( via / via )

Buried Between Her Eyes.

"Strip back the rattling chains and the cold spots and what you find, again and again, is someone who wasn’t allowed to speak." —CJ Cooke via

"Taste is making aesthetic choices someone does not want you to make. Everything else is public relations."

"Parallelogrampire"

Pale cerulean this tense July
Fun mortality blossoms;
Riddlethwarts destroy
As debris counts the lessons.
Bicentennicide swift and clean
Mellows in the hell-machine.

No one saw where assassins waltzed;
Outlines stand or they seem to.
Pickpockets say it's all our faults--
Xmas lights on the lean-to.
Bicentennicide's Potemkin vibe,
Hoedown for a toxic tribe.

Fireworks and AI-targeted drones
Dance in the heads of vatniks.
Doctor's verdict spills on stones
Dealwise necromantic,
And manly bicentennicide
Mogs the day the music died.

"I keep a cup I have used for nine years. I have written about it before. But the cup is mine in a way Ryōkan’s bowl was never his. The bowl was held lightly enough to be handed to a stranger. Mine, I would chase down a thief for.

( via / via )

Tricola.

"Requiem for a Staunch Trumpist"

When the tale of all of this is told,
Some were reluctant knaves, and some were bold.

Rainfield and Argument.

"I have come to realize that no matter how badly the algorithms fuck us up, the internet is still the front line of the struggle between the DIY movements surviving from the 20th century and the commercialism of global tech corporations trying to dominate the 21st-century world." —Hana &Co via

A Hinge in History.

( via / me )

"The trouble is that Adams has been using the machine long enough that he feels dependent on it, even if he struggles to get it to work as he wants."

"I used to get quite a lot of these emails and I did indeed take part in book clubs, festivals and TV programmes about books. The difference now is that the clubs, festivals and programmes don’t seem to exist." —Christina Patterson via

Sugar.

      "subvortex"

Nights in July in Texas, never dipping
under eighty, the pool bathwater-warm.
Cicadas all day long thrash raucous hymn
   nastily carping.
July nights, their annulling
      humid clasp
nothing before mooring
   our cloistered drift;
lit windows · that were less views
than unkept promises & now too late—
Texas July trundles into Europe
on Panzer treads; nightmares sponge-envelope
   (cicadas assert)
while here (heavily) · a glow ebbs.

Register.

( via / via )

Hnefatafl. Or. And.

"LA GIOCONDA
Leonardo Da Vinci
The Louvre

Historic, side-long, implicating eyes;
A smile of velvet's lustre on the cheek;
Calm lips the smile leads upward; hand that lies
Glowing and soft, the patience in its rest
Of cruelty that waits and doth not seek
For prey; a dusky forehead and a breast
Where twilight touches ripeness amorously:
Behind her, crystal rocks, a sea and skies
Of evanescent blue on cloud and creek;
Landscape that shines suppressive of its zest
For those vicissitudes by which men die."

—Michael Field in Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890's (1981)

"Been trying to figure out what it reminds me of and it's 'Main Street USA' at Disneyland."

"After this, and despite a long series of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sniping, they ['the Michaels'] converted to Catholicism, going so far in their zeal as to become Dominican tertiaries (lay sisters), though with a special dispensation that allowed them to continue attending the theatre." —David Wheatley via

Glasgow.

( via / via )

Carmel Point.

"My favourite part is a tie between the anecdote about sending postcards from his band’s New York tour to the Irish social welfare office, and his finding out a hallucinated group of pygmies due to a mushroom trip were, in fact, a tour group of dwarves coincidentally visiting the nightclub at the same time (!)." —Sam Enright

"The New Yorker, the prize culture, the MFA system, establishment criticism, the canon, imperial academics — these are not innocent bystanders to the suppression of the core and most vital American literary tradition, the suppressed people’s literary tradition, engaged literary populism."

"Spring View

The country is broken, though hills and rivers remain,
In the city in spring, grass and trees are thick.
Moved by the moment, a flower's splashed with tears,
Mourning parting, a bird startles the heart.
The beacon fires have joined for three months now,
Family letters are worth ten thousand pieces.
I scratch my head, its white hairs growing thinner,
And barely able now to hold a hairpin."

