers are not caught

an emptiness enamored
of its not-being-crossed;
that color to the eye

murderers are not caught

looking back to those bad years
whose recipe is lost

Stars, I have seen them fall.

"Where do you think it will get you, to wage war against all the smartest humans?" —David Brin via

Listening to Leverkühn.

( via / via )

Amon Düül II / Call of Cthulhu intersection.

"I have always been on the side of ornament and artifice."

—Lisa Robertson, Riverwork via @levistahl.bsky.social

Coffee, Cigarettes & Memories.

      "Waspshudder on Wilshire"

1.
drive a Shining · Trapezohedron
   in the Angeldust Bowl
redbrick pivo Rogaine
      beach of split
   quest plenilune
Choc'late Ralston vaultdoor

chartreuse Twelfth Street · Twombly epigones
   a few curated hardcopies
      new potholes
   for viaduct
Gestapo scarce, skatepunk
scratched runes in the underpass

2.
Tara taradiddle
so dark the waves

on Biscayne Bay
corpsepaint fiesta

3.
aesthetic murderboard

"My mother used to tell me fairy stories, most of which she made up herself, which were wonderful—and many of which I’ve ripped off for things, subsequently!"

( image from my 12/23 blog. the news link is twitter & broken. a reverse google image search retrieves similar photos from aleppo, damascus, gaza city, mosul, beirut, & homs / faall[a]w[a]y via )

"We are not persuaders. We are the children of the Unknown."

bluegray slab · slithercam
       glass tinted
   revolving doors
purposes dark perking
palindrome the calendar

probable treachery · traffic crossings
       canyons dim
   with missed warnings
forest clearing finish

"Things last either too long, or not long enough."

Once i coined a difrasismo for Noir with the Lojban words for “night” and “fate”.

"51.4% or 23,419 sold between 12–999 copies."

( via/ via )

"The books being destroyed by AI companies are exactly the opposite. They come from curated selections of titles that booksellers decided were worth saving. For every book on the shelf, each bookseller considered five or ten or even twenty other books and found them wanting."

"For the disembodied entities that dwell in language, the cloth mother and wire mother are best analogized as bouba mother and kiki mother" —@ctrlcreep

"We had no way to talk about any of this."

      "SOMEWHERE OR OTHER.

Somewhere or other there must surely be
   The face not seen, the voice not heard,
The heart that not yet--never yet--ah me!
   Made answer to my word.

Somewhere or other, may be near or far;
   Past land and sea, clean out of sight;
Beyond the wandering moon, beyond the star
   That tracks her night by night.

Somewhere or other, may be far or near;
   With just a wall, a hedge, between;
With just the last leaves of the dying year
   Fallen on a turf grown green."

—Christina Rossetti

A Christmas Ball at Catville.

( via / via )

A new crater.

"Squalicum Nocturne

Pavilia of the moon's aperture tonight
the veined lineaments of desire to the Bering Strait
beyond. This is jealousy's perfection, the aftermath
of the pack-ice. I only mention it because

reticulated into the stratified, the beatific.
& there are raptors along the high ridges
nomadic Clovis hunters of the Cascade Crest
ostensibly a promenade of phalanxes

for the skulls of ungulates, the bare white plinths
scratches, indentations, scrolls
of predation's delirium, a validation,
the frescoed trellising obviously its grim stain.

& so it goes here in these rainshadow archipelagos.
The humped backs & hooked snouts of the dark ones,
invalids of the parapets, the fish ladders...
of the holding ponds. The climax conifers soothe

somewhat, as does the vale & warp of the moon.
But the gaudiness of the death-rattle remains."

—Anselm Parlatore via

Medieval Beach Reads.

Big Suicide coughs in the wings.

We really need a word for.

( via / via )

My Philosophy in Seven Covers.

"If you want to know why someone would grind their life away scrolling the jackpot in their pocket, look no further than these drive-by bits of reality." —Travis Wright via

"I knew that one day my gallery would get me laid."

sea of humans choosing
those for whom slop is more real
pale cerulean powerhouse
Zeus is angry

"Verse dramas have died out because nobody writes them. Diaries are dying out because everybody writes them."

( via / via )

Network.

"all that allows us to plan"

lanes closing in
Hiroshima

on a morning like this

dance
because nothing
dance

because nothing
dance

"One might think he had gone blind on principle and with an august masochism perversely preferred the return of the Stuarts."

"Polymarket has millions of dollars in wildfire-related bets & more than $1M in beds were placed on the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires!" —@malena.bsky.social via

Catharsis Interruptus.

