( via )

( 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."

( via / via )

"The black smog speaks."

"Did ever he walk the twenty-six wards of the city, within and
extra, did he cast his nautic eye on her
         clere and lusty under kell
in the troia'd lanes of the city?"

—The Anathemata, V.

Berenice.

"i wish children would be temporarily elevated to the skies until the war ends
then they would return home safe
and when their parents would ask them,
where were you? they would say,
we were playing in the clouds”

- Ghassan Kanafani via @gazapoetssociety

"It is as though a poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader's consciousness henceforward."

( via / me )

The Leaves.

pursuit of closures · in the growing dusk
      puzzles climb
   crag rosary
story lurches · a large spider
with a small head

" 'Crake' is a dialect word for crow, leading back to an echoic origin in Old Norse krâka. A corncrake is a field-haunting, night-calling bird, more often heard than seen, whose Latin binomial — Crex crex — is also onomatopoeic."

"Within the great aquarium of language the light refracts and can bounce by inclinations not previously observed." —J H Prynne

"...the philosophical devotion to contradiction is what has driven this poetry to ever greater obscurities."

( via / via )

Topology of Loss.

"This was no time to consider the mother-baby aspects of the firebeast ecology nor to quote from Edgar A Guest at great length." --Emil Petaja, Lord of the Green Planet (1967)

"Van Vogt adapted by Disney."

      "hereness"

Atlantis mints owllight
& lush drifting cliffthreats
      warning sign
   wags insolence
redspangled · spigots of hark
familiar coil merging
mitigates dense frenzy
      pale yellow
   yearn pentacle
necromancer's · mercy to wander

That Trump meme perfected.

( via / via )

Not enough room.

"the audacious proposal"

Gegenschein-flavored dreams
wake to smoke foaming
no shirt pocket at all

sharpened by the cold
my outline in the dark glass

insight is the best catnip

Thinking about the immortality of the crab.

"What if it were the other way around? What if the faculty of storytelling were not specifically human but rather the last remnant of our animal selves?"
- Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island via @jacobwren.bsky.social

"I once had a literary agent, but after the book we sent to editors was rejected thirty different times, she slowly stopped responding to my emails."

( via / via )

"We often write our poems as if they were our last words."

"I replaced doomscrolling with the company of fractal machine elves dwelling on the other side of a chrysanthemum-like mandala. Here’s what happened" —@rmhaines

"...deep inside stalactite town there were these big huntsmen spiders gripping slabs of rock."

"Prophecy

I shall die hidden in a hut
In the middle of an alder wood,
With the back door blind and bolted shut,
And the front door locked for good.

I shall lie folded like a saint,
Lapped in a scented linen sheet
On a bedstead striped with bright-blue paint,
Narrow and cold and neat.

The midnight will be glassy black
Behind the panes, with wind about
To set his mouth against a crack
And blow the candle out."

—Elinor Wylie

"I knew from dialectical philosophy that certain aporias can’t be resolved through contemplation alone, so as an experiment, I decided to live my life as though I were autistic, and I found that doing so generally improved being alive for me in pretty profound ways, which convinced me that “identity” is kind of a pointless thing to think about."

( me / via )

Wheel in the Sky.

"space needle"

i knew it well
a long, long time ago

skyey wheel
i knew it well

days gone AWOL
cast upon Zubenelg gray

i knew it well—
a long, long time ago

Windows, towers, and hoodoos.

"Can you have greater Miracles than these? Men who devote
Their lifes whole comfort to intire scorn & injury & death"

—William Blake, Milton, Plate 23

"By the time we reached the second and third pages of these pronouncements, in their booming, prophetic, diabolical but also weirdly funny voice, I was sitting in the strange suspended energy that seeps in after certainties have been shattered."

( via / via )

"Hence the urgent need to disarm its ambush..."

"Our generation’s first revolution may not be in the style of mass protest. It may instead be a spiritual re-orientation away from technology and towards romance, wonder, peace, love, spontaneity, and beauty." —Magazine Non Grata and Marigold via

"We are dealing with the most corrupt, callous, and incompetent presidential administration in the history of the United States."

"My Rome praises, loves, sings out our little books,
At every breast--every hand has me.
Look: someone blushes, pales, is struck, yawns, loathes.
This, I want: now our poems please us."