—Du Fu via via

Carolina Rain.

( via / via )

Beyond the Vessel.

"CROW (Palindrome)

Deft,
I saw a crow,
over us,
a sure vow or caw
as it fed."

—Anthony Etherin

Grover Leach.

"I will go to watch the animals, and let
something of their composure slowly glide
into my limbs; will see my own existence
deep in their eyes, which will hold me for a while
and let me go, serenely, without judgment."

—Rilke (tr S Mitchell) via via @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social

"The wildly allegorical, unsolvable ending of The Prisoner...got him out of one phase of his career and into another. It’s a little bit like Lou Reed making Metal Machine Music or Prince becoming The-Artist-Formerly-Known-As..."

( via / via )

More than a Folk Song.

"My dad was a poet so I could never really join in when the other boys would argue about whose dad could beat up the other dads, but I was confident that my dad could make your dad feel seen in ways that would quietly devastate him." —@sjksalisbury.bsky.social

Night piloting.

oomphdip seldom suffered
      both coffees
scary-steep graph our faring
   occult downfall
if you stick to ixodids

overwarm morning
      my old car
most of whose char windows
   open nicely
the parkinglot lurk-fang'd

new summerhat gnomon
      drivethrough line
nestled in a chessgame
   faraway dreich

This fish doesn't swim.

( via / at the grand hotel )

Tagged crab report reward pin.

"CROWS (Anagrammed Lines)

The crows are back at the
weathercock that bears
a hawk.... Both trace secret
arches to the backwater,
to caw at the brash creek."

—Anthony Etherin

"...grad school takes our desire to dedicate our life to some sort of learning, fosters it, demands vows even of a monastic sort, then tells us there is no room at the inn—and, with great cruelty, and not a little bad faith, that it’s our fault.

"...real detonation but false report..." —Finnegans Wake

July Evening.

( via / via )

Eleven Dantes.

I too have always been baffled by this seemingly hardwired feature of our literary culture. I enjoy reading translated works in languages i can't read, like Russian. But i also have explored (to a limited degree) poems in two or three of their original languages & the difference is what i like to call "a cover song versus the original"... Literary culture requires generalizations it 𝑎𝑏𝑠𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑦 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑏𝑎𝑐𝑘 𝑢𝑝, in most cases (unless the critic is someone like George Steiner). The alternative is having the humility to admit most of us aren't qualified to make the kind of sweeping critical judgments we would want to.

Caravans to Empire Algol.

boiling in the tar-pit
em'rald rain
vilipend neon lie
blinds drawn
ritual murder board
half empty

"Everyone talks about our cherry blossoms and sometimes our azaleas and magnolias, but Dos Passos is the first writer I’ve encountered to remark on the crape myrtles."

( via / via )

Rondeau.

turbid patch on the surface
appurtenances minces
      faint shadows
   shiv'ring hour
resume zither · lattice adding-to
hot pink sticky notes pelting
paragon of lawn trim

"Kingsnorth is wary of culture-war politics for good reason - though his book, in the end, cannot be read otherwise than as an intervention within it."

"...a continent that falls in love with Milan Kundera deserves to end like Atlantis." —Franco Moretti via

Movement Song.

( me / via )

San Francisco Girls.

"You must remember that because the mysteries come to an end makes them no less true." --Gore Vidal, Julian (1964)

"And when they reared, the elfish light/ Fell off in hoary flakes."

11.
Heorotweiler hailstorm
   sweetness now
hasten onnthe lacewing
   old bitterness
their house steep of staircase
   wandering lorn
the stuffed owl ending
   glass encased

12.
scribbled in stone · askew pylon
   choc'late affogado
along broken sidewalks · the play of photons
   Xmas in July is back

turbid patch on the surface

"Thus, if theōria is the faculty that perceives form or essence, and if both have been denied real existence in the reigning philosophy of the day, or at the very least, are depicted as ontologically suspect or epistemically illegitimate within a culture’s habit of thought (as is often the case today), then theōria is left with no proper objects to attend to as publicly credible realities."

( me / via )

Forty-eight hours of the Sun.

