( via / via )

Ricardo Reis collected.

"You didn’t need to choose a brand so much as a side..."

"literary fiction is when your advance is $100k and you sell 5,000 copies and genre fiction is when your advance is $5k and you sell 100,000 copies." —@andymboyle.bsky.social

The Xylophone Player V.

( via / via )

"I'm going to put on Satantango and tell my kids it's Harry Potter."

"Even the simplest journey was only the superficial evidence--the diagram--of another, more difficult one." —M John Harrison, The Course of the Heart (1992)

Bird is so metal.

Too Soft.

( via / via )

Universal Soldier.

"a game of blindfold football"

complicated symptoms
captured in a snap
years of war outnumber
peace plus recent spate—
the sacrificial victims of the state

complicated rapture
cold battlefields rolled up
in the coruscating dawn
spawn of flycloud-clyte
the sacrificial victims of the state

I'm sorry, we don't have the drugs for this anymore.

"If I had a 'familiar' it would resemble less a nervous exotic animal than a chipped enamel sink. You would not find it on my shoulder but in its natural environment at the bottom of a derelict canal in the industrial Midlands. Our connection would be the source of my special powers, which would neither mimic nor metaphorise its qualities but be unmistakably sink-related. I would feel no emotion towards it even when events caused us to be separated and tortured. A sink can feel nothing. That is one of the baseline or default qualities of a sink. But wherever I went, I would know that out there, bedded in the mud beneath the slow black water, never more than a mile or two from my present location, its energies focussed, site-specific and calm, there my sink would be" —M John Harrison, Wish I Was Here (2023)

Green Shirt.

( me / via )

Exhale.

"Dwellers in precarity must provide themselves with a narrative future." --M John Harrison

Balkan Cosmology.

      "epinician ode"

clues from the quisling clinic
reclaimed polder, goldflake
      innocence
   bullied inchmeal
steer into glare · that glass house of thunder

shadowy shark deadbolt
pale shroud of the tailspin
      weedy marge
   blindfold amerce
steer into glare · that gleet-dripping ingot

stale cerulean story
stirious measurements
      of the sky's
   arval feedback
steer into glare · that gloss on Revelations

Untitled melting Loackme.

( via / via )

Tanka.

"Mina's lamps"

scarlet whispers
flown
book stained by wheels
moonscrawl clown joist
past

At Netherne Hospital.

Thousand Year Reich, built from the bubbles on an idiot's lips.

Not to mention cats.

( via / via )

"In 2008, her Oramics Machine – an electro-mechanical interface built for the use of Oramics, thought lost – was discovered in a barn in France..."

"Popular posters of the Kefahuchi Tract were taped up on every wall. The New Men had some kind of cult, centred round the idea that this was where they had originated. It was as sad as everything else about them. Every child knew where they came from and it wasn't there." --M John Harrison, Light (2003)

Peak cinema.

"schadenfreude & fumes"

unidentifiable cry
in the Brutalist labyrinth
find my car by the bumper sticker
among the other gray cars

grackle crosses my path
like someone with a purpose
unidentifiable cry
in the Brutalist labyrinth

Verstiegenheit.

( via / via )

"Nothing is more important than summer."

"Spleen (Baudelaire: Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux)

I’m like the King of some damp, rainy clime,
Grown impotent and old before my time,
Who scorns the bows and scrapings of his teachers
And bores himself with hounds and all such creatures.
Naught can amuse him, falcon, steed, or chase:
No, not the mortal plight of his whole race
Dying before his balcony. The tune,
Sung to this tyrant by his pet buffoon,
Irks him. His couch seems far more like a grave.
Even the girls, for whom all kings seem brave,
Can think no toilet up, nor shameless rig,
To draw a smirk from this funereal prig.
The sage who makes him gold, could never find
The baser element that rots his mind.
Even those blood-baths the old Romans knew
And later thugs have imitated too,
Can’t warm this skeleton to deeds of slaughter,
Whose only blood is Lethe’s cold, green water."

—tr Roy Campbell

I Have Faith in You. (When my wife played this, i thought it was a Leonard Cohen song i hadn't heard.)

"I consider the poetry reading to be the actual mode of existence of the poem, the actual place where it comes into its final existence. So that the written poem in the book is like the score for the poem..." —Gary Snyder via

"This is how fascists think and act; they meme themselves into being."

( me / via )

"Cynthia hijacked me, a loser, who desire/ had never touched before..."

To be the dancing ape, not the ape that bands together to kill.

Tanka.

"GLP/GPT"

the everflow
squidveil
& lodge pool
1 could stock mouse joints

Raptor.

( via / via )

Autumn Landscape with a River.

“Echo

Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope and love of finished years.

O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter-sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brim-full of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death;
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.”

—Christina Rossetti

I don't pay any attention to the words in Italian opera, either.

Lack of self awareness IS THE BRAND.

