( via / via )

Leaflostness.

The arts of fascination—can & will be automated; the arts of deliverance—never.

Commodities are fetishized throughout history and become the objects of profound myths.

( via / via )

The greatest silent movie ever made.

"bread in payment"

ducks with prophetic powers
paddle across turquoise
circles expand spoiling
my dark-spawned poem

it's not over till it's over

Knott's collected "Chanson d'Automne" versions. (pdf)

"Per-capita energy consumption has risen from about two thousand kilocalories a day in the palaeolithic, all of it food, to two hundred and thirty thousand in the modern United States." —Aneesh Sathe via

On some words of the Georgics.

( via / via )

"The Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha liked her books very much, presumably in French translation, for Hoxha was fluent in French."

"Essays on this topic are collected in the astonishing anthology Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience in which anthropologists struggle to come to terms with experiences they had in the field which align with their hosts’ world view, but not their own." —Gnostic Pulp via

"It's as if the writer refused to do the choosing between background and foreground..."

"Soft City

Bread and breadknife, like the best of friends,
Nap in the night kitchen, and neither see
Snow taking the city by storm.
The flakes fill the sky, falling soft
Like the crumbs coming off a cut loaf.
The houses, having no home to run to,
No space where snow has not spread,
Must stand sentry as the flakes spin down.
And if some tidy-minded titan
Decided to sweep the whole street up,
The crumbs and buildings, the cars and bushes,
All so like dust, into his outsized dustpan,
Who would be any the wiser?"

—Jonathan Roper at FGR

Confusion.

( via / via )

Restless Shores.

"THE CHRYSALIS (Anagrammed Lines)

A shy echo splinters
those shiny parcels.
The chrysalis opens
physical otherness...."

—Anthony Etherin

At Eighty.

"Because we are all susceptible to this kind of literally irrational yet ethical turn of mind, we do the same with art. We want to dance to music that doesn’t make us feel morally compromised."
—Daniel Moran via

Epigram.

( me / via )

Halfway Elfwisk.

"Any poet in English whose work consisted solely of such jewelboxes, no matter how brilliant, would be labeled minor by default." —Elijah Perseus Blumov via

Poegematry.

"twin cousins"

tintinnabulation · night's lees skewed
zygal trachea · itch resides
in the oobleck · of the anteater

Unlimited books for free.

( via/ via )

Sleepy Don LEGO.

"strychnine beats"

dénouement remaining
amerceproof tortsufi
the box babbles glibly
with a barded-wire marplot
too close to the claw-swing
declining pile dial tones
scrabble of waves scraping
screwball danse macabre

The Medieval Irish Law of Cats.

"In darkness by day we must press on,
giddy at the tilt of a negative crystal."

—J H Prynne via

Eye & Thou.

( me / via )

No comedians.

"Around 1820, his followers built a labyrinth with a small shrine at its center; they used it to meditate on the many false paths the soul would face before the coming of the millennium... the labyrinth was neglected until 1939, when a local preservation society built a new one. One of the first people to visit the new maze was the Indiana poet Marguerite Young..." —Ryan Ruby via

Time lapse of lightning.

      "left & right not interchangeable"

something that hurts · something that doesn't hurt
   enough about the cultural
wombat. it will always · wear gray
   double espresso bolsters
your rigamarole · of rude answer-jabs
   the sky is threatening
but threatening what?

New FGR.

( via / via )

Topkapi cat doors.

"April's Blister

Shroud-dried April’s frigid toes are dangling from the lair,
of the charnel house’s tower, deviant arsenic sun seeps in my skin;
neighbourhood couple jesting like rancid pieces of marzipan.
horribly peerless, so hurry-
violently stuff yourself with air, neatly clutch your eyeballs,
arrange them in pinholes, lest-
tenant-less cobwebs are already settling on ink;
this ceiling blazing in a monotone
fizz, holds a rusty fall which withers
down the lake of daffodils.

Peeling off my kip, a bubble wrap sprouting blood, ants
dutifully build borders and walls on white blisters, curses
on the wall shimmer in bright light; churning
out corpses- like an accident
prone area. a stale evening washes
you over like rotten bandages. dirt shovelled
with fingernails in twain; brittle, and tied
with lovers lint. Wracking dirt for an
aeon’s necropolis, my bones cave in -
weather dolls of ash, crumbling
in acrid April rain. I munch down bricks in the catacombs
of defiance of desiderating.