—Martial 6.60 via

"It has also been attacked as 'blasphemous' since the central woman figure sits on a rehal, which is traditionally used for reading sacred texts."

( via / via )

In Mildew Velvet.

who in the dark hours
has died on the other side
tersehook on the wet street

oligarchs barking
playback singer dies
only glowing red

amidst suffering gray
waiting to cross
the great freeway

you may find yourself
waiting for the asteroid
who in the dark hours

Trolley to Sheboygan.

"Oh, when will ignorance be dethroned, and reason and justice reign supreme?"
—Lucy Parsons, letter to the editor, The Socialist, 12/7/1878 via @resistancereborn.bsky.social

A Directory of Formal Poetry Authors.

( via / via )

The Onion plans.

"Dennett had a word for this kind of problem: chmess. The world cares about, and follows, chess. But as it’s hard to originate a new idea in chess, noodlers get distracted with variations that begin with someone else’s untenable thesis." —Paul Sas via

Blackbeard.

"human thunder shirt"

to see the rot in the word
as mold on bread through the bread wrapper
to have gone blind
to one's own words
suspended above an umber sea
the million year journey
to reach the surface of the sun
cord coiled
by someone else

"The CEO just published a book arguing that postwar denazification was a mistake."

( via / via )

"Fuck these guys. I’m gonna make my own label."

"no more discoveries"

driving on a flat
can't stop can't get off this road
arrives brindled nerves
in the vertigo realm
slides of burning slagfall
crystal cloudy ball
driving on a flat
in the party bus

Bialetti Moka pot.

“He drank quickly. The wine was ancient and heady. It lifted up his skull so the moon, which now was sailing closer over the groves, could see in at his brain.” —Tanith Lee, Faces Under Water (1998)

"Your new best friend might be your toaster."

( via / via )

Epitaph from a smart dog.

"While I lay there in my bed last night, half-asleep & half-awake, listening to the violence of the rain just a few feet above me, I was thinking about the particular colour of floodwater. Tea with milk or coffee with milk; sometimes tannic, sometimes yellowish, but always turbid, thick with mud & other shit. A colour we didn’t used to know, but now we know. That colour— floodwater colour— is the 2020s in Aotearoa New Zealand." —Rosie Whinray via

"(there comes a point when taking nature’s call in a bucket loses its frontier charm)..."

"a deeper engagement with the spiders"

pumpkin-headed harp song
hark to tased marquee
the josh-wizard's jazz set
juggles the Bond condoms
high roulette hitsmudge
harsh positive feedback

to Bogart day's tugboat
Telstar was a hit once
at Frankford woned frondbrush
afraid to right titrate
blue & red spied sparkle
spirulina choirboy

engine light still stodging
stirious sear-nova
by day & night dirtswarm
draws us on to Oz green
war as ever erring
orange cone my onus

pumpkin-headed harp song

Idiot Wind.

( me / via )

Tanka.

"CNIGLIC"

frozen glacial frogshift
offramp rifted lampad
hierophant tap syrup
sassafras, urn vanished

ponder too long Pindar's
podium gold sweepstakes
dance left then dance right
the whole time burning

burden of Not-Yet
burden of Been-There
ducks of the deep fix
on the lam from deadfall

"For all the hypothesizing about neuro-chips, there is relatively little acknowledgement that the corporations have already installed modules in our minds."

"Writing tip: Make the perfect the enemy of the good. Then it's way hotter when they fuck at the end of the book." —@sannewman.bsky.social

Paper of Ambiguous Status.

( via/ me )

"...this particular pathology, reality experienced only through the mediating filter of prior representations, has reached a pitch in America that is no longer low stakes."

"The river frightened me, as though it had deliberately followed me here."

Unquiet, E. Saxey via @minxmarple.bsky.social

No Moon Floods the Memory of that Night.

"Winter

Three winter brightnesses—
Bridesheet, boy in snow,
Kirkyard spade."

—George Mackay Brown via

How I wrote "Turn of the Tide".

( via / via )

I added a new shader to my portal asset.

"Poema palindrómico de Merlina Acevedo

   Se anulan

Ella iba sola, ya iba honda,
de lo sola, mar era.
Mal o soledad no había;
y así, rara rosa, con él obra.
Nueva ave, un árbol en ocaso, rara risa,
ya iba honda, de lo sola,
mar era. Mal o soledad
no había. Ya lo sabía, llena luna es."

