( via / via )

"The Road still markets itself as boundless – a blacktop birthright, horizon as inheritance – but these days its liberties are severely rationed, and booby-trapped."

( me / via nightcafe )

You Are Here.

To taste tea is to discuss the Tao.

"At the present time, I think the reason everything has fallen into a state of decay – both in our words and prayers – is because they are continually being changed by the innovations and lawlessness of the Greeks. For the Greeks by nature are followers of the latest trends and are eagerly carried off in all directions, possessing no stability in themselves."
—Iamblichus via

"Even the worms know it’s over."

( me / via )

"So much of classical reading is accounting for absence that presence becomes a problem."

"I just realised that AI is a Mechanical Turk device it’s just the Turk is literally all of us and all we’ve ever done"
—@nikprassas

To the Etruscan Poets.

Two armed pylon in the cold light.

( via / me )

The Temple of Baalshamin.

"pumpkinification"

the big steal · in plain sight
locked inside · the car alarm
roller coaster · & stooges' eye-gouge

Disabled.

"But aren't you sick of there being about five basic avenues of satisfaction, each internally graded for price?" —M John Harrison via

The best book ever written about nature.

( via / via )

I Read Banned Books.

"Toad sat on the edge of his bed. 'Blah,' said Toad. 'I feel down in the dumps.'

'Why?' asked Frog.

'I am thinking about tomorrow,' said Toad."

—@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Mood.

October morning chill
this & other graces
weary years
weary years of summer
still our career spiralling
ørlǫg undecided
weary years
weary years of autumn

The Swan.

( via / via )

Finding the Edge.

"playing pawn to queen four in the twenties"

payroll loan at sunrise
trash is heaped
journey before the alarm
sabertooth
in the long partial shadows

When I Thought I Was Dying.

"Paratactic strategies might be the best way I know to carry the weight of a broken world on our shoulders..." —AV Marraccini via

"Some creatures may occupy ecological niches, while others occupy ontological niches."

( via / via )

Season of the Witch.

"We yearn for re-enchantment so badly that we’ve accepted a return to horror instead..." —Aaron Lange via

Into the Fire.

"smell of olive oil lamps"

dark task to dish wash
bel epoch
Freud couch full
righteous squeal

When Doves Cry.

( via / via )

Song of Sorrow.

5.
Goya saw it—
arms raised
night scene

bulletloud crack
so soon

Into the Light.

"Fifty-eight years ago, a school teacher from Sherman Oaks, California named Harriet Gluckman wrote PEANUTS creator Charles M. Schultz...[Schultz] created the Black character Franklin and introduced him to Charlie Brown and his friends three months later." —@colehaddon via

Dear Hope live.

Been an absolute week from hell for me, but I was given a new toy to tinker with a fix up, this cool old Motorola vehicle dispatch terminal!#retrocomputing #diy

[image or embed]

— Selena the Retro-Princess (@superselena64.bsky.social) October 9, 2026 at 12:07 PM

( via / via )

"All easy poets are alike; each difficult poet is difficult in his or her own way."

"One of my favorite Anne Carson moments is this one:

Interviewer: 'What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?'

Carson: 'I’ve never received any. I don’t ask, frankly.' " —@lexorgera

"Essentially, the popular music industry in 2050 will look a lot more like that of 1850, where musicians were paid per performance, and the only recorded music available to you was player piano reels. The idea of making a living from recorded music will be remembered as a quirk of history, one of the many ways in which the 20th century was unusual."

4.
two hundred year old
shell wight crawls

smack putsch

hail louse void drops

"Are we the last of those who have the power, or the first to go defenceless?"

( via / via )

Doing chapbooks right.

3.
dead astronauts snicker
on icy plains
cloudwool croons

noise

Tyrannosaurus Rex settling into its quarters in Noah’s Ark.

"The not quite happening/may be more meaningful" —@dansturn.bsky.social via

Anneliese's House.

( via/ me )

Deep dive into the real stories behind this famous XKCD.

I don't understand those memes that say "just breathe"; like, if i wasn't breathing already, i wouldn't be in a position to use facebook now, would i?

"How do you know you're a ghost?"

2.
bells migrate richly
to sad oblongs

though plugged now
push toy

"A paradox is a kind of thinking that reaches out but never arrives at the end of its thought."