I enjoyed reading this, as i would anyone (so rare these days) willing to give that era serious consideration; however, being one who has read deeply of its poetry as well as its prose, i'm baffled that you don't mention one who is clearly (in hindsight) the preeminent Victorian poet: Christina Rossetti.

( me / via )

Little Eye.

"a modern retelling of The Cask of Amontillado where Montresor tells Fortunato that they’re going to the Criterion Closet" —@theworldsgreatestwriter.com

Vegetative electron microscopy.

"adaptogen"

send a freenzied yawp up high
& crown the work of silence & dust
catculdesac heist
botox Melania
yawp up high
phishtexted Sunday
the crime scene oh so tidy
& spoonerized arch-malison

Love is Blue.

( via nightcafe / me )

Crimson tears.

   "love, lines, angles & shrines"

counter-Schicksaltaglodyte
refolding more correctly
imagine a society
just starting
      to get light
stilts unbuilt yet, relic
vote-sticker unvectored
i evade catering
coming to rest rhyme scheme
respite made of vespers

standing close to staycease
stilts assembling scrimshaw
plastic drivethrough. plowversts
applaud choice of gaudy
goldenbathed storefronts
baroque blackbird wingbeats

A Storm in a Stamp.

"After the Armistice Nash was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to make large oil paintings as a form of remembrance, including The Menin Road. It shows a notorious stretch of country, ‘the most dreaded and disastrous locality of any area in any of the theatres of War’, Nash wrote." —John-Paul Stonard via

Let's hope and pray.

( via/ me )

Diaper Daddy.

"There's no running-from that is not a running-to." —The Rouse

A Salvific Kettledrum.

coming to rest
round putsch
highway stop
decoy
at staunch rote

Notes Toward an Ending.

( via / me )

"I think about that sometimes. How something can be over and still be on its way."

      "Low Tide

The birds are gathering over the dunes,
   Swerving and wheeling in shifting flight,
A thousand wings sweep darkly by
   Over the dunes and out of sight.

Why did you bring me down to the sea
   With the gathering birds and the fish-hawk flying,
The tide is low and the wind is hard,
   Nothing is left but the old year dying.

I wish I were one of the gathering birds,
   Two sharp black wings would be good for me —
When nothing is left but the old year dying,
   Why did you bring me down to the sea?"

—Sara Teasdale via @sallythomas

Waste Land Limericks.

“Of the welkin king, O irked imp!” —Sid Basu via

Staircase.

( me / via )

Lobocraspis griseifusa.

"The great Karl Popper: I think that there is only one way to science - or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part - unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children, for whose welfare you may work, with a purpose, to the end of your days." —@britishmythology

"A path through the predicament is to remember that right now is not the only era that artists have been working. Artists have worked in all eras, we may well be the defining workers of humanity."

"diagetic payroll"

still can't go back to not caring
court reporter for the Cthulhucene

Excel animation.

( via / via )

Midterms.

last-minute aasvogel
divebombing
nothing about this date

there were surely things that fell
how would now be diff'rent

rain of droppig margents
i've checked
nothing about this date

turquoise chill
how would now be diff'rent
last-minute aasvogel

A flute unseen.

Bezoar poems are the best poems.

Carving a frog fully in the round from this material is doing something the stone was not supposed to allow.

( via / oil painting by me )

Young Magpie Catches a Grub.

When i was young i much prized the idea that a painting had secrets that could be read like a book if you were patient enough.

"Throughout his wanderings, from Greece to Ireland, America, the Caribbean, and, finally, Japan, Hearn never felt rooted in any one place, in any one time, which makes him an apt guide for human experience at its eerie and fascinating extremes."

   "Prison

Man said:
Blessed are the birds in their cages
For they, at least, know the limits
Of their prisons."

—Mourid Barghouti via

"Man has become a god by means of artificial limbs, so to speak, quite magnificent when equipped with all his accessory organs; but they do not grow on him and they still give him trouble at times."

( me / via )

"If there's one thing right the day is made."

         "untitled"

      "My Druid heart" --Walter de la Mare

My Druid heart has found its final lair,
and in its last redoubt made fast its sleep;
yet this has not preserved from lancing pain
   my Druid heart.

The world let go of me, but not the moon
in whose regard i dance out some charade
with rays that ricochet around the vugg.

Now i emerge, a pharaoh from the sand
or from the night, a lustrous crackling grackle.
Silvery-crackle-shines in another kiln
   my Druid heart.

(publ in Illya's Honey vol 15 spring/summer 2009)

"Our folklore has never advanced beyond daintiness, and the greater melodies about our country-side have all issued through the pipes of Greece."

"One who reads with some awareness of the parapolitical theories, trying to discern what DeLillo himself thought about the assassination, is wrapt at once into a microcosm where more appears to be conspiratorial than possibly could have been, and yet where even the most naked cases (at least in the novel’s fictional account) of conspiracy manifest ultimately as little more than poetic enjambment, indifferent to the truth." —Gyres via

Builder's End.

( via / via )

"What shall we call contemporary Republican ideology? Is it conservatism? Libertarianism? Authoritarianism? Trumpism? Fascism? How about kayfabe?"