The floor whimpers itself white, lying under
chandeliers that loosely hang half-awake.

Still complaining about the weather, my-
plaster saint for gloom, my face scribbled over
in the posters. I’ll label the street lights huge, my
bed-sheet is the ghost. Dreams that i never had
hang from its crevices, loose skin flaps
softened by tides. The ocean is an open wound, moon has a habit
of poking it. it dutifully delivers corpses, payback; hope
is an hourglass filled with quicksand; a four lettered blister
I etched with tongs on my skin. Where are the feathers?"

—@erratumaddendum

Today's poem.

"History is basically one long record scratch of men saying, 'I’m just saying,' and then building a legal system around it." —Professor Meredith via

Instructions in an Emergency Room.

( via/ via )

Hat honour.

"Kitëzh weathered"

car shroud thesterness
coral neon
the air not cleared

a few notes
like last rain drops

creak & rattle of birds

"What gives this its peculiar grief—and Watteau knew it, the affliction and the genius arriving together—is that Rococo is not unconscious of what it has lost. The fêtes galantes are pastoral haunted by the knowledge that pastoral is fiction."

"...Sergei Khoruzhii, something of a Renaissance man among whose quite unbelievable achievements is translating Joyce’s Ulysses into Russian." —Victoria Stoilova via

Daughter, your frontier is the brutal jut and dint of their conditioning.

( @faallwy / via )

On the E at Delphi. (Along with citing modern attempts at interpretation.)

“I fight against the gluttony of time with so many very amusing weapons,–with gestures and with attitudes and with wholly charming phrases; with tears, and with tinsel, and with sugar-coated pills, and with platitudes slightly regilded. Yes, and I fight him also with little mirrors wherein gleam confusedly the corruptions of all lust, and ruddy loyalty, and a bit of moonshine, and the pure diamond of the heart’s desire, and the opal cloudings of human compromise: but, above all, I fight that ravening dotard with the might of my own folly.” —The Way of Ecben

"The ache of incompleteness is not a problem to be solved but a sacred disposition to be inhabited with full intellectual and spiritual seriousness."

      "double helixir"

Father of Lies · life's blood
      on the red
   rustling carpet
corridors stab starboard
scheme remnants my hymnal
bogus sward · bound for decay
      just weary
   aware morning
jinx agenda manxome
the mire country chyron
      what the storm
   richly installed
eyes still dark with irkthwart

"For years after I would wake shrieking."

( via / me )

Mnemonics for metre.

"Góngora: De la brevedad engañosa de la Vida

No less than the swift arrow solicited
a mark sharply destined to be bitten,
nor with more silence than the agonistic chariot
glided across mute sands to a winning finish,

does our century run to its prompt, secret end. Who doubts,
though he be beast destitute of reason,
yet may he read the portent of every dawn.
Carthage testifies, & still you don’t admit it?

You’ll run into trouble, Licio, if you persist
in chasing phantoms & embracing frauds…
Badly the hours’ll account you to yourself:
the hoürs that are grinding down the days,
the days that are gnawing away the years."

(my translation)

On a Line by Celan.

"This site is making me think Plato was right about banning poets from the republic"
—@jordandavis3

Programming.

( me / via )

The poetry of the pseudoscience of poetry.

"To the moneyed amateurs who ushered the subject into universities at the beginning of the twentieth century (men who fondled poems like antique clocks and ranked novelists like vintages of claret) the study of literature was 'a glory of the universe' or 'the spring which unlocks the hidden life'." —James Marriott via

"Eyes filled with wonder, she went home and changed her baby’s Vietnamese name to an American one."

"How Poetry Comes to Me

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light"

—Gary Snyder via

When Words Collide.

( via / pic by me )

Beelzebufo.

      “The Fountain

All through the deep blue night
   The fountain sang alone;
It sang to the drowsy heart
   Of the satyr carved in stone.

The fountain sang and sang,
   But the satyr never stirred–
Only the great white moon
   In the empty heaven heard.

The fountain sang and sang
   While on the marble rim
The milk-white peacocks slept,
   And their dreams were strange and dim.