9.
small threat small evasion
smaragdine greenhorn
      some thin road
   of real traction
& the blood mist · gathers on gewgaws
not into a tartbook
attained through raindance
      educed though
   & river delved
the square filled · with a squamous mob

10.
deep cerulean
the drag gods
brick bared to
those gliding by

swirl of smoke
& no swimsuit
this hot spring
of harsh clinkers

missed future
all amercing
dragged to hell
by a small drone

"I carry my awareness..."

"I have just been reminded that Fritz Lang’s 'Metropolis' is set is 2026. Isn’t that fascinating? Someone 100 years ago thought the world be a stratified society with elites and worker slaves, pleasure places and religious figures driven underground…and artificial humans causing havoc for the human population in 2026?" —Sarah Light-Waller via

Night in July.

( via / via )

When you accidentally find your doppelganger on a painting made over 100 years old. 😀.

"Territory changes too fast to keep the maps up-to-date." —Catherynne Valente

Dusty Road in July.

7.
embossed ceiling balework
aboard tossing cosplay

the same terrible sirens
sulfur oblique weakness

fill up notebooks footfalls
feigned intricate bricktown

the odds taken irksome
by edge grayest sedgebrink

words fade to propelled Fillmore
fake ceiling or blue acorn

into the place plaints go

8.
   are the bombs falling
is that car shade burgundy
   this idle bubble
reached by driving an hour
keeping the computer mum

Brancusi’s Golden Bird.

( via / me )

"I long to scatter far and wide, in verse that will not die, the glory of great Oughtred."

5.
skelterfugue in skugry
askew winter bent twig
      sixty-eighth
   aileron swerve
in a white bathrobe · benthic sentiments
twilight twisting the mauve death
can't wait in this spate mist
      ahead course
   most recursive

6.
in the shadow of the hat fact'ry
an abundance of tictacs
i am king of tictacs
with my smart glasses
& my military presence

as close as i ever want to see
to a death drop for real

Girl with Pigeons.

"Maybe there's another army, invisible, even more invisible than ghosts, fighting over things we don't know and can't see, and they fill the ranks there. But we don't know." —Deathless

"As I picked up the heavy book, I knew terror, for I am that rarest of reviewers who actually reads every word, and rather slowly."

( via / via )

"It took him days to paint just the splash."

"...that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia..." —Finnegans Wake

Far from the Land of Eagles.

3.
loadbearing stain
stark cusp of wastefulness
sudden quiet seeing
corsair calaveras

a wind out of Ardbeg

4.
atop one black castle
atop another
a year from now
wind through their empty rafters

so close bearing down
on our meager refreshments

there will come better days

Difficult Epigrams.

( via / me )

Alien & Mechanic & Uncanny.

"mallard lake"

1.
dark bars & dark clubs
beige ground zero
in the barking snowfall
starvation carves a place
it was a time of turmoil
glass figures shivered
on a dustless glass shelf

house that was a bus once
that once had wheels
room without demarcations
except in the mind
words that a crow dropped
on the way to somewhere else
gravel ath that petered out

2.
the war is going badly
in the thin winter light
fingeryielding
pavement of the dead city

It's a Heartache.

"Cosmetics is an extension of the will." —Catherynne Valente

Travel case for a skull.

( via / via )

I used to live round the corner from Leytonstone Underground station, in Hitchcock’s birthplace, where the subways are lined with 17 mosaics of his life and films.

There’s different ways to relate to museums. Before i learned better, i used to try to look at every object in a museum at least once. Later i would only pick a handful out & spend fifteen or twenty minutes before passing any sort of judgment (while skipping everything else). Now there are a couple of paintings in the museums in the city where i live, that are old friends; i visit them whenever i can, & tell them my troubles.

Obelisk of Grixis, from Reuters.

"An increasing incidence of extreme weather events

We watched the charts all week
as the old hurricane's great lash
curled back across the ocean, not weakening
until we saw Bristol in its path.

The police told us to leave
for the nowhere we had to go
in the nothing we had to get there.
They would take the gloves off for looters.

Abandoned people are always crazy
like a fool who squares up to a storm.
Crazy like us, on the roofs of Easton
waving at the news helicopter

as the studio repeats the warnings
we were apparently ignoring
when we walked onto the M32
in a world already shaking and tearing

for a woman desperate to pass her child
into the mystery of a stranger's car
which was crammed to the corners
with the old necessities of home."