( via / via )

"...we hope this exercise illustrates one of the great dangers of generative AI: a particular form of alienation consisting in the illusion of understanding through the mere act of deferring to it." (via @bruces.bsky.social)

"livestreamed firing squad" (1)

gilt swastikas flail
azure wine
look out for boygs
death lodge

RIP Margaret Hamilton.

"Why did I. Thought of everything as a middle, where to find an edge, to find a height. Thought of this fog, why. Somewhere our groves lament us, whom most they had loved, and the silver swimmer strokes silently by, how far from shore is hard to say." —Anne Carson via @aliner

"...poetic drama had all but vanished from American stages, and a handful of young, mostly Harvard-adjacent writers decided to manufacture an audience for it themselves..."

( via / via )

Telemusik.

“In Sappho’s poem, her addresses to gods are orderly, perfect poetic products, but the way—and this is the magic of fragments—the way that poem breaks off leads into a thought that can’t ever be apprehended. There is the space where a thought would be, but which you can’t get hold of. I love that space. It’s the reason I like to deal with fragments. Because no matter what the thought would be if it were fully worked out, it wouldn’t be as good as the suggestion of a thought that the space gives you. Nothing fully worked out could be so arresting, so spooky.”

– Anne Carson, “The Art of Poetry N° 88”, The Paris Review, Issue 171, Fall 2004 via @andrewgallix via @mjohnharrison

Recognition.

"Whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing--oh, it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment,
no speaking is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead--or almost
I seem to be.

But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty . . ."

Fragment 31
Sappho; translation by Anne Carson
from If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Vintage, 2003) via

Frederick Douglass.

( via / via )

Industrial Muzac 04.

"Aubade

Here, where it is always noon,
Where noon and midnight are the same,
You wake, who will be leaving soon.
You will put on your strange new name
And learn to call the roundness moon
That shimmers in the window frame.
Here, where it is always noon,
You wake, who will be leaving soon.
Your language has no consonants.
No babble but a siren’s cry,
Imperious as an ambulance,
Yanks me upright, drains me dry,
Returns me to the languid trance
Of timelessness in which we lie.
Your language has no consonants,
Imperious as an ambulance.
Stranded on this shoal of time,
Abandoned by the ferryman,
You feel the way your fingers rhyme
Or swim in sleep, amphibian.
The nodding bells forget to chime,
The minutes halt their caravan.
Stranded on this shoal of time,
You feel the way your fingers rhyme.
Your gaze wanders the room and finds—
Alighting momentarily—
A mobile that the wind unwinds,
The shifting summer filigree
Of maple leaves behind the blinds,
My earrings gleaming. Dreamily,
Your gaze wanders the room and finds
A mobile that the wind unwinds.
You snatch at something bright and miss,
Watching it float beyond your reach.
You will remember none of this
Brief idyll on a desert beach
That curves, like a parenthesis,
Between the worlds of sea and speech.
You snatch at something bright, and miss.
You will remember none of this.
Mothers of older children say
I’ll drink the milk of Lethe too—
That soon I will have lost the way
Your scalp and belly smelled brand new,
The heft and texture of each day,
Your eyes’ opaque Atlantic blue.
Mothers of older children say
That soon I will have lost the way.
One day I’ll wake and you’ll be gone.
A sturdy stranger in your place
Will shake the bars and call at dawn,
Or stagger, laughing, while I give chase
Under these trees. But not the one
Who lay for hours, the windblown lace
Of sky and clouds, branches and sun
Reflected in her changing face."

—Catherine Tufariello via @maryanncorbett.bsky.social

"There is no way out of hauntology at this point."

“Anne Carson’s essay ‘Stillness’ ends in this astonishing way (Critical Inquiry, Autumn 2021):

'There are many stillnesses we didn’t get around to in this essay—snow; fog; moonlight; chastity; the gerundive; Odysseus tied to the mast while sailing past the Sirens.’ ”
—@TheElegyProject (via @jeremy_millar_1)

Golem.

( me / via )

In the Land of Invented Languages.

“They fall asleep and dream
of muffled corridors,
greenish glow
along the edges of mirrors, faces, cities.
Snow spins over it, down over it all.”

(Anne Carson) via @dreamsofbeing_

Warrior Duck.

      "ODE: damiana & butterfly pea flower"

https://bsky.app/profile/astrojaz.bsky.social/post/3mxf27j7ivc22 domesilver cerebrum
Assyrian pinball
      rolling sound
   sliding wheelbase
pumpkin spice · sparse Betelgeuse

change calendars codger
start counting in heartbeats
      day's coffee
   & dulcet spin
the things i've neglected · terrify me

no-brakes frolic fractals
frore noontide sidecar
      this lov'd light
   on the monsters
      wit without
   witness & strain
without strangeness · stulmthwart bit

misty caverns, cursed by
carved turquoise quicksand
      silence then
   non-silence shown
light between towers · some of them to fall

can't block numbers, blimp glides
blasphemous thick pixels
      yoin of rags
   ruin dwelling
all this time · never passed

Clove Fire Escape.

( via / via )

Dark Corners of the Classical World.

"Mockingbird in the Rye"

weathered wood fence
pale blue sky
that knows bog years
lost Troy
vouchsafed view
Hogsober feast
wood fence
coughlet
taskmoist iron

Monty Python and the Holy Grail--Lego style.

"Anne Carson, in Plainwater: 'My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. "Listen," he said, "life and no escape." ' " --@dreamsofbeing_

The world’s first alliterative-verse marionette show.

( via / via )

Recent thrift store art purchase.

"I’ve had intrusive thoughts about electrical explosions for as long as I can remember." —Tundranaut via

The Mamod model steam engine.

October light fills
each nook & nowl
slag realm
rain school
poised

Weil & Modern Times.

( via / via )

Low Kick.

"A Gull Goes Up

Gulls when they fly move in a liquid arc,
Still head, and wings that bend above the breast,
Covering its glitter with a cloak of dark,
Gulls fly. So as at last toward balm and rest,
Remembering wings, the desperate leave their earth,
Bear from their earth what there was ruinous-crossed,
Peace from distress, and love from nothing-worth,
Fast at the heart, its jewels of dear cost.
Gulls go up hushed to that entrancing flight,
With never a feather of all the body stirred.
So in an air less rare than longing might
The dream of flying lift a marble bird.
Desire it is that flies; then wings are freight
That only bear the feathered heart no weight."

—Léonie Adams

A Modest Proposal.

"I've seen quite a few people using -iĉ- to denote masculinity, and treating words that are normally masculine by default as gender neutral, e.g. using patro to mean parent, patrino to mean mother, and patriĉo to mean father." —Savaal8 on r/Esperanto

"It wasn’t Gleason’s only album, but the collaboration on the cover with Salvador Dalí might make it his most well-known."

( me / via )

Amontillado Soirée.

from the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris (Loeb translation--W B Anderson):

"Consider too that the mob of the sluggards has so grown in numbers that unless there are at least a modest few like yourself to defend the exact use of the Language of Latium from the rust of vulgar barbarisms, we shall in a short time be lamenting its extinction and annihilation, so sadly will all the bright ornaments of noble expressions be dulled by the slovenliness of the mob." (II.x, to Hesperius)

Night of the Vampire.

"starships"

decrepit wizard in the whirlpool
wielding phantom galleons
clownbane closing in
claw listicles yet

more gilt on the borrowed walls
galloping word salad
& this is what power parlays
out of pure hierarchy

red-assed baboon Brutalism
handedness equivocal
in the dark velvet kitchen

A Thousand Times Before November.

( me / via )

Always wanted to follow up on this.

"billboard of a beaker"

riddle nook
concrete antfarm
snow voice spools
now die headache

More & more sawdust in your bread until it’s ALL SAWDUST.

"Writers are always trying to end their own species of writing, to be the final word on what it is they are writing about, to exhaust their subject, and the funny part is that the more accomplished they are in their pursuit of this goal the more subsequent writing they engender and inspire." —E Harkness-Murphy via

"To speak of one's feelings was unacceptable in Ceausescu's Romania. Your feelings simply did not matter."

(via / via )

Forensic theology humor.

"Taking place between the years 1994 and 2024, Atrocities moves irregularly through the 'incoherent rubble' of the so-called end of history, in which 'art, faith, and paranoia unite in comedic rebellion against contemporary culture'. The result is a fractured and mosaic-like portrait of our present era, weaving together a turbulent assortment of artists, writers, politicians, murderers, television shows, political thinkers, terrorists, mystics and videogames into a kaleidoscopic, Bosch-like tapestry. " —Patrick Zaia via

Cutting edge as ever.