Bright dew was on the grass,
   And on the ilex, dew,
The dreamy milk-white birds
   Were all a-glisten, too.

The fountain sang and sang
   The things one cannot tell;
The dreaming peacocks stirred
   And the gleaming dew-drops fell.”

—Sara Teasdale, Stars To-night (1930)

"Patriarchal societies are fueled, at their deepest root, by a fiendishly simple maneuver: separating women from each other."

A hundred photographs of stairways.

"The gothic, in my view, is the story of the dead coming back, told in a thousand decaying houses."

( via / via )

"True warfare in which large rival armies fight to the death is known only in man and in social insects."

"bsky needs a sad like button" —@wristroom.bsky.social

"I doubt it helps for it to be categorized as science fiction, or for it to be categorized at all."

"Like any good son, I pull my father out
of the water, drag him by his hair

through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail
the waves rush in to erase. Because the city

beyond the shore is no longer
where we left it. Because the bombed

cathedral is now a cathedral
of trees. I kneel beside him to see how far

I might sink. Do you know who I am,
Ba? But the answer never comes. The answer

is the bullet hole in his back, brimming
with seawater. He is so still I think

he could be anyone's father, found
the way a green bottle might appear

at a boy's feet containing a year
he has never touched..."

—Ocean Vuong via

Nicolai Fechin in Taos.

( via / via )

Predictive Markets song.

"looking for where i thought was the obvious place"

Penderecki pizza
unpacked by foul owllight
once dripping sparks burgeon
sippy cup costs bupkis

Two Akutagawa stories.

"Both novels are meditations on the aftermath. They ask the same question: what remains after the fall of meaning? " —Brock Eldon via

I want to steal that typeface.

( via / me )

Birubi.

"In the wake of the Michael Jackson biopic success, producers are now planning a John Wayne Gacy movie that focuses only on his career as a clown." —@frankconiff.bsky.social

With Wavering Feet.

lights with me
here & to the end:
should give them names
brighter as the landscape dims,
by saffron figments sained;
i clasp & release no solider show.
so cardboard season
with fiery glee will soon bedizen
& i who left such dreams
say: this is not my crimson.

"The moonlight catching the keys on the first visit, the music scores in pink, light blue, pale yellow scattered among the debris, the same rubble shining in clear autumn sunlight on the second visit: none of this names what was lost when the earthquake came."

( via / via )

Some giant solar flares lately.

century's gem, sampo
filtered softly wharf-left

eyes on the prose, prickly
practicum teeth-umgang

decades mix, still this diction
that drifts t'ward riftshade

amber & what utters
an orc skull at cull tide

"You look at these photos for 3 seconds and the AI tells. Are there."

"In Italian, the word tempo is used for both weather and time. A compromise for everything that lies beyond our control, yet remains within reach in the long run." —Jörgen Löwenfeldt (via

"From then on, I was able to appreciate even the most unsightly Brutalist architecture simply by imagining it reclaimed by the elements."

( via / via )

Latent.

the velocity
of chocolate is invariant

Great Fire of London.

mountain lantern tent
test filigree dugout
Rushmore rapist septic
& room sorted warthog

Delphi has its dizzy
derelictions tricksome
floaters attest darkflirt
of the flak-dodge lodger

vacuoles hold hawkish
hymns, gatherer's purview
i move to next nervetwinge
not adroit loitering

carousel with killers
crisp centipede cupcakes
whirlcrake & thick whinny
whiplash from the diptych

charcoal gray & sky gridlock

Boojum tree.

( via / via )

Wood_s lot.

"Philomela

It ended sooner than a song,
The thing he did without a word.
They hadn’t known each other long.
It ended sooner than a song,
And no-one seemed to think it wrong:
She was not changed into a bird.
It ended sooner than a song,
The thing he did without a word."

—Matthew Buckley Smith via

Archaeology says otherwise.

"Caroline’s new book Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King describes asking King why he used 'The Emperor of Ice-Cream', and he said 'the Stevens poems is about death and also about the ephemeral quality of life (ice cream melts fast)' but also picked out 'her feet protruding: horny, cold and dumb'. He added, I think very charmingly, 'let’s face it, Caroline, I was working to a large extent in an EC comics pulp horror vein, and I wanted to class up the joint a bit'." —Sam Leith via

"The chaos of the sun has gone on forever and will continue forever. But here, now, we have deer, and sweet berries ripening in the wilderness, and the quail whistling about us: this is as much as we will have of paradise, and it’ll do."