( via )

(Google translate:

    They dissolve

She went alone; she went deep—
so solitary, she was a sea.
There was no ill, no solitude;
and so, a rare rose, she acts with him.
A new bird, a tree at sunset, a rare laugh—
she went deep; so solitary,
she was a sea. No ill, no solitude
was there. She knew it now: she is a full moon.)

Iran war: 10 frequently used words and their meanings.

"The true poem is walking that edge between what can be said and that which cannot be said. That's the real razor's edge. The poem that falls all the way over into what can be said can still be very exciting, but the farther it is from the razor's edge the less it has of the real magic. ...And then some of them fall too much in the realm of what can't be said. Then they are no longer poems, they are meditation themes like the koan, or they are magical incantations, or they are mantras." —Gary Snyder, The Real Work

"When the recognition is negative it looks like rage-bait. When the moment is right it looks like zeitgeist."

( via / via )

Hausu.

"Panoneirism: few things have the coherence to be aware and reason. But all things are perpetually dreaming" —@ctrlcreep.bsky.social

"He quipped that he was 'a composer seduced into being a carpenter'.

“turmeric days”

an hour comes round again
& all the things i know to do
are burdensome of remedy
beside the effervescence gone

a little more strong coffee guides
my hand along the wonted groove
whether or not an ardent grave
is offered with the household gods

i feel there ought to be some word
awaiting me as light grows back
& matter in its staid alembic
reaches what we call the world

"Merlin obeyed the King's orders and put the stones up in a circle round the sepulchre."

( via / via )

"I woke up after my first night back home and realized I needed to change my life, and quit the insurance business."

      "virtual try-on"

scientists disappear · is it paranoia
      extra cold
   morning curdles
the luscious light · what peace looks like
seaweed winding · down the ravaged shore

"Gothic fiction is the literature of the body inside the institution. Not the body wandering freely, but the body governed, watched, classified, confined - by an architecture of power that has already decided what it is."

"...P D Ouspensky...in his book Tertium Organum, an English translation of which was brought out by Knopf in 1922 and became a favorite, not to say sacred, book for Hart Crane early in his poetic career." —John T Irwin, The Poetry of Weldon Kees: Vanishing as Presence (2017).

Operation Spider Web.

( via / via )

Fixate.

“Borges is capable of making up much better books and monsters and authors than anyone can find in libraries.” –Gene Wolfe, in: 𝐴𝑐𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑊𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑑 𝐺𝑎𝑙𝑎𝑥𝑖𝑒𝑠 (1990)

Bucket list.

“The End

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.”

—Mark Strand

My favorite scene from the Bible.

( via / me )

Now pursuing a master's in mathematics.

   "N. B. Symmetrians

We, the symmetrians, seek justice here,
And asymmetric nature makes a drought.
We wrap up handouts for the martyred poor,
Making sure to put in books and tin-can beer.
Each man relieved goes home and gives a clout
To mrs man, or pal-man, and slams the door.

The speechful day in knowing languors goes,
We seek again for salt and summer sky.
The pure-blue meteor flares and falls unburnt;
We take to our heels standing on staunch tiptoes.
We read half-works of science for the why
And scheme to balance marxly with what’s learnt.

Fastened and fasting in the bed-rock man
The assainted, snuffed-down halo strives to rise;
The unstabilized land still slips up out of ocean,–
Bears odd, imperiled flora built to plan.
A natural start is now no one’s surmise,
To take things as presented, no one’s notion.

They used to start a-fresh, but we try burdened,
Trimming the present’s future with the past.
It’s all the fault of inter-communication,
Mountains of dove-tailed pebbles and words wordened.
The newest prism is moulded from the last.
The simplest thing is: to laud the massive nation.

The moon still shines beside the daytime star,
The waters weave, rain cools, dunes move, grain grows,
Soft words bring soft replies, muscles expand.
Whether we say the stars are near or far,
The polar lights still paint the glacier floes,
The temperate zones are yet more fully manned.”

—Gene Derwood, 1955

Robot at the starting line.

I have always maintained that Gentle Giant was just Emerson Lake & Palmer played backwards.

The Great Class War.