"You can tell AI is a very real industry by the way it implodes unless a sympathetic political party has totally unchecked power" —@stuntbirdarmy.bsky.social

New Updates on the Arc of the Moral Univrse

unlock leeway · lost inkpen
watching the insect · swarms descend
in the gloaming

i could walk now · out of this work
we set down · our dire directives
in the gloaming

opulence · one learns a taste for
old ruins · & new
in the gloaming

in the gloaming · in the gloaming
what might we not achieve
in the gloaming

In the Light of Darkness 4.

( via / via )

A redemptive urge to wander the earth.

in close woods
dark hours pool
years-long plan
haywire
death foiled

The Broken Bridge.

"On his first day in prison, Russell Brand should walk up to the biggest, meanest-looking inmate and misquote Voltaire to him." —@pattonoswalt.bsky.social

"It has often struck me how few unarguably great poets did not also translate."

( me / via )

I should have been a pair of shiny claws.

"in 50 or 100 years people are going to read about the trump years in history books, learn about the president who spent all his time obsessing over grandiose home renovation projects while offhandedly imposing crippling tariffs and starting the stupidest war ever and...just not believe the stupidity" —@tomtomorrow.bsky.social via

Emily Dickinson Opines on the NSA.

veil thin hour
sootfall slow
choice-haunt
newsreels
rags set fire

Matches.

( via / me )

"That's like Darth Vader losing the Death Star."

this gray sky
after so long blue
looks deadly
fraught
loud-voiced

"Hold on, are they selling printed Substack articles over there?"

America's decision to abandon psychology has had the very real consequence of rendering whole classes of problems insoluble.

No Drapa Pardon.

( me / via )

String Quartet No 14.

"and chucking utility one
longs to be useful"

—Debbie: an Epic

"...he found [a] way to turn filmmaking into something more like painting..."

"margent psyop"

ordering bombs to fall
that's not catsup on the wall
and I saw my reflection on a snow-covered hill
will the last light bring it down

Piano Trio in D Minor.

( via / me )

Kindling.

"interlunation"

1.
Horton hears police
helicopters
tries not to breathe heavier
supernal chiaroscuro
the plunge sloppy dead
of insight, of meteors
(should be done soon)
a box of soft peppermints
defrocked signifiers
thieves' oil, dream the alarm
& halcyon
day like the towers fell

2.
of late become limberger
lunes spooled
by a handless pickpocket
star collisions notwithstanding
spans lured
to the dragonfly Silurian

3.
melancholy cairns my team's success
perp walk
more than earned & mindless malice splurged
dwale's loom

4.
skirmishing
on the astro
to ride the train
groaning loudly
a wood balks
points not shed

scuff hanging
in the luminous air
i imagine prisoners freed

i will not see them

5.
alternating inks · etch the smoke
unveil vistas · that devour gazing
with what tentative · telling you begin
decrypt traceries · & crenulated barriers

people lured · by the wrong candy
scalding void · no other escape
then Cheetoh raised · a rotting fist
& the crowd roared back · spittleflecked approbation

'twas a miracle · of marsh gas
the asskiss rapture · each promise snaps
& when it was finished · smouldering ruins
blessed this landscape · far as the eye could see

i was here at the beginning · i will last till the end when
Horton hears · police helicopters

"Wild that everyone treated..."

"My skepticism of doctrine, after all, comes from an apophatic place." —Elijah Perseus Blumov via

Some fun slop-animation.

( via / via )

The King Will Come.

"@gallowsfolk: American friends, emotional support Canadian here, how are [you] feeling tonight?

@shawnd202: Like a hostage who's just heard the police helicopters"
—@mouthyrenegade.bsky.social

White Rabbit.

shadowed gravel
antelucan chill
slow remedy proffered
by the hand on the wall
& you go gainly
with all four wheels
a citizen of Fillmore
sad at sun's advent

Helvegen II.

( via / via )

"Trumpism is not a protest against how the world works. It is a rejection of the very concept of knowing how the world works."

      "the lonesome vampire"

the bitterness of pain that will not cease,
a conflagration painting all the sky
   pale cerulean scree
   masked agents of ICE
huddled cars yearning to go much faster
& stoned buzzards tracing an isopleth
   all is aftermath
   flailing deranged jester
   & pain that will not cease—
i whisper to the workers on the bench
our freedom lies the other side of the crunch

"...‘Bird On The Wire’ appearing at funerals as a slightly more bookish alternative to Sinatra’s ‘My Way’.."

"English is not an especially good language for daring experiments with form or for pure style. There is a burgheresque stolidity to it. When I think of the lyrical richness and sheer romanticism or mysticism possible in the other languages I know, I am again startled anyone attempts the lyric or visionary mode in English." —Jayaprakash Satyamurthy via

"In a sense we defeated the Confederacy last night. But this time we must get Reconstruction right and not let it get sold out the way it was in 1876-7."