( via / via )

Re-enactment.

"We submit ourselves to fantastic degradations of image and sound consumption in order to anaesthetise the pain resulting from having lost reality." —Ivan Illich via

Michel Ocelot & "Earth Intruders".

"ergotism of the administrators"

pomp of hurled paragraphs
a poor show quarrelling
what we wish to seem is finished
in the wild druid grove
libraries burning like beaconlights
in a time of vast eclipse
the stout mind with a merle's shrug
mutates lately

Zine revival in England.

( via / via )

"If you want to look at who was challenging gender, look to the battlegrounds not the amphitheater."

      "we chose unwisely"

pinkgold rattle, respite
      glowing eyes
roost in the teal wheelchair
   gallery whirr
come again with cairnthwart
      payphone wire
coiled & broken off token

Beds are Burning.

"The monster that best captures the current nature of human-machine hybrids is the wraith, a creature that isn’t impeded by barriers and that serves as an uncanny double of real people."
—Meghan O'Gieblyn via

In That Cellar.

( via / via )

A Name for the Fourth Moon of Pluto.

"And not even the blasphemers of the demiurge have dared to deny that the universe is most beautiful, but rather, they maintain that because of this beauty, souls are harmed."

—Proclus

In the Hollywood Hills.

"Hubble site:
impatiently waiting
for a galaxy to load"

—Tom Clausen via

Wobble of the chess piece.

( via / via )

"...the AIs will build the cathedral on their own. They will be better architects than us."

"Poppy

They’re calling me. The arsonists of cypresses.
I stroked bunnies in my palms.
He rose at dawn. He rose at dawn.

They’re embracing me. The tiger that stomped on the tribe.
It coiled the roads like flax around legs.

Die, Tomaž! You no longer have a soul!
I photographed you with your mouth open
as you lay on the snow for the agreement
with the ravens. The hall that you
thought was rock was really
the rag of a red heartbeat."

—Tomaž Šalamun (Translated by Brian Henry in The Yale Review)

Shelley.

"Greek, Sir, is like lace; every man gets as much of it as he can."

— Samuel Johnson via @hereforthebooks

Dark Carnival of Language.

( via / me )

The Roses of Jabalia.

"When they burned the Library of Alexandria, the crowd cheered in horrible joy. They understood that there was something older than wisdom, and it was fire." —@yurirando (2022) via @incertus

"As Arno writes Celan acquired a degree of social status, including as an instructor of German at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, where Jacques Derrida would see him in the hallways." (via aldaily)

      "grizzled Zubenelg"

supernal yarn fizgig
      is signal
   or is it noise
final noun rhinestone
trees narrow · traik among edges

borderlands of blitzkrieg
      sombrero
   orb indigo
braille in pale cerulean
trees narrow · traik among edges

"But I am very sure of the style of the architecture and of the consecration of the church."

( via / via )

Evidence.

"ardent dero, rodent dear"

Sitzfleisch ullage, zealwise
berserk the wheeled keelhaul
inchmeal sunrise satchel

The Power of the Powerless.

"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness." —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

Wild Bull and Raven Are Friends.

( via / via )

Nobody is that dumb.

"Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone." —Flaubert via

On the Russian Persecution of the Jews.

      "setter of tasks"

poltroon wanting nothing more
than follow what he's done before
      mothlamp smear
   wooden remorse
the Joker's phiz · plastered storeys tall

fixture of gilt furltide
foul scarecrow & rare pickpocket
      vap buzzing
   in burdened trees
this hour small · mothlight smirr

cannot stay, stark word
& stalled dollhouse hourglass
      lets me think
   a thorough wreck
looking through · lightning prism

parked cars all newer
on this nowl-filled stoneglebe

"By the late 18th century, it was taken for granted that Ossian was one of the chief poets of Western civilization: he was the favorite poet of Napoleon, admired by Diderot and Goethe, and Thomas Jefferson called him 'the greatest poet who ever existed'."

( via / pic by melanie pruit )

"...we’ve had a nice, long period of American literary culture as the dominant literary culture of the world. It might just be time for other national literatures to become the epicentres of literary value."

      "bungee cord"

buzz not lost for boasting
      the high fire
debacle perne lockstep
   afar haggard
game of lids illumined
      trick gravel
deluscious thirst flushing
   the grue sprig turned

Good Chance of Making It.

I always wondered what happened to [Keith Roberts]. 70s scifi had some major literary figures, & by the end of the 80s had repudiated or driven most of them out. Lafferty seems to be having a comeback, maybe Keith Roberts will too.

Manymong escape.