( me / via )

Our Little Boat Drifting.

"You wouldn’t feed a child nothing but candy and call it dinner, but you feed your mind nothing but content and call it thinking." —@whitenoise

Only represented as.

"Redbrick rubric pantisocracy"

abstract sculpture orpiment
Illig's daze figment
we craze to find floors gone

crenulated inbox
pothole full & pillaged
report stolen mortmain

commute L33T Scarlatti
pass long dead confederates
abstract orpiment sculpture

Boring Classics that are Actually Unhinged.

( via / via )

Masters of disguise.

      "Brutalist alma mater"

dead soldiers & Nixon's clubhouse
      navigate
   the gowned antheaps
wooden gate gadding
some gilded thrall squalor
brutal brillig · red door optional
      plastic jug
   aglow Isis
horseshoe Biscayne shinto
shattering dead medflies

Wait up Dajjal.

"My favorite James Baldwin line: 'There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend.' " —@thehumanityarchive

But they'll never compare.

( via / via )

Things My Grandmother Said.

"The purpose of an artistic star system is to undermine solidarity." —@jacobwren.bsky.social

"First there was my motorcycle Donna, the Ducati Monster 695. The first truly swish vehicle I’d ever owned. My sexual stock instantly went up about 54%."

"the lonely robot"

postman's perne smashtannies
repair itself veering
resume scant lattice
soft mission of nesh days

songs as before faze this
furious still hollow
wrap-up better buildmaze
barely erect victor

saving bread when Rome burns
truth barrier dreeing
distant witness werewolf
welds cobweb to feldspar

"Cyril Connolly had a fantasy about owning a ganadería where he would train bulls to murder matadors."

( via / via )

"You ever try to code switch at work and fail? 😂."

       "the watcher of a rock"

crakeshinies · on a crooked wind
       much curdled
   flow of monsters
stories of downfall · stories of treachery
too long bent · over silver laptop

Commuter cycling in the Dallas area.

" The historian discovered that all the mentions of natural phenomena recorded in the Welsh annals appear to have occurred at the times scientists had calculated corresponding events did – and these events included one mentioned in an entry that also names King Arthur." —Bernard Mees via

An Aria.

( via / via )

"Once fully committed, afflicted parties float free in a fantasy world unconstrained by the gravity of reality; their natural expansionist tendencies, reinforced by mythic construct, become fixated on achieving perpetual economic growth."

"The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerizes some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves." —Vincent via

It’s not just a calamity, it’s a pandemic.

"XIV. Star-Winds

It is a certain hour of twilight glooms,
Mostly in autumn, when the star-wind pours
Down hilltop streets, deserted out-of-doors,
But shewing early lamplight from snug rooms.
The dead leaves rush in strange, fantastic twists,
And chimney-smoke whirls round with alien grace,
Heeding geometries of outer space,
While Fomalhaut peers in through southward mists.

This is the hour when moonstruck poets know
What fungi sprout in Yuggoth, and what scents
And tints of flowers fill Nithon’s continents,
Such as in no poor earthly garden blow.
Yet for each dream these winds to us convey,
A dozen more of ours they sweep away!"

—H P Lovecraft

Babe wake up, the Pontiff is baudrillard-posting.

( via / via )

When He Calls Your Name.

"HPL

Those streets were not his
so he kept them in the dark to himself
knowing age for a solid pent in mind
he turned out volumes of locked domed hills

Penciled purples in the daylit dreams
wore wool humid and apology bright
letters in the doorway, arabic at the edges
the colors of science turned jagged at his cease

He was not Poe, he lived on a hill
dreamed afternoon and woke to write
icecream from ivory, an undersea
crystallized Providence cats broke
out of the past and Fomalhaut speaking"

—Clark Coolidge

"I didn’t think much about the last part, because as a Black man living in the United States, I’m aware that my whole country is a friendly space for white supremacists."

“Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.”

― Theodore Roethke via @poeticoutlaws

"The first rupture of democracy isn’t really between people and power. It’s between language and what words are willing to acknowledge or betray."