“Vanitas

I met you at the parting of the ways,
And I have lingered with you certain days.

Over a little grave I had set a stone:
I had buried love, and I was all alone.

The roadway of the unforgotten past
Ended; the road in front lay vague and vast.

I met you at the parting of the ways,
And I have lingered with you certain days.

Because you took my hand in both your hands,
I think there may be help in other lands.

Because you laid your face against my face,
I wonder if hope lives in any place.

Because you laid my head upon your breast,
I know the earth holds yet a little rest.”

—Arthur Symons, Lesbia (1920)

It's bad acid all the way down.

( via / via )

Poem recordings thread.

      "angel crater"

   i could not just sit
with my insufficiency
   to solve that great need

mountain unclimbable or
armwrestle a gorilla

so i chose abandonment

Two very distinct urges.

Many people have opinions about at least some indie movies, fans of indie music are highly vocal, but even in a place like Substack there’s not a lot of reviewing of indie publications that aren’t by friends of the reviewer.

Jim Bakker's Buckets.

( via / me )

"Leave the diseased portion of your herd."

I like it that Japanese metalheads wear glasses.

Two little red hares.

"space monkey"

empire of toys, tampered
Ectaban the trees
deluge of trash

recognize the flavor
if not the name of the flavor

let the robots do it

Endless Walk.

( via / via )

Star Shell.

       "the core district"

shipwreck opera echoing
asteroid target narghilay
       rubberband
   powered airplane

i collect sad things

Expressionist Autumn.

It's not depression if it's true.

Dictionary of Underutilized Space

( via / via )

Peak technology.

"Apparently, in Rus, there have been two types of poetry since ancient times. One stream is poems without rhyme, based on deep thought and image, where words are cramped but thoughts are spacious (historical poetry, poetry about traditions, about the people’s exploits), and the second stream is rhymed poems, where rhyme plays a dominant role in versification. In ancient times, such poetry was created only by buffoons." —Ksenia Nekrasova via

Houses on the green on Angel Road.

"MUTATIONS

The scribe’s frames are atomistic. But in
mutations, the Scribe Afar scribes time.
Become a rubric, matter shifts in its sea,
but its core, its fabric, remains the same....

It is a cabinet, a crib, the summer forests.
It is the ember cut from a cane. It is brass.
It is a mimic, stubborn secrets, a feather.
(But its core, its fabric, remains the same.)

It is the brief but mesmeric sonata’s arc.
It is absent rites; chamber music to fear.
It is a manic orchestra’s ebb. It must free —
but its core, its fabric, remains the same.

It is sacrifice, abasement, sombre truth.
It is a ceramic urn, a fresh tomb. It besets.
It is a cherub become man.... It starts fires.
(But its core, its fabric, remains the same.)

It is the scientist, macabre form; a rebus.
It is mechanics, time’s barbarous fetter.
It is a cosmic number. Set far, it breathes —
but its core, its fabric, remains the same.

It is a bust of Artemis — her bent ceramics.
It is a statue from birch — timber séances.
It is a tribe’s rich number — a totem’s faces.
(But its core, its fabric, remains the same.)

It is a sermon — the burst, beatific scream.
It is an Arabic secret, the umber of mists.
It is a burnt fresco, a scheme’s bitter aim.
But its core, its fabric, remains the same.

It scribes afresh. It embraces mutation.
A chimera of cries, it ebbs; it transmutes.
Acts remember the fabrications: It is us
(but its core, its fabric, remains the same.)"

—Anthony Etherin

New Iran slop video.

( me / via )

The Lord of the Island.

      "puddle on the catwalk"

three dragons · or only three
   in the pinkgold dawn glow
rumble of rude wheels · & mean roads
   join the sputtering train
complain about prices · puerile pop groups
   something said on Substack
elsewhere with goblin ire · unimaginable crimes
   unspool daily ramified
golden the treetops · the rest still in shade

"Revenge is what these people do. Justice is what we do. Here’s the architecture."

"I don’t care where you started out on the political spectrum

If your kid comes out as trans & you don’t become a rainbow-clad, parade-cheering ally & rock-solid supportive girl/boy/enby dad/mom?

You were never a parent at all

You were a doll collector furious they didn’t stay in their packaging." —@catvalente.bsky.social

"I wonder if we’ll see any resurgence of writing beyond paper and laptop?"