—Tom Sastry, Life Expectancy Begins to Fall (2025)

I do think our ideologies are rather like termite towers.

( me / via )

"But it’s in the narrow streets that turn without warning, in the weight of the air in certain doorways that Prague’s secrets whisper."

"transhumance"

white candle darkening sky
zircons in fiberglass
these deadlines
cast among expedients
music from the flaking loom

sparing of maps
upon cool umber
put the round aside

white candle darkening sky
zircons in fiberglass

" We are not nudging the thermostat for a season or a generation. We are setting it for longer than all of recorded history."

The trouble with psychology is not that it’s not true; it’s that it wants to be respectable.

Don't Expect.

( via / me )

"A decent society does not require saints. It requires guardrails, a floor, and institutions that do not turn every human need into a sales opportunity."

"There is for me just one simple, most exact definition :

Poetry is the music borne by speech."

—@henryghenrik

10 Books That Will Change the Way You Think About Books.

"Midsummer Loop

now in the stillness, the two still hours
between this meeting and that,
hours of silence in which the angel of conversation deserts us
to beat her wings above another gathering,
another long room, magnificent table and solemn pronouncement
made to the detriment of everybody else
and the glorification of the subject,
now we are abandoned to our own resources
on this one original summer’s day
and two hours fill like stones with the heat of the afternoon,
two flat stones placed on the stomach to steady
the heartbeat and the breathing,
a number of rabbits
emerge from their secret holes hidden about campus,
hidden but not undiscoverable holes
down in the beginnings of dry holly-bushes out of season
and the naked wooden roots of rhododendrons
from which the rabbits hop forward one hop at a time, one a minute,
a hundred little clepsydras
all set to different schedules, forward
on to the grass, where they balance, weightless as empty pelts
on the points of the blades, like martial artists
who lie unharmed on beds of nails
conducting their spiritual business, with two hot stones
weighing down their bodies, lightly, painlessly,
rabbits fanning out
across the sweeps of grass that sustain them,
across the blades that do not bend beneath them,
and they eat with steady hunger and enormous concentration,
clipping flat the sharp tips
precisely with ordinary, curved, discoloured teeth
again and again, masticating the strands
as they cross and re-cross the blocks of dark gold sun
laid across the lawns like golden doors
they pass through unharmed, through which we cannot pass,
both ears laid flat like banked canoes
and their great hind legs quiet and relaxed,
white scuts bobbing
gently across the campus, which is also their campus,
attached as rabbits are attached to their shadows
to a vast university invisible underground, the one ours mirrors,
intricate halls of residence and studios
round which the rabbits conduct themselves
in absolute darkness, by touch and smell alone, the wordless
sensitivities of their whiskers
brushing the walls and other warm bodies
or thrilling to an offensive discharge of fear in the air
undetectable to humans,
to the human who feels so pleased to have spotted
two rabbit-holes, there, at the foot of that blossoming tree,
now in the stillness, the two still hours
between this meeting and that"

—Frances Leviston via

"The waters of the American Heartland are fouled, more than anything, because we figured out how to keep the bugs off the crops. When you stop to think how much life we’ve erased from that fertile region in the 150 years since we first settled it, you might get a different idea who the real swarm is."

via / via )

Primrose Hill linocut.

sublunary pivosucht
wolfladder liftoff
cinnabar disparbled

"The room has become, for the evening, a smaller and more specific place — which is exactly the kind of smallness I have been trying to build into this apartment from the beginning."

"If the dinosaurs had had a telescope, they would have observed Saturn without its rings" --@fedeitaliano

Opioid of the Masses.

A $3 @mta.info subway fare and some good Q train timing can buy you one hell of a view of the July 4th fireworks and the Brooklyn Bridge light show!

Huge shoutout to the train operator for slow rolling over the Manhattan Bridge and the conductor for announcing it.

[image or embed]

— Jason Rabinowitz (@airlineflyer.net) July 4, 2026 at 9:10 PM

( me / via )

Orbit movies.

"...what if the foundational problem with AI is that we’re trying to code wei instead of wu wei?"
—Callum Hackett via

Aspire to "unhinged".

      "crushing it"

wolf ladder on redial
diligence broken wheel
      cerulean
   sidewalks buckle
Scheveningen dugout · borogove guards
wolf ladder at leafturn

"The kitchen smelled faintly of badgers and despair."

( me / via )

Lovers Atop the Empire State Building.

charmed terrible chamber
this time furnished i failed
chart no further

like a debt delved
'gainst no beginning
darkest ghost

my kindness would have carried

(2024)

"It seems like we’re racing toward a Singularity of AI enshitification, beyond which the enshitified world is hidden by the enshitificatory 'event horizon'."

"...The host with someone indistinct
Converses at the door apart,
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud."

—TS Eliot via

Flagged as 97% AI.

( via / via )

Warning from Space.

“I only mean to figure in that late 20c anthology: among the 10 million minor poets.” —The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism

Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds.

"NOTHING IS SACRED (Anagrammed Lines)

Nothing is sacred:
the gods in cairns,
and gnostic heirs;
once-hiding stars
and echoing stirs....
Nights, scored in a
sigh constrained."

—Anthony Etherin

Writing every which way.

( via / via )

"Some of it’s made in the Soviet Union, countries that don’t exist anymore, in factories that don’t exist anymore."

spirulina smoothie
smaragdine glitchwarp
      filch silenced
   in the mask aisle
where the pipes hide · page refreshed
ranting to the robots
rocking the twilight workshop
      a sound might
   sunder this depth
spew spirulina · thick Paris green

"This literary lineage, this passing down from editor to editor, temporary imprint to temporary imprint, is the real history of book culture."

"you couldn’t write Lolita today because it’s narrated by an academic who can afford a car"
—@simsben1

Every former Confederate state.

( via / via )

Iron Horse.

"How I wish this milestone anniversary could have been a time to take stock, to admit to the failures and tragedies of the past as well as the achievements, and begin a process of self-reflection, reconciliation, and restitution with those who have been so badly harmed, as well as looking forward with realism and hope for all people..." —Beth Adams (The Cassandra Pages) via

Circadian novels.

"CALL IT ALL NAMES, BUT DO NOT CALL IT REST

Go, death, give ground, for none of yours is here.
Weep with no sound, figures around a well.
Here gales knock down the chestnuts year on year,
And block with leaves the entry to the temple.
There the inscription no man's eyes can spell,
Archaic, in the forgotten character.
Sleeps near the nymph the font that christened her,
A shell unfastening to the vanished marvel.

Apart, life suffering in a tale of shadows,
Her patience lives, like light on infants' graves.
Rain drowns their names, the ground is full of echoes,
And there are rainbows buried in her naves.
Night cancels debts, the prince's and the slave's,
And one stays true, though quitted by his fellows.
The winter earth forsaken by the swallows
Rocks through blind storms their nest of cloistered waves.

The season's ritual offerings, fruit and leaves,
Die at her feet. Hazels in foliage dressed
Fall; but her tomb for men no increase gives.
Here for the thirsty no quick vats are pressed.
Yet her love's dayspring here breaks quietest,
Light for the doomed, and for the lost, reprieves,
Tthe ring-dove's changing light, heaven found through olives;
Call it all names, but do not call it rest.

Here where through trees death's voice, all-severing, blows,
Hung with stone tongues, the language of farewell,
Great doors are opened which no hand can close
And wide heaven flies into the bud's cold cell.
So is her sickness her last oracle
Where from its falling we may seed the rose
And her new joy from her remembered sorrows
Which time, being stony, has no tongue to tell."

—Vernon Watkins, Cypress and Acacia (1959)

"It hardly matters that generative AI systems are actually too incompetant to replace workers because the leaders making the layoff decisions are also incompetant and entirely delusional."

( via / me )

Turangalîla live. (i'm guessing—in Venezuela?)

"phronema"

phalanx of Faust-glisters
on fire with new choirbench
small thing fit for comprehension
tiny honorarium

"Triumphant disaster was the sign under which the members of the Frankfurt School lived their lives."

"America keeps trying to get me to go to her birthday party and I’m like no girl u need to go to the hospital" —@audipenny.bsky.social

A lot about Low.