falling tumbling tollbooth
intestate earth nestling
counting coup
on the sluggards
corner eyeslipt firefly
the blur that goes blooey
taking note
of the talkers
come away wambly
wetigo's chief chetnik
likes my poem
says it perkles
Was it so very hard to be incorruptible?
"carbolic acid smell"
looth scarcity scathe-hap
no scandal, just dustbin
pale auroras peering
as punk jackals hunker
sparks photopsic, spyport
for a spruce puce skinflint
Maybe the best of all pop-up books.
“THE WIND IS BLIND
Eyeless, in Gaza, at the mill, with slaves
–Milton’s ‘Samson’
The wind is blind.
The earth sees sun and moon; the height
Is watch-tower to the dawn; the plain
Shines to the summer; visible light
Is scattered in the drops of rain.
The wind is blind.
The flashing billows are aware;
With open eyes the cities see;
Light leaves the ether, everywhere
Known to the homing bird and bee.
The wind is blind,
Is blind alone. How has he hurled
His ignorant lash, his aimless dart,
His eyeless rush, upon the world,
Unseeing, to break his unknown heart!
The wind is blind,
And the sail traps him, and the mill
Captures him; and he cannot save
His swiftness and his desperate will
From those blind uses of the slave.”
—Alice Meynell
"hachette isn’t canceling a book bc of the way it’s written, but bc they can’t copyright something generated by another corporation’s algorithm" —@patricknathan
"Now, making a work is not thinking thoughts but accomplishing an actual journey." --David Jones, preface to πβπ π΄πππ‘βππππ‘π
free paint stirrer
asymmetric peace
gray dawnlight of groansift
grist for the verb stillicide
Walnut St
Arapaho
new floaters to keep up with
"problematic fav"
blearyeyed blame chiming
astrobleme tremendous
texture. despair spoon's end?
spiracle clog dogma
blow my nose nave-bound
anent bomb-winter
taperdimpse adept goes
dallying morn's floornail
hieroglyphic glucose
infirm glare sparingly
hostage to the sky scaffold
The set of The Addams Family was actually Pastel Goth.
"When I was a Stanford Prison Experiment guard I was always nice to everybody but no-one ever wants to hear about that." —@causticcovercritic.bsky.social
"for all their ubiquity in the waking world, i barely ever see any electronic devices in my dreams" —@ulkharaghayeva
"TRIAD
These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow…the hour
Before the dawn…the mouth of one
Just dead."
--Adelaide Crapsey
"A-sway,
On red rose,
A golden butterfly…
And on my heart a butterfly
Night-wing'd."
—Adelaide Crapsey (Shadow, 1911-1913) via @twicktwit
"The current age is one of material abundance and spiritual poverty. It is odd for that reason by historical standards." —@syntheticsocrates
Night sky on Mars. (Not really.)
19c: grade school Classical Greek
20c: high school calculus
21c: two lanes taking turns to merge into one IS ROCKET SCIENCE
the mad king shuffles ballroom plans at an empty desk
screaming comes across the sky
cool bright morning where i try to fadge some slack
windshield crusted with false-spring pollen
"He came to literature in an unlikely way."
"APOLLO 11
*
ARMSTRONG (Palindrome)
Neil A., NASA peer.
Craft far,
creep as an alien.
*
ALDRIN (Palindrome-by-Pairs)
Char sea.
Run, ally Aldrin!
Skies, kind, rally a lunar search.
*
COLLINS (Palindrome-by-Triples)
Oil, kit,
daring wander.
Collins: Outer soul.
In colder, waning dark,
I toil."
—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
" 'Trump visits Graceland during the war' sounds like second-rate DeLillo but here we are"
—@rhhaines
My first sound release made from sonifying my analogue film reels.
"Village Explainer Tells All"
soft dirgewrixle dockside
dazzle razzle clown lung
in the truck-trawled desert
plumes retrace my lost plumb
lammermeier misprint
flayed digging
antelucan
Mt Olympus · on Ozempic
silicon chip · harsh chassis
break breadsticks
my brain on kedge
turquoise cup · cold order
burnt orange
I write only for Thomas Merton & his electrician.
"I’d say jazz drumming taught me how to write."
"It is cowardly to describe as illusion what we know is merely farce." — E M Cioran (tr P Traylen) via
"Sojourner
Shepherd's Law, Northumberland
The fettered hill.
The skull.
Old stone, among nettles fallen, near.
Her light brown hair.
The brief bales.
The bared hills, the load-bearing hills, the hills of Lammermuir.
Her coming headlong here."
—Gillian Allnutt
"For us, the contemporary poetry that matters tries make sense of the history of the recent past, a past that’s been propagandized, memory-holed, and co-opted to the point it can be difficult to remember, much less reconstruct a historical narrative about these times and their psychic darkness." (via)
"this first fog, enough
to paint grass turquoise-grey, plus
a few extra wisps"
—Jenkins Rising via
Let’s keep snobbery in jazz where it belongs.
Central Market just upped the ante on highfalutin' coffee culture with a roast-it-yourself option in its own dedicated room.
What stocks should I buy right now?
"anchor in effigies"
questionnaire honk droppings
library halftime rhyming
your cloak on a coat hanger
catch the sun if shining
deputize a wise finger
Dilbeck's fallout darb
"Yet still the unresting castles thresh."
dragons, dragon holdings
a dreich name for framing
touch Gestapo gingerly
to a tune accelerando
“What we don’t want to look at, we think we don’t have to deal with, and then it owns us completely.”
– Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor" —@jacobwren.bsky.social
Everything is great! Everything is fine!
" Like Tennyson, Larkin is half in love with his own melancholy. He is also warning us against it." —Jem via
"This is why the traffic between storytelling and metaphysics is continuous."
"The plum’s snow blooms are past,
Again I hear birds cry.
I fear this springtime grass
Will climb our polished steps too high."
—Wang Wei via
"manic noun"
maze full of reasons
moving through to sieve
here before to find
dust that's my sustenance
rich market of merch
many lost things winnowed
on the book dream path
dim days without music
gravel tracked in
animorphic shadows
share stage with reagents
& news its own game
avoiding what has happened
& in truth little sense said
would account for this war
"There was a line of perfect boards, ready to be made into something. There was a door, warped and fallen into the street. There was a boardroom, where meetings went on so long that no one knew what decision had been made. In my apartment, the tulips have reached the stage of paper. When they hear music, they will turn from purple to yellow. They will become a tent in which I have always remembered sheltering. It is cold, and yet I shelter. The panorama is of the river, and on the river there is sailing, and the sails fill the river, and the sails are gone."
—@salrandolph
"He later sent money to place flowers on Crone’s grave every Memorial Day until his own death."
"Things that are inevitable: aging, growing less attractive, infirmity, disease and disorder, death, not getting what we want, the disappointment and boredom that are core to adult life
Things that are not inevitable: poverty, war, homelessness, disenfranchisement, cruelty, bigotry, exploitation
Our culture acts like it’s the exact opposite, and so naturally many people are miserable."
—@freddiedeboer
I’m glad to know about this i suppose but it is one of the most depressing things i’ve ever read.
"Echoes of Love
The house is creaking like a rocking chair.
I’m small again,
comforted by the sway of matter in a shift of air,
cosseted by wind.
Undulate earth, how do you slip your hum
around our roar
of concrete, needles, neon, wadded gum,
demented hungers, war,
discarded children? Your lap is full of us
and of our wrong.
How can you simplify the noise
to cradle our first song?"
—Isabel Chenot
"Cain needed somewhere he could lick his wounds. So he invented the city —."
"to paint anything other than the witches' sabbat at the witches' sabbat"
violet's shroud shrinking
shirked ghost trio
burning through ten of my nines
shadow boxing blindfold
"Then the sitcom – and Bernard Black in particular – became a cult favourite; I picked up my first proper writing jobs in Mexico, to which I’d decamped as soon as I’d raised enough cash; and my memories of that winter above the shop – the utilities cut off, jacket potatoes as bed-warmers, my breath making tortuous sculptures in the air – took on a certain garret glamour." —Joseph S Furey via
"Today we live in the future she warned us about."
" ' My God!' he bit out.'“Of all the stinkingly unlucky arrests I could have made at this particular time--the arrest of Karl Imhoff--alias "Professor Waldemar Unruh"--alias "Paramoecium Pete"--alias "Amoeba Ambrose"--alias "Herr-Doktor Heinrich Zonenblink"--alias--' "
—@harryskeeler.bsky.social
"UMAMI (Palindrome)
I’m a muse
to note,
raw at last:
salt, aware
to notes umami."
—@anthonyetherin
Psalm 88 “Flowers cut will sing their clime”.
"Lunula
O luna novella,
Es digna fabella
Quae versibus edat
Itinera Sputnik
Tam ardua ut nic--
Tans Lucifer cedat."
—Van L. Johnson, The Classical Outlook (Dec 1957) via
"I have a bunch of worlds that I’m world building for different projects. I’ve already world-built thoroughly the worlds for the next four series. And I’m working on the fifth one!" —Ada Palmer via
INTERNALATIONAL DICTIONARY OF NEOLOGISMS.
"Every time I’m in Union Square I think about how Tammany Hall, the seat of power for New York for decades, is now a Petco" —@cooperlund.online
"clepsydra"
barrel-jeweloid
jazzy typeface fuseblown
Polish cold war neon
colder in here & cheerless
gas higher the whole world
hurrying pellmell hellward
barrel jewel the password
jester at monsoon fun'ral
mahogany milch · amass skypoints
angst surfing
the swift Imbolcs
at the right temp · i can gulp this starbucks
no eye on · Monday's urnclock
Karg Island
has been hours
in the barrel sun · of a jewel burn
internet out Biscayne
ill among flung robots
sky array of scare-drones
scumbled with pallid humbug
somewhere Substack tickles
salvo orc & elvish
handkerchief worn threadbare
threatens to pull wool up
threatens to
pull stark rank on
starbucks napkin · sonnet annuls
“Clearancing DeLillo”
The names, somehow the blessèd names continue
In sonorous emptiness, down furrowed canyons,
Names for things long flown on fragrant pinions;
Believe it. Swift incarnadined Danube
Carried off America too, we huddle
Some pier with flickering clouds & dimming screens
Screaming for Daddy, shipwreck, or the needle.
We are the lucky ones.
Later, there will be monuments anew;
Records. Not the stories we’d have told,
But honest accounts. On these i sometimes brood.
A bard without a theme, without a role,
Chattering as this tutelary venue,
Burning house, collapses: words continue.
"Don Fitch recalls that early zines were called fanmags, but Louis Russell Chauvenet (who's still publishing) coined fanzine about 1942 and it became the common usage, sometimes abbreviated to zine." —"Zine History" at Zinebook
At some point, backpacking became a curated experience.
Reluctant to bother to fill in the crosswords of a TV mystery show--clue, clue, clue. If i like how it ends, i'll go back.
"thirlshoon"
to cut cancer research
more cash for that fascist
mild winter with furl doors
wailing silence-thudbrink
I knew i’d find some real Philosophy on Substack if i just kept looking.
"playing war with the neighbor kids"
in the cracked china cup
creep swevens of grovewalks
decipher street struggles
stern with turnip carveface
the lanai full of photons
in the cracked china cup
creep swevens of grovewalks
ferry's rage to be drydocked
"The word love 'resists being a word, almost successfully' " —@oldoldoldoldnew
"You know how in a library no one’s trying to sell you anything?
That’s how the internet was." —@butisitart.bsky.social
China and the Future of Science.
taking Kharg Island
like a little bitch
blood splashes
at night in the empty kitchen
low sussuration